At lunch we met two of the female Midorikai students who have been here since September. Tanja and Verena are both from Finland.

After lunch (chicken katsu), the new students gathered at the Urasenke center to fill out a round of paperwork. We met, in passing, one of our teachers, an American named Gary-sensei, with whom I may have gotten off on the wrong foot–or hand, anyhow: when I gave him my standard firm American handshake, he quietly but curtly warned me not to squeeze so hard. Bouncing off a plane from the Czech Republic and into the office was another new student, Nadezda, who goes by “Nadia” for simplicity’s sake.

Then we were led to the local ward office to register as resident aliens. The bureaucratic machine here looks and operates much like it does back home; it was like going to a DMV where I didn’t understand 95% of what was said to me.

After dinner (some sort of fish), Tanja and Verena led us to the women’s dorm and persuaded the vigilant attendant at the lobby desk that the men were there with only the most honorable intentions. Then we got to see their own second-floor tea practice room and cast-off stuff collection, and the room full of dōgu (tea implements) that we’ll be able to use for our own ceremonies later in the year.

On Szymon’s recommendation, after dark I returned to Nijo castle with Sean in tow. A huge crowd had lined up outside to pay a 400 yen admission fee: during sakura season, the castle illuminates its trees and some of its structures for a nighttime celebration they call “Nijo LightUp.” The path through the grounds is chosen with care to create a sense of pacing. Entering through the giant gates and turning left, we first found one little pink-blossomed tree glowing in the walls’ corner beneath a spectral guard tower. Then a restrained row of trees; then larger clusters, larger trees. The ones with bigger blossoms were crowd favorites, and everyone pressed close with camera phones held aloft to get pictures.

Down one path, tea ceremony was being demonstrated in the castle tea house, but Sean and I decided to skip it, following the majority of the visitors past a pond where a particularly lovely sakura hovered delicately over its reflection in the still water. The tour’s grand finale was a long straight lane between rows of giants, old trees that had grown to overhang the path almost completely with their branches: a dizzying barrel vault of floral lacework.

We exited through a makeshift market where food and souvenirs were peddled from brightly lit white fabric pavilions. Happy families huddled on benches in the cold with steaming bowls of udon noodles; Sean and I bought skewers of hot, chewy dango balls dipped in a sweet and savory sauce before hiking home up Horikawa-dōri through the finger-numbing night.