Sakurapalooza

Landing here as we did in the barren stick season of frigid early February, we've been eagerly awaiting Spring, and with it the legendary sakura (cherry blossoms) that attract nearly 4 million tourists each year to Japan. And you know me. I like trees. I like flowers. I was ready to see and appreciate some seasonal beauty, replete with allegorical meaning about the fleeting transience of life and whatnot. But deep down, I really didn't expect it to be qualitatively different from the signs of Spring I see each year.

 

Let's cut to the chase -- the show is spectacular, a rare instance of something not just living up to but arguably surpassing the hype. From a landscape of ancient, dead-looking, sculptural trunks, there erupts an unabashed riot of white cream pale pink red blooms, covering the branches like weightless snow, looking somehow as if lit from within. I understand now why these flowers have been the objects of admiration, art, and poetry for thousands of years.

 

As luck would have it, the riverside street where we live is lined with old, spreading cherry trees and becomes, each Spring, a major destination for blossom viewing. For about two weeks, our relatively quiet street was positively mobbed with people of all walks of life appreciating "our" sakura. This turned out to be an unexpected source of delight for all of us, seeing how intensely (and in such odd ways) people enjoy these flowers.

Bo and Zadi walking down our blossomfied street 

 

To begin, there is the ohanami, a succinct term that means "cherry blossom viewing picnic". When I started online Japanese learning back in Durham, one of the first lessons was all about ohanami. Being invited to an ohanami, what to say at an ohanami, etc. In the back of my mind, I was thinking, "Is that really a thing?" It is.

Ohanami is a thing.

 

It's like something out of a Seurat painting, the groups of people beneath canopies of blossoms with their bespoke food baskets and fluted wine glasses and snappy clothes and faint happy chatter. Of course, no one sits directly on the ground (always a cloth or groundcover of some sort), just like no one actually touches their food...please, it is still Japan, afterall!

Another popular way of appreciating sakura is through a camera lens. If you think the film camera is dead and that SLRs are a thing of the past, think again. I haven't beheld so much photography equipment since the 1990's. People with two, three, four different cameras, strapped every which way; rolling suitcases chocked full of light meters, foot-long telephotos, remote shutter controllers, reflectors. During our cooking class, Taro mentioned that photography is one of the culturally accepted hobbies for men, likely due its strong association with gear and technical gadgetry.

Of course, there are also plenty of people using the cameras on their phones as well. And here's where the fun really comes starts. It's not just photos of the trees and flowers themselves, though there's a lot of that (guilty!). It's the posing with the flowers. The staged upward look of rapturous appreciation, the coy backward glance over the shoulder with blossoms in the background, the dressing up (geisha, maids, samurai, cosplay galore), the posing with parasols, the endless wedding couples (with teams of telephoto-wielding photographers issuing directions from 30 m away via phone)...it's intense.

Cuteness straight out of Studio Ghibli. Not sakura but part of the same frenzy.

 

And then things start to get a little weird. The posing of dogs with sakura -- often dressed to the absolute nines (bonnets, dresses), perched in their little carriages. 

 

The posing of cars and motorcycles with sakura.

 

The posing of dolls with sakura -- this is done by adults who appear to cherish and relate to their dolls in ways you might expect to be reserved for their kids or partners.

OK...it's a peony, not sakura -- but you get the idea.

 

We even saw people with full-scale mannequins! Their children? Girlfriends?

 

At this point, although there are a few late-blooming sakura here and there, by and large the show is over. By now the cherries have dropped their petals and leafed out, and it's the dogwoods and azaleas and peonies that have taken the baton of full bloom. Even at peak sakura, however, I found that much of the beauty resided in the interplay of the cherry blossoms with the less celebrated minor characters surrounding them. The impossibly delicate green of baby maple leaves, the pink coral salmon splashes of flowering quince, the tulip trees and forsythia, the thousand hues of camelia, the lacy irises, the willows, the gun metal blue of the Kamo River, the purple of Mount Hei, the flash of white of a hunting great crane. Spring has arrived in full force, and it really is a marvel.

Not that the world needs more sakuratime photos, but below are some more...try as I might, I just couldn't resist trying to capture it all.