letter from kyoto: the herald of spring

by Chris Gladis

It’s April again, and I am required by law to write about the cherry blossoms.

The cherry blossoms in Japan are possibly the most carefully-watched flowers in the world. Everyone from the Japanese Meteorological Agency to housewives to schoolchildren is acutely aware of the progress of the cherry blossoms. Starting in March, the Japanese track the sakura zensen — the “cherry blossom front” — which looks like a pink wave on the weather map, slowly advancing northwards. All the talk among my students is about the sakura: when they’ll bloom, whether they’re early or late, where to see them and when. For about a month, this one thing dominates people’s lives.

It’s remarkable to watch from an outside perspective. For most of the year, the people of Japan are fairly reserved and polite, especially in Kyoto. All the delicate interactions that you read about and panic about before you come here dominate relationships between company employees, students, and neighbors. But when the sakura come out, all bets are off.

The tradition of the hanami, or cherry blossom viewing party, is said to go back over a thousand years. The Heian Era aristocrats, having nothing to do but sit around and be rich, enjoyed being among the flowers and observing them. And drinking. A lot. In the 16th century, Toyotomi Hideyoshi held a lavish cherry blossom party at Daigo Temple, and even today that temple is a prime viewing spot for beautiful cherry blossoms.

For the average person, though, hanami are far simpler. Get your friends or co-workers together, find a nice spot that hasn’t already been claimed, lay down a blanket and get to the party. The preferred food is anything portable — homemade pot-luck, convenience store lunchboxes, or mobile barbecue — and the preferred drink is anything with alcohol. I’ve heard people tell me that a hanami without beer can’t be considered a real hanami. Take a walk through Kyoto’s Maruyama Park in early April and you’ll see a grand variety of cherry blossom parties. The nicest are usually corporate hanami; a local company will throw a party for all its employees with the best food and booze they can afford. If you go there early in the morning, you can see the freshmen employees in their suits, sleeping on tarps and holding the best spots. On a smaller scale, you might see college groups, drinking their way through as much alcohol as they can get their hands on, or small groups of friends just sharing a couple of beers and some food.

But is that all there is to these flowers? A chance to let the hair down and live it up for a little while? Of course not.

The cherry blossoms are a herald of spring. Around the time the cherry blossoms come out, schools start their new academic years, companies induct their new crop of employees and I have to renew my video rental card. It’s the real start of spring, as far as most people care, and roughly coincides with the planting season for rice, also vastly important to Japan.

More importantly, though, the sakura are symbolic.

They appear in late March or early April, bloom intensely for about a week, and then fall, drifting to the ground. It doesn’t take a blissed-out aristocrat or a hardened samurai to spot the similarity that the cherry blossoms have to life. We are born, we live our lives on this Earth, and then we, like all things, die. This image was especially attractive to the youth-obsessed aristocracy and short-lived warrior class. For those who lived their lives briefly and intensely, the cherry blossoms were their symbols of the transience of life, and as the cherry blossoms fall, so shall they. Centuries of poetry, painting and song have drawn this connection between the cherry blossoms and our mortality; in World War II, Japanese pilots painted sakura blossoms on their planes in a symbolic acceptance of their immanent deaths.

The sakura are, in essence, transformative. Disreputable night-streets such as Kiyamachi Street, with its garish bars and restaurants and karaoke joints, become white and pink spectacles. Riversides across the country become as beautiful as the most exquisitely-wrought impressionist paintings, and photographers such as myself are entranced annually. They bring a breath of life to the country, ushering in spring and doing away with the grey bleakness of winter.

I greet the cherry blossoms every year with a sense of wonder. Every spring is, somehow, more beautiful than the previous one, and every spring I am reminded of why I love to live here.

tagged under:asia, living abroad, photography, travel