It’s that time of year again.
For those of you who don’t know much about us, and there can’t be many, our
clan includes the Somei Yoshino, Shidarezakura, Yaezakura, and literally hundreds of other varieties. The most
popular of us are open for business as soon as it begins to get warmer, and we
race across the land in wide swaths of our familiar pink and white hues. We
decorate the fields and hills, the valleys and plains; we brighten up the
riverbanks and dark canals; and even the concrete-crowded urban areas are
forgiven their existence momentarily when the passer-by’s attention is arrested
by the resplendent blooms of a solitary tree against a background of a blue
building-site canopy. Yes, we are at your service everywhere, ladies and
gentlemen.
We have been
written about, photographed, illustrated, drawn, animated, printed, used as
decoration on clothes and cutlery, and have given our name to banks and movie
characters. Our flowers have also been a perennial tattoo motif on those brave
enough to go under the needle. We have supplied the main themes for hundreds of
songs, even up to the present day, and have been immortalized in the entire
corpus of classical poetry, from kanshi
to waka, and renga to haiku. The
poet-monk Saigyo wrote that he wanted
to die in spring, underneath the cherry blossoms, and he did. We also feature
prominently in the poems of Fujiwara no
Teika and Ono no Komachi.
Some say that all this has
made us too big for our roots. Maybe, but please remember how hardy and
tolerant we are: We have to endure the rain, sleet, and snow which seem to
follow us around as we creep northwards, and we raise no objections to the
occasional dog spraying our lower trunks. Our barks are mightier than theirs!
We stand silently and majestically when the drunken karaoke lout climbs up to
enter into communion with our flowers, and we calmly tolerate the artificial
lighting that glares into our bosoms for the edification of those who believe
they have no time to meet with us in more natural circumstances.
And then after the two-week
extravaganza comes the grand finale. As our petals flutter to the ground inducing
thoughts of transience and mono no aware,
and you feel both sadness and joy when you see small piles of fallen blossoms,
or return home to find a perfectly formed petal stuck to your shoe, it’s not
quite over yet. Before you start your frenzied checks of peak-viewing forecasts
for the soon-to-come azaleas and wisteria, spare a few moments to view the
gorgeous green hues of our new leaves. They are also worthy of your attention.
