The seasonal calendar has turned again, and the city has shed its winter malaise. In this country so finely attuned to the seasons, spring, the most anticipated, has arrived. The faces one meets on the street seem brighter, more playful; stepping outside without a coat, one feels lighter, suggesting a burden lifted. Storefronts are decorated with pink and purple, and inside the honorable customer is, on particularly nice days, served cold tea instead of hot.
And then there are the cherry blossoms (sakura). Oh, how the Japanese love the cherry blossoms. The Japan Meteorological Agency, a government organization, spends most of the year attempting to calculate when they will bloom, though they're usually wrong. When the flowers first bloomed in Tokyo two weeks ago, earlier than expected, the event made the front page of the newspaper. The article cited statistics kept over the last 100 years to identify the last four times Tokyo had had the first bloomed blossoms in the country. Those swathes of city green that I frequent that have a large number of cherry trees suddenly have twice as many people in them then I have ever seen. Many of these people are engaged in hanami, flower viewing parties, with friends or co-workers, sitting on blankets underneath the trees, sharing food, pouring warm sake for each other in the customary manner, brushing fallen petals off of their neighbor's head. Groups of people stand around the fully bloomed trees, aiming their hulking cameras at the tiny, delicate flowers, pulling branches down to their level to get a better shot. It's as if the entire country has been allowed to go outside for the first time in months.
It's easy to be cynical about this level of excitement over foliage, but the trees themselves are really magnificent. Held aloft by gnarled trunks of the darkest brown, branches extend like lithe arms, gently sagging earthward as they stretch languidly from the tree body. The ends of the branches hang limp, like hands waiting to be held. On every protrusion, dozens of tiny, glass-like petals of a transparent pink are presented elegantly, face-up, as if they it is in their very botanical nature to be admired. The colors of one tree become the foreground for the colors of the next, as the entire scene is set, the backdrop a surreal sky of pure pink.
I can't imagine that there is a cultural-botanical pair more perfectly matched than Japan and the cherry blossom. Trees that were bare for months on end suddenly burst into color, reinventing themselves, evoke the Buddhist theme of re-birth, on the other side of which the short lives of the blossoms – they bloom for only a few weeks - remind that, as life is a cycle, all things, for better or worse, must pass. The evanescence of beauty, the phenomenon that each and every haiku attempts to express, is fully represented within that cycle. A small hollow space at the base of a cherry tree is quite a conducive environment for reflection, for feeling nostalgic. The Japanese term mono no aware, 'the pathos of things,' is reflected in the bittersweet nature of this season, the simultaneous joy and sadness of enjoying something so beautiful that, almost before one can fully appreciate them, vanishes so quickly. Not surprisingly, in this literary vein, the cherry blossoms are often compared to, for lack of a more specific term, life.
My own cherry blossom search brought me to the Nakano section of town, where, I had heard, there is a place called the Philosophy Park, founded by a philosophy professor, that contains 77 spots that symbolize different doctrines. Disembarking at the station, I followed the broad central avenue, flanked by fully bloomed sakura, underneath which ran a seemingly never-ending succession of pink lanterns. There was a bridge over the street some ways down, and I climbed it to take some photos, along with a few older people saying kirei ne, sugoi kirei, it's pretty, so pretty, and a lone high schooler taking pictures with her cell phone, seeming lonely.
The park appeared after a bend in the road. The plaques on each of the 77 spots were only in Japanese (I don't know the word for existentialism, let alone the vocabulary necessary to read about it), but the mood was indeed pleasant enough to allow the mind to saunter along paths of contemplative thought. As I made my way through, I came to the cherry blossom area, a large square filled with the trees, a canopy of pink softening the entering sunlight. I found an empty bench and sat down. Many people were having hanami parties, six or ten people sitting on large blankets, while others were simply sitting against the base of a tree, eyes closed, soft grins on their faces.
I felt it too, that pinch of nostalgia brought on by the season. When was the last time I had simply sat against a tree and allowed my mind to wander? I held my head in my hands and sighed, listening to the white noise of the hundreds of branches above my head swaying in the wind. It was quite soothing. Gradually, the winds began to pick up, their shuffling growing louder. It was what I had hoped it would be - sakura fubuku, the cherry blossom snowstorm.
It's quite beautiful when it happens: thousands of little cylinders of pink dancing this way and that in the wind. Watching them drift down from the sky is mystifying, hypnotic – they seem to move in slow motion, weightless, as if they could float upwards like a balloon, were it not for the breeze. The children around me ran around joyfully, grabbing as many as they could, mid-flight, to bring back to their parents. I held my hand out to catch a few, while at my feet countless fallen petals began to make a small pile, fragile and pale, like a distant memory.
