Bay of Plenty
In Japan, on a fine weekend at “peak” blossom time, popular urban parks can receive tens of thousands of visitors in a single day.
Sandra Simpson takes in cherry blossoms in Japan.
Thanks to the beautiful manners of the Japanese though, this isn’t the problem you might expect, even in densely populated Tokyo’s Shinjuku Gyoen park. Everywhere, millions of locals and visitors take part in the celebrations, spreading tarpaulins and rugs on grass yet to green again and breaking out picnics.
A walk through a park also means you sometimes nod at a solitary figure on a tarpaulin (usually the youngest person in the office sent out early in the day to nab a spot under the “best tree”). At other times, you find yourself cheek to cheek with strangers as we all shuffle across a small, stone bridge.
As the sakura season approaches, a nightly “blossom report” is added to the weather forecast.
It shows where trees are flowering and where they’ve yet to start. Tokyo forecasters use an aged tree at Yasukuni Shrine to announce the official opening of blossoms in the city.
Most blossom-viewing tours from New Zealand begin in Tokyo at the end of March and end in Kyoto about a fortnight later. Last year, after seeing beautiful blossoms in Tokyo, our group was advised we’d likely seen the best. However, an immediate cold snap held blossoming back and we floated south on clouds of sakura – the best season our Kiwi guide Robyn Laing said she had seen in 10 years of leading such tours.
Sakura celebrations date back to about the 8th century. They were originally a religious rite held to forecast the rice harvest – a bounty of blossoms meant full grain houses. The upper classes began to picnic under the trees, but it wasn’t until the end of the 17th century that hanami caught on with the working classes.
Today there’s an abundance of seasonal foods available to complement the merrymaking, from fast food (cherry shakes and icecream) to more traditional treats such as sakura tea (using salt-pickled blossoms) and sakura mochi, small cakes made from pounded rice flour, filled with red bean paste and wrapped in saltpreserved and edible cherry leaves. The first punnets of new-season strawberries are also arriving in the shops – with a choice of (expensive) white or pink fruit – to complete a colour-theme picnic.
Just as the Inuit have multiple words for snow, so the Japanese have many expressions linked to blossom season.
These include kaika for blossom opening, mankai (peak blooming), sakura fubuki (cherry petal storm or blizzard), hanagasumi (flowers that look like mist), hana-no-ami (blossom rain) and hazakura (flowers and leaves at the same time). I experienced sakura fubuki in Kyoto – and it was exactly like being in a very localised snowstorm, a whirlwind of petals.
Parks extend flowering by using a wide variety of trees – as one type flushes and finishes, another is coming out. Fivepetalled blossoms are the first to open, usually before leaf break so the entire tree appears covered in flowers. Later varieties, including doubles, generally open at the same time or just before leaf break.
Adding to the party are the colours of peach and crabapple blossoms, and the flowers of mountain azalea, japonica and Edgeworthia, while Japanese women and tourists are splendid in seasonal kimono, whether family heirlooms or hired by the hour.
Before Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1873, spring was the start of the new year and April 1 still heralds the new academic year, new fiscal year and is the time when new graduates enter the workforce en masse.
Last year there was another reason to celebrate: a new imperial era, with the Heisan giving way to the Reiwa on April 1, in preparation for (now) Emperor Naruhito ascending the Chrysanthemum Throne. We joined the crowds in trendy Ginza to view the handwritten calligraphy of Reiwa. Just down the street, a fashionable department store had young, flowering cherry trees installed on the pavement in pink boxes bearing a poem by the master, Matsuo Basho, in Japanese and English: “how many, many things / they call to mind / these cherry blossoms”.
Indeed, they do. ✤