Hanami Celebrating Transient Beauty in Japan After a day of work in Osaka, Japan, Laurel Armstrong of Minneapolis, Minnesota, got on her bike to head home, winding through the city’s busy streets toward her high-rise apartment complex. She had been living in this Japanese metropolis for almost a quarter of her one-year work contract and had grown accustomed to the gray, austere metal of the city’s skyline and its almost incessantly overcast weather. As Armstrong rode past a wide alleyway, her thoughts of dinner that night were suddenly interrupted; her eyes caught sight of something white and brilliant moving softly, stark against the alley’s monotonous slate walls. She stopped her bike and walked through the alleyway and soon found herself surrounded by a gentle, steady shower of cherry blossoms. A man standing nearby, also pausing to admire the soft stream of flowers, turned to Armstrong
60 ▶ spring 2014
with a smile and explained, “It is the season of sakura.” The reverence that locals and travelers feel toward Japan’s exquisite natural beauty—especially toward the Japanese Cherry, its most symbolic and well-known flowering tree—is what makes the springtime in this country so special. “If you’re going to go to Japan,” says Greg Wilkinson, a former professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona, “go at the end of March because that’s when the sakura are in full bloom.” In northern Japan, the blooms may come later—in April or May— but hanami, which literally means “to look at flowers,” usually occurs at the end of March and is a Japanese Shinto festival that celebrates nature, family, friends, and beauty. Anticipated nationwide in Japan, hanami commences when the sakura, or cherry blossoms, begin to appear. In fact, the Japanese watch weather
forecasts almost religiously leading up to hanami in order to plan their celebrations. Newspaper and TV weather reports often predict if hanami will come earlier or later than in other years, and even Japan’s most stringent workers are known to take afternoons or long weekends off to celebrate the holiday. In the last three years, however, hanami has taken on new meaning and ignited controversy throughout the country. After Japan’s devastating earthquake and subsequent tsunami and nuclear plant disasters on March 11, 2011, the nation went into a state of mourning. The feelings associated with 3/11 in Japan are comparable to those of 9/11 in the United States. Just as the United States held off on events like professional sporting games and comedy shows immediately following 9/11, many Japanese have felt that the somewhat rambunctious and celebratory nature