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For a few short weeks around April, every park in Japan springs into life. As the winter snows recede and the weather begins to warm up, trees burst into bloom, lanterns are strung up, and people arrive in droves to enjoy the festivities and admire nature’s show. Spring in Japan is hanami season. Hanami – literally, ‘flower viewing’ – is the custom of appreciating the beauty of the cherry blossoms, or sakura. It is usually a very social event, with groups of people spreading blue tarpaulins on the ground and indulging in open-air parties beneath the branches, laughing and telling jokes, singing songs, and eating picnic food and drinking tea, beer or sake. Enormous bottles of sake are de rigueur during hanami, and enjoying this ubiquitous Japanese tipple under the spreading blooms is known as hanami-zake. As workers leave their offices for lunch, as students pour from their classes, and as others venture forth from their homes, every square foot of ground in the parks becomes a sea of plastic blue sheeting as groups of people stake out their territory. Hanami parties are also held at night, under the lanterns, when it is called yo-zakura (‘night cherry blossoms’). Food and drink, as an important social lubricant, is an integral part of any hanami party. Temporary stalls are set up, selling hot snacks such as yakitori, broiled sweetfish, stews and, of course, more sake. Many people also bring their own supply of food, most of it lovingly and laboriously prepared over many hours, as befits any special social occasion. Special rice dumplings on skewers – called sakura-dango – are commonly eating during hanami. These dumplings, which became popular among the working population during the Edo Period, differ from dango eaten at other times in that the three dumplings on each skewer are coloured sakura-pink, white and green; representing the cherry blossoms, the last of the winter snow, and the coming of summer, respectively. They have entered the Japanese lexicon in the expression hana yori dango (‘rice dumplings rather than flowers’), which jocularly refers to people attending hanami for tangible things like the food and drink rather than the abstract appreciation of the flowers’ beauty.
Blossom viewing is said to have begun with the nobility during the Nara Period (710–784), with the practice of holding social gatherings adopted by the Emperor Saga around 812. Until this time the blooms of choice had been fuji (wisteria) and ume (plum blossoms), the latter having recently been introduced to Japan from China; but these were overtaken in popularity by the cherry blossoms in the early Heian Period (794–1185). Indeed, in Japan’s earliest anthology of poetry, the Manyoshu, published in the late Nara or early Heian Period, there are about 40 poems referring to cherry blossoms and about 100 poems about plum blossoms; in the Kokinshu, an anthology of waka verse published in the Heian period, these numbers are reversed. It was about this time that the Japanese word hana, ‘flower’, came to mean sakura in the context of tanka and haiku verse. One of the first written references using the word hanami comes from The Tale of Genji, when wisteria viewing is also described, but at this time, hanami itself referred exclusively to the appreciation of cherry blossoms. Hanami spread to the commoners during the Edo Period. It is said that the large number of cherry blossom trees in every park in Edo (today’s Tokyo) are the legacy of the shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune, who had them planted to encourage hanami among the people. Most cherry blossom trees in Japan today are of the species Somei-yoshino (the Yoshino Cherry), a hybrid thought to have come about from cross-pollination of two different species during the Edo Period. Plum blossoms typically bloom before the cherry blossoms, and are still appreciated today; although to this day cherry blossoms are the more popular of the two. In the modern age, technology has made it easier to plan hanami to coincide with the blossoms’ short life. As the blossoms begin to bud, the weather reports start to include blossom forecasts. As the so-called sakura zensen, or ‘cherry blossom front’, progressively moves from the south-west to the north-east, lines on the map like isobars show the different stages of blooming, based on the most common Somei-yoshino, in each part of Japan. Although the earliest cherry blossoms may come out in south-western Kyushu in March, and the last petals in northern Hokkaido fall like snow as late as May, most of Japan experiences the blossoms at some point during April. This coincides with the start of the school and fiscal years, and so the cherry blossoms can be thought of as a metaphor for a new beginning.
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Hanami: a short, beautiful life
Each city and region in Japan has its own places which are said to be the best viewing spots. In Tokyo these popular spots include Ueno Park and Chidori-ga-fuchi, by the inner moat of the Imperial Palace; in Kyoto, they include Arashiyama to the north, and amongst the many temples of the Higashiyama district east of the city. Some entire towns are also said to have the best displays in the country – Yoshino in Nara Prefecture and Kakunodate in Akita, to name just two. These spots are usually the busiest and most crowded, but beautiful displays can be enjoyed almost everywhere in every city or town. The blossoms are notoriously short-lived, and for Japanese people, their ephemeral beauty and transient nature has come to be symbolic of fleeting nature of life itself. Cherry blossoms can be seen throughout most of Japan, and leave a strong impression on the Japanese psyche. They are the quintessential image of spring in Japan.
Cherry blossom forecasts can be seen on the following websites: