Japan Navigator

Look here for a sakura (cherry blossom) timetable!

As spring finally draws near, the first warm days bring a certain giddiness. And expectation. The great “sakura (cherry blossom) wave” is about to roll over our heads, enveloping us in its pinkish extremeties… sake and sakura, what better combination could there be?

[Sakura. Photo © Ad Blankestijn]

The sakura front is as closely followed as the stock market and certainly more interesting, as there are more peaks. When will these most fickle of flowers bloom? How long will the fragile blossoms last? When should we be stand-by for hanami, the flower viewing?

The first hanami scene seems to be from Japans first novel, about a flowering young prince called Genji. He was drunk with all sorts of blossoms, those on trees and those of the flesh.

Towards the end of the Second Month, the festival of the cherry blossoms took place in the Grand Hall. […] It was a beautiful day. The sky was clear, birds were singing. […]

Remembering how Genji had danced at the autumn excursion, the crown prince himself presented a sprig of blossoms for his cap and pressed him so hard to dance that he could not refuse. Though he danced only a very brief passage, the quiet waving of his sleeves as he came to the climax was incomparable. […]

The festivities ended late in the night.

[Blossoming cherry tree in Shoboji, Kyoto. Photo © Ad Blankestijn]

But the real interest in sakura would come a bit later, in the great poetry compilations of the Kokinshu and Shinkokinshu. The medieval poet Saigyo was one of the loudest laudators of sakura, sakura and even wished to die under a blooming tree (a wish that was miraculously fulfilled). One of his most famous sakura poems goes:

switching my path
from the trail I marked last year
on Mt Yoshino
I go searching for blossoms
in directions I’ve never been

Yoshinoyama | kozo no shiori no | michi kaete | mada minu kata no | hana wo tazunen

[Cherry Blossoms in Arashiyama, Kyoto. Photo © Ad Blankestijn]

The sacred mountains of Yoshino were Saigyo’s favorite haunt for sakura. This was the territory of the wandering, ascetic monks and Saigyo who did not belong to any fixed temple, was more or less one of them. Here he saw the yamazakura, the wild mountain cherry, which still graces the slopes of Yoshino. It was from this wild tree that later ornamental garden varieties were developed: our present sakura with double flowers, or the “weeping cherry trees” with their branches hanging down, or the late blooming varieties. Wandering through the mountains, Saigyo was drunk with sakura, as a sort of this-wordly Satori…

Read up on sakura lore while waiting for the blossom to break and don’t forget to watch the daily updated sakura front on the website of the Japan Metereological Agency.

The quote from the Genji Monogatari is from the chapter The Festival of the Cherry Blossoms in the (online) translation by Edward Seidensticker.
See another translation of Saigyo’s poem in 2001 Waka. It has also been translated by Burton Watson in Saigyo, Poems of a Mountain Home (Columbia 1991) - my translation follows that of Burton Watson closely, as there is usually no better way to put it than he does.
Read more about sakura lore in Enbutsu’s A Flower Lover’s Guide to Tokyo (Kodansha International, 2007).
Japan Times article about the fine science of pinpointing the days of blossoming. See also this piece about Yoshino.