Sakura fubuki 桜吹雪

Cherry Blossom snowstorm

Tokyo 1991
Because my first arrival in the country coincided just days before the cherry blossoms burst into bloom, I still associate sakura with my early years in Japan—and that terrible emotional darkness following my father’s death.

And yet, there was so much joy in the season. The cherry blossoms appeared like billowing pink clouds, when seen from a distance.

It was as if the entire nation became drunk on flowers. I don’t think in many other places in the world you could find quite so much activity surrounding a blossoming tree—no matter how beautiful. Trains changed their schedules to facilitate easier blossom-viewing, as the entire country mobilized into flower-viewing mode.

For a thousand years, the Japanese have treasured the sakura by engaging in the ritual of  hanami, (flower-viewing). During weekdays, families and colleagues would gather in great numbers under the trees for long lunches with beer and karaoke. And at night there were even more parties—as cherry blossom-viewing by moonlight is considered an elegant way to celebrate spring.

Maybe even more astonishing than the beauty of the sakura in bloom was what happened next, as the flowers faded and then scattered. Tetsuya always grew ecstatic and said:

“It looks like it’s snowing!”

I would watch as the trees shed their pale petals into the wind. The flowers falling gently like snowflakes.

Sakura-fubuki means “cherry blossom snowstorm” and Hana-no-ame means “flower rain.”  One word poems.

We ate sakura-mochi, the sweet pink ricecakes filled with red bean paste in the middle and wrapped in a salty pickled cherry tree leaf. I loved eating the bite-sized sweets with warm tea we prepared in a thermos for our blossom-viewing excursions. If it was warm out, we spread a blanket under a blossoming tree and talked. Well, mostly Tetsuya talked, marveling at the way everything was utterly transformed.

“A flowery world…” he called it. “And in just a few weeks, it will be gone. That’s why we have to appreciate them now.” He always reminded me of this.

He knew I was thinking of home. “The sadness you feel for your father is the sadness of the cherry blossoms,” he said. He explained that the transience of the cherry blossoms reminds us that if the flowers never scattered, they would cease to have the power to move us. They’d be no different from plastic flowers, he said. “It’s because the flowers last only days that we find them so poignant.”

Things can change so quickly in life, like “cloudy skies over cherry blossoms.” This is picked up by the term hanagumori, as explained by writer and academic Nakanishi Susumi in his book The Japanese Linguistic Landscape. Spring has always-changing weather and so the cherry blossoms hardly stand a chance, between wind and rain, snow and sleet. This is also expressed by the term, mikkaminu ma-no-sakura (三日見ぬ間の桜) - meaning “you won’t even see them for three days: the sakura.”

I was startled to learn that the young kamikaze pilots who went on suicide missions during World War II were also referred to as sakura. This was an association that happened from almost the beginning of the war, since the young men could expect to be loved even more by the nation for the fleetingness of their lives, just like the flowers.

This heightened awareness of impermanence is known in Japanese as mono-no-aware. The lesson of the cherry blossoms is attentiveness to the evanescence of the present moment. It is also a radical acceptance of the ephemerality of things. The fragility of human bodies and of peace between nations.

It is the pathos of the world.

Recommend Books:

Nakanishi Susumu’s The Japanese Linguistic Landscape: Reflections on Quintessential Words—translated wonderfully (!!!) by Ryan Shaldian Morrison

M.G Sheftall’s Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze

Top photo by Japan Web Magazine.