SLIMHANNYA, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

These weeks the gardens of North Asia and continental Europe are filled with visitors and are looking their best. It is cherry blossom season, much to the delight of people of all ages. To ‘admire the beauty of the flowers’ or ‘hanami’ as it is called in Japanese, millions of people flock to public parks. Picnics with friends and family and drinks under the trees until late in the evening are the favourite pastimes of this season. In Japan, to give everyone the chance to enjoy the most spectacular moments, there are cherry blossom forecasts, similar to weather reports, which track their blooming almost in real time, from the south to the north of the Japanese archipelago. You can view them here.

It is not only the Japanese who consider the cherry blossom season a very important time of year. Chinese and Koreans also attach very deep symbolic meanings to these trees and their spring blossoms. However, these meanings are subtly different from one another.

The blooming cherry trees that delight entire countries have a cool scientific name -Prunus serrulata; they occur in dozens of varieties and are grown for the beauty of their blossoms. In urban gardens they live for 20–25 years; in the wild they can reach 40 years. They are usually fruitless, although some varieties also produce small edible cherries. They have been selectively cultivated for centuries for their flowers, and to produce the most beautiful blooms in the loveliest colours, ranging from cloud-white to candy-pink to pink-purple.

A symbol of Japan and the transience of life because its flowering is magnificent yet very brief, the cherry tree or sakura is considered a good omen for students, as the school year begins precisely in the weeks when it blooms, and may also be a sign of a good rice harvest. It is also linked to a very Japanese aesthetic concept, mono no aware, ‘sensitivity to things’ or ‘ sensitivity to their sweet melancholy’. It describes a kind of gentle emotional response we experience when faced with the fleeting beauty of nature and life, a nostalgia for things that will soon disappear, like the petals of the cherry blossom that fall within the space of a few days. Japan’s oldest literary anthology, the Manyoshu, dating back to the 8th century AD, includes numerous poems dedicated to the cherry blossom, linking them to the timeless topics of love and melancholy, while haiku masters captured their fleeting splendour.

The blooming of cherry trees as a metaphor was taken up by the samurai class because it evoked the ideals of Bushidō: a short life and an honourable death. It is the same ideal that would be rediscovered by the kamikaze pilots during the Second World War.