Frontier of International Exchange

My Cherry Blossom Pilgrimage

Miranda Hannasch (2009-2010 Amherst-Doshisha Fellow)

  When I first came to Japan, I knew I had to do two things before I left: eat sashimi and see the cherry blossoms bloom in Kyoto. Waiting for the season to come was the hardest part. Kyoto is a city with famously troublesome weather, exchanging hot muggy summers with bitterly cold winters, and often driving its wealthier residents to seek second homes elsewhere. Part of the reason why Kyoto residents admired the change in the seasons so much is because the city is practically unbearable in its extremes. When fall and spring come, though, the natural beauty within the city more than makes up for its chameleon nature. Foreigners and natives alike trek to Kyoto twice a year to pay homage to natural beauty with the backdrop of historical monuments - the ancient temples and shrines that are Kyoto’s finest claim. First, they come in the fall, to see the mountains that ring the city turn crimson with maple leaves. But even this pales before the popularity of cherry blossoms in the spring.
  Cherry-blossom viewing is a highly-anticipated event, complete with cherry blossom forecasts that show the “front” moving across Japan. In the far southern islands of Okinawa, the cherries may display their petals as early as January, while in Hokkaido, the delicate petals often hide until well-into the spring. Kyoto’s blossoms, on the other hand, are perfectly timed at the beginning of April, which the whole country recognizes as the time of spring and new beginnings. The beginning of April is the beginning of the Japanese school year as well as the fiscal year. It is the time when new employees begin their jobs. In Kyoto, the cherries appear as if to welcome them.
  For me, hanami - or cherry-blossoming viewing - would be an opportunity to finally see some of the famous sites of Kyoto as they are always pictured in guidebooks. The word hanami, I knew, implied a major expedition, usually packing some sake and treats as company for an extended contemplation of the trees. For my own cherry-blossom pilgrimage, I only took along a camera and enough coins to pick up whatever roadside sweets might catch my eye. I started out traveling light because I had a busy schedule in mind, strolling from one temple and famous spot to another throughout the afternoon. I worried that maybe I would miss the point of really appreciating the blossoms, but I was more worried about the weather: the sunny Sunday I picked to set out was the first day without rain in a week, and cherry blossoms are delicate enough that they can be prematurely ended by a powerful rain. This might be my only chance.

First blossoms at Maruyama
  My adventure started when I took the train to Maruyama Park - home of Kyoto’s most famous cherry tree, an enormous shidare-zakura, known for its dangling, weepingwillow- like branches. I knew Maruyama Park as a mild, peaceful place - a little drab, perhaps, but pleasant enough, with strolling walks and small ponds dotted around an undistinguished landscape, and attracting the occasional street musician by the stream on sunny afternoons. So I thought I knew what I was getting into. I was wrong.
  Without quite realizing it, I had always pictured cherryblossom viewing as a solitary endeavor: standing on the dark bridge in the wind, watching the cascade of pale petals, contemplating my own mortality. I should have known better. Approaching Maruyama Park, the streets were so crowded with people that we crowded in single-file lines among a sea of heads. I looked up at the huge, branching cherry tree which forms the center of the display in Maruyama -- in the brilliant sunlight, it was a spectacular sight. All around its confines, a shuffling mass of people held up cellphones and blinked into screens obscured by the glare, trying to preserve a glimpse of history. Some posed in front of the blossoms, coached by friends with cameras. Even faced with a famous symbol of temporality, we can’t resign our urge to arrest the past.
  As I shuffled past the endless rows of yatai, or street stalls, I couldn’t help gaping at the sheer numbers of people who had gathered in Maruyama. If the flowering cherries offered a profusion of petals, the crowds sprawled out on blue plastic mats in every corner of the park rivaled them for a proliferation of abundance. It turns out that the saakuru, or clubs, of Kyoto’s many universities often gather at Gion Station for their first welcoming-party of the new school year, and induct their new members under the trees at Maruyama Park. Anyone who doubts that ancient Kyoto is also a mecca for the young should observe the vast crowds here. As if to make the modern point, I turned from watching a busy stand selling grilled bamboo shoots to hear the cheerful, blaring tones of “Twist and Shout” echoing from a nearby loudspeaker, as the club who had brought the music twisted en masse to the pop music. The park was a cross between a festival and the largest street fair I’d ever seen.

Joining the crowds
  The spectacle was overwhelming. America, of course, has its own seasonal events -- a steady trend of New Yorkers escape the city to see the fall colors change in rural New England, for example, and Independence Day celebrations (on July 4) are similar to the summer festivals here with happy families, fireworks, and food -- but there’s no equivalent to the tantalizing one-week blooming time of the cherry blossoms to draw crowds of people in an extremely short period of time. (Legend has it that the ancient Japanese courtiers originally revered the earlier-blooming and fragrant plum blossoms more, but grew to prefer the cherry blossoms as more metaphorically poignant.) It’s hard not to pick up some of the excitement, even if you’re not affiliated with any of the groups, as I wasn’t. I picked up a seasonal food, sakuramochi - a kind of mochi flavored with the pickled cherry blossom leaves and wrapped in a tree’s leaf - and watched the “Twist and Shout” partiers improvise an on-the-spot dance. If Heian courtiers spent these days listening to the plucked tunes of the Japanese biwa and savoring sweets from elaborate tea ceremonies, I thought, perhaps our community celebration at Maruyama Park wasn’t far from the spirit of their wellrounded entertainment.
  There are many wonderful cherry-blossom sights in Higashiyama, the “Eastern Mountains” area of Kyoto -- everything from the long rows of weeping cherry trees along the wide and shining Kamo River, to the pink and white blooms that flutter in front of old temples along the lovely “Philosopher’s Path,” wending along a narrow canal with the backdrop of green mountains. The maiko dancers in Gion every year prepare a traditional entertainment called the Miyako Odori, or the “Dance of the Old Capital,” to celebrate the changing of the seasons and the coming of the spring -- and there, peacefully resting in the center of the teahouse’s moss-and-stone garden, is a gentle pink cherry tree. I saw petals on the ground by the old Takasegawa Canal; and much later, when I ventured west of the city, I marveled at Kameoka forest awash in flowering cherries. For hanami in Kyoto, there’s really no place you can’t go.

Last farewells at Heian Shrine
  And yet there is one place that everyone agrees must be held for the last, treasured in its fragility. In The Makioka Sisters, Juichiro Tanizaki writes of a fading Kansai family that steadily preserves its traditions with one sacred springtime visit, commemorating the Kyoto blossoms in a justly-famous passage: “The cherries in the Heian Shrine were left to the last because they, of all the cherries in Kyoto, were the most beautiful. Now that the great weeping cherry in Gion was dying and its blossoms were growing paler each year, what was left to stand for the Kyoto spring if not the cherries in the Heian Shrine?” He wrote in the 1940s -- the great weeping cherry of Maruyama Park, I am glad to say, still survives. But the faith in the Heian Shrine as the emblem of all things Kyoto is stronger yet.
  The Heian Shrine was only built in 1895, but it recaptures the essence of a much older capital dating back over a thousand years, to the days when Kyoto was first founded and known as “Heian-Kyo.” That delicate past is now shrouded in mystery and myth, and many fleeting human lives have passed away from that day to this, as Kyoto endured through the ravages of fire and war more times than we can count. But the cherry blossoms still bloom every year.
  When I visited the Heian Shrine at last, the rain had begun to fall from a cloudy sky. In the wide garden of an aristocratic shrine, the cherry blossoms that draped everywhere from trellises began to reveal almost a noble look, a mournful character. Some were in full flower, a triumph of lovely endurance against the sky. Some were already beginning to fade. Such is the quick, silent joy of the cherry blossom season, and its yearly tragedy. For myself, I think I love the blossoms best that are “left to the last,” and I’ll treasure them -- until the spring, as always, comes once again.

(Reprinted from “Doshisha University Staff English Club News “Topics” No.9, on May 31, 2010)”