Essay Under the blossoms By Kaori Shoji	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
花の下にて春死なん 今年も桜の季節がやってきた。 この時期になると花見に心を躍らされるばかりか、各地の桜の開花を追いかけて、国内を飛び回る人たちも珍しくない。 それほど日本人と桜の間には切っても切れない縁がある一方で、土地開発のために桜の木を伐採してしまうケースもあるようだ。

The Japanese relationship to sakura cherry blossoms is weird. We lust and pine for those blossoms. We count the days till the first pink buds finally open. We keep tabs on which trees in which region yields the earliest blossoms, and talk about them with the exuberance of people who have never seen sakura in their lives. We've even invented what's called a "cherry blossom frontline," which charts how far the blossoms have opened on the Japanese map, starting from the southern tip of Okinawa in early March and ending with Hokkaido in May.

Devout sakura worshippers will travel with the frontline, sampling the new blossoms as they open. The pastime is especially popular among the "pensioned retirees" who traverse the nation pursuing the sakura frontline for nearly two months. "All I wish for is to die under a cherry tree in spring" goes the famous poem by Saigyo. And we don't need "The Last Samurai" to tell us that when committing seppuku, it's infinitely preferable to do so in spring, so that the pale pink blossom petals will flutter artfully around one's bleeding body. The Japanese live, breathe and (desire to) die with the sakura. We're obsessed.

Why then do we treat them so badly? You'd think that there would be cherry trees throughout Japan. At the very least, you'd expect a government-sponsored protection program that bans real-estate developers from destroying a single tree. Alas, however, the fact is that sakura trees are cut down with chilling regularity, and often in huge numbers. Along the banks of Edogawa River for example, 10,000 cherry trees were destroyed and concrete poured in their wake to prevent the water from rising during heavy rains. All over Tokyo, in fact, contractors raze sakura trees without a backward glance. In Kyoto, century-old trees are chopped down to make way for parking lots.

Perhaps these barbarities have something to do with the complexities of the Japanese-sakura relationship. "Love and hate are different sides of the same coin" is probably the best way to describe it. Novelist Motojiro Kajii wrote about how the season of sakura depressed him unbearably, the "arrogant beauty" of the petals reminding him, not of glories and new beginnings, but of personal misery and doomed love affairs. Weird stuff.

And here we are again, in the season of those evocative petals.

Shukan ST: April 4, 2008

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