'Hanami', cherry blossoms in Japan

Every year, millions of tourists visit the country, in particular Kyoto, the ancient capital, to see the cherry blossoms. The tradition is rooted in the culture of the aristocracy of the ninth century. The "mono no aware" is the wonder of beauty and the melancholy of its transience. Now an invasion of insects threatens it.

Kyoto (AsiaNews/Agencies) – In Japan, hanami is the traditional custom of enjoying the cherry blossoms when Japanese and tourists alike fill the streets to look at cherry trees (sakura), the country’s symbol.

As spring approaches, the Japan Weather Association releases weekly reports on when blossoms are expected to start flowering and reach full bloom in the various parts of the country.

The cherry blossoms have been an important event in Japanese culture since the ninth century, when the aristocracy of the time (Heian era: 794-1185) gathered under the trees to contemplate the newly bloomed flowers.

For the Japanese, the fragility and short life of the flowers – no more than two weeks - was a source of poignant emotion.

This is the mono no aware (literally, the pathos of things), an emotion that combines amazement in the face of great beauty and melancholy for its transience, a symbol of the fragility of life itself.

Emerging in a literary form called monogatari – including the Genji Monogatari - the mono no aware also appears in modern Japanese literature and in the works of the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese-British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro.

The event has long attracted waves of tourists, making their way to isolated locations, especially on the islands of Kyushu and Honshu, from mid-March until the last week of March and the first of April.

This year, flowering is expected to reach its peak in a week in Kyoto on 28 March.

Japan’s old imperial capital is traditionally regarded as the best of places to witness the natural phenomenon, a city replete with gardens and venues like the temples of Kiyomizudera and Kodaiji, and Nijo Castle. 

However this year, the famed blooms are facing a “invisible” enemy, a beetle named Aromia bungii native to China, Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula and northern Vietnam.

The beetles live inside cherry and plum trees, stripping them of their bark. Now experts are sounding the alarm, calling for countermeasures before the infestation spreads.

The beetle was first spotted in 2012 in Aichi Prefecture but has now spread across the Tokyo region, according to the Environment Ministry.

• japan
• hanami
• cherry blossom
• tourism
• transience
• religious feelings
• beetles