"To see the cherry hung with snow"

For the first time in 13 years snow fell during the peak of Tokyo's cherry blossom time. Saturday the city was filled with eider down-like flakes slowly spiraling through the branches of Japan's and A. E. Housman's favorite tree. The temperature dropped to nearly freezing, but Tokyoites so love their bloom along the bough that intrepid souls, made bold by large stocks of sake and beer, reveled under umbrellas, plastic sheets, coats, and makeshift tents in the snow and freezing rain.

Sunday, as an April Fool's surprise, was warm and sunny without a cloud marring the robin's egg sky. In parks, along river banks and canals, in cemeteries, along the Imperial moat, and on blocked off city streets, hundreds of thousands of Tokyoites were out under boughs celebrating the loveliest of trees, the cherry now.

They sit on blue tarps, on cardboard, on blankets or on handkerchiefs. Some compose haiku, others look forward to the freedom of university life, while others -- four years senior -- contemplate their first day at the company.

For about ten days the cherry trees will canopy singing, romance, cavorting, dancing, and red-faced pull-out-the-stops drinking parties. Mark Twain once said the first of April is the day when we remember what we are like the other 364 days of the year. As for drinking, singing, and having a merry time in Tokyo, he was right.

Under the blossom-heavy boughs, winter, school worries, old lovers, past arguments, office stress, and lost youth are forgotten. Another winter has been survived. Sake is poured; onigiri rice balls, bento and yaki tori unpacked. Grandfathers play with grandchildren. Couples sit with heads together holding hands. Small boys cavort and catch a falling petal mid-air, stretch it carefully between thumbs and forefingers and blow -- achieving, if they are careful, a thin reedy whistle and a smile.

Soon, the air of Tokyo will be filled again with snow -- the pink snow of falling petals. And legions of street cleaners with their gasoline-powered blowers will appear to tidy up the streets blowing with their noisy engines the fallen petals into gutters..

--mjk

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Cherry Blossoms

Maps of Tokyo are obsessively detailed and exceptionally clear. Perhaps in contrast to the oft-lamented, occasionally lauded, ambiguity of the Japanese language, they define the city with computerized accuracy. So, why would it be surprising to see cherry trees marked on maps of Tokyo?

It shouldn't be, but it is somehow. Looking for an obscure address in an unknown part of town, the map reveals a little series of pink circles along a canal. Cherry trees, of course. What other country's maps would include pink markers of cherry trees on maps that typically only delivery people, sales people, walking addicts, and the directionally challenged pore over?

Yet there they are. The rest of the map is covered with the tangled chippings of land, complex numbering, and the angled disorder of Tokyo's layout. Then, alongside the expected gray quadrangles of buildings, crossing signals, convenience store logos, bank and fast food emblems, are those rows of pink markers. Page after page in the atlas contains these pink dots, along streets and streams and parks indicating the probably rather exact position of cherry trees.

Most of the year cherry trees are nice crinkled, snoozy grandparent-like trees. But in blossom, pink, a color that is excessively cute most of the year, becomes, as if in a fairy tale, a robust, venerable, virile hue, with impressive gradations towards both serious red and dazzling white. It's not the kind of thing that maps typically convey.

Yet the annual two-week limited engagement is colored in right there in the middle of all the other unchanging spatial locators, as if cherry trees are equal in importance, direction and meaning to these other facets of Tokyo's appearance.

Which, of course, they are.

What other country in the world has so many flower reports, nestling them in after the news, sports and weather? What other country prints, on the front page of the newspapers, the expected dates of blooming south to north along the archipelago? Once again, a western scientific import, here of meteorology, is subverted by eastern aesthetics. First things first, for a couple weeks anyway.

Cherry blossoms would seem to oppose maps in their fundamental intent. After all, cherry blossoms don't DO anything exactly. They aren't medicinal plants, they hardly produce many cherries even, inside Tokyo anyway. They are just beautiful, pure and simple. Most maps in this day and age are pure functionality.

Maps are based on spatial consistency, even though stores succeed stores, banks change their names, and corners become pachinko parlors. The numbering, the streets, the shape of the mapped territory remains roughly the same across time.

The cherry blossoms bring time into this serious, reality-ordering plan. They bring in beauty, and give renewal an honored place in the middle of what otherwise helps us locate ourselves. Those little pink dots infuse the map with a different sense of values altogether.

Their inclusion emphasizes what helps us get by over what helps us get around. It reminds us, when noticed, that for a couple weeks of the year, Tokyoites love to turn away from the ordered angles of mapped-out, boxed-in lives to walk and sit by flowers, with friends, colleagues, and family.

They flee the delimiting gray boxes and sharply bordered spaces to just wander from pink circle to pink circle. It's the brief recognition of the wonderful unpredictability of nature's temporality, which thankfully is so good at disrupting the somber continuity of spatial proportion.

--Michael Pronko