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Come April of 2008,
I’m going to a graveyard in Tokyo to see the flowers.
Yes, that does sound completely weird. Fortunately, I have a perfectly
good explanation. You see, I’m going for the cherry blossom viewing.
The cherry blossom, or sakura, is Japan’s most popular icon and deeply
embedded in the national psyche. Throughout the centuries, odes have
been written about its beauty and symbolism and even today, its pretty
pastel petals are plastered on everything from tissue paper to cartoon
characters. Every year at the beginning of spring, as the first snow
white blossoms burst into flower on the cherry trees, thousands of
people crowd into parks and other green places around Japan to admire
the ephemeral beauty of the this most Japanese of flowers. The ohanami
(cherry blossom viewing), or the cherry blossom festival as it’s
sometimes known, is the first major event of the year, and it’s a
cherished and thoroughly respectable Japanese tradition. It’s just that
I happen to like going to see the cherry blossoms in a cemetery.
More specifically, the Aoyama Cemetery. There are, of course, literally
dozens of other places to have cherry blossom viewings in Tokyo. Ueno
Park is a perennial favourite, Shinjuku Park has thousands of the
flowering trees to view, Sumida Park even has a very pretty river for a
more picturesque scene. Thousands of other people will choose to have
their cherry viewing parties in these places. Personally, I’d choose
Aoyama Cemetery because for obvious reasons, it’s a bit less crowded
there. Also, it’s free to enter.
Aoyama Cemetery is classically Japanese in design, a tidy arrangement of
grey headstones standing over tiny plots (due to space constraints, only
the ashes of the cremated remains are buried), all packed tightly away
in one of the most fashionable districts of the city. The cemetery has
been here since 1872, long before Tokyo was the overcrowded hip
metropolis it is now. Normally, it’s a very quiet place. If it wasn’t
for the 200-odd cherry trees planted along the main road through the
cemetery, it would still be a quiet place during April as well.
 Exactly
when the cherry trees burst into bloom really depends on their location
and the weather, as the milder the climate, the earlier the blooming. If
I’d been in subtropical Okinawa, I’d be able to enjoy a cherry blossom
viewing in January, while further north in Hokkaido, I’d have to wait
til May. Around Tokyo, blooms come out anywhere from end March to
beginning May. The timing of the first blossoms is eagerly predicted by
the Meteorological Agency, reported by the press and avidly devoured by
the sakura-hungry public.
So when the sakura trees finally burst into bloom, there I’ll be, with
my blue groundsheet and takeaway yakitori, camped out under the trees
and enjoying the sight of great clouds of white gracing the trees along
the road and occasionally drifting to the ground. Cherry blossoms only
last about a week or two after opening and the ephemeral nature of the
blooms may even inspire me to contemplate the fragile mortality of human
life, surrounded as I will be by the spirits of lives past.
Then again, maybe not. In true Japanese salaryman tradition, many of the
other cherry blossom viewing parties around me will be busy drinking
copious amounts of sake and beer. The mobile stalls selling noodles,
yakitori and squidballs will be doing a brisk business and as the night
wears on, some of those jokes getting tossed about will get incredibly
bawdy. I doubt sakura blossoms will feature in any of them. Still, I
won’t complain. I read on Wikipedia that the Japanese flower viewing
tradition was something the Japanese adapted from ancient Chinese
customs, when the entire Imperial households (royals, poets, sycophants,
concubines and all) would sit under the blooming plum trees and party –
so maybe the drunken revelry of today’s sakura viewings in Tokyo are
just the modern continuation of a very old practice!
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