Cherry Blossom

BACK AFTER NINETEEN YEARS.
MY TIMING COULDN’T HAVE BEEN BETTER!

I should have suspected something was up when I couldn’t book a room, any room in Tokyo. Some capsule hotels and youth hostel bunks were still bookable, but honestly, I would rather brave it out in a sleeping bag at Shimbashi train station. Now I’m in Ueno Park, just north of Akihabara, watching endless groves of Cheery trees in their peek blossom. To give this a bit of perspective, Japanese Cherry blossom is a fickle thing that lasts no more than a week or two. Many around the world put seeing Cherry Blossom in Japan high on their bucket list. I’m here by complete chance and can’t help but feel a bit “unworthy”. Now, if only I could find an umbrella.

They sentenced me to nineteen years of exile

It has been long, way too long. Full-nineteen years had passed since I last set foot in the land of the rising sun. Since then, I have visited Costa Rica, China, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Laos, Mexico, Tanzania, India, Brazil, Cambodia, Peru, Nepal, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Jordan, Singapore, Seychelles, Philippines, Egypt, Korea, Thailand, The Maldives, Botswana, Argentina, and host of other countries of the developed or undeveloped world. But my favorite place? Japan? Nada!

Call it laziness, call it lack of opportunity, call it COVID, call it whatever you like. I missed Japan, its quirkiness, strangeness, weirdness, and drive for perfection, even if perfection makes no sense. I’m reminded of the young Japanese train driver who oversped and flipped his train, killing 106 passengers and himself because he was 90 seconds late. This is Japan. Flying there is the cheapest journey to Mars. What’s there not to like?

Perhaps a good place to start is the shoebox of a room I was lucky enough to secure. Room eleven-square-meter (including a miniature bathroom), residence on the 2^nd floor overlooking a service ally. I tried to see if I could touch both walls by stretching my arms. No dice! But hey, I was pretty close. Still, as far as cleanliness, features, overall maintenance, and built quality, goes this three-star APA chamber could have easily shown a four-star room how it’s done. The following week I stayed for two nights at the Mercure Grand Residence in Bangkok. A five-star hotel that was a complete sty. No one does it quite as well as the laborious, borderline-fanatic Japanese. Cherry blossom included.

Cherry Blossom? Who gives a f***?!

Well, the Japanese do. Big time. Through centuries of careful cultivation, the Japanese have created cherry trees that give large pink flowers (but oddly, no fruits) at around the same time in spring. Blooming en-masse, and before growing their green canopy, these Japanese Cherry trees adorn the streets and parks of Tokyo in majestic pink. But not for long. In about two weeks, the flowers drop, and the magic is gone. This very transient, not to say fickle, annual rite is called ‘Sakura’ and is embedded in the very soul of this island nation.

An enduring metaphor for the ephemeral nature of life, mortality, and the acceptance of destiny and karma. Cherry blossoms are everywhere, in art, manga, anime, film, songs, and on the back of the 100 Yen coin, to name but a few. If this wasn’t clear enough by now, the Japanese are serious about their Cherry Blossom (and yes, they are serious about everything else as well. Like, duh…).

Japan has been following and documenting the peak blossom of their non-fruit-yielding Cherry trees for more than 1,200 years. Which gives yet another alarming sign of global warming. The date of full bloom was relatively stable from 812 to 1800s, at around April 17^th. But after that, the time of full bloom had rapidly moved earlier, and in 2023, the earliest full bloom date in 1200 years was recorded on March 22^nd. The date I set foot in Japan. Call that Karma!

We come in pieces

Unlike the many who ventured out to Japan solely to experience Sakura (which perfectly explains the lack of lodging), I, on the other hand, was in for a completely different business. Motorcycles. The annual Tokyo Motorcycle Show is a massive gathering of the Asian two-wheel industry. It includes all the usual Japanese suspects, as well as every self-respecting motorcycle brand from around the world. Being the CMO of Cardo Systems and having been denied entry for three whole COVID years, I thought the 2023 show was as good an excuse as any to return to the largest metropolitan city in the world (over 37 million by last count). The show was excellent and could perhaps merit its own post sometime in the future. But we’re not here to talk about souped-up engines and carbon fiber, are we?

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Grasping our unintended luck, Cardo’s Asia Pacific team, myself included, decided to meet one early morning at a Café in Ueno Park to witness Sakura first-hand. The whole week was cloudy and rainy, and that morning was no different. Excluding perhaps the fact I chose that morning to forget my umbrella at the hotel. We enjoyed an OK-ish Cappuccino and a green tea cake (weird but good) while waiting for the rain to subside. It didn’t. Coming out into the trickle, I pulled up my woolen hoodie and thought about all those poor tourists who have booked their Sakura experience months in advance, only to witness it in the wet. Strangely it made me feel a little better, if not a little drier.

Sakura! Sakura! Sakura!

We step out into a rain of umbrellas. It’s early morning, but the park’s main pathway is already half-full of spectators. The ever-methodological Japanese have split the road right down in the middle and placed cleared marked arrows for the spectators to follow – which they do, of course.

Strange for a left-driving country, the one-way split puts us on the right side of the path. This makes little sense, but hey, very little does. Not wanting to be treated as a bunch of anarchist gaijin, we follow suit, asking no questions. The boulevard, lined with peak-blossom Cherry trees, is impressive indeed, though, I must admit, not a “bucket-list item” that some tour guides and Instagram influencers might lead you to believe. We stop to gaze at the pink flora and draw our waterproofed smartphones to snap pictures.

But it’s only when we step away from the busy main thoroughfare and venture into the more obscure pathways of Ueno Park that the “real” Japanese Sakura experience starts to sip in. Small Shinto shrines with their rugged, thick wooden frame dot the back alleys, occasionally joined by Japanese pagodas and prayer tablets. It’s here that the flowering trees make their most significant impact.

We set our way through the puddles to a nearby passage flanked on both sides by lakes. Imagine a snake of a land traversing through the water. Now, add pink trees marking the border between land and water. I take my smartphone and press the snap button one last time.