Hanami

One of my favorite activities in Japan was hanami -- cherry blossom viewing. Hanami is an annual rite in Japan that takes place in late March/early April. The country nearly comes to a stop for the week that the blossoms are out, with offices holding after-work viewing parties for which junior workers are sent out during the day to find and hold a good spot. Hanami takes place wherever cherry trees can be found, and some of the best places are in spots you wouldn't guess. For example, a great place to view cherry blossoms in Tokyo is Aoyama Cemetery, where the avenues between the graves are lined with cherry trees. The park is packed even at night, when people visit the cemetery to see the trees lit up by the street lights, called yozakura, or "night cherry [blossoms]." (I am sure that, in the old days, yozakura was done by the light of the moon, but you can barely see the moon in Tokyo now, given all the light pollution, and the street lights illuminate the trees quite beautifully.)

My first hanami took place in 1992. Dave S. (who had not yet assumed his secret identity, Meishi Man), his girlfriend Chieko, and my first girlfriend in Japan, Kaori (who shares the same first name as my wife -- Hi Honey!!), went to Aoyama Cemetery on the spur of the moment one Saturday when the blossoms were out.

We bought some convenience-store bento boxes and some beer and found a spot under the trees, next to a large group of men who seemed to be work-mates. Their set-up was quite elaborate, complete with a blue tarpaulin, large platters of cold cuts, and a crate of jars of Ozeki "One Cup" sake -- sake that comes in a glass with a pull-top lid for drinking on the go, a workingman's favorite in Japan.

Being in earshot of this group, they soon overheard us speaking in Japanese and started to get friendly. With a mid-day beer buzz making me sleepy, I put my head down on Kaori's lap, and stared up at the cherry blossoms above. Suddenly, a man's sake-reddened face burst into the scene above me. "O-den ga suki?" ("Do you like o-den?"), he blurted. (O-den is a popular dish of vegetables, vegetable cakes and fish cakes that simmer in a broth for hours, usually consumed in cold weather, and hanami season is generally still cold.) The question was sudden, and out of context, and I didn't even know the guy who was asking me, but through the beer haze I said that I did.

"Okay, wait a minute," he said. He returned a couple of minutes later with a serving of o-den that he bought from the open-air vendor just a little way down the cemetery avenue. We thanked him appreciatively, and then began to talk with our new-found friends. Naturally, they wanted to know how Dave and I had learned Japanese, what we were doing in Japan, where we worked, etc. They didn't ask us the usual question about whether we liked Japanese girls. The answer to that question must have seemed obvious.

The men had been there for hours before we arrived and their party broke up before we left. They had a lot of leftover cold cuts and One Cup sakes, and they insisted that we take all of it. A single One-Cup is enough rot-gut to generate a really good buzz, and we were already pretty full from beer, so I think we wound up having only one cup each, and then Dave took the rest home. We ate some cold cuts and then threw away the rest. It's possible we went to "Oh God!" after that, since it was nearby Aoyama Cemetery, but I really don't remember.

From that first cherry blossom experience, I began to organize a hanami party every year. When I later moved into my own apartment, which had a big roof-deck, a friend gave me a barbecue set, which I used to lug to Aoyama Cemetery or Inokashira Park (another famous viewing spot) to cook yakitori. The parties were successively bigger each year; I think the last of them drew about 40 people.

I've only gotten to see the cherry blossoms once more since leaving Japan in 1994. In 2007, my wife Kaori and I visited her parents when the cherry trees were blooming, and I had the rare treat of seeing the blossoms in Kyoto, which is famous for its cherry trees. The last "Unrelated Japan Photo" I posted is from that trip.

I've tried to recreate hanami in New York, and have found an excellent spot in Central Park where the blossoms are as plentiful as in a Japanese park. It's always fun, but the general party atmosphere of life stopping while the trees are blooming is missing. There are always a few Japanese there also trying to recreate what they are missing from Japan, but it's never quite the same. Most Americans, it seems, don't even notice the blossoms.

P.S. Out of nostalgia, I just looked on the internet and found that the bar is not "Oh God!," but "Oh! God," as if God walked in on you unexpectedly. The placement of the exclamation point is so classic and so quintessentially Japanese! How could I have forgotten this wonderful tidbit?

A review is here: http://ultimatepubguide.com/pubs/info.phtml?pub_id=334