Sakura: The History and Significance of Washington D.C.’s National Cherry Blossom Festival and The Ephemeral Nature of Time

With the graduation season passing, a new video has gone viral. It is a creatively simple yet effective video in which grade school children (5-7 years old) leap towards the camera (as though jumping over an unseen crevasse). The shot then reverses, and they land on a padded surface in their high school caps and gowns. The timeless message (no pun intended) is clear: “Time flies. Cherish the moments you have with the people you love while you can, because they won’t be around forever, and your children will grow up faster than you think!”

My two cousins recently graduated from high school. On an extended family text-message group chain, my uncle and aunt shared photos of them in their caps and gowns (triumphantly smoking cigars) alongside photos of them from a decade or more ago. Minus the smart phones…this is of course a tale as old as time! My uncle- who I had namelessly alluded to in a previous article about the birth of thespianism and the “performative impulse”- is the same uncle whom I’m alluding to here. I can only gather that he and my aunt shed many “happy tears” over this classic “passage of time” experience!

Cherry Tree History

Let’s shift gears, though (we’ll return to the “passage of time” shortly). Every year- at the beginning of spring (late March/early April)- another major event occurs. Right along the Tidal Basin in Washington D.C. the “Cherry Blossom Festival” enthralls crowds. It’s a beautiful site to behold, and it always attracts millions of visitors. Millions of photos and videos and Instagram stories then, of course, follow! When and why did this festival first begin though?

Efforts initially took place in 1885. Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore- having recently visited Japan- approached the U.S. Army Superintendent of the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds and petitioned him to plant cherry trees along the reclaimed Potomac River waterfront. The department initially rebuffed her, but Scidmore (later, the first female board member of the National Geographic Society) would go on proposing her idea for the next 24 years¹. At some point, it caught traction! Various individuals brought cherry trees to the Washington D.C. area.

In 1905, Scidmore hosted a cherry blossom tree viewing tea party in northwest D.C. and invited several notable guests. These included prominent botanist David Fairchild and his fiancée, Marian, daughter of inventor Alexander Graham Bell². A year later, Fairchild imported over 1,000 cherry trees from the Yokohama Nursery Company in Japan to his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland and planted them on his property. The Fairchilds promoted flowering cherry trees as the ideal tree to plant alongside Washington, D.C.’s grand avenues.

On September 26, 1907, their friends and the Chevy Chase Land Company ordered 300 cherry trees for the Chevy Chase area. The following year, they donated cherry saplings to every D.C. school to plant on their grounds in observance of Arbor Day. At an Arbor Day speech (which Scidmore attended), Fairchild proposed that Washington D.C. transform the now non-existent “Speedway”- a route than encircled the D.C. Tidal Basin- into a “Field of Cherries”¹.

Beautifying the Tidal Basin

Scidmore raised money for this project and, in 1909, she even drafted a formal letter to First Lady Helen Herron Taft (wife of newly elected president William Howard Taft). First Lady Taft responded:

Thank you very much for your suggestion about the cherry trees. I have taken the matter up and am promised the trees, but I thought perhaps it would be best to make an avenue of them, extending down to the turn in the road, as the other part is still too rough to do any planting. Of course, they could not reflect in the water, but the effect would be very lovely of the long avenue. Let me know what you think about this¹.

Japanese chemist Jōkichi Takamine- who had discovered adrenaline and isolated epinephrine in 1901- was in Washington D.C. at the time with Japanese consul to New York City, Mr. Kokichi Midzuno. When this proposal came to his attention, he asked the First Lady if the city would accept an additional 2,000 trees given in the name of Tokyo. The First Lady accepted.

On April 13, 1909, Spencer Cosby (Superintendent of the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds) purchased ninety cherry trees and planted them along the Potomac River from where the Lincoln Memorial currently stands south towards East Potomac Park. On August 30 of that year, the Ambassador of Japan was in Washington, D.C., and he informed the U.S. Department of State of Tokyo’s plan to donate 2,000 more cherry trees to be planted along the Potomac.

An initial batch of trees were infested with nematodes and insects, and so the Department of Agriculture destroyed them to protect local growers (on January 28, 1910, President Taft ordered they burn the trees)^1,3. When Secretary of State Philander C. Knox wrote a letter to the Japanese Ambassador and expressed regret over this unfortunate turn of events, though, Takamine responded with another donation- at least 3,020 cherry trees from alongside the Arakawa River in Tokyo that the Japanese had grafted onto stock from Itami, Hyogo Prefecture. On February 14, 1912, Tokyoites shipped twelve cultivars of these trees on board the Awa Maru, and, on March 26 of that year, all 3,020 trees arrived in D.C. via railcar from Seattle¹.

City of Trees

Over the ensuing century, the United States would, of course, become fatal enemy and then best-friend-once-again to Japan. At the turn of the 20^th century, though, U.S.-Japanese relations were generally positive, and, while the diplomatic events linked to the Japanese giving cherry blossom trees to Washington, D.C. in 1912 are relatively unknown, we can gather Prince Iyesato Tokugawa sanctioned the donation as a gesture of goodwill. Prince Tokugawa- a member of Japan’s House of Peers (1903-1933) and heir to last Shogun of Japan Tokugawa Yoshinobu- refused to take credit for the gift, and humbly wished that the U.S. would view it as a donation from the capital city of Tokyo itself. Prince Tokugawa also visited the U.S. and even dined with President Taft.

On March 27, 1912, an official ceremony for cherry tree planting took place on the north bank of the Tidal Basin in West Potomac Park. First Lady Taft presented Viscountess Chinda with a bouquet of “American Beauty” roses. Several years later, the U.S. government gifted flowering dogwood trees to the Japanese people as a gesture of gratitude⁴. From 1913 to 1920, Washingtonians planted 1,800 trees of the Somei-Yoshino variety around the Tidal Basin and the remaining Yoshino trees in East Potomac Park.

In 1934, a joint sponsorship of numerous civic groups held the first “Cherry Blossom Festival,” and in 1935 the festival became a national annual event. A group of women notably chained themselves to the cherry trees when, in 1938, the government planned to clear ground for the Jefferson Memorial. They reached a compromise, though, and more trees were planted along the south side of the basin (beautifully framing the Jefferson Memorial). Various gift exchanges between the U.S. and Japan continued in the decades following World War II as the two countries rebuilt their amicable relationship. In 1999, a mysterious force began destroying the cherry trees. The Department of the Interior eventually identified this shadowy, roguish, anarchic individual…an elusive and tenacious…beaver (which they then relocated to another reservoir).

Peering Into the Flower

It’s like something out of a painting. The swarming multitudes. The pinkish-salmon foliage. The shimmering reservoir. The floating paddle boats. The marble white memorial in the background. The 30-foot sculpture of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. staring across the Tidal Basin…fusing natural and social horizons…the history of the United States and its place in the world coalescing with the history of every individual person who visits the Tidal Basin. Why do so many visitors visit the Tidal Basin and flock to see the Cherry Blossom Festival?

The cherry blossom (“Sakura”), a flower of trees in Prunus subgenus Cerasus, are not the types of trees that grow their own fruit. They do, however, have a very appealing vanilla-like smell (mainly attributed to the flowers’ coumarin molecules)⁴. Wild species of cherry trees are widely distributed across the Northern Hemisphere but are most common in East Asia (especially Japan)^5,6,7. The Japanese created a cultivar suitable for viewing by selecting the wild species of Prunus speciosa (Oshima cherry).

Endemic to their country, the Oshima cherry trees produce many large flowers, are fragrant, easily mutate into double flowers, and grow rapidly. The Japanese have been producing them since the 14^th century and still use them to contribute to the development of “Hanami” (“Flower viewing”) culture⁴. The “Kanzan,” for instance, is a double-flowered cultivar that developed during the Japanese Edo period. It has 20 to 50 petals in each flower, and it turns a vibrant pink during its peak blossoming period. Cherry blossoms are also very important to the Japanese as they symbolize the ephemeral nature of life, and that is undoubtedly why so many people flock to see them every year.

What is Time?

With that we return to our initial topic…the “passage of time.” What is it about time and its relationship to beauty that strikes such a chord with us? When we think about time, we usually do so in many different aspects. “Time flies.” “Time is money.” “Time is of the essence.” “Time heals all wounds.” 18^th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that time was not “an empirical concept somehow drawn from experience” but rather a “necessary representation that grounds all intuitions.” Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that time was “the measure of motion and of things being moved (present equally everywhere and with all things).”

American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau viewed time as the “meeting of two eternities” (past and present). All these explanations are, of course, rather esoteric, but they do all point out something very important. Time is not as straightforward a concept as we initially perceive it to be. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, and so forth can characterize time, but so do experiences, and the latter is certainly a harder category to pin down.

The controversial 20^th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger perhaps captured the concept of time best in his appropriately titled, seminal work, Being and Time. Time for him was the primary foundation of “being” itself, and it structures all our conscious experiences. Given humanity’s razor-sharp capacity for self-awareness, time for him was also oriented towards and inextricably linked with death! Death not just in the sense of “beginnings and endings” but also in the more entropic sense of the term. Things move away from states of singularity to multiplicity. Living organisms die when the biological systems that unite them disintegrate. Families, organizations, and countries all die when they fracture and the people within them disperse.

As many thinkers have pointed out, this brief period of balanced singularity and order we call “life” undoubtedly derives its beauty from the “two eternities” that bookend it. Something wholly unique and unprecedented emerges into a tiny finite window and then disappears forever! The moment that something occurs is the only moment that something occurs in the exact way that it does in the entire scope of eternity…. a realization that is oftentimes hauntingly and tragically difficult to accept.

“Seems like that was just yesterday!”

The children in the article’s initial video who “leap” from elementary to high school graduation only do so as the children and ages that they are once in the entire scope of global and cosmic history. Set aside Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence.” Once that “passage of time” has transpired, it’ll never happen in the exact way that it did ever again! I remember the summer I graduated college (2011) …when my two cousins who just graduated hadn’t even yet begun kindergarten. “Seems like it was just yesterday,” as the old expression goes. “Where did the time go?”

Yes. Where did the time go? Kant’s version of “time” is intuitive and perceptual. Aristotle’s is more-or-less material. Thoreau places all time worth our attention in a single “place” (the present moment). Heidegger orients it towards the inevitability of death. Which philosophy should we appeal to? Let us take a page from an award-winning South Korean director and approach time in the form of “everything everywhere all at once.” Then let us travel east to Tokyo…and much further east back to Washington D.C. (where we began)

Time is eternally still…yet always in motion…always only ever in motion in the singular moment that one perceives it to be…and always in relationship to a beginning and an end…a rising and falling…an accumulation and a dispersal. We can capture time in all its quintessential nature in all the flowering cherry trees that line the U.S. nation’s capital. It rises and falls…again and again…year after year!! New visitors who take new photos of new flowering plants will arrive every spring to capture this beautiful, unique period of life that briefly blossoms and then inevitably fades away.

SOURCES

1. “History of the Cherry Trees”. Cherry Blossom Festival. National Park Service. Archived from the original on 2016-03-22. Retrieved 2016-03-22.
2. McClellan, Ann (2005). The Cherry Blossom Festival: Sakura Celebration. Bunker Hill Publishing, Inc. p. 23.
3. Jefferson, Roland M; et al. (1977). The Japanese flowering cherry trees of Washington, D.C.: a living symbol of friendship. Dept. of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service.
4. Katsuki, Toshio (2015). Sakura (in Japanese). Iwanami Shoten.
5. FAQ・桜の豆知識 [FAQ・Cherry Blossom Trivia]. The Flower Association of Japan (in Japanese). 日本以外にも桜は自生してるの？ [Are cherry trees native to countries other than Japan?]. Archived from the original on 5 August 2014. Retrieved 21 February 2024.
6. さくらの基礎知識 [Basic knowledge of cherry blossoms]. JAPAN Cherry Blossom Association (in Japanese). Retrieved 21 February 2024.
7. Qingwei, Yao (February 1982). “Studies on the History of the Flowering Cherry”. en.cnki.com.cn. Journal of Nanjing Forestry University. Archived from the original on 12 May 2022. Retrieved 9 April 2019.