Cherry Blossom

It's My New Drag Name

First of all, apologies to subscribers who had issues with images in the past two issues. I hope this issue fixes that problem.

I have a hard time imaging a single plant in nature that would captivate the whole of the United States. We are a large country, after all, and encompass numerous different biomes, from tundra and alpine to tropical and desert. For many years, I have been a macro floral photographer, and I remain in tune to blooms and trends, but a nationwide blossom has yet to ping my radar.

Each state has their flower, of course. For Washington State, that’s the rhododendron. I have photographed hundreds of them.

But What About Japan?

The story is very different in Japan, though. Cherry blossoms have fascinated for more than a thousand years. The brevity of their bloom duration connects with an emotional awareness of the fleeting nature of beauty, known as 物の哀れ (mono no aware) in Japanese. This ephemerality was even said to have inspired Zero pilots during WWII. One kamikaze penned the following haiku (I’ve no source for the original but the translation appears in The Nobility of Failure by Ivan Morris): If only we might fall like cherry blossoms in the spring — so pure and radiant!

I’m very lucky to live in Seattle. Moss on a cherry tree was not something I ever saw in Japan.

Cherry Blossoms in 2023

With modern technology comes new ways to anticipate the flowering of the cherry trees. Hiro and I roughly targeted our first visit to Japan since 2016 to coincide with the cherry blossoms (we leave on March 19 and return on April 9, 2023), but a friend then shared the map with projected bloom times.

Tōkyō seems to be the earliest of all dates (even though we won’t be in Tōkyō until our last nine days). This is likely because of the heat-retention from all the concrete within Tōkyō proper. We start our trip in the Fukuoka area and work our way eastward from there.

How do the Japanese celebrate the cherry blossoms? The quick and dirty answer is one of my favorite aphorisms: 花より団子 (hana yori dango). Roughly translated as I prefer sweets (dango are balls of sticky rice cakes dipped in a sweet sauce or slathered with a sweet red bean paste—yum!) over flowers, but I also like the homophonous version: 花より男子 (hana yori dango); I prefer men over flowers!

Celebrate!

The season of cherry blossoms is marked with large outdoor parties held in any park where cherry trees bloom in profusion. The parties are referred to as 花見 (hanami) or flower-viewings and even company employees enjoy them. When I worked in downtown Tōkyō, one of my responsibilities was to head out of the office early on a perfect spring day and stake out a location for the party that would follow after work. I spread out the tarpaulins, weighing them down with my shoes and backpack, and just waited the afternoon out. Absolute bliss.

The gay BBS I belonged to in Tōkyō, GayNetJapan, hosted 花見 too. From 1994 onward, Hiro and I attended together, and although my fashion choices were very 1990s, I smile to see the two of us back then, shy and laughing together in Shinjuku Gyōen, a massive park famous for its cherry trees.

If you time it right and are just past the peak blossoming time, you can experience my favorite floral phenomenon: 花吹雪 (hana fubuki), a blizzard of cherry blossom petals. The very wind turns pink in that magical moment.

Early in the 2000s I was very passionate about digital art and sold some of my work. This piece, Petal Blizzard, was inspired by cherry blossoms, and was a customer favorite for years.

What’s Next?

In the weeks ahead, I’ll share some of the travel plans that Hiro and I are making for our epic return to Japan, I’ll talk about same-sex relationship in Japanese manga and the concept of 腐女子 (fujoshi, literally rotten girls), and I’m also planning an issue about my second-favorite festival, the Steel Dick Festival (yes, it’s a thing, and yes, there are both penile and vaginal candies associated with it—yum!).

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