In the space of about a week, Tokyo has woken up to find spring has arrived. The crisp icy days of January and February have receded and in the seasonal precipitation I can no longer see Mount Fuji from my school road around 60 miles east north east of the mountain. It is impossible to ignore spring in Japan. In fact, spring is Japan. Without spring, Japan is either a cockroach infested, half-baked notion of a monsoon or the windswept remains of the biting wrath from Siberian coasts and the North Pacific. Everybody in Tokyo woke up last week and left winter, along with their electric blankets, in their futon cupboards. The coming of spring in Japan has been celebrated since around the middle of the 9th century BC by the opening of the iconic cherry blossom, a custom originally imported from China, but that has changed entirely since then in meaning and style, but for the simple uniting principle of celebrating flowers opening.  Forecasts for the Japanese sakura blossoming are as detailed and frequent as the regular weather forecasts during this season. Necessary in fact for the proper planning of ‘Hanami’ – the alcoholic picnics that overrun the local parks, sparking territory wars for the best spots in the park (no small victory in a city with a population density of 5800 people /km sq.). As the season gets underway, the forecast also keeps viewers informed of the ’sakura front’ ~  at what latitude on the 2100 or so kilometers distance of Japan’s territory south to north the sakura blossom has opened.

Last year when the national meteorological agency got it wrong, they apologised profusely on television news for the inconvenience to housewives and department heads everywhere in charge of organising this time honoured celebration. According to the the Japanese Meteorological Agency, who has dedicated researchers, their “prediction of cherry blossom blooming dates is conducted by applying the relationships between temperatures and blooming dates in previous years to the temperatures observed since last fall and those predicted in weekly, monthly and three-monthly forecasts” Whatever the hell that actually means its the most recent in a centuries-old pursuit of cherry-blossom prediction. Forefront among the most important of these methods is the lifetime work of a man called Yasuyuki Aono, whose self-taught ability to read the now antique hand written documents of the Kyoto nobility has culminated in a formula for working out the relationship between cherry blossom opening times and the temperature during that year. These records indicated the cherry blossom season opening dates from as far back as the 11th century.

His research has proved of vital importance not only to us Tokyoites waiting for our hanamidango and an excuse for public disorder, it has also lead the way globally in the use of phenology (study of natural phenomena) for indicating climate change, as the data is very detailed and goes back further than any other on plant flowering times. From this research produced along with another guy Yukio Omoto, we know that in this record period, sakura has come as early as late march and as late as early May. Prolonged periods of early flowering also seem to coincide with known about periods of warmer global temperatures.  This story is going the way all the climate stories go. “By the 1980s and early 1990s, average flowering times had become earlier than at any time previously during the entire flowering record of over one thousand years. “  And this, like all the other evidence of human-induced climate change is important. However, one of the defining aspects of cherry blossom study -owing to the planting of millions of these hay-fever disasters in EVERY city in the country- is that measurements can be observed in urban, suburban and rural areas, enabling the researchers to identify and separate the effect of urban ‘heat islands’ ~ another major contributing factor to the recent early blooming. The heat island effect is so pronounced that trees in Tokyo are open 4-5 days earlier than in the surrounding countryside. Regardless of the graphs and obsessive forecasting that takes over the morning news bulletins every spring, I think the philosophical meaning attached to the sakura by the Japanese is a message to reflect on during this time of change to its yearly pattern. The transience of mortality, and the scattered ephemera embodied by the narcissistic cherry blossom as it falls just a week after it awakens us to the new season, reminds me that our relatively short period of wealth and profligate use of scarce energy resources must also give way to the more stable long lasting green period that is a sign of the continued health and life of the cherry trees.

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