【TOKYO】
“If you want to understand Japan, you have to know its four seasons,” a correspondent friend of mine once confided to me. Indeed, the Japanese themselves never stop reminding their visitors of this fact — even those coming from Italy, where a certain Antonio Vivaldi set the four seasons to music some four hundred years ago.
Each season in Japan, in fact, marks a distinct moment in the social life of its people.
For those arriving from abroad, the most iconic and representative moment is undoubtedly spring. “White foam over the city,” wrote a German correspondent in the 1930s, before drawing comparisons — regrettably fashionable again these days — between cherry blossoms and the Yamato spirit.
That’s the thing: for Japan, the pink flowers aren’t simply there to be admired on their own. They are imbued with meaning, from the most trivial to the most profound.
Let’s start with the appealing ones. Spring means departure, new beginnings — and so cherry trees have always accompanied the start of the school year and the working year alike.
The latter is particularly interesting. Walking the streets in the first weeks of April, you encounter groups of young men in dark suits and young women dark blazers with a beige trench coat folded rigorously over the forearm. These are the new recruits of various companies, and by convention they dress in a kind of uniform, just as they did during their school days — uniforms, after all, are still standard in Japanese classrooms. Virtually no room for individual expression.
“But why do you all dress the same?” I ask a small group at a crosswalk in Otemachi, Tokyo’s business hub. “Doesn’t it feel uncomfortable to suppress your originality right from the start?”
“Not at all,” they reply, somewhere between surprised and amused. “We don’t have to waste energy picking out new clothes — we just look at what our senpai (senior colleagues, the old guard) do and conform to the system.”
A fine arrangement, becoming an office decoration like a plant or a curtain, I think to myself — but then I notice I am guilty of what some scholars might call ethnocentrism. Especially since I notice in the group a Chinese young man and a Nepali young woman who, after an intensive Japanese language course, driven more by the sight of writer Ichiyo Higuchi’s face on their banknotes than by any desire to read her novels in the original, tell me that Japan offers them work, on the condition that they adapt to these rules of etiquette.
Yet it strikes me as a system running on autopilot, where everything renews itself as in nature, but with no room for early or late blooming.
Those who don’t renew themselves along with the flowers — who do so only after the petals have fallen — have missed the train, and this is why in many cases they choose, tragically, to end up under one. Often as a final act of spite, causing delays for thousands of passengers.
Indeed, while the cherry trees bloom, many trains run strange delays that the authorities euphemistically call “human-caused incidents.”
Meanwhile, many children are also swept up in enormous upheaval alongside the cherry blossoms. They are sent to private after-school programs to sharpen their skills in preparation for the exams in the spring that will open or close doors to their future careers. There is little room for imagination or individuality: everyone races toward a test, and after that? Work. Ideally following a ready-made model.
When Westerners arrived in Japan for the second time, in the late nineteenth century, they came not as Iberian missionaries but primarily as Northern Protestants, and they wasted no time pointing to Japanese laziness and tardiness, to say nothing of the drinking at the raucous festivals that were then still celebrated across Japan. Thus, they decided to leverage the Japanese sense of duty while suppressing the more festive side of the national character, creating a Bismarckian model of development, as is historically documented.
It is no coincidence that school uniforms — unchanged in the century and a half since — were modeled on the Prussian style. We should also not forget that the Japanese parliament houses a Diet modeled on that of Berlin, which in turn was based on the Germanic Diet of Worms.
“The Catholic missionaries brought devotional statues,” writes a British writer friend of mine, “the Protestants arrived with a model steam train and kept their religion to themselves, seeking a practical and immediate approach to the Japanese.”
The Catholic missionaries, however, translated the Bible (in Jesuit circles, this was called inculturation, creating considerable controversy in Rome), trying to speak to the Japanese soul. The newcomers of 150 years ago, by contrast, wanted only to extract Japan’s efficiency.
So, as the festivals, the kimonos, and the slow rhythms of Japan faded away, the last traces of that old world reached Europe and made the fortunes of the Romantic artists of French Impressionism, who effectively created the myth of the Land of Cherry Blossoms at the very moment it was filling up with smokestacks and railways.
Today, the relentless pace that arrived on the islands a century and a half ago continues to chafe. Perhaps the only romantics still capable of appreciating its beauty are those untouched by the system: those who, in the momentary intoxication of a beer they drink in Tokyo’s great parks, let the old nombiri (leisurely, carefree) spirit of ancient Japan resurface — or those who, coming from outside, don’t have to worry about all the obligations these blossoms bring with them.
As for me, like every year, I admire them while jogging or cycling beneath them; I contemplate them, but never stop with my feet on the ground for too long.
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