The cherry blossom has a dark past, which Naoko Abe explains in her lovely book “The Sakura Obsession”
Knopf; 400 pages; $27.95. Published in Britain as “‘Cherry’ Ingram: The Englishman Who Saved Japan’s Blossoms” by Chatto & Windus; £18.00.a Japanese phenologist observed the pink-and-white blossoms on a cherry tree in the Yasukuni shrine in central Tokyo and formally declared the start of the cherry-blossom viewing season. There are many of this type of cherry, known as, in the shrine that honours Japan’s war dead. Some are so old they are held up by wooden struts.
, a cloned variety that flowers for a mere eight days or so in spring, evoking syrupy delight as its mist of pink blossoms billow in the wind. As Ms Abe tells it, the tree was first hybridised in the 1860s, just as Japan was emerging from a 400-year period shut off from the outside world by its rulers. After the fall of the shogunate, its outward-looking leaders needed a symbol of unity and modernisation. TheIngram was a cherry devotee.
He was no idle enthusiast. He soon realised that an extraordinary variety of cherry trees cultivated during 2,000 years of tree-worship in Japan were in danger of being lost in favour of one, the. Not only did he relate this in a blunt speech to the titans of Japanese industry at Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel. He also promised to help Japan restore more variety by sending stock back from his garden.
Two tensions animate this book: the difficulty of sending fragile scions around the world and successfully grafting them; and the wrenching historical context. As Ingram battled to safeguard Japan’s cherry legacy, the country was succumbing to belligerent nationalism. Many loathed the idea of relying on a Westerner to recover its botanical heritage. Moreover, thepilots would fly to their doom with cherry blossoms painted on their fuselages.
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