Budding History: On Nationalism and Cherry Blossoms

Through myth-making and symbolism, the natural world comes to stand in for potent human ideals.

When I moved to Berlin, I came to associate the city with a particular shade of pink: Summer and autumn skies were saturated with fuchsia sunsets. Spring was colored with flirtation—the color of bubblegum, of confetti—with clouds of blossoms on the trees.

My first home in the city reminded me of the film The Lives of Others: an aging “Altbau” apartment with peeling plaster and a balcony overlooking the path where the Berlin Wall once stood. The day I moved in, the landlord showed me to the cellar—where people once dug escape tunnels, he added, incidentally—and pointed out the storage unit that came with the apartment. I couldn’t stop staring at the walls, the sections where brick and mortar had been patched. I never went into the cellar again.

The elation of moving somewhere new quickly gave way to something unwieldy in the months that followed: depression and grief. Before moving I had gone through a divorce, and then a new heartbreak entirely. But I chided myself that all of this was small compared to a city shaped by actual, capital H History.

I took to walking and cycling, as many others have done, along the Wall’s route. Birch and ailanthus grew scrappy and lean on the edges where the death strip had not yet been filled with condo developments. The Berliner Mauerweg (Berlin Wall Trail) traverses 160 km of the city, tracking along forest roads, city streets, and the depths of lakes. I swam across it, marveling at where a border had once been written in water. The Mauerweg is a space that could—and in some ways should—devastate us. But it is also the ground from which the cherry trees grow.

Upon the fall of the Wall in 1989, ten thousand trees in total were gifted to the city by a donation campaign led by Japanese television station Asahi. They were planted in the symbolic space left behind by the Wall: blossoms meant to unify a severed city once more. Following suit, the city is now filled with pink blooms. They line the streets of my Kiez (neighborhood), grow in our apartment’s courtyard, and pepper the lawns of our local park.

They were planted in the space left behind by the Wall: blossoms meant to unify a severed city once more.

Along some of the most visited sections of the Wall, in spring, rows of luminescent blossoms cluster on the trees, calling me from the gray weight of winter. Six springtimes have passed since I moved here; my life in that time has become more joyous than I could have imagined. Still, walking amongst the cherries is a peculiar pleasure. Each year, I want to drink in their color and beauty, as if I could carry it through the year. Unimaginably light, they seem frivolous even, in a city where so much once felt too heavy to hold.

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A sakura might be one of many types: some 400 varieties have been cultivated from wild mountain species. Commonly, these are the Prunus serrulata, renowned for its frilly pink flowers, the Prunus pseudocerasus, with flat, cheerful blooms, or the commonly-planted Yoshino cherry, with its delicate pink-white flowers.

Cherries inspired exalted prose amongst European travelers to Japan first encountering them. The Prunus serrulata was, in the words of nineteenth-century botanist John Lindley, “one of the most ornamental hardy plants with which I am acquainted.” In the words of travelers, they became blossoms “touched rosy by the setting sun” that feel “like whipped-cream when you kissed them.” And beautiful it is: a small-ish, gray-barked tree, bursting with clusters of white and pink flowers.

Sakura is so central to Japanese culture that an 1893 handbook for young Japanese botanists explained tree anatomy with reference only to the sakura: Its leaves, roots, and branches are the prototypical Japanese tree. The springtime practice of hanami (flower viewing) is synonymous with viewing cherry blossoms, “the queen/king of flowers in Japanese.” They invite festivals in their honor, with such celebrations speaking to the cherry’s role in centuries-old agrarian cosmology: A healthy and well-timed flowering signaled a good rice crop each year. After the eighth century, when the imperial family began hosting annual hanami celebrations, flower viewing grew in popularity amongst urban-dwellers, with many composing and reciting poetry about the ephemeral beauty of the blossoms.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the practice of gifting sakura trees became a vital component of Japanese diplomacy: In 1912, six thousand cherry trees were planted along the Potomac River in Washington, DC. These gifts of trees have graced all the cities I’ve called home: In 1959, Toronto was presented with two thousand trees. This year in London, over six thousand gifted cherry trees will be planted. The thousands that grow in the former border strip near my home in Berlin are among many trees that have been cultivated, packaged, and sailed or flown across the globe from Japan in the name of friendship and diplomacy.

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But the cherry blossom’s symbolism is not altogether straightforward. Though for many centuries the sakura had been associated with vitality, towards the end of the nineteenth century, falling cherry petals became associated with precisely the opposite: with death. “The master trope of Japan’s imperial nationalism,” anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney writes, is the phrase “‘You shall die like beautiful falling cherry petals for the emperor.’” By the Second World War, Japanese planes were painted with the emblem of a single cherry blossom. Women waved pilots off with blooming branches, and tokkōtai pilots (kamikaze) flew to their deaths with sakura pinned to their breasts.

The sakura was not merely deployed as symbol: Actual trees were planted across occupied territories like Korea and Taiwan, where my family is from. It was an intervention in the landscape intended to turn colonized land into Japanese land, and thereby inspire the same transformation in people.

But the seasons in Taiwan do not match those of Japan. Being markedly warmer, the blossoms would arrive as early as late January. At the border between winter and spring, my mother and her parents would venture into Yangmingshan to watch them bloom. They rarely spent time together as a family—my grandfather lived hours away in his work for the air force—but on those occasions, my mother had both her parents by her side. My grandfather carried her on his shoulders. To her, the cherry blossoms meant only lightness, love.

The mobilization of nature in service of imperialism and nationalism was by no means isolated to Japan: As the recently deceased environmental historian Alfred Crosby famously argued, the age of exploration not only brought “new-world” plants like potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco back to Europe, but was followed by the planting of European flora across newly-colonized terrain. Scots pine, dandelions, and English ivy all came to North America via Europe, while in India the introduction of non-native species have been traced back to the British East India Company’s botanical gardens. Where colonies were established, plants that reminded the colonizers of home usually followed.

Through myth-making and symbolism, the natural world comes to stand in for potent human ideals: the sakura as an embodiment of Japanese faithfulness to the emperor, the oak as a symbol of enduring Englishness. In Germany, the eagle remains a problematic image: The Reichsadler (Imperial Eagle) had been deployed as a symbol of power since the late-nineteenth century, but today it carries the weight of its history as a Nazi symbol. To brandish the image of an eagle, here, can be a profound message of hate.

Trees were planted across occupied territories like Korea and Taiwan, an intervention in the landscape intended to turn colonized land into Japanese land.

That nonhuman nature—from blossoms to birds—remains fraught with the baggage of human history seems somehow unfair. It seems, at best, to center human narratives in a world far more complex than us. But this is a world we’ve irrevocably transformed; little in the work of transplanting and introducing species across the globe seems guided by fairness. As Lauret Savoy writes in Trace, human attempts to order the natural world cannot be separated from “colonial world trade that collected human beings as it collected exotic plants and animals.” In the wake of human actions, there is no neutral nature; no blank wilderness.

Still, I wonder how these symbols we’ve made might reply to the stories we tell about them.

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In cherry blossoms, scientists now find something more vital and potent than these prior imaginings. As our world warms, the sakura stands as sentinel for anthropogenic climate change.

Since at least the 1930s, Japanese scientists have been collating data on hanami and cherry blossom festivals: for when the festivals fell offers a unique insight into temperature changes over time. Accounts of Japanese cherry blossom festivals go back much farther than usual datasets on flowering trees: The cultural significance of the plant means abundant records stretch back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—with some reaching back to the ninth century. The records follow the period when the cherries were markers of the agricultural year, a symbol of vitality and romance, and the decades in which they took on the darker sheen of nationalism. In centuries’ old diaries and court records, the traces of a cooler climate remain.

The data show that cherries have typically bloomed over a six-week range from late March to early May. Much as the timing of the blossoms historically portended fruitful or dire harvests, these trees of the past offer a stark warning. By the 1980s and 1990s, the cherries began consistently flowering earlier than at any other time over the past 1200 years. Spring pinks arrive earlier each year.

In Berlin, in December last year, the temperature hovered well above freezing. It was the second winter in a row I’d left my parka packed in a vacuum-sealed bag under the bed; the second without snow. The trees replied. Autumn flowering cherries kept their blooms through the holidays: for ten winter weeks in total. The blooms were smaller—the size of a quarter—but fully formed, the petals tightly stacked and luminescent. Instead of snow, pale petals dusted the ground in January.

When the cherries bloomed again in March, the pandemic was upon us. Wearing masks and sunglasses, my husband and I strolled with our dog beneath the cherries along the Wall. We marveled at their pinks against the grey. This was a land marked by loss—but the trees stretched their roots beneath it, and scattered the path with petals, indifferent perhaps. It seemed wondrous that cherry blossoms could hold the weight of histories we’ve laid upon them, even briefly, before the flowers fell again.