‘Biggest ever’ festival as cherry trees bloom

The wind is warm and fragrant, the honey-toned Potomac swells with tiny, white-capped waves, and winter’s skeletal brown trees and hard-packed embankments are foaming with green life again. Spring has arrived.

And every spring a celebration unlike any other takes place in the nation’s capital: The National Cherry Blossom Festival.

“This year’s festival will be the biggest ever, and we have some incredible sponsors,” says Diana Mayhew, executive director of the festival.

“The cherry blossoms bring more people to D.C. than any other event each year. The festival helps us not only to take care of the trees for the rest of their lives, but also to showcase D.C. and celebrate the Japanese culture.”

Opening Saturday and running through April 11, the festival celebrates the 92nd anniversary of Japan’s gift of the trees to the United States in 1912. It also marks the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Peace and Amity between the United States and Japan in 1854, officially beginning formal relations between the two countries.

The festival is a two-week-long, citywide event featuring daily international cultural performances, sporting events, arts and crafts demonstrations and other special attractions. Some of the festival’s key events — besides the unfurling of the cherry blooms, currently predicted to be right on time — include the associated Smithsonian Kite Festival on Saturday, a parade and a street festival. In addition, expect sumo wrestling, movies, concerts, and a visit by Sony’s two-legged robot, which will dance and even make a speech.

The Cherry Blossom Festival Parade begins at 10 a.m. April 3 and runs along Constitution Avenue from 7th to 17th streets. Showcased will be entries from across the country and around the world — marching bands, floats, helium balloons and international performing groups. Seats in the grandstand, at 15th and 16th streets NW, are available for $15, but of course anyone can watch from any sidewalk along the parade route.

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The cherry trees, or “sakura” in Japanese, are perhaps the most revered flowering plants in Japan. The trees are celebrated both here and in Japan, not just for their beauty, but for what they represent to the Japanese culture.

“To the Japanese, the cherry blossoms are a symbol of life, and how life is fleeting,” says Ms. Mayhew. “Let’s appreciate life while we are here; it will soon be gone,” she says, approximating the Japanese view.

The blossoms also epitomize the transformations Japanese culture has undergone through the ages, and the enduring friendship between the Japan and the United States.

At the turn of the 20th century, Japan had gained the admiration of President Roosevelt for its spirit in defeating Russia in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. Roosevelt helped broker the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth, which ensured Japan a much larger measure of equality among world nations than it had previously been allowed.

As a result, Japan viewed the United States as a great friend. This relationship was furthered even more when Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, took office in 1909. First lady Helen Herron “Nellie” Taft had relished traveling in Japan. When she and other Washington and Japanese dignitaries started a movement to have cherry trees planted around the Tidal Basin, Japan was more than happy to comply with a flowering gift of gratitude.

“It was a wonderful, flourishing period of U.S.-Japanese cooperation,” says professor Kevin Doak, chair of the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Georgetown University and the Nippon Foundation Endowed Chair in Japanese Language and Culture there. “The United States’ relationship with Japan has been critically important, and they remain a strong democratic nation and one of our closest allies.”

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