Has It Bloomed, or Not Yet?

In April, as spring deepens, Koreans find themselves in a strange division.

The crowds at cherry blossom festivals grow larger than ever, and beneath the cherry blossoms of Yeouido, Jinhae, and Gyeongju, people eat, drink, and take pictures. No one is unaware of their beauty. Yet the sense never fades that to fully enjoy this beauty, one must momentarily forget something. In the Korean memory, the cherry blossom has never been completely free from Japan.

There was once a story that resolved this discomfort. The claim that the Somei Yoshino — the cultivar that now accounts for the vast majority of Japan’s cherry trees — originated in Jeju Island. The narrative that the dispossessor paraded the dispossessed’s property as its own held a satisfying symmetry. But this narrative could not withstand genetic analysis. The moment the origin story collapses, a more interesting question remains. If the Somei Yoshino belongs to Japan, how old a Japan does it belong to?

In the aristocratic culture of the Heian period, the cherry blossom was already at the center of spring. Before the Heian period, however, the spring flower most beloved by Japanese aristocrats was the plum blossom. It was only after the mid-Heian period that the cherry blossom pushed aside the plum blossom and emerged at the forefront. Amidst a movement to consciously cultivate a uniquely Japanese sensibility in a culture that had taken Chinese models as its standard, the cherry blossom was the flower chosen in the process of Japan finding its own language.

The Heian aristocrats viewed this cherry blossom, which had thus risen to the center, in a manner completely different from today. Blossoms blooming sparsely in a forest where cedar and oak grow intermingled. Blossoms whose white finally surfaces between green and red, as flowers and reddish leaves sprout together. It is no coincidence that the cherry blossom appears so frequently alongside the language of waiting in Heian poetry. The tension of “Has it bloomed, or not yet?” was possible because the blossoms were not obvious from the start.

The cherry blossoms that fill Japan’s spring today are not those blossoms.

Today, the vast majority of cherry trees across Japan are a single cultivar, the Somei Yoshino. Unable to bear seeds, it reproduces solely through grafting. It is no coincidence that the blossoms across the country bloom on the same day and fall on the same day. They are, literally, the exact same entity.

The mountain cherry sprouts flowers and leaves together. The Somei Yoshino blooms its flowers before its leaves emerge. Entire branches are covered only in blossoms, without a single leaf. When thousands of trees bloom at the same time, it is not an appreciation of flowers, but something overwhelming. The active gaze of the Heian poet discovering a single flowering tree in the forest, and the gaze of today, captured by waves of blossoms filling a park, are opposite in direction. In the former, blossoms were something discovered; in the latter, they are something that descends upon you.

Tradition has not disappeared. What tradition once pointed to has been replaced by something else.

The spectacle of thousands of cherry trees gathered and blooming in one place was not created by the Somei Yoshino. That logic had already been at work for centuries.

Feudal lords during the sixteenth-century wars planted thousands of cherry trees at once to transplant the beauty of Kyoto to their own domains. The act of planting flowers was an act of claiming cultural authority. Moving into the Edo period, economics is added to this logic of massing. The shogun planted cherry trees on a massive scale along riverbanks to create excursion destinations, while pleasure quarters, temples, and restaurants rushed to plant them as well. One government document explicitly states the reason for planting cherry trees along the riverbank: “so that people may gather and form a bustling district.” The cherry blossom had already entered the language of governance.

The Somei Yoshino was the most efficient form this desire finally found. Yet something remains that efficiency alone cannot explain.

There is a decisive gap between the cherry blossom symbolizing Japan and the cherry blossom being the Japanese spirit itself. And what bridged that gap was not aesthetics, but war.

Around the time of the First Sino-Japanese War, ultranationalist commentators discovered the firm integrity of the Japanese people in the cherry blossom, and voices within the educational sphere argued that cherry trees should be planted in schools to commemorate war victories. This argument did not flow naturally from a thousand years of tradition. It was abruptly constructed amidst the fever of war.

Yet the biological characteristics of the Somei Yoshino fit this ideology strangely well. Trees across the nation, sharing the same DNA, bloom on the same day and fall on the same day. There is no individuality. A single collective moving uniformly. Every spring, this flower performed the image of the body the modern state required, in the form of beauty. The Somei Yoshino filling the grounds of Yasukuni Shrine bloomed and fell every year. When the spectacle of petals falling all at once overlaps with death, mourning slides into admiration, and the one who admires asks no further questions.

The cherry blossoms were beautiful. That beauty was real. And that is the most uncomfortable part of this story. The state did not design the feeling. It merely cultivated the conditions over a long period of time for the feeling to grow.

If the cherry blossom symbolizes Japan, wherever the cherry blossom is becomes Japan.

This logic was not a declaration. It was a principle that functioned in reality. Japanese who crossed over to colonial Korea planted cherry trees without exception in the areas they settled or developed. In front of government offices, in schoolyards, within shrine grounds. A Japanese official at the time wrote this: that by looking at the distribution of cherry blossoms, one could roughly grasp the residential status of Japanese in that area.

The blossoms were a map.

The cherry blossom destination where the most people gathered in Korea was Changgyeongwon. This site, once the palace grounds of the Joseon royal family, was transformed into a park complete with a zoo and botanical garden, and over two thousand cherry trees were planted there. Annual visitors exceeded one million. Korean newspapers and magazines relentlessly criticized this culture. But the crowds at Changgyeongwon did not diminish. The blossoms were beautiful. And they were so in a way that descends upon you.

The same trees were the spring of a hometown for some, and for others they were something else. This gap was not created by logic. It was something felt in the body.

The strange discomfort Koreans feel beneath the cherry blossoms does not come from botanical facts. It comes from the weight of the history this flower has passed through. Resolving the issue of ownership does not erase the history the flower has passed through. And the fact that history is not erased does not mean the flower is not beautiful. Beauty and history do not cancel each other out.

Spring has arrived again this year, and the blossoms have bloomed. The question of where the feeling we experience every spring comes from does not ruin the experience. It merely makes it a little more honest.

Wandering through the forest in search of blossoms, the Heian poets asked: Has it bloomed, or not yet? The blossoms we see today demand no such question. They descend upon us without being sought.

The question remains.