When April deepens into spring, Koreans find themselves in a strange division.
The crowds at cherry blossom festivals grow larger every year, and beneath the cherry blossoms of Yeouido, Jinhae, and Gyeongju, people eat, drink, and upload the exact same landscape from different angles. Everyone knows it is beautiful. But the sensation that one must briefly forget something to fully enjoy that beauty never disappears. In the Korean memory, the cherry blossom has never been completely free from Japan. The trees planted across Joseon by the hands of the colonial Government-General, the afterimage of a flower-viewing culture transplanted by a logic entirely separate from the spring culture of the Joseon people — these still seep somewhere into the fluttering atmosphere of April.
There was once a story that resolved this nagging unease. It was the claim that the origin of Japan’s representative cherry blossom, the Somei Yoshino (Prunus × yedoensis), was actually Jeju Island. The narrative that the flower Japan took as the core symbol of its national identity had actually crossed over from elsewhere carried a thrilling symmetry. A story that the taker paraded what belonged to the taken as its own.
But this narrative could not hold up against genetic analysis. In the late 2010s, molecular biology research confirmed that the Jeju king cherry and the Somei Yoshino are separate species. The story of origin was not as accurate as it was comforting.
Yet the moment that story collapses, a more interesting question remains. The question the origin debate had quietly covered up. If the Somei Yoshino belongs to Japan, how old a Japanese thing is it? Since when did the cherry blossom become the face of Japanese civilization in the way it is today, and what process did it go through?
The answer lies in a direction neither side of the origin debate anticipated.
The Tradition Was Real
In the aristocratic culture of the Heian period, the cherry blossom was already at the center of spring. The poetry of the time repeatedly summons the cherry blossom as a language for the moment when beauty and transience overlap. The Tale of Genji and The Tales of Ise do this, and so do the records compiling Kyoto’s famous spring spots a few centuries later. In those records, the number of famous cherry blossom spots cannot be compared to any other flower. The cherry blossom was not simply a widely planted flower — it was a flower that organized the experience of spring itself.
But there is a barely visible shift in this long history.
Until before the Heian period, the flower most loved by Japanese aristocrats as the flower of spring was not the cherry blossom, but the plum blossom. Under the influence of Chinese culture, the plum blossom was the symbol of learning and dignity, and the protagonist of poetry and painting. It is only after the mid-Heian period that the cherry blossom pushes the plum blossom aside and emerges to the forefront. This shift was not merely a change in taste. A movement to consciously cultivate a uniquely Japanese sensibility in a culture that had taken Chinese things as its model — within that current, the cherry blossom was the flower selected in the process of finding Japan’s own language. The transition from plum blossom to cherry blossom was already, in itself, a cultural construction.
How did the aristocrats of Heian look upon the cherry blossom that had thus risen to the center?
It was quite different from the landscape we recall today. A flower blooming sparsely in a forest where cedar, beech, and oak grow mixed together. A flower where blossoms and red leaves sprout together, where the white finally surfaces between green and red. A flower emerging faintly in the fog. It is no accident that the cherry blossom appears so often in Heian poetry alongside the language of waiting and searching. It was a flower that could only be seen if one searched for it. Not a flower that catches the eye, but a flower that is discovered only when the gaze is actively directed toward it. The tension of “has it bloomed, or not yet” was possible because the flower was never obvious from the start.
That tension, that waiting, was the core of the emotion that Heian aesthetics drew up from the cherry blossom.
Looking at the records of the late Edo period, the flowers people enjoyed in spring at the time were not just cherry blossoms. Plum blossoms, camellias, peaches, wisteria, azaleas, peonies — guidebooks to spring spots for the people of Edo listed dozens of species of flowers and trees together. It is true that the cherry blossom occupied a special position, but multiple voices were still mixed within the landscape of spring. The cherry blossom erasing everything else and becoming the sole face of the Japanese spring is not yet the story of this period.
The tradition was real. But the convergence of that tradition into its present form — a single cultivar blanketing the entire archipelago — happens much later. And the process of that convergence had far too many interventions to be called a natural evolution of aesthetics.
The Flower Changed
The cherry blossom that fills the Japanese spring today is not the flower that the poets of Heian wandered the forest searching for.
Most of the cherry blossoms seen across Japan today are a single cultivar called the Somei Yoshino. This flower was something horticulturists in the early Meiji period began selling in what is now the northern part of Tokyo. A flower not born of nature, but made by human hands. Because it cannot bear seeds, its reproduction is only possible through grafting. What this means is that all the Somei Yoshino that bloom in unison across Japan every spring possess the exact same DNA. It is not a coincidence that the flowers across the country bloom on the same day and fall on the same day. Because they are, literally, the same being.
Its lifespan is not long. It declines in about sixty years. The gap between the image of a flower of tradition that has continued for a thousand years, and the reality of a cloned plant that disappears without quite crossing a century, is the first layer of contradiction this flower harbors.
The mountain cherry (yamazakura) sprouts blossom and leaf together. As the white petals and the red-sprouting young leaves mix, the viewer’s gaze naturally travels back and forth between flower and leaf. The Somei Yoshino is different. The flower blooms first, before the leaves emerge. The entire branch is covered only in flowers without a single leaf. The gaze has nowhere to go. The flower overwhelms the landscape, and pushes everything else into the background.
To this, the effect of massing is added. When thousands of trees bloom at the same time and at the same speed, it is not an appreciation of flowers but a kind of overwhelming. Not looking, but being swept away. The active gaze of the Heian poet finding a single flower in the forest, and the contemporary gaze captured by a wave of flowers spread across a park, face opposite directions. In the former, the flower was to be discovered; in the latter, the flower is what strikes you.
This is why the cherry blossom appeared so often in Heian poetry alongside the emotions of anxiety and waiting. Because the flower was rare and scattered, its appearance was always an event. Today’s Somei Yoshino has erased that scarcity.
Come to think of it, it is a strange thing. When the meteorological agency forecasts blooming times every spring and millions of trees bloom in unison on the same day, what are we waiting for? Waiting originally exists only within uncertainty. Before a flower certain to bloom, a flower whose time is already announced, a flower blooming identically everywhere — expecting the tension the Heian poet felt in the forest to rise again is impossible from the start.
The tradition did not disappear. The experience the tradition pointed to was replaced by something else.
Of course, there was a reason the Somei Yoshino was adopted. It was cheap, it grew fast, it was spectacular. And above all, it perfectly fit the logic of a desire that had already been progressing within Japanese society for hundreds of years. Bigger, more, more in unison. That logic had begun long before the Somei Yoshino.
Where Did the Massing Come From?
The landscape of thousands of cherry trees gathered in one place and blooming is not something the Somei Yoshino created. That logic had already been operating for hundreds of years.
In the 16th century, when the country was divided and fought over by large and small powers, the lords across Japan sought to grant urban dignity to the lands they newly acquired through war as they organized them. The city they took as their standard was Kyoto. Kyoto, the center of Japanese culture for a long time — and the flower most planted in Kyoto was the cherry blossom. The lords planted thousands of cherry trees all at once to transplant the beauty of Kyoto to their domains. The act of planting flowers was the same as the act of claiming cultural authority. The so-called “Little Kyotos” that emerged across Japan at the time were built by directly copying Kyoto — not only in topography and street structure but down to its famous cherry blossom spots.
In this process, the very method of appreciating the cherry blossom began to change.
Until then, the center of flower-viewing in Edo was to seek out a single renowned tree with a legendary origin and spend time before it. One went to see the tree, not the flower. But as thousands of trees gathered in one place due to the lords’ large-scale plantings, the object of appreciation changed. Not the beauty of each single blossom, but beauty as a mass compared to clouds or snow. Not the individual, but the whole. From this point on, the cherry blossom began to be experienced as massing.
Moving into the mid-Edo period, a new engine is added to this logic of massing. The economy.
Entering the 18th century, Edo had already become one of the world’s leading megacities. A few renowned trees could not handle the outing desires of this many people. The shogun Yoshimune planted cherry trees on a massive scale along the Sumida River and in various empty lots to create outing spots for citizens. Afterward, pleasure quarters and temples, high-end restaurants and inns began racing to plant cherry trees. The flower drew people, and money circulated where people gathered. The cherry blossom became an economic device as well as a cultural symbol.
Moments when this logic meets the language of governance remain in the records. A municipal document in Osaka explicitly states the reason for planting cherry and maple trees along the riverbank as “to make people gather and form a bustling street.” It was a calculation to soothe public unrest while naturally reviving the economy as people gathered by the river. The cherry blossom had already entered the language of governance.
Yoshiwara, Edo’s licensed pleasure quarter, is the most dramatic example of this logic. Every spring, gardeners transplanted nearly a thousand cherry trees whole into the main street of the quarter, only to uproot them again once the flowers fell. It is said that countless customers flocked as night cherry blossoms, illuminated by lanterns, blended with the atmosphere of the quarter. It was not because the flower was beautiful. It was because the flower called people.
At this point, a single question naturally follows. To the people who had been planting cherry blossoms on such a massive scale, with such intention — what was it when the Somei Yoshino appeared? This new cultivar — cheaper than the existing mountain cherry, growing faster, and blooming densely with only flowers and no leaves — was an instrument perfectly fitted to the desire for massing that had already been refined over hundreds of years. The Somei Yoshino was the most efficient form that desire finally found.
But something remains that is not explained by efficiency alone. If the Somei Yoshino had simply been a more convenient flower, it would have ended as an event taking up one line in the history of horticulture. This flower becoming the “face of Japan” requires a story of a different dimension. And that story begins not in a flowerbed, but on a battlefield.
When Was the “Soul of Japan” Made?
There is a decisive gap between the cherry blossom becoming the flower that represents Japan, and the cherry blossom coming to symbolize the Japanese spirit itself. And what bridged that gap was not aesthetics, but war.
Around the time the clouds of the First Sino-Japanese War began to gather, a Japanese politician published an article in a magazine. It was the claim that the cherry blossom was indeed the national flower of Japan. This claim spread to various magazines after the war ended. Nationalist commentators discovered the firm integrity and will of the Japanese people in the cherry blossom, and voices emerged from the educational sector that cherry trees must be planted in schools to commemorate the war victory. The reason put forward was that it was a flower that “has symbolized the spirit of the Japanese people since ancient times.”
There is something to pause and note here. As we have seen, the cherry blossom had long been loved in warrior society as a symbol of Buddhist transience, or as a symbol of prosperity and advanced culture. But it had never once been declared “the Japanese spirit itself.” This claim did not flow naturally from a thousand-year tradition. It was abruptly constructed in the heat of war.
Then why was this claim accepted so easily?
The answer is that the trees were already there. Passing through hundreds of years of plantings by lords, the creation of public parks in the Edo period, and the explosive distribution of the Somei Yoshino in the early Meiji period, Japan had become a land planted with more cherry trees than could be compared to any other country. In spring, the cherry blossom was everywhere you went. This overwhelming physical reality made the claim that “the cherry blossom is the flower of Japan” look like a natural association. The discourse did not create reality; a pre-made reality lent the discourse the appearance of something natural.
And the biological characteristics of the Somei Yoshino cultivar fit this ideology strangely well.
Trees across the country hold the same DNA, blooming on the same day and falling on the same day. There is no individuality. There is no difference. Wherever you look, the same flower moves at the same speed. The image this paints in the language of nature is a homogeneously moving collective — blooming not one by one, but as a whole, and falling as a whole. Every spring, without any coercion, this flower performed the image of the body required by the modern state in the form of beauty.
The act of binding the falling of petals and the dying of people into the same language took place upon this soil. Expressing dead soldiers as having “scattered like blossoms,” the Somei Yoshino filling the grounds of Yasukuni Shrine, the military songs and educational materials teaching young people the beauty of “falling like a cherry blossom” — these were not interpretations added after the fact. They appear explicitly in the records of the time. The long sensibility for beautifully falling slipped into the state’s demand for beautifully dying.
Consider the spring at Yasukuni Shrine. In those grounds where the war dead sleep, the Somei Yoshino blooms and falls every year. When that scene of petals dropping all at once overlaps with death, death becomes not an event of sorrow, but an event of beauty. Mourning slips into admiration, and the one who admires no longer asks.
The cherry blossoms were beautiful. That beauty was real. And that is the most uncomfortable part of this story.
If someone had coerced it, it would have been simpler. But people gathered beneath it themselves. They were moved themselves. They began to feel it as the essence of Japan themselves. The state did not design that emotion. It simply cultivated the conditions for that emotion to grow over a long period. While trees were planted in parks, trees were planted in schools, and trees were planted on battlefields, the sensation of spring itself was little by little becoming something else.
To stand before a beautiful thing and ask where that beauty came from always feels somewhat irreverent. The more beautiful the flower, the more unnecessary the question seems. Perhaps that is the point.
The Flower Planted in the Colony
If the cherry blossom symbolizes Japan, the place where the cherry blossom is becomes Japan.
This logic was not a declaration. It was a principle that actually operated. Japanese people who crossed over to Joseon from the early 1900s planted cherry trees without exception in the areas they settled or developed. In front of government offices, in schoolyards, along newly paved roadsides, in shrine precincts. A Japanese official who lived in Joseon for fifteen years in the 1920s wrote this in his memoir: anyone traveling Joseon during cherry blossom season would notice. Around the small parks of the capital, the entrances to town streets, schools, newly opened markets, Japanese houses in the countryside, small stations and company housing — and around the chungnonsa, memorial sites for Japanese soldiers killed in battle — there are always cherry blossoms, big or small. He added: looking at the distribution of cherry blossoms, one can roughly grasp the residential status of Japanese people in that region.
The flowers were a map. A map blooming every season, marking how far the land of Japan extended.
The planting of cherry trees within Joseon grew in scale every year. Changgyeongwon, Namsan, the Hangang Footbridge, Jangchungdan — a Joseon memorial space that Japan turned into a park. While the number of Japanese crossing over to Joseon rapidly swelled, cherry trees changed the landscape of Joseon to match the speed of that increase. Because it was originally a tree not noticeably present in Joseon, the change in scenery created by intensive planting was even more pronounced.
The tension surrounding the flower was not abstract.
In the records of a Japanese official planting cherry trees at the foot of the Gongju fortress wall, this passage appears. When trees were planted, they were snapped off and uprooted. Even if one lets it go that insects eat the sprouts and cows step on them, there were so many trees pulled out half in jest that eventually they had to post guards under the trees to watch them day and night. The person who wrote this record was Japanese. He recorded this as an inconvenient event, but did not explain why such a thing was happening. Probably because an explanation was unnecessary.
The same tree was the spring of home to some, and something else to others. This gap was not made of logic. It was felt in the body.
Meanwhile, the cherry blossom spot where the most people gathered in Joseon was Changgyeongwon. Originally a palace ground of the Joseon royal family, this place was changed into a park equipped with a zoo and a botanical garden by the Japanese empire, and more than two thousand cherry trees were planted after it opened in 1909. From 1924, lights were illuminated so flowers could be seen at night. The number of visitors swelled year after year. A few decades after opening, the annual visitors surpassed one million. At the time, the population of Gyeongseong — colonial Seoul — was around 930,000; it was as if nearly everyone living in the city had visited at least once.
Joseon newspapers and magazines relentlessly criticized this Changgyeongwon flower-viewing culture. They defined spending the day eating and drinking beneath the symbol of Japan as a consumptive and lethargic excursion. Articles appeared putting forward azaleas and peach blossoms as Joseon’s spring flowers in opposition to the cherry blossom. There was also a claim that while the cherry blossom “sells its name as the sakura flower,” the spring of Joseon with its willow trees was more elegant.
But the crowds at Changgyeongwon did not thin.
Knowing the critique was right, people gathered beneath them. There were those who came all the way up from Cheorwon specifically to see the cherry blossoms, and those who carried their old mothers on their backs, showing them the flowers here and there. The flowers were beautiful — and in an overwhelming way, at that. To remember the symbol, one had to take a step back from the flower, but that landscape, where thousands of trees bloomed in unison, did not permit that distance.
In the travelogue of a Joseon poet from the late 1930s, cherry blossoms around the Dongnae hot spring resort in the south appear. The cherry blossoms reflected in his eyes were not a symbol of Japan. It was a flower blooming like clouds to blanket the area, a scene in a landscape where the colors of spring sequentially crossed, with azaleas blooming after the cherry blossoms fell. In an essay a boy wrote after a picnic around the same time, “sakura” was just roadside scenery. Not a symbol of Japan, nor an object of resistance — just a tree blooming in spring.
The meaning did not disappear. The flower merely took up the foreground. Critique, memory, and history were all pushed behind the flower — not vanished, but rendered inaudible, like traffic noise. And that displacement left another problem. In the space where the symbol receded into the background, the flower became just a flower, but the memory of how that flower came to be there was also pushed behind. Yet the sensation that “the cherry blossom is a Japanese thing” does not completely disappear — not because the flower harbors the memory, but because people harbor that memory.
The strange nagging unease 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. Those who feel that weight are the ones who remember, however faintly, with what logic this flower was planted.
Beneath the Flowers Today
The emotion Japanese people feel before the landscape of Somei Yoshino blanketing the Japanese archipelago every spring is real. There is no reason to doubt it.
Where Koreans stand before the same flower is a little different. That nagging unease felt while enjoying the cherry blossoms — where does it come from? It does not come merely from colonial memory. That discomfort may perhaps come from an honest recognition: the sensation of remembering in the body that this flower was not just a flower, that it was a flower planted with a specific intention and logic.
That sensation is not unnecessary. Only, there are times it flows in the wrong direction — like clinging to the Jeju king cherry origin theory, the attempt to resolve the discomfort by reclaiming ownership of the flower. But just because the problem of ownership is resolved does not mean the history the flower has passed through is erased. And just because history is not erased does not mean the flower is not beautiful.
Beauty and history do not erase each other. If holding both simultaneously is uncomfortable, that discomfort is probably an honest one.
The Question Remains
Spring has come again this year, and the flowers have bloomed.
The Somei Yoshino will bloom in unison on the same day across the Japanese archipelago and the Korean peninsula this spring as well. People will gather beneath it, eat and drink, and take pictures. They will be moved. That emotion will be real.
And that may be enough.
Only, one question remains. Where does that emotion we experience every spring come from? If that experience, which feels as though it flowed naturally across a thousand years of time, was actually made by specific hands within a specific time — does knowing that ruin the experience, or does it make the experience a little more honest?
The poets of Heian wandered the forest looking for the flower and asked: has it bloomed, or not yet? Within that waiting, the flower was something that appeared, and appearing was always an event. The flower we see today does not require that question. The flower is forecasted and broadcast, and is everywhere. It strikes you even without you searching for it.
I am not trying to say that landscape is not beautiful. Only, if we could ask, just once, what that landscape is, and how it was made — before the flower blooms, or right in the middle of it at its peak.
Spring will give no answer. The flower will simply bloom. Yet the question remains.