The Sakura Obsession Quotes

“A moon of unsurpassable brilliance flooded the silent landscape with a cruel glare of greenish light, which traced sharp inky shadows of the trees on the rounded white folds. The snow crystals caught and reflected the moonlight upon a myriad facets until I appeared to be walking in a world of sparkling diamonds. The frightful stillness of the woodland at midnight was almost startling – everything seemed to be frost-bound and nerveless. Even the icy air seemed frozen into immobility. The crisp crunch of my footfall appeared to be an unpardonable intrusion, while the scars they made upon the smooth field of scintillating white seemed a positive sacrilege.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“In AD 812 the imperial family hosted a cherry-blossom viewing party for the first time, establishing a link with the cherry culture that continues to this day. The Japanese aristocracy, which sought to forge a national identity away from Chinese influence, celebrated cherries as their own special flower. At their annual hanami gatherings they wrote poems about the flower and about life, and then read them aloud.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“The first-known cultivated cherry in Japan was a weeping cherry, a form of Edo-higan. Aristocrats were enchanted by the way in which the thin, supple branches bent over towards the ground, giving the illusion of tears when the tree blossomed, and so they propagated this mutation by collecting seeds and planting them in their gardens.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“the Meiji leaders faced a dilemma. How could they unite, emotionally and spiritually, thirty-four million people who had no sense of belonging to a ‘nation’? During the Edo period, from 1603 to 1868, everyone belonged to his own domain and was beholden to one of the 270 or so daimyō. No one called himself or herself ‘Japanese’. But now, in case of an emergency, the government would need to convince millions of ordinary people to take up arms.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“To Ingram, the way that Japan had lurched into a culture of extreme uniformity was alien, restrictive and potentially dangerous. The disappearance of diversity, highlighted by the extinction of the Taihaku cherry, was indicative of Japan’s militaristic mood in the 1920s and 1930s. The ubiquity of the lookalike Somei-yoshino cherry spoke volumes about the dark path of conformity which the Japanese followed, until their 1945 defeat.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“Collingwood Ingram was a cherry-tree colossus. A passionate advocate for the blossoms and a leading authority on them, he saved some varieties from extinction. He built the world’s biggest collection of cherry-tree varieties outside Japan in his Kent garden. His broader legacy was to spread a diverse cherry-tree culture almost single-handedly across the British Isles and the world at large.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“Japanese sakuramori, or cherry guardian,”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“cherries were portrayed as symbols of youth, love, romance and contentment,”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“The Somei-yoshino variety has only existed for 150 years at most, Sano stressed to me. Given the 2,000-year-plus history of Japan’s cherry trees, the monotone scenery of the twenty-first century is an historical exception rather than the norm.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“the decade between 1955 and 1965 a ‘Somei-yoshino bubble’ because so many trees were planted by local governments, both to beautify land that had been bombed by the Americans”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“By 1964, when Tokyo hosted the Olympic Games, Somei-yoshino was again Japan’s quintessential cherry.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“in the 1960s, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party that has ruled Japan almost continuously since 1955 sought to make the cherry tree a recognisable global icon of the nation’s rebirth,”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“Most urban cherries had been wiped out in Japan during the war, leaving the cities bereft of colour and character. The revival began on a small scale as early as 1948, just three years after Japan’s surrender, when 1,250 trees were planted in the war-burnt fields of Tokyo’s spacious Ueno Park, one of the capital’s first public parks. This had been a popular cherry-viewing, or hanami, site since the early seventeenth century, so it was natural that the government wanted to re-establish this tradition.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“From a virtual standing start in the 1920s, Japanese flowering cherry trees became a part of British people’s daily lives within half a century.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“Toyotomi’s extravagant parade and party are re-created at the temple every April in the temple gardens, where more than 1,000 cherry trees now bloom.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“The Tale of Genji, a literary masterpiece written by Murasaki Shikibu in the early eleventh century, cherries were portrayed as symbols of youth, love, romance and contentment,”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“Japan’s abundance of cultivated, or man-made, cherries was unique. No other peoples in the world cultivated cherries to such an extent. All of these man-made varieties were derived from only ten known species of natural wild cherry that grew in Japan.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“Since 2011 cherry trees, a symbol of life and rebirth, have been planted in great numbers near Fukushima, in memory of those who died and to help resurrect neighbourhoods washed away during the tsunami.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“Check the map of any British town or village and there’s almost always a ‘Cherry’ or ‘Cherry Tree’ avenue, close, park, road, street or way, mostly named during or after the 1950s, each containing a few hastily planted trees to justify its name.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“in Britain, tens of thousands of cherries were planted between the 1950s and the mid-1970s, bringing colour, variety and a touch of Asian exoticism to the urban environment. The trees’ popularity became evident in the names of streets, parks, pubs and restaurants.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“Britain racked by post-war austerity, the sight of cherry blossoms in full bloom was an uplifting experience. Few people associated these Japanese flowering cherries with Japan’s conduct during the war,”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“Hiraizumi’s comments were given additional weight by the fact that the blossoms of the Somei-yoshino cloned variety, which dominated the landscape by the 1930s, all bloomed and fell at the same time. That was a relatively new phenomenon. Before the mass plantings of Somei-yoshino in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cherry blossoms in Japan did not give such an impression. Indeed, what few realised was that the Somei-yoshino cherry had not even existed before the 1860s.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“the feudal domains were re-designated as prefectures, which were similar to English counties and US states, and the daimyō lords who ruled these fiefdoms were replaced by governors sent from Tokyo.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“At least three of the doctors stationed on the island over the centuries–Engelbert Kaempfer in the late seventeenth century, Carl Thunberg in the eighteenth century and Philipp von Siebold in the early nineteenth century–were avid botanists, whose Japanese plant collections and descriptions were the first to reach Europe.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“The Tokugawa shogunate established a nationwide system consisting of about 270 domains, each ruled by a daimyō. Although the shōgun led the country, each domain in this feudal system had its own political, economic and social structure. In effect, each functioned as a small country or principality that paid homage to the shogunate. Each domain also maintained a rigid class system. At the top, of course, were the daimyō, served by their samurai warriors, who were the only Japanese allowed to carry swords. Beneath them came the farmers and peasants who produced food, followed by artisans who made clothes, swords and other goods. Almost at the bottom were the merchants, segregated and ostracised because they made money from others’ labour. Underneath everyone else were the Eta: leather-tanners, undertakers and executioners, who dealt with animal slaughter and death.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“By shutting itself off from most of the world and banning Catholicism, Japan avoided being colonised and enjoyed peace for more than 200 years.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“Japanese arts, crafts and culture became a craze after the 1860s. In particular woodblock prints and paintings featuring cherry blossoms, by artists such as Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige,”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“during this peaceful Sakoku period that unique arts and culture evolved, mostly in Edo and other large cities. These included ukiyo-e woodblock prints, pottery, haiku poetry, kabuki plays and the creation of about 250 varieties of cherry blossom in the Edo gardens of the daimyō lords.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“Catching up with the West became a national obsession and a new era of rapid economic, social and political development took hold. After centuries of discouraging contact with most foreigners, Japan welcomed thousands of Western educators, entrepreneurs, government officials, naturalists and adventurers.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms

“Catching up with the West became a national obsession and a new era of rapid economic, social and political development took hold.”
― Naoko Abe, The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms