Sakura

Once a year, at the turn of spring, the entirety of Japan turns from this...

...to this:

Now before I get into all my words, take a minute and just look at the photos below. Take a good, long look. 

I know I'm no pro photographer but...can you feel it?

Now as stunning as these trees are, equally or even more amazing is how perfect every single petal is. Every one. Every solitary petal on every single one of the uncountable millions of blossoms.

Look.

Sakura (cherry blossoms) inspire so much more than happiness in Japan. They are far more than just the heralds of spring. The experience, to me, can only be described as spiritual.

Let me see if I can do it even some bit of justice with a low-grade camera, questionable photography skills, and mere, mortal words.

Sakura bloom en-masse only once a year: when it becomes warm after a long period of cold. Great resources are expended to predict when exactly this will be, but no one can tell for certain. Because they are tied to the weather patterns, they can be extremely fickle. Sometimes, if you get a warm spell in winter, a tree or two will decide to bloom - treasures, for sure, but very isolated ones. They can also tease you, like they did this year. They'll start, popping out a glorious bloom or two...

...and then decide that it's too cold and wet and hold back their splendor for another week. Though I can't say I blame them, it was aggravating all the same. 

The most iconic sakura is white and has five, full and rounded petals. 

But there are many varieties in shape, number of petals, and of course, color.

One of my favorites (and I'm clearly not alone in this) - the weeping sakura.

These ones grow in adorable little pompoms!

Bonsai sakura.

My personal favorites - the beloved five-petal shape with a mix of blossoms with yellow-green and pink centers, interspersed lightly with the green of leaves. 

All of them are perfection.

Here are some more varied scenes for your enjoyment:

Sakura lead beautiful, brilliant lives.

But the thing about sakura is that their lives are only half the story. Lots of things are beautiful. Roses, waterfalls, a blue sky, these things can take your breath away too. 

What sets sakura apart isn't just their lives, it's equally or more about their deaths.

Bear with me while I try to explain what the sakura mean to me.

Sakura symbolize mortality, and are a reminder of just how quickly life fades. Their lifespans are staggeringly short. In about a week they reach the mankai, or full-bloom, and from there, they have about another week to gradually wane, and sometimes significantly less if there is wind or rain.

As beautiful as it is, it is also incredibly sobering. Rivers run white with fallen petals, and if you stop to think of what that symbolically is, it's heartbreaking.

There is a word in Japanese - setsunai - that has always intrigued me. There is no true English equivalent - though one dictionary defines it simply as "cruel", and another as "melancholy". It was first explained to me as the feeling you get remembering a past love when a song that was special to the both of you comes on, something beautiful and terrible at the same time. It's sadness, but colored with nostalgia - a mixture deeper than sadness alone for the beautiful memories of the past. 

Whether or not I have the true meaning of setsunai right, that's the kind of feeling I get walking alone through the remains of the sakura.

The poet Kobayashi Issa said:

"What a strange thing!

To be alive

beneath cherry blossoms."

If you look up Japanese poems and quotes on sakura, you will find that for every one that is celebratory, there is at least one more that is sober, pensive, or outright sad. This is why I don't like to say that salura are just a "symbol of spring". Yes, they are, but that's only a fraction of the story! I do not think anyone in Japan looks at sakura and feels the same way we in America feel about, say, Easter bunnies and chicks and tulip buds. It's not a giddy, light-and-sparkles happy. From the very first blossom, everyone knows that this will not last. They are, in every sense, a reminder that life is short.

Which brings me to my favorite lesson of all to be learned from the sakura:

Life will not last, so live it. 

Now.

Everything grinds to a halt for the sakura. People travel great lengths to see sakura, or wait for twenty-hours or more to stake out a picnic spot beneath the trees. The teen with her smartphone is trying to preserve on her smartphone as many precious sakura moments as the seventy-year-old man is with his camera, despite how many sakura cycles he has seen. It is a time to be happy, to enjoy, now, while it lasts. It is a time made precious precisely because it is so short. It's a time to forget the future and let go of the past and live in the moment - to literally stop and smell the flowers.

Live now, and live beautifully.

It's a lesson I need every single year. 

Luckily, they will be back to remind me.

Festivals and Street Food

Festivals, called "matsuri" in Japanese, are nothing special in that they happen all the time, everywhere. They are, however, VERY special in that they are extremely awesome.

At my local park, they held a festival today, and it was everything I dreamed it would be and more! It was a blast of fun, culture, and SO. MUCH. TASTY. FOOD.

YOU GUYS DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT GLORY PASSED MY LIPS THIS DAY.

I tried to catch as many pictures as I could, but of course, nothing beats being there in person! If you find yourself in Japan, especially in the summer months, find a big festival and experience it, and then find the tiniest, dinkiest little festival and experience that too! It's a must on any tourist's list! (And yes, I am aware that I say that about everything I talk about here. It's absolutely true every single time.)

To add an extra layer of special, the sakura were in full splendor this weekend. I'm still polishing up my super-extra special sakura post, but here's a sneak peak of what Japan looks like right now.

Take a look at this magic.

So for several hours, we wandered under tunnels of sakura, looking at booths, watching performances, getting freebies, and eating food. It was pretty much a perfect day with plenty to do and see and eat!

And thanks to the wonders of technology, I can share these things with you!

Any and all criticisms of my photography will be laughed at. In the "flow" of a festival, it's hard to stay still. You have to move with everyone else. Well you don't have to but you become a roadblock and make small children cry. So yes, these shots were extremely hastily snapped for the sake of the small children toddling along behind me.

This is a game I actually see a lot. You take a rifle, load up with a cork pellet, and try to shoot down a prize off the far wall. If it falls, it's yours, and it's as simple (not easy) as that! The prizes are candies and toys and things that are generally for younger audiences although I've never seen anyone of any age turned away. You're never too old for jumbo Pocky sticks!

This is about as Japanese as you get. This is a good, old-fashioned, man-powered mochi maker! Mochi is pulverized rice. There's...really no other way to describe it. But when I say pulverized, I mean pulverized. Pulverized as in mashed with those hammers on the right, swung down from above your head. Repeatedly. If you beat it long and hard enough, it makes a tasty, sticky goo that has been a treat in Japan since practically the invention of rice. I was disappointed that I didn't get to see it in action...maybe another time.

Look a bit familiar? Maybe it's a bit hard to tell from the picture alone. Fishing for toys out of a vat of circulating water! You use a very delicate net made of paper, which makes it much trickier than it looks! Ever caught anything with wet paper?

My favorite variation of this game is kingyo sukui, or scooping for goldfish, which is extremely difficult because the fish are fast and when you finally catch them they thrash and the wet paper net breaks and then you get no fish. If I see this at another festival, I will be sure to document it. There's also an arcade game which simulates the experience. Set me down at one of those and I'll be content for the rest of time.

See a video of the arcade game here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWHXYLXwR08

There were also no shortage of performances from different regions of Japan! A great thing about Japan is that every area has a unique identity with it's own distinct foods and traditions. And the awesome thing about Tokyo is that people come to us to share those things with us!

There were the more traditional dances:

And the more uh...ECCENTRIC dances (and costumes...):

These guys aren't pro dancers. They are credit union employees. ....My guess from their faces is that this was NOT done on a volunteer basis and it didn't make most of them very happy. 

Also of note: they are singing about a festival from their city of Shibukawa, (I am NOT making this up) the Belly Button Festival. Hear it?? Heso matsuri. You can't un-know this: a belly button festival exists. And if you think for a second that that's not number one on my travel wish list right now, you would be dead wrong.

And what would a Japanese festival be without a ninja? How about one that plays awesome-sauce soccer?

So there's lots to see and do. Let's move on to what there is to EAT. Caution: you should probably only continue if you have a full stomach or this might be excruciating.

Japanese street food is a real treat. I get giddy whenever I see those booths go up. Some of it is very familiar. Some if it is entirely new. And some of it is an entirely new twist on a very familiar food.

Take, for example, the super-potato.

That's not what it's called. I don't know what it's called. But I loved it so much that I made my husband take me back to the festival hours after we had left it just to get another one.

This mountain of joy isn't just any baked potato. It's steamed. Which means you get all the goodness of a baked potato with all the moisture of mashed potatoes. And in case you didn't notice, it's as big as your face. Top it with all-you-can-eat butter served with a spatula out of a five-gallon tub, and what could possibly go wrong? (Contrary to popular belief, the Japanese CAN be really unhealthy when they want to be!)

I may or may not have consumed absolutely ungodly amounts of butter today, which is ok, because my butter and cheese intake has been hovering somewhere between "scant" and "naught" since I got here.

Next: Japanese Shaved Ice

A familiar classic that never goes wrong in any country. Pay for a cup of ice, dump on your syrup(s) of choice. The Japanese do it super well, though. The ice is actually flaked, not pebbled, which means that the syrup is absorbed a bit more instead of taking the express route to the bottom. Also, the container is extremely handy. Not edible, but handy. Also also, one of those bottles is sweetened condensed milk....

In the mood for something a bit more savory? Look no further than okonomiyaki.

Okonomi is roughly "whatever you like", and yaki is "to cook or fry". So...take whatever you like, slap it on a griddle, and you have okonomiyaki! This conglomerate of stuff is beloved throughout Japan, with different regions having their own distinct preferences. Here the base is chopped cabbage, with other goodies like "bacon" (it's ham, don't let the Japanese tell you differently) or fish bits, or other veggies, or practically anything else in the cupboard (I like dem noodles!), and held together with something similar to pancake batter - your standard flour, water, and egg type deal. Fry it, top with sauce, bonito flakes, mayo, an egg, and anything else you haven't used in the cupboard yet, and you have a tasty.

The chef of this stall, upon seeing my obvious foreign heritage, gave me a huge grin when he saw me eyeing his creations. Ever a valiant salesman, he chirped "Japanese Pizza!" in thickly accented English. It made my life. Firstly because, come on, that's extremely targeted advertising, in my native language, and right on the spot. I like dat moxie! And secondly because no, in no way, shape, or form is this pizza. The Japanese do have pizza, and this is not it, and we both knew it. I laughed with him and bought one.

Yakisoba and steak.

The latter needs no explanation, I trust. 

Yaki, again, means to cook or fry, and soba are noodles. Yakisoba noodles are a specific type that you can buy for 40 cents a pack here in Japan (...happiness...), but you can actually approximate them at home! Take spaghetti noodles and add a half-tablespoon-ish of baking soda to the water as you boil them (beware, this will create major over-bubbling, don't be caught off guard). Take these noodles and pan fry them with yakisoba sauce and other veggies such as cabbage, onion, and thin carrot slivers and you have, yet again, a tasty.

Chocolate covered bananas or waffles. With sprinkles. On sticks.

Does anything else need to be said?

Hiroshima omusoba, with the omu coming from "omelette". Take yakisoba (noodles, see above) and wrap in omu. Viola! A tasty!

Sweet potato fries, lightly sugared. Sweet potato is a go-to for Japanese sweets, and you can get them just about every way imaginable.

And that is a scant selection of Japanese street foods. There's still so much left to cover - yakitori, taiyaki, takoyaki, dorayaki, yakiudon, lots of yaki...the list goes on and on but the memory on my camera does not.

Summer is festival season, so stay tuned for more magical Japanese street foods! I will be covering as many as I can think of in the coming months!