Sakura season!

Right now in Tokyo the cherry trees are in full bloom. Just wanted to share the beauty with you! It is a custom in Japan during cherry blossom season to go to "hanami". In kanji, this word is written: 花見. The first character means "flower" and the second character means "look". Basically, this means you go and spread a tarp under a blooming tree and hang out enjoying it.

I went to hanami with some of my students last week. Whenever food is involved, my students do amazingly impressive things. I had kind of expected the food to come out all at once like a traditional American picnic. But food kept showing up out of bags throughout the entire meal. Homemade inari-zushi (rice wrapped in thin sweetened tofu), cooked carrots and lotus root with a sauce to go over the top, little dango (balls made from pounded rice) with a sweet glaze over them, etc.

Tokyo usually feels really busy. It's easy to walk through a crowd. There's usually a rather slow lane of walkers, and then a stream of people in a hurry that one can jump into. But the blossoms put even Tokyo walkers into slow motion. I left to meet a friend at the train station this last weekend. My walk crosses some ponds, and the path is lined with cherry trees. Usually the walk takes me around 20 minutes, but I was eight minutes late because the whole path was filled with people looking up at flowers, ambling along slowly, enjoying food and friends as they went. Even though it made me late, it's lovely to see Tokyo slow down to enjoy beautiful things!