Sakura, Sakura...

Spring is officially here, and that means that the sakura (cherry blossoms) are in bloom. They really are beautiful, and they are everywhere. The soft pink flowers really make it feel like spring. Awareness and celebration of the seasons is really important here in Japan, and so come this time of year, people will partake in what is known as hanami, which is the act of going out to look at and enjoy sakura. As I think I mentioned earlier, the blossoms don't last very long, making hanami a meditation of mortality and transience.

The appearance of sakura here is a huge event. The blossoms slowly make their way from southern Japan to northern Japan as the weather warms up, and there are special foods to eat, products at the store will acquire seasonal packaging (there are these sakura Kit-Kats...cherry blossom flavored. Kind of a strange flavor, but pretty packaging. Will try to get a picture up...), and decorations all over the place.

So I came to school today and was informed that the teachers decided that today would be hanami. We ordered special hanami bento boxes with seasonal food in them, then all the teachers went outside (it was a nice day) and set up lunch on the kyudo (Japanese archery) deck where our school has numerous sakura trees. We took an extra long lunch break (I think we spent about 2 hours out there) just eating our bento and talking and admiring the flowers and basking in the warm sun. What an amazing ritual.















Close up of those pretty sakura.















Shinko-sensei passing out some sweets for our hanami bento lunch. This is the kyudo deck.















Me, Shinko-sensei, Fukushima-sensei, Naitou-sensei, Hayashida-sensei, and Ogou-sensei, waiting for Kocho-sensei (the principal) to come so we can dig in!

(Just as a side note, I realized that I've gotten really comfortable sitting seiza, on my feet, like in this picture. However, I also realized that my mother spent the first 10 years of my life trying to get me to stop sitting like that because it made me walk pigeon-toed, and finally after lots of training and scolding and some orthotics, I got past it. And now I'm reverting back to old ways, i.e. sitting on my feet, in an attempt to assimilate. Sorry, Mommy!)















Our special hanami bento. It was a lot of food...let's see how much of it I can name. Starting in the upper left hand corner, imo-age (this sticky deep fried potato thing), fish and cucumber salad with vinegar, sakura jelly, some kind of bean vegetable salad, shrimp tempura, tamago-yaki (fried egg), salmon, another kind of vinegar salad, rice with umeboshi (pickled plum), and some maki-sushi (roll sushi). Oishii yo!















Ishikawa-sensei made her own lunch that day, which included a Doraemon fishcake. He's this cartoon character cat who has a magic pouch from which he can pull out anything, which either causes trouble or saves the day. He doesn't have ears because they were eaten by mice when he was young. So now he's scared of mice. Weird.















Suenaga-sensei, Nakamura-sensei, Tanaka-sensei, Tajima-sensei, and Hayashi-sensei enjoying their bento with sakura and the bunker for the kyudo targets in the background.















The requisite hanami group picture. Pardon the orientation of the picture, I still can't figure out how to rotate on Blogger.

Looking forward to seeing lots more sakura when my family comes and we go to Kyoto. Exciting!!