Recently, I have watched the meal drama "The Most Perfect Divorce" many times, played by Eita and Makiko Oino, and the neighborhood where the male and female protagonists live in this drama is full of cherry blossoms flying in the spring, and the filming location is Megurokawa, one of Japan's famous cherry blossom viewing areas.
Japanese people's records of cherry blossoms are not only in film and television dramas, but also in some Japanese songs and haiku, such as:
Everyone is in the middle of nowhere
The cherry blossoms passed silently
Relatively momentary
Japan is a country nicknamed "cherry blossom country", and every year in March and April, when the cherry blossoms are in full bloom, many Japanese people will go out of their homes to enjoy the cherry blossoms, which shows the Japanese love cherry blossoms.
In Japanese there is a word "cherry blossom time", which means "spring season", the original Japanese folk, every spring cherry blossom season, use this to judge the farming time, farmers under the cherry blossom tree to worship the god of agriculture, blooming cherry blossoms mean that this year will be wind and rain, at first it was just a ritual activity, and later evolved into a cherry blossom viewing culture.
Cherry blossoms in Japan have a history of more than 1,000 years, to say that cherry blossom viewing culture began, probably in the Heian period, in fact, before this Japanese society is the most popular is the plum blossom, this is largely influenced by the Tang Dynasty, after the arrival of the Japanese Heian period, the Saga Emperor very much like cherry blossoms, and also made cherry blossom viewing very ritualized, this wave of operations, it can be said that indirectly affected the later folk attitude to cherry blossoms.
In the Heian period of Japan, a cherry blossom feast was held in the Imperial Palace, and basically the people who attended the banquet were the magnates, and cherry blossom viewing was the elegance of the magnates at that time, and in the Edo period of Japan, this kind of cherry blossom viewing gradually developed into a folk activity, and eventually became a unique culture in Japan.
I remember once watching Dou Wentao's "Threesomes", there was an issue about Japan's "material mourning" culture, interested can look at the book "The Tale of Genji", the Japanese love for cherry blossoms and this "material mourning" culture is closely related, cherry blossoms bloom for a short time, after blooming, in a few days, the petals will fall with the wind, briefly open and leave, with a sense of poignancy.
This kind of "material mourning" culture actually has something to do with Japan's Shintoism, which is a primitive religion in Japan, and the "thing" of material mourning can be said to be largely influenced by Shintoism.
In this kind of thinking that all things have animism, every flower and grass can be worshipped as a god, through the grass and trees to express the mood, a bit like the Chinese borrowing scenery lyricism, borrowing things to speak of zhi, but Japan is borrowing things to say "beauty", especially the instantaneous beauty of all living things.
And this sense of momentary exclamation, to a large extent, is caused by Japan's geographical environment, poor resources and natural disasters, so that the Japanese people have a sense of insecurity that they will say goodbye to all things at any time.
The momentary beauty of cherry blossoms coincides with the Japanese attitude towards life.
The cherry blossoms in Japan at that time in the Edo period were already associated with the spirit of Japanese Bushido, and there is a proverb in Japanese folklore, "Flowers are cherry blossoms, and people are samurai", which means that to make flowers is to make cherry blossoms, and to be a man is to be a samurai.
Ancient Japanese believed that the most beautiful moment of cherry blossoms was when they withered, which was like the spiritual world advocated by Japanese samurai, pursuing the flash of life and choosing death without nostalgia.
This blessing of the Bushido spirit has elevated the cherry blossoms from a representative of the beauty of mourning to a representative of a national spirit.
Life is short, like cherry blossoms blooming for a short time, calmly leaving.
However, ordinary people like cherry blossoms, may also simply feel good-looking, and there is no such additional meaning, the short bloom of cherry blossoms, more reminiscent of short life, more to cherish life.