“HOW A LOT, many things / they remind me / those cherry blossoms! The poet Basho once wrote about Japan’s favorite flower. Flowers have long sparked reflections on the beauty, transience, and relentless rhythms of the natural world. This year, their annual appearance prompts many to think about how those rhythms are changing. Tokyo’s cherry trees began blooming on March 14, tying the record for the first start since the Japan Meteorological Agency began monitoring in 1953. In Kyoto, the trees reached full bloom on March 26, oldest in 1,200 years of records Scientists believe climate change is to blame.
Soon Sakura can come not only early, but with less profusion. The common cherry tree throughout most of Japan, the Somei Yoshino breed, requires a long cold spell in the fall and winter to produce its resplendent buds in the spring. Temperatures are expected to stay below 8 ° C for around 40 days, which is no longer a certainty in parts of southern Japan. Fortunately, scientists at Riken, a research institute, have created a less picky strain. Abe Tomoko and his colleagues scrambled cherry pits’ DNA by irradiating them in a particle accelerator. The result is the Nishina Otome strain, which still blooms after a mild winter.
It’s not just the cherry trees that confuse climate change, but also the poets who write them hymns. The seasons have long occupied a place of choice in Japanese literature: Kokinwakashu, an anthology of poetry published in the 10th century, opens with six chapters of seasonal poems. Basho, who popularized haikus in the 17th century, tended to include in his poems kigo, or seasonal words, to anchor them temporally and thus evoke a certain emotional state.
Over the centuries, poets have compiled almanacs of kigo, classifying most natural phenomena and even some human phenomena by season, or even by month. But as the climate warms and the weather gets more extreme, kigo slip off their seasonal moorings. This “season creep” makes it harder for contemporary readers to understand traditional haiku, says David McMurray, who teaches form at Kagoshima International University. A poem about typhoons is supposed to be about autumn, but they now occur from May until December, laments Miyashita Emiko, a poet. The fluctuating Sakura, although disturbing, are still evocative. They recall “the danger of the situation in which we find ourselves”.
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This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “As the Seasons Defy the Norms /”
