Term · Japanese culture
Hanami
A national appointment with a tree that keeps it for about a week and then stops.
In Otakana the clue reads: Picnic held under the cherry blossom
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Japanese culture
- Letters
- 6 · Hard
Hanami is flower viewing, and in practice it means sitting on a blue tarpaulin under cherry trees with food, drink and everyone you work with. Parks fill. Junior staff get sent early in the morning to hold ground. The blossom lasts roughly a week from opening to falling, and a hard rain can end the whole thing overnight, which is more or less the point of the custom.
Aristocrats of the Nara period viewed plum blossom first, imported along with Chinese poetry, and the Heian court shifted the attention to cherry. Emperor Saga is credited with a flower party in the early ninth century. By the Edo period it had become a public habit, helped along by rulers planting cherry trees where crowds could reach them.
The forecast is a genuine institution. Weather services track a blossom front moving north up the country, and the news reports it the way it reports typhoons. Most of the trees are somei yoshino, a cultivar propagated by cutting, so a whole park is one clone and flowers on the same day. That uniformity is why the timing works as drama at all.
Spelling HANAMI
HANAMI is hana, flower, plus mi from the verb to look, and knowing that split fixes the middle of the word. Six letters, three of them A or I, alternating with consonants the whole way. No long vowels hide in it and nothing doubles. The last letter is I, not E, which is the one place a guess by ear tends to go wrong.