Video: When Sakura is in Bloom, All Japanese Love: Okinawa Winter Cherry Festival
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The Japanese are famous not only for their electronics, manga comics and fighting samurai traditions. Their culture surprises with a reverent, truly poetic attitude to nature, attention to every flower and every blade of grass in the Universe. One of the most striking manifestations of this feeling is the annual Sakura Blossom Festival held on the island of Okinawa at the end of January.
Okinawa is the southernmost territory of Japan. This island, close to China both geographically and culturally, is the first in the country to be covered with sakura flowers - as everyone now knows, this is the name of a cherry in the Land of the Rising Sun. In a couple of weeks, delicate pink flowers will become the center of attention of hundreds and thousands of people who will specially gather in the central park of the central city of Okinawa Nago. And not without reason: cherry is, perhaps, the most beloved tree of the Japanese (although their admiration for chrysanthemums, and their tender love for peaches, and they value soybeans, are very well known).
In honor of the long-awaited sakura blossom, brass bands, ensembles with a national flavor, dancers and drummers in traditional costumes perform at the festival. Parades, games and karaoke with their noise distract from the main event, and therefore many ordinary Japanese and tourists go away from the epicenter of the celebration to admire in silence the quiet trees with such familiar, and every time in a new way, amazing, pink flowers. A total of 20,000 Taiwanese cherries have been planted in the park - enough for every guest of the festival. The paths of the park are decorated with such light paper lanterns.
Sakura in bloom is an image that inspires every Japanese with light thoughts about the arrival of spring, about the cycle of good and bad in nature, sleep and awakening, death and life. This is also a manifestation of the love, organic for the Japanese, for everything delicate and short-lived, but at the same time subtle and graceful: after all, cherries bloom for such a short time. And this holiday reminds us that winter has already passed the middle, and soon the sky will slowly begin to fill with light, and the earth will turn green.
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