THE MOST HOPE-FILLED BLOSSOM
When tragedies happen in the early half of spring, the people they hurt face their darkest, coldest days just as the earth is ready and able to cradle them in warming breezes and soft petals—just as the birds return, gently tugging at them with colors and chirps.
Springtime, rebirth, and resurrection are old theme-mates. Buds and blossoms get our hopes up. Even now. Lives and limbs, ripped away by the bombs at the Boston Marathon just last week, still leave us with gaping wounds and elephants-sitting-on-our-chests-grief. With the season starting a bit later than usual this year, it’s cherry blossom time now in Boston.
When we see new buds and blossoms each year, our wistfulness begins to take a backseat to hope. Cherry blossoms lift us higher than most. These massive candyfloss petal clusters weigh heavy along branches. When planted alone, cherry trees show off the poetic curves of their armatures as much as they show off the sweetness of their puffy flowers. When grouped in large numbers, as they are in Washington D.C. and Kyoto, the trees turn places into breathtaking impressionist paintings. In either case, they banish gloom and grief for at least a brief time, as their luscious colors and ambrosial scents invite rapture.
Documentary filmmaker Lucy Walker captured the epitome of this drama as it played out in Japan, when the Tōhoku earthquake struck in mid-March, 2011. In her Sundance Award-winning and Oscar-nominated film, Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, Walker covers and contrasts the more widespread, far-reaching catastrophe, as the resulting tsunami and the nuclear meltdown devastated tens of thousands of lives. It happened just before sakura zensen, what the Japanese call the advancing tide of blooming cherry blossoms, as it edged northward, from Kagoshima, to Kyoto, and beyond. Like a rolling wall of buds ripening, bursting, and peaking, the cherry trees came to grace Fukushima when the region’s survivors needed them most.
“I’ve always been struck by both the visual and the symbolic image of the blossom,” explains Walker. Long obsessed with cherry blossoms, they mark transformative and poignant times for Walker. She recalled the last cherry blossoms her mother saw before she died of cancer a few years ago, as well as the last her grandmother saw before she succumbed to the same disease years earlier. Her father died shortly after her mother, adding to the epic loss amidst the seas of blooms. Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom was a film Walker was destined to make. She refers to mono no aware, roughly translated as the “pathos of things” or the “sensitivity to ephemera,” as the people who emerged from the toxic mud to find their lives irrevocably changed and their loved ones irretrievably lost. The cherry blossoms pulled their traumatized psyches up to where they could find joy in beauty again, if only for a few days, from bud to bloom to blossom to petal showers.
At cherry blossom parties in this keep
Old pines caught the new light of the moon
And cast it glittering over the sake cup;
How can such brilliance have passed so soon?
- Doi Bansui
FILM AWARDS
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Nominee, Best Documentary Short, The 84th Annual Academy Awards 2012
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Winner, Short Film Jury Prize: Non-Fiction, Sundance Film Festival 2012
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Winner, Women In Film National Geographic All Roads Award, Sundance Film Festival 2012
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Winner, Polly Krakora Award for Artistry in Film, DC Environmental Film Festival 2012
