I would like to take you to Tokyo this time of year. The entire country celebrates the blossoming of these trees. It is a tradition, a pastime, a requirement. The entire nation collects discarded cardboard to place under trees where they sit all afternoon and drink Sake too excess and talk until they can not talk anymore and then they sing until they can not sing anymore and then they laugh. Conservative Japanese women hike up their skirts and conservative Japanese men hike up their trousers and find a way to be comfortable sitting on boxes and bits of cardboard for hours. Children run from tree to tree gathering blossoms in their hair. Street vendors deliver food to try and balance out the alcohol consumption. Lovers love under these trees, children are named, families are reunited, workers and bosses lose their hierarchy, classes lose their identity all in the name of Honami, the blessed cherry blossom. They sit for hours and sometimes days in celebration of the miracle of rebirth, of cycles, of the dieing of the dreaded Tokyo winter and birthing of the wondrous Tokyo spring, of the dichotomy of nature that brings forth such tender white fragrant beauties from such a hard, dark and twisted wood. And for hours and sometimes days they sit, on their cardboard blankets, passing around their cartons of bitter sweet rice wine, intoxicating themselves and each other with drink and food and fragrance and conversation and song. And they sing nationalistic revelry, and they sing Elvis and they sing children's songs and they sing old standards. Those songs that have been made famous by one of Japans most revered performers an older man who dresses like a women and sings in a warbling, mysteriously beautiful voice. And they all sing in their best warbling drunken voices and sometimes an entire tree lined street or an entire tree filled park will come together in song. A melody, like a wildfire, will just catch on and suddenly its as if the entire nation is warbling in unison. An entire people joining together in song and the freedom that intoxication inevitable brings. Slowly as the lazy night sets in they stubble to buses and trains that will carry them to homes and tatami mats and futons and sleep. Some, who are to drunk to move and do not have relatives or friends that are willing to drag them along, will simply stay, curled up, together or alone, on their beds of cardboard, where no harm will come to them, until the harsh sting of the morning sun reminds them of the coming of the day. And there is a celebration in side of me and someday we will walk together down those tree lined streets and we will sit under one of those trees and we will drink Sake and sing songs and I will remember the breaking of dark spells and the acceptance of love.
