Explore everyday life in Japan

Ohanami

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Every spring the cherry trees in Japan bloom in profusion some time between the end of March and the end of July.

Some years, the cherry bloom progresses slowly and is long and drawn out, providing many opportunities for people to spend their days or evenings walking through parks or sitting alongside rivers eating snacks and bento boxes with their friends while drinking beer, sake, chu-hi, or some other alcoholic beverage. Other years, the cherry blossoms burst open over night and are quickly battered down by wind and rain before their beauty can be enjoyed. This uncertainty can make *Ohanami*, the Japanese custom of spending time with friends outdoors near cherry trees that are in bloom, difficult to plan successfully.

Perhaps the hardest thing to convey to people who have never lived in Japan is just how busy and scheduled life here tends to be. People here often work ten or more hours a day, six days a week and students generally stay after school everyday until five or six o’clock at night, participating in sports, music, art, and other activities before going to tutoring schools where many of them receive extra education until eight or nine ‘o’ clock at night. Weekends, too, tend to be filled with work-related or school-sponsored activities.

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Generally speaking, spontaneous plans and outings in Japan are rare. Barbecues, lunch dates, and meeting friends out for drinks often require quite a bit of coordination. Locking in a date where everyone can participate is not easy. When planning something like ohanami, where weather becomes a factor, if the weather is less than ideal, you either have to cancel, which can mean not seeing your friends for another few months or longer, or you have to be prepared to have fun in any kind of weather. I have heard many people say that they don’t like doing ohanami because, many years, doing ohanami means sitting outside in cool, damp weather that borderlines on being cold for long periods of time. In other words, it can be an uncomfortable time where more energy is spent on shivering and trying to stay warm than actually appreciating the beauty of the short-lived cherry bloom.

That said, when the weather is nice, ohanami is something that I think just about everyone in Japan enjoys.

People go to parks in large crowds, often with tarps and blankets in hand and large bags full of food and alcohol. Sometimes, as with fireworks displays and other outdoor events, people arrive early, or even the night before to lay their tarps on the ground or rope off an area that they want to use, which in Japan, is a respected sign that the area has been taken, even if nobody is there to use it. Kids run freely. Vendors stand in their stalls selling food, toys, and helium-filled balloons with different action and anime characters on them, and in general, the atmosphere ranges from being light and carefree to downright intoxicated.

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Image Credits: All images and videos in this post are original.

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This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting regular updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.

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If you missed my last post, you can find it here Hard-Off.