Figure 1.--For 2 week's all of Japan focuses on cherry blossoms. There are local festivals all over the country. The celebrations begin in the south and then ripple north. The press caption here read, "All classes regard the cherry blossom as one of the most glorious things in nature. A sampan loaded with children on one of the lakes in the Ishikawa region on Honda Island. They are on their way to a big cherry blossom picnic." As the chukdren seem to be ll girls, we are guessing it is a school group, but for the event the girls all wear colorful tradidional dress. Norice one girl has aather American-European style hair bow. The photograph was apparently taken in 1928.

There is no one single cherry blossom festival, but a huge number of endlessly varied local events. And given the north/south orintation of the Home Islands, the local festivals are set at slightly different dates from late-March to early-April depending on when the trees usully blossom. Festivals occur throughout the country. We believe that the Shinto festivals are particularly important. We do not know much about the Shinto ceremoies involved here. The Japanese can mix Shinto and Buddhist ceremonies. I think that the individuals here are Buddhist monks (figure 1). There were also Shinto priests involved in the ceremony. We note some of these cherry blossom festivals referred to as Syunka festival. Our understanding is that this means spring festival. The cherry blossom festivals or ceremonies seem to be one type of Syunka festival (matsuri). Hopefully our Japanese readers will orovide some insights here.

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Created: 5:06 PM 7/27/2017
Last updated: 5:06 PM 7/27/2017