Short Stuff: Cherry Blossoms

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1:08Chuck Bryant:Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and this is Short Stuff. And we're going to take a little tour, a little trip around the world. We can do a little Washington, D.C. We can do a little Japan. And that's mostly it.

1:20Josh Clark:I think everyone knows what we're talking about then because we're talking about cherry blossoms and the Japanese cherry tree, which is does not produce actual like edible cherries that we know and love. It does provide a little fruit berry for animals and such, but it's not that kind of cherry tree. So just stop asking. It's better.

1:42Chuck Bryant:It is better. I mean, I like my cherries for sure, but if you've ever seen a cherry blossom tree in full bloom, it's such a sight to behold that Japan essentially created an entire cultural season around it with its own emotions and songs and all sorts of stuff. It is really moving. If you're American or North American, or you just like traveling to the United States and happen to be here in the spring and go to Washington, D.C., there's a good chance that you've seen the cherry blossoms on the tidal basin blooming. And this is about the time they're going to start. I think in 2026, it's predicted the whole season's from March 20th to April 12th.

2:28Chuck Bryant:But if you really want to make sure that you're there for the peak, they usually say like the last day, last couple days maybe in March is usually when they peak.

2:37Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. Brooklyn Botanical Garden, by the way, shout out to them. I know D.C. gets all the press here in the United States for cherry blossoms, but they do pretty good on their own. That's where I've seen them. But in Japan is where the real show is. They've been cultivated there and really beloved since 8th century C.E. and they first started appearing in poetry and in books and in pictures and things like that. They have a word for the cherry blossom, which is sakura. They have quite a few words for this, as it turns out, because it's Japan. And then their flower gazing when the time rolls around where they're in bloom is called hanami.

3:17Josh Clark:And it's sort of a mixed bag in Japan because it's definitely, you know, spring and new beginnings. They start the new school year then. It's the start of their fiscal year. But it's also a little bittersweet because it also symbolizes like the ending of things, right?

3:34Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And the reason why is because cherry blossoms just stop all of a sudden at their peak. They don't like grow and peak and then fade. They grow and peak and that's that. They just fall off and die. So there's this idea, this concept of something dying in its prime, which is in and of itself quite bittersweet. They have a word for that, this kind of nostalgic, bittersweet feeling that's kind of associated with cherry blossoms is Natsukashi, which means exactly what I just said.

4:08Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. And I was sort of laughing on the inside there because they I got this from a lot of different sources, but this may have been someone HowStuffWorks interviewed. The last name is Malat. And this guy was like, if you're watching a Japanese movie or TV show, and it's some awesome young person that is the central character, and they're walking around and you see the cherry trees blooming, that means they're going to die in this movie, for sure.

4:36Chuck Bryant:Right. That was John Malat. He organizes the Sakura Matsuri Japanese Street Festival in D.C. every April.

4:43Josh Clark:Yeah. So that's the I guess the Japanese version of what we have in the United States, which is somebody coughs into a napkin and there's blood in it.

4:52Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah. That's always a bad sign, isn't it?

4:54Josh Clark:You're always gone.

4:58Chuck Bryant:That never just becomes this thing that just happened in the movie moves on.

5:01Josh Clark:That would be a fun red herring to put in a movie. Sure.

5:05Chuck Bryant:I think that would be a MacGuffin.

5:06Josh Clark:Oh, God. The emails. This is the new haiku.

5:11Chuck Bryant:Oh, I forgot about haiku. I wonder if somebody could write a haiku about what a MacGuffin is or is not.

5:16Josh Clark:It's coming. You asked for it.

5:19Chuck Bryant:So you said that there's other words for cherry blossoms in Japanese. One of them is Oka, O-H-K-A. And tying into the idea of something dying young in its prime, that's what Japanese kamikaze pilots were called in World War II. Oka. And that's what their planes, they're essentially human-driven missile planes. Plains were called okah as well. And they had like cherry blossoms painted on the side of the plain. That's right.

5:51Josh Clark:Symbolism all over the place. So let's take a break. We've covered some of Japan. And now we're going to talk about D.C. right after this.

6:22Josh Clark:We'll see you next time.

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7:23Geico.

7:39Josh Clark:All right. So we promised talk of Washington, D.C., the most famous purveyor, provider, rather, of cherry blossoms here in the United States. And it all started on March 28th, 1912, when The Washington Post ran a little story with the headline, Mrs. Taft Plants a Tree. And that is when Helen Nellie Taft, wife of William Howard Taft, the president, planted a couple of cherry blossom trees that were gifts from Tokyo. But the story is a little more interesting than that, right?

8:10Chuck Bryant:Well, apparently the Washington Post journalist left in the middle of it. It just plants a treat. So it's not even a correct ineffective headline. But yes, that is just the broad stroke. That's the end result of decades of organizing and campaigning by a woman named Eliza Skidmore. She was the first board member of the, sorry, the first woman board member of the National Geographic Society. She was very well traveled. She loved to go to Japan. And so having traveled to Japan, she had been exposed to the cherry blossoms and was like, these are the greatest things ever. We should get some of these back in Washington, D.C.

8:49Chuck Bryant:And I'm sure that she thought this would be no problem whatsoever. Well, fast forward almost 30 years and she finally gets this thing done. But it's thanks to the intervention of two other people who just also happen to be men.

9:03Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. I do love this quote, though. I want to read it because it just shows how enchanted she was. Potomac Park there on the river, they were reclaiming it at the time. And this was in 1885. And she wrote that basically, like, they had to plant something there in this space. And she said, they might as well plant the most beautiful thing in the world, the Japanese cherry tree.

9:22Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

9:23Josh Clark:It's very sweet. But, yeah, you mentioned a couple of dudes. One guy was named David Fairchild. and it's kind of cool when you look back at how all these convergent things kind of take place to make something happen. I love stories like this, but this was a guy who was the, he worked at the USDA, which is a new thing at the time for our Department of Agriculture, is a job that I want. I don't know if they still have it, but he was a plant explorer. So he would travel all over the world looking for plants that they could cultivate in the United States.

9:54Chuck Bryant:They do not still have that.

9:55Josh Clark:Oh man, I can't imagine anything better.

9:57Chuck Bryant:They had it until like last year, I think.

10:00Josh Clark:Yeah. Man, I wish somebody would have told me.

10:03Chuck Bryant:So David Fairchild was like, hey, these actually can work in Washington, D.C. I think he transplanted a few and showed that they could live. Skidmore found out about this, and she was like, okay, I'm going to try one last time. I'm going to get in touch with this new First Lady, Nellie Taft, and I'm going to say, please, for the love of God, hear me out about these cherry trees. Everybody thinks it's a good idea. Please, let's start planting cherry trees in D.C. She got a reply two days later after she sent the letter. And Nellie Taft said, I have taken up the matter and have promised the trees.

10:39Chuck Bryant:And all of a sudden, things just started looking up for Eliza Skidmore's idea.

10:44Josh Clark:Yeah. I mean, after 25 years, can't imagine how she felt. She got in touch with a guy named Dr. Takamini, who was a wealthy Japanese chemist. And he had been beating the cherry tree drum for New York City for a while. And she knew this. They were fellow enthusiasts. So she said, hey, Mrs. Taft said, like, she's going to try to make this thing happen. He was like, well, I'm a wealthy Japanese chemist, so I can pull some strings. Why don't we make this like an official like state gift from Japan to the United States?

11:13Chuck Bryant:It's a great idea. So Japan said, here are 2 ,000 cherry blossom trees. And also, here's a bunch of insects and disease in them. Yeah, fortunately. They're lousy with Japanese beetles, and God knows what disease that cherry trees get. Yeah. So they had to burn them. And Japan was like, did you have to take a photograph and send it to us of all the cherry trees burning? So they sent them 3 ,000 more. And those are the ones that included the two that Mrs. Taft planted the next day after that second shipment of 3 ,020 healthy trees arrived.

11:49Josh Clark:That's right. I guess they hedged their bets and sent the extra thousand plus 20, which is kind of funny. They line the tidal basin there in D.C., Potomac Park, kind of right there around, was it the Jefferson Memorial, I think? Yes. Yeah. It's gorgeous if you've ever been there. I know Yumi lived in D.C., right?