Ingram’s discovery of this tragic trajectory, and his response to it, form the core of Abe’s sympathetic and engrossing account, which draws extensively on Ingram’s published and unpublished writings alongside interviews with surviving members of his family. Meanwhile, with Japanese officialdom more concerned with symbolism than with nature or aesthetics, the country’s enviable variety of wild and cultivated cherry trees was losing ground – literally – to the hardy and fast-growing Somei-yoshino species. Many of the old aristocratic gardens where the trees were tended had been lost to building work, tea plantations and mulberry bushes (used to feed silkworms, which in turn fed a valuable export industry). And yet the centuries of botanical expertise and connoisseurship on which all this rested was fading. The sakura were being made to work diplomatic and domestic overtime: the gateway to a Japanese garden at the Japan-British Exhibition (1910) had been guarded by samurai warriors standing below two artificial cherry trees Tokyo’s mayor sent thousands of cherry trees to New York and Washington DC in thanks for American mediation to end the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 back at home, cherry blossoms were becoming ubiquitous in poetry, story and song, romanticising the short and selfless lives for which a nation frequently at war required its citizens to prepare. But in its hunger for industry and status, Japan gorged itself on all things western, resulting in a “violent aesthetic indigestion”, one of whose saddest signs was the steady impoverishment of the country’s cherry blossom culture. This was a land, he thought, where “man adds to, instead of detracts from, the beauty of his country”. On his first visit in the early 1900s, the country had appeared to Ingram – as it did to many other western travellers – positively Eden-like in its freedom from “smoke-begrimed cities” and the cynicism they bred. Ingram opted for cherry trees, setting himself up for fresh disappointment on a botanical expedition to Japan in 1926. He became a renowned ornithologist, only to turn his back on the subject when it appeared to lose its way: “When the editor of one of the world’s premier ornithological journals deemed it of sufficient interest to publish a paper in which the author recorded the number of times a great tit defecated every 24 hours, I came to the conclusion that it was high time I occupied my thoughts with some other aspect of nature. The flipside of his devotion to nature was a seriousness about sacrilege.
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And you can see what she means in an accomplished boyhood sketch, full of joy and feeling, featuring four young birds chirruping heavenwards from their nest. “Nature was the boy’s religion”, Abe writes. The sounding of the meal gong would be met with the fluttering of wings as a small, hungry host – a jackdaw, together with a few sparrows and blackbirds – made for the table. Photograph: Courtesy of the authorīorn in 1880 and home-schooled in wealthy Westgate-on-Sea, in Kent, Ingram grew up in an English idyll. By deftly combining the two themes, Naoko Abe, formerly a journalist for Japan’s Mainichi newspaper and now living in the UK, manages to transform Ingram’s life from horticultural footnote into historical adventure.Ĭollingwood ‘Cherry’ Ingram with one of his beloved trees. This survival of the sakura’s symbolism is every bit as interesting as the story of the trees themselves, and the role of the English expert Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram in preserving them. And still they retain their innocence and resonance. They have been the focus of an annual commercial onslaught, from seasonal pink-and-white product packaging to endless tie-in campaigns. They have found themselves pressed into the service of dramatically conflicting visions of modern Japan: saplings given to international allies, flowers adorning kamikaze flying caps and fuselages, sakura imagery adopted by the far right. There is no keeping the blossom on the tree.īut for all their feted fragility, Japan’s cherry blossoms have weathered the past century and a half remarkably well. Peace, pleasure, purpose – tinged with an awareness that the future will all too soon be the past. Starting out in the world of work: smart suit, sweaty palms. The faces of family and the company of friends. You could fill a book trying to convey the associations, such is the evocative power of these blossoms – sakura – in full bloom. P ity the manga translator faced with cherry blossoms in an opening scene.
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