sakura

When I logged in today, I noticed two comments.  It was totally unexpected.  Just for the record, the statistics say that this blog has had 262 visits from Japan (though this is probably counting my own visits too), 118 from America, 83 from Germany, 25 from Korea, 24 from Russia, 8 from the Czech Republic, 8 from the UK, 7 from France, 4 from Malaysia, and 2 from the Netherlands.  I'm not writing this blog for anyone, but it's still nice to know someone finds my writings worth reading and commenting on.

While I was on the plane today, I was listening to a program featuring "sakura songs".  I didn't even know there was such a word, but according to the DJ, it's a relatively new word.  In the early 2000s, a song called Sakura written by Naotaro Moriyama （さくら） became a million seller, and since then many singers started writing songs featuring the flower.  Up till then, sakura was never a common theme in J-pop.

This is pretty interesting because sakura was the most commonly used flower in Japanese classic literature.  People from the Heian era wrote poems after poems featuring sakura.  Since it blooms only for a short period of time, it was thought as a symbol of fragility/frailness and transiency of life/beauty/power.  It was also commonly associated with manly/graceful behavior from the way the petals fall rather quickly - when the time comes, they die out without lingering attachment.

 

 

These are some sakura songs that I like:

 

河口恭吾(Kyogo Kawaguchi)：  桜(sakura)

aiko：  桜の時（sakura no toki / the sakura season)

アンジェラ・アキ(Angela Aki)：  サクラ色（sakura-iro / the color of sakura)

 

Enjoy!