A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
hanami
Hanami is the Japanese practice of going out to look at flowers, and in modern use it means cherry blossom in particular. People take mats, food, and drink under the trees and sit for the afternoon and into the night, when the blossom is lit. The season moves north up the country over several weeks and is forecast nationally, tree by tree, with a front line reported the way weather is.
Etymology
The word means flower-viewing, and the flower it originally meant was not cherry but plum, which blooms earlier and was the fashionable subject in the Nara period under Chinese influence. Cherry displaced plum during the Heian period and has held the word ever since. The related term momijigari, autumn-leaf hunting, is the same idea applied to maples in the other half of the year.
Notes
The forecast is taken seriously and has been recorded for a long time. Court diaries in Kyoto note the flowering date going back over a thousand years, which makes it one of the longest continuous biological records anywhere. A separate word, hanafubuki, meaning a blizzard of petals, names what happens when the wind takes the blossom off all at once.