Bob Sanchez’ BS

2009 is the fifth calendar year in which I have done some time in Japan. I’ve spent over half of my working life in this country, but there are two very Japanese things I have never experienced - the New Year celebration and cherry blossom viewing.

I may never be here for New Year’s for various reasons, but I’ve had five chances at hanami and finally made good on one of them this year.

Cherry trees were shedding their delicate, pink petals when I stepped off the plane in Tokyo in April 2005, and I actually made it to a famous park in Shinjuku in time to see them scattered on the ground.

It being my first-ever visit to Japan, I was so overwhelmed with everything else that I couldn’t fully appreciate what I was seeing. Imagine teaching a foreigner all about American baseball for three years without letting them go to the United States during that time, and then taking them there and giving them plate seats at a Yankees-Red Sox game. It was kind of like that.

People go crazy waiting for sakura to bloom, and the faintly pink blossoms carry significant cultural meaning. Obviously, they’re a welcome sign that spring is on the way, and consequently for Japanese an excuse to spread out a blue tarp and get blasted outside during the day with one’s coworkers and friends.

The school year begins on April 1 in Japan, and new graduates begin work around this time as well. This sets off a never-ending cycle of things beginning and ending in early spring, so the sakura also stand for new life, painful goodbyes, and exciting hellos.

Many schools and companies rotate their workers within prefectures or even countrywide, and these seemingly arbitrary transfers are often made for unknown reasons; they are simply decided behind closed doors by those above. Married couples and families with young children are not always exempt to these transfers, and I have met more than a couple young fathers who spend their nights alone in Kochi while their families miss them from places like Fukuoka, Iwate, and Gifu.

March is a time for anxiety, and when the day for transfer announcements (Black Day) rolls around, employees rush to log on to the company website and check their fate. What follows is a flurry of text messages, clutched chests, clenched fists, frustrated moans, relieved sighs, teary eyes, and gut-wrenching, down-on-one-knee, face-to-face with destiny moments.

No wonder Japanese bust out the blue tarps and go nuts. After finding out whether or not you have to pull up your roots by next week, it must be nice to have something as beautiful as cherry blossoms to gaze at and appreciate.

I’ve missed this the last three years because I was out of the country each time. In 2006, I couldn’t stand the cold winter of Fukushima and bailed out early. In 2007, I was in Seattle forging another step on my baseball journey. In 2008, I spent two weeks in Phoenix at Spring Training and was gone for the exact amount of time that the cherry trees were in full bloom.

How maddeningly ironic that the sales point of my new apartment was not the Washlet, but the proximity to an aquatic boulevard of beautiful sakura. The trees are not ugly by any means during the rest of the year, but their value lies in the ten to twelve days that their blossoms are on display.

If anything, that has taught me that I am never going to see everything in the world, let alone in Kochi. Even my most routine bike trails are different every time I take them; I cannot go somewhere once on one day out of the year and fully appreciate that place. That I will never know everything is apparent, but has still been a humbling realization.

I arrived home from Phoenix and the cold wind promptly blew away about half of the sakura. There are still some out now, but they are disappearing fast. I decided to tour Kochi in search of places I’d heard about, and it took a whole day to do.

I began, simply enough, with the Horikawa Canal right in front of my apartment. Tourist boats pass by at all hours and folks walk by on the docks all day. I happened upon a grandfather showering his grandson with fallen petals and having a merry time at it. Those are my clothes hanging behind the flowers.

I cycled out to Tosa-Yamada Town to see a temple that is run-of-the-mill but for its sakura-lined road. There were just a few canopies selling octopus balls and okonomiyaki, and it looked like I had missed the party by a couple days.

Next, I followed the Monobe River northeast for a spell, happening upon a scene that I hadn’t expected on the opposite bank. I love the low-hanging trees off to the right of the cherries but didn’t know that the little trees in the picture were sakura.

I tried three different roads in an attempt to find the back way up to the Ryugado Caves, but each one was steep and ran out of pavement after a few kilometers. When I finally made it to the caves, I was flogged. I hadn’t cycled in two weeks and the wind was a bit brutal. Ahead of me lay the Ryugado Skyline, a steeper, inland version of the Yokonami Skyline with grittier pavement.

I love pain and only had today, so I trudged up the slope. Usual views were still just as breathtaking, but it looked like I missed the best of the sakura. Still, the one newly-paved section was a big dip between peaks that was shrouded with cherry trees and was probably awesome last week.

The hanami party was at my place that night, and we tried to start some Korean barbecue out on my balcony, but it turned out to be a bad idea because of the smoke. We ran through my apartment and carried the flaming barbecue outside, where it promptly began to rain. We finally found shelter next to a clapboard warehouse, and seven friends showed up in the freezing cold to eat, drink, and look at flowers.

Just get hot, already!