Post-16: Cherry Blossoming

My mother asked me by email if cherry blossoms were yet out in Seoul. There are cherry blossoms in Seoul?, was my initial reaction. It seems Seoul’s Yeouido Island has some. I had no idea. My own ignorance surprises me.

She asked because the cherry-blossoms on the National Mall (a few miles from my home) are blooming.

For some reason, this is quite a big event in the Washington DC area at this time of year. I don’t know the last time I walked among them. Not in the 2010s.

The first photo (AFAIK) ever taken of me outside of my birthplace (Arlington) was in the shadow of these trees.

I was born in February. In April, my grandfather was visiting from Iowa, as he worked part-time as a kind of deliveryman for Winnebagos at the time. Somebody in Maryland, say would order one. He’d drive it out to the buyer, and Winnebago would fly him home. As he was passing through, he and my dad took my down. I was two months old, and in the photo, I frowned in that curious way babies have of doing flawless impersonations of Winston Churchill.

Come to think of it, I never much cared about these cherry-blossoms, thinking it a tourist thing, or something. Or maybe it was because of the crowds: Consider the picture snapped above: The crowd is so dense that it hugely detracts from the value. Doesn’t it? I much prefer walking those pathways when they are deserted, as I have many times.

Back in Korea: I did see that Korea’s Jeju Island, far off the southern coast, has some kind of cherry blossom festival.

This brings up an interesting question: Are cherry blossoms actually Japanese? The city of Washington got its cherry-blossom trees as a gift from Japan in 1912. That is shortly after the annexation of Korea by Japan. I wonder if cherry blossoms were also aggressively planted in Korea at a similar time. Is that possible? Wiki says that “watching of cherry blossom was introduced to Korea during Japanese rule”, whatever that means.