Cherry blossom special: Hold these truths

by Mark Silva

We spent some time this weekend not thinking about budgets or deficits or bailouts or Congress or the G-20 or NATO or the European Union or anything even close to political.

We went looking at flowers - specifically, the blossoms of the cherry trees that ring the Tidal Basin and attract many hundreds of thousands of people each year to see little white petals in bloom.

We have one mayor of Tokyo to thank for this, the mayor named Yukio Ozaki who gave the city of Washington 3,000 cherry trees in 1912.

So much has happened, since then, in the course of relations between Japan and the United States.

We think, primarily of former Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi's tour of Graceland -- the Elvis-loving leader of the Japanese taken on a tour of the king's shrine by former President George W. Bush, who, as he loved to tell us every time he got together with Koizumi, had a father who went to war against the Japanese. Just goes to show what 60 years and Elvis can do.

It was First Lady Helen Taft who first accepted the Japanese gift that has become one of the most prominent monuments of our nation's capital.

The United States reciprocated, in 1915, with dogwoods.

The first festival celebrating the cherries was held in 1935, not long before certain events transpired that would put the U.S. and Japan at something of an arm's length for some time to come.

As a new global era came of age, and relations mended, First Lady Lady Bird Johnson accepted another 3,800 trees from the Japanese in 1965.

And by 1994, the festival celebrating the cherries had become a two-week affair in Washington. The National Cherry Blossom Festival this year runs through the 11th, when all of the petals will have vanished in the wind and the warming Spring air, then washed away with one good rain.

This past week, the cherry blossoms reached their peak. And on Saturday, we circled the Tidal Basin with many others who had come from Japan, India and other places far more distant than our perch in Alexandria, Va., to see nothing more than the white-petaled bloom of thousands of flowering trees.

The sky was cloudless, the air in the 60s and a stiff breeze was booting the mature petals from their flowers, the white cherry petals drifting across the walk and onto the wind-whipped basin, glimmering in the sun, like so much Spring snow upon the cool water.

We were heartened by the fact, as we climbed the wide steps of the Jefferson Memorial, that so many camera-toting people had come from near and so far to see nothing more than the mature blossoms of some century-old, gnarled trees and the many slender younger ones that have been planted around the basin in the decades that have passed since the inaugural gift of one nation to another.