Cherry Blossom Motif in Japanese Films

[bottled spider]

As Donald Richie explained in his commentary to A Story of Floating Weeds, the rafters of theatres were equipped with confetti dispensers to generate artificial snow or flower petals. The falling of a few stray paper blossoms could be taken in part to indicate the delapidation of the theatre.

Yes, the closing scene of Makioka Sisters is saturated with cherry trees in blossom.

Didn't one of those Yimou Zhang Kung Fu movies (Hero, or House of Flying Daggers) have a sword duel set amongst blossoming cherry trees? [edited: no, I think now it was a forest in autumn colours].

I haven't seen it yet, but there's a recent German film, set partly in Japan, called Cherry Blossoms, which I'm going to guess has lots of cherry blossoms.

[corrected Floating Weeds to the earlier silent A Story of Floating Weeds]

[bigP]

I haven't seen it yet, but there's a recent German film, set partly in Japan, called Cherry Blossoms, which I'm going to guess has lots of cherry blossoms.

It has indeed. It's a lovely film, well worth seeking out - a part remake / reworking of ozu's Tokyo Story with it's Japanese cliché-trappings (such as the Cherry Blossom motifs) worked nicely into the story.

[Gregory]

Kenzo Masaoka's Sakura. It's on DVD but well over $100 and no English subtitles.

[HerrSchreck]

The falling cherry blossoms motif is repeated several times throughout the 1959 FLOATING WEEDS.

I know MK mentioned it in passing but pux, if you look up a bit from your original post, there's a discussion of all this and Ozu in general.

[puxzkkx]

Regarding this motif in general, I wonder how many films link it directly to war trauma. Weren't the deaths of kamikaze pilots often likened to 'falling cherry blossoms' in nationalist rhetoric of the time?

Here's a book on the topic that looks interesting.

The falling cherry blossoms motif is repeated several times throughout the 1959 FLOATING WEEDS.

I know MK mentioned it in passing but pux, if you look up a bit from your original post, there's a discussion of all this and Ozu in general.

Ah yes, I should have quoted - I posted that in response to the discussion that had been ongoing.

[Sam T.]

Cherry blossoms swirling in the wind are a staple anime cliche. Maybe it's just because of the particular anime I tend to watch, but I've always thought it was a trope for "a young girl's budding sexual awareness" (I hope the quotation marks distance me a little from the creepiness of that phrase). My sense is that cherry blossoms are, for obvious reasons, a conventional metonymy for the spring in Japan, and springtime itself is a conventional metaphor for girlhood blossoming into womanhood. I mean, in what other context does the title "Late Spring" make sense for the particular story that film tells? Cherry blossoms are also - y'know - pinkish white flowers.

Ai Yori Aoshi and Koi Kaze are two anime brimming with images lovelorn schoolgirls in vortices of cherry blossoms, though I don't necessarily recommend either on its own merits.

Slightly related: images of gay male desire in anime are almost always accompanied by images of red roses for some reason.

[puxzkkx]

I think a visual motif of flowers encircling a person or a couple is shorthand for love or romantic (if not necessarily sexual) desire, especially in anime (lol, CardCaptor Sakura).

[D_B]

Argh - I KNOW I have seen this motif quite a few times, and usually to good effect too but am not positively sure where and when.

I feel like I remember lots of Cherry Blossoms in Mizoguchi's Princess Yang Kwei-Fei

I also feel like one of the films "Hidden Blade" or Twilight Samurai" make use of them - both films use natural elements so beautifully.

Maybe also "Gate of Hell"??? Kurasawa's "Dreams"?

It's Chinese, not Japanese but maybe the more recent version of "Spring Comes to a Small Town" had some nice cherry blossom moments?

[Michael Kerpan]

At the time of Princess Yang Kwei Fei, ume (apricot/plum) blossom viewing (at the very end of winter) was the big event. It was ume blossom viewing that was introduced into Japan (in the 900s or so). Eventually, not sure when, someone came up with the idea of celebrating cherry blossoms as well (late March into April). Ume blossoms are (IMHO) more elegant:

[roujin]

Think my favorite recurring motif/scene in Japanese media is any scene taking place on the school rooftop. That's just such an alien thing to me, but it pops up over and over again.

[bottled spider]

D_B: yes, the second dream episode in Kurosawa's Dreams has an extended scene of falling peach blossoms.

~

I found some interesting stuff on googling the cherry blossom motif in Japanese haiku. Apparently farmers used the blossoming of the cherries to indicate the best time to start planting rice.

[martin]

I know this is quite a bump but I kept thinking of this thread when I saw Koreeda's Umimachi Diary (2015) aka 'Our Little Sister' on TV recently. Cherry blossom is a major motif in the film.

There's a beautiful blossoming cherry tree - seemingly unnoticed - in a scene when Suzu, the youngest sister, is on her way to school.
When a man says his eyes are getting worse, he's recommended to see the cherry blossoms before his eyes gets even worse.
We see Suzu pick fallen cherry petals at the beach lamenting that the cherry blossom season is over.
We're told that two persons at their deathbeds have said it's important to see the beauty in beautiful things - even at such a hard time. This is said specifically in regards to cherry blossoms.

And this:

SpoilerShow

[Roscoe]

Oshima's TABOO, aka GOHATTO, features a cherry tree in full blossom near film's end.

SpoilerShow

It is, of course, cut down, in a remarkably powerful scene.

[longstone]

"An" from Naomi Kawase uses Cherry throughout both in bloom, and at other stages such as falling petals , in full leaf and so on which echoes the original source novel.

[feihong]

Very frequent cherry blossom motifs in the later Seijun Suzuki films, including the flurry of cherry blossoms in Zigeunerweisen when Aochi gets the phone call from his wife to tell him Nakasago is dead. The camera whips back and forth between the two figures, showing they are on the same set, and the cherry blossoms fall all over them even though they are indoors. In Mirage Theater Michiyo Ookusu appears sitting in the branches of a blossoming cherry tree. Suzuki likes to change the traditional meanings of symbols in his films, so "spring" and "renewal" get played ironically in the Zigeunerweisen phone call, which heralds a death in spring, and Ookusu in the cherry tree in Mirage Theater has some very ambiguous meaning––her character is dead or maybe longs for death, and in the cherry tree scene Yusaku Matsuda's character is trying to "start over" with her romantically, talking to her from the ground, far away from her, as she perches in the cherry tree. She doesn't respond; he can't get through to her. Matsuda is viewing Ookusu almost as one views the cherry blossoms.

There's also the long opening scene in Shunji Iwai's April Story, where the heroine moves in to her college apartment. The cherry trees are giving off blossoms everywhere. The meaning seems a little more than seasonal, but I'm not sure there's as symbolic a meaning as the cutting of the cherry tree in Gohatto, for instance.

The original Patlabor OAV series features streets lined with blossoming cherry trees in its first episode. In that series it's entirely meant to be a seasonal marker, as the action moves later into summer and eventually winter as the series goes on.