Note: The text below is the transcript of the YouTube video above.
Thirty-two days. Seventeen places.
I spent the past month simply chasing cherry blossoms, from the south of Japan all the way to the north. I’m Japanese, and even for me, this felt like an incredibly special experience. Most Japanese people rarely get the chance to travel like this for an entire month.
And during that journey, I kept asking myself one question: why are Japanese people so deeply moved by cherry blossoms?
Have you heard the Japanese word mono no aware?
Cherry blossoms are beautiful because they fall so quickly. That feeling, seeing beauty in something because it doesn’t last, has been part of Japanese sensibility for over a thousand years.
Today, I want to talk about that, and what thirty-two days of chasing cherry blossoms actually taught me.
Hi, I’m Satomi Takayama, a Japanese artist based between London and Japan. On this channel, I explore Japanese aesthetics, craft, travel, and the inspirations I collect for my creative journey.
1. Why Japanese People Are So Conscious of Cherry Blossoms
Can you picture just how much attention Japanese people pay to cherry blossoms?
In Japan, blossom forecasts start appearing in the daily news more than a month before the flowers even begin to bloom. And then there’s hanami: gathering under the trees with family and friends, eating, drinking, and watching the petals fall.
But I think for Japanese people, it goes beyond simply liking cherry blossoms. It feels more instinctive than that. Cherry blossoms are so deeply embedded in Japanese life, as a seasonal marker that returns every year.
Historically, cherry blossoms have also held a sacred meaning in Japan, and the culture of appreciating them goes back at least to the imperial court of the 9th century. Later, especially through the 17th and 18th centuries, hanami spread among ordinary people, and cherry blossoms became deeply woven into Japanese life. That’s the root of the cherry blossom culture we still have today.
2. Mono no Aware
There’s a Japanese expression that always comes up when we talk about cherry blossoms. That’s mono no aware.
Simply put, it’s the feeling that quietly stirs in you when you encounter something passing, something you can’t hold onto. It’s not simply sadness. It carries tenderness, nostalgia, and a sense of beauty. Things feel beautiful precisely because they don’t last.
Cherry blossoms have long been a symbol of that: they bloom, and almost before you notice, they’re gone.
During this trip, I was reading a book called The Aesthetics of the Japanese by Tomizou Hiekata. What stayed with me was this idea: in Japan, people have long lived close to nature and found beauty in the changing seasons. From that came a uniquely Japanese sensitivity to beauty, not only admiration for nature itself, but also an awareness of impermanence, solitude, quiet sadness, and the feeling that things are always passing. In that sense, mono no aware became one of the foundations of Japanese aesthetics.
Japanese samurai would sometimes compare their own lives to cherry blossoms in the death poems they wrote. To bloom with grace, and to fall with grace. There has always been a particular kind of beauty the Japanese see in that last moment.
This sensibility has long appeared in Japanese expression, and one of the places it comes through most clearly is in waka poetry.
According to Hiekata, as Japanese court culture absorbed Buddhist ideas about impermanence, the cherry blossom gradually shifted from being simply a beautiful flower to being a flower that was beautiful because it falls.
And the roots of this sensibility go back even further. Even in the Man’yoshu, Japan’s oldest poetry anthology from the late 8th century, you can already find this undercurrent: the sadness of love, loneliness, the sense that nothing lasts. Japanese people have been trying to put words to this feeling for a very long time.
I want to share a waka that stayed with me throughout this trip. It’s by Ariwara no Narihira, a poet from the 9th century.
世の中に
たえて桜の
なかりせば
春の心は
のどけからまし
“If there were no cherry blossoms in this world, how peaceful the spring heart would be.”
What’s so beautiful about this poem is that the loss of peace becomes its own kind of praise for the beauty of cherry blossoms.
Of course, you can look at cherry blossoms and simply think, they’re beautiful. But people in the past also felt something much deeper beneath that beauty, and in Japan, that sensibility has been passed down over the generations through countless waka poems and other writings.
3. Reading Basho While Chasing Blossoms
Just before setting off, I picked up a book called Oku no Hosomichi by Matsuo Basho. Basho was a 17th-century haiku poet, and this book follows a long journey he made on foot through Japan, weaving haiku and travel writing together as he went. It felt like exactly the right companion for a journey of my own.
If you’re not sure what haiku is, it’s an even more stripped-back form than the waka I just shared earlier. Haiku follows a 5-7-5 structure, just seventeen syllables in total. Within that tiny space, the poet compresses a season, a landscape, an emotion. Basho took that mono no aware sensibility and deepened it through travel and haiku.
I’d encountered Basho briefly at school, as most Japanese people do. But reading him now felt completely different. It landed so much more deeply.
What struck me wasn’t only the poems themselves. It was the feeling he described around leaving. Travel in Basho’s time was nothing like now.
There were no booking sites, of course, no reliable transport, no easy way to reach anyone if something went wrong.
I’ve become so used to travelling easily. So reading his description of departure, especially the way he lingers in that moment, genuinely moved me.
行く春や
鳥啼き魚の
目は涙
“As spring passes, the birds cry, and even the eyes of the fish fill with tears.”
This is the poem he wrote at the very beginning of his journey, layering the sadness of departure with the sadness of spring coming to an end.
Because life has become so convenient, I think it hit me even more deeply. It made me realise that in gaining so much comfort and ease, we may also be losing some of the tension, sensitivity, and feeling that once found their way into literature.
4. Saigyo and the Wish to Die Beneath Cherry Blossoms
But the poet who really stayed with me was someone Basho himself was deeply inspired by: a 12th-century poet who loved cherry blossoms intensely. His name was Saigyo.
Before becoming a monk, he had been a samurai. At 23, he walked away from everything, his rank, his wife, his children, and entered religious life. He was so captivated by the cherry blossoms of Yoshino, a mountain area not far from Kyoto that I also visited on this trip, that he is said to have built a small hut there and spent time among them.
Try to imagine what it would feel like to spend your days deep in the mountains, looking at those cherry blossoms every day.
One of his most famous tanka about Yoshino gives you a sense of the answer.
願はくば
花の下にて
春死なむ
そのきさらぎの
望月のころ
“I wish to die beneath the cherry blossoms in spring, around the full moon of February.” That’s when, in the old calendar, the Buddha is said to have passed away.
And Saigyo reportedly died on the 16th of February, 1190. Exactly as he had wished.
Again, it’s not just beauty. His feelings for cherry blossoms were so deep that he ended up weaving his own life and death into them.
5. What I Actually Felt Along the Way
Following the cherry blossoms through Japan, I found myself moved again and again by what I saw. Kyoto’s blossoms, the unexpected trees I came across in small country towns I’d never visited before, all of it was beautiful.
But I noticed something. More than the grand scenes with thousands of trees in full bloom, what moved me most were the solitary ones. A single cherry tree standing quietly on its own.
Something about that solitary presence felt so composed. So dignified.
I spend most of my time on my own, and I think part of me was projecting something onto those trees. A quiet wish: to be able to stand like that. To be on your own, and still be beautiful.
6. Cherry Blossoms Didn’t Wait
But the cherry blossom trip wasn’t entirely as I’d imagined.
This year was warmer than usual, and the blossoms came early. By the time I was heading north in the later part of the trip, many of the trees I’d been planning to see had already scattered. I kept thinking, just hold on a little longer. But the blossoms didn’t wait.
I found some later-blooming trees, but the scenes I’d pictured in my head weren’t quite what greeted me. I was more disappointed than I thought I would be.
And I found myself thinking: cherry blossoms can feel a little like being in love. You can’t control them. You can’t make them wait for you.
I tried writing my own waka about it.
恋ひ焦がれ
春の町ゆく
花びらの
待つこともなく
雨に散りけり
“Like petals drifting through a town in spring,
my feelings scattered into the rain
before they could ever reach anyone.”
The image of those rain-soaked blossoms, and that feeling of impermanence, stayed with me. That’s what became this waka.
It was actually the first waka I’d ever written. I’d love to know what you think.
7. Mono no Aware in Everyday Life
This sensibility doesn’t live only in poetry. I think it also appears in Japanese spaces, in rooms that open onto gardens, in softened light, and in the quiet details of sukiya-zukuri architecture. For me, it has become a huge inspiration for the kind of space I want to create in the future.
Take a moment and think: what does mono no aware bring to mind for you?
Maybe it’s the way a sunset fades just as you’re properly noticing it. Or time spent with someone you love, that feeling of knowing, even in the middle of it, that it won’t last forever.
I think even just knowing this concept exists, having a name for it, makes you a little more attuned to the beauty that’s already in your everyday life. It sharpens something in you.
We’re living in a time when things move incredibly fast and everything feels uncertain. That’s exactly why I find myself wanting to pay more attention to this kind of quiet, delicate feeling.
8. Ending
Thirty-two days. Seventeen places.
Chasing cherry blossoms across Japan, I came to feel very clearly that cherry blossoms aren’t simply beautiful flowers. They’re a symbol of something Japanese people have always been moved by.
Reading those old poems while travelling, I felt humbled by how deeply those poets were able to feel, and by how beautifully they could express it.
If your own culture has literature or a tradition with something like mono no aware, I’d genuinely love to hear about it in the comments. I hope this channel can be a place where we learn from each other, not just from me.
During this trip, I was writing in my journal every day, and one day I’d love to bring these experiences together in some form, not just the cherry blossom journey, but everything I’m experiencing in Japan right now. I’ll share updates first through my newsletter, where I write more deeply about Japanese aesthetics, my creative journey, and future private curations. I’ll leave the link below if you’d like to follow this journey more closely.
There was so much from this trip I couldn’t fit into one video, so I’ll keep sharing what I found and felt along the way.
I’ll see you in the next one.
