Season of special poignancy

[AsahinaKimi]

Earthquakes, cherry blossoms traditional reminders of mortality

By JOJI SAKURAI
The Associated Press
The cherry trees will soon blossom in Japan.



It will be a particularly poignant sight. Even in normal times, the "sakura" flowers are a cause for rejoicing tinged with sadness, because they fall at the moment of their greatest beauty. They are the embodiment of a notion that is central to Japanese culture — "hakanasa," a hard-to-translate word that conveys the fragility, or evanescence, of life.

For Japan, this sense of transience is also a source of strength.

In this time of national grieving, the cherry blossoms will bring home the awareness of hakanasa with a strange kind of force — one that doesn't strike but sinks into the soul like heat from a hot spring or fire from a sake bottle, bringing sorrow and solace in equal measure.

The fragility of technologically advanced Japan was exposed in the most terrifying way in the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the northeast, leaving more than 10,000 people dead, some 17,500 missing and about a half-million homeless, and spawning a nuclear disaster.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110329f2.html
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Fragility, indeed. Like one life, the leaves from the Sakura tree fall... and are blown about
in the wind. :(