cherryblossom John Cole: Here is your host for this afternoon's talk.
The talk is in a series that we call Books and Beyond,
and we honor new books, recently published books
that have a special significance for the Library of Congress,
or in this case, really for Washington,
D.C. And we are very happy that the Library of Congress can be part
of the Cherry Blossom Festival by helping to host this talk.
And I see that some of us has also dressed the closest we could come
to cherry blossom -   [ laughter ]

-- colors.
And it's fun to be a part of the celebration in every possible way.
The Center for the Book, I will just say a brief word,
helps promote books and reading throughout the country,
through established state Centers for the Book.
There's a Center in every state, and their job is primarily
to help promote books and reading in that state
by promoting those writers from the state, and often getting information
about authors and writers, sometimes hosting state book festivals,
sometimes hosting book awards that honor the authors of that state.
That's one network.
The second network we have are organizations
that are reading promotion partners that work with us
in developing projects to promote books and reading.
In the District of Columbia, we have a D.C. Center for the Book,
which is part of the District of Columbia Public Library.
The Center for the Book also is very active, our Center for the Book,
in the relatively new National Book Festival, which is hosted
by Laura Bush, but the Library
of Congress is the organizer and the sponsor.
And the Center for the Book is the group that works primarily
on the program side of it.
We are not required to raise the money
that the Library's development office has
to raise for the book festival.
But this year's festival will be on the Mall, September 24th,
and we hope that all of you will at least, if not be able to join us,
but to tune in on C-SPAN which also does the televising of the event.
It is a wonderful celebration of books,
and last year we had 85,000 people on the mall and all
of the talks are also available on the Web site for the book festival.
Today's talk also will be available, this one on the Center
for the Book's Web site, because we're honored
to have not only a special program, but a special speaker.
Ann McClellan, I met her today for the first time.
Ann has, as many of you know, has been in Washington,
D.C. much of her life, if not all of her life.
But more than that, she's worked for a number of important organizations
such as the Smithsonian Institution, the World Wildlife Fund,
the American Lung Association and the American Association of Museums.
And in talking with her and admiring the book, which has been produced
by Ann and Bunker Hill Press,
I commented on how not only well laid-out it was,
and how the pictures were used so well and how well produced it was,
but also it's a book that talks about the environment of Washington,
D.C., and in many ways is a cultural history of not only the Cherry Tree
in Washington, D.C. but Japanese ornamental trees.
It has a lot of cultural little tidbits in it, which I love having
and the designer did a wonderful job in laying it out.
I can say all of this.
Ann is going to give you the story behind it.
But she told me that in her years at the Smithsonian, she had worked
in what we would now call product development or business enterprises
and had worked on a number of books and had gotten to know
about illustrations in different institutions around town,
including the Library of Congress.
And it's that kind of skill which I recognized immediately
when I saw the book, which is really a wonderful, not only a souvenir
or a background or history book about cherry trees,
but in its own way, as I said, a cultural history of ornamental trees
and a cultural history of the role of the Cherry Blossom Festival
in Washington, D.C.'s own history.
I would like now to turn the program over to our speaker, Ann McClellan,
author of this wonderful book on the Cherry Blossom Festival.
Ann? I know you're there.   [ applause ]

Ann McClellan: Great.
Thank you John, and gosh, with all the wonderful introduction,
I think I could just maybe sit down.
That pretty much told you a lot of what I wanted to say too.
Thank you all especially for coming today, and I'm looking forward
to sharing with you some of my favorite things
about the cherry blossoms in Washington,
how they came to be here.
This picture is actually taken of the cherry trees
in bloom around the Tidal Basin.
But to me, it signifies the wonderful allure
that the blossoms have for the Japanese and Americans both.
The Japanese called cherry blossom viewing hanami, and it means going
to view the cherry blossoms.   They view it.

It's exciting for them.
It's almost like going to the Super Bowl or something like that.
And they watch the blossoms progress
in their development across the archipelago.
But the other thing that they do is they lose themselves
in the blossoms.
And I think that this picture shows you that quality.
You can imagine, picture yourself just losing yourself
in the moment of their bloom.   There's a poem by Tatsujo

[ spelled phonetically ]   that I think speaks to this.

"When Cherry Blossoms bloomed, they brought beauty to my heart."
And I think that's why we're all so glad to see them
when they come every spring, whenever they get here.
I wish it were now.
This particular image is from the Freer, and it's a screen
from the 17th century, and it shows all the traditional Japanese cherry
blossom viewing activities.
Everything from just sitting and enjoying the trees,
to parading under them, to various religious ceremonies and dancing,
listening to music, that sort of thing.
One of the things that's particularly beautiful
about this screen is the juxtaposition of the pine trees
with the cherry blossoms, which you see a lot in art,
and also in Japanese landscape.
The whole idea of the exuberant brief blooming cherry blossoms
juxtaposed poignantly against the evergreens standing tall
and permanently behind them.   The cherry blossoms have a lot

of meanings beyond just the beauty of the landscape though.
The image on the left is a carved tusk elephant tusk
from the Walters Art Gallery, and it shows
[ unintelligible ]
, one of the figures in the Heian legends and tales of the Japanese,
about the 11th, 10th century.
And I've included this image because the Samurai are closely associated
with the cherry blossoms.
The Samurai feel that like the cherry blossoms,
they want to live life fully, briefly and fall at their prime
without withering, which is what the blooms do.
It's not all grim, though, as you can see on the image from the right,
which is from the Japan American Society of
[ unintelligible ]
. There's the two dancing ladies, and they have the cherry blossoms
on the screen behind them, and the one on the left has cherry blossoms
on her kimono and on her obi.
So, there's also that, you know, quality of living life
to the full while you're in it, which is captured in this work.
This particular image is a detail of a very short screen.
It's only about this high, and it's very long.
And it's from the Freer.
It was used to surround a child's sleeping area,
and it has the four seasons.
This one just shows the season of spring, and it includes everything
from families viewing the cherry blossoms to playing with their dogs,
to blind man's bluff and, you know, playing with balls and things.
So this would have been what a child went to sleep with
and had dreams of the cherry blossoms.
One of my favorite activities that the Japanese do
to celebrate the cherry blossoms is they write poems.
Actually, they do it a lot, for other things too,
but they certainly do it in conjunction
with the blooming of the trees.
And the image on the left from the Scripps College collection you can
see a little boy tying his poem to a tree.
The idea is that the thought will blow away with the wind.
The screen on the right is a very famous one
from the Art Institute of Chicago.   It's from the 17th century,

and it has famous Japanese poems written on it.
And it's meant to depict that moment after a party
when the people have left and it's time for,
you know, the dust to fall.
The poems are famous Japanese ones, and one of them may be like this.
This is from Emperor Shomu from the 8th century.
And it goes, "This gathered cherry branch can scarce convey a fancy
of the blossom laden tree.
Blooming in sunlight could I view it there.
Thoughts of beauty would drive sleep away."

Like Washington, the Japanese also have uncertain weather,
shall we say, in March,
and the image on the left shows the windscreens that they would put
up to create rooms underneath the blooming trees.
So those pieces of fabric are hung from ropes
and people would dine or they would dance.
As you can see from the image on the right, that's what they're doing.
The woman with the fan is dancing, and someone is playing the
[ unintelligible ]   and someone else is eating.

And the whole world can pass by, and they're lost
in their own private world under the tree.
I have to confess, when I worked at the Smithsonian and saw the screen,
I could never understand why they kept it, what was special about it,
because I thought it was laundry.   [ laughter ]

Now I know.   This image is by

[ inaudible ]
, and it shows a parade of women on their way, moving out of Edo
for an official cherry blossom viewing activity.
It's about that, but it's also meant to be a party on the parading
of the Samurai, which the Danyo would lead back and forth
from their castles to Edo at the direction of the Shogun.
And the idea was, by keeping the military people on the move,
they weren't allowed to develop strength in their local entities.
And so at the end, their parading of their strength
and might kept the local people down, if you will, under control.
Anyway, this is a beautiful image and it's also from the Scripps.
This image, one of my favorites, is from the Library of Congress.
And what's wonderful about this one, I hope you can see the Westerners
on the left hand panel -- see the lady with the bustle
and the umbrella and the man with the bowler hat and the dog?
So this dates from after 1853, when Westerners came to Japan,
and you can see that everyone, all walks of life were
in this case shown walking under the trees along the Sumida River
in Tokyo.
I like to think that maybe one of the people who was instrumental
in bringing the trees to Washington is depicted in this image.
I mean, it's just my imagination.
But it's wonderful to see that the Westerners were there
and appreciated by the Japanese.   This image is by Whistler.

It's called, "Caprice in Purple and Gold."
It's from the Freer.
And I've included it to show the wave of enthusiasm
for all things Japanese that overtook the world in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries.   The model is Irish.

She's wearing a Japanese kimono.
She's looking at Japanese woodblock prints.
There is a Japanese screen behind her and a chair,
and you can see the Japanese emblems on the screen around the edge.
And images like this, the furnishings were very prevalent
in the 19th century as Westerners went to Japan and saw the aesthetic
and it captured their imagination and their hearts.
So it wasn't too long before people were coming back to the U.S.,
and one of the people who was most instrumental
in bringing the blossoms
to Washington is this wonderful woman, Eliza Scidmore.
Her life defines intrepid.   She went around the world.

She was an expert on all things Asian,
and also I learned recently about things Alaskan.
She was an expert about Alaskan indigenous people.
But she was determined to get the Washington newly reclaimed land
on the Hains Point to have cherry blossom trees.
And she talked to endless numbers of superintendents at public buildings
and grounds and showed them pictures like the one
on the left with the rickshaw.
I chose this one to show you because her book about her life
in Japan is called In Rickshaw Days   [ spelled phonetically ]

. This picture was not shown by her, but something like it was shown.
And she was convinced that the cherry trees would enhance life
in Washington, and you can see why in this picture.
This is a speedway, which was built on the claimed land of Hains Point,
and what it was designed for was for carriages to do their racing at up
to 20 miles an hour, horse drawn carriages.
Now you can see from this picture, it's an engineer's dream --
straight road, easy to care for trees, but not very inspiring.
And so this is what Eliza and others saw
and thought it would be an appropriate spot
for the cherry blossom trees.
Other people who were involved were Marian Bell and David Fairchild.
They were married.
Marian was the younger daughter of Alexander Graham Bell
and a fascinating person in her own right.
She was instrumental in the Smithsonian's accepted
of the gift of the Freer Gallery.
David, her husband, was a planet explorer, and we owe him things
like olives -- as you can see in the jar on the desk in front of him --
he's the man with the glasses and the moustache --
avocados and various other fruits and vegetables.
His job was to go around the world and find plants and fruits
that would allow the U.S.
to be completely self-sufficient and not need to trade.
He did not see the trees in bloom in Japan, but he did feel
that they would be, it would be appropriate.
And Marian had seen them and knew that they would be beautiful.
So they grew many different varieties of the trees
in their own land at Chevy Chase and were helpful in having hundreds
of trees imported to Washington, both for Chevy Chase
and other estates in the area.
It all came together, though, with first lady Helen Taft.
This image of the portrait is from the Library of Congress collection.
And it's shortly after her husband was inaugurated in March of 1909.
She received a letter with the picture
on the right enclosed saying,
"Wouldn't this be a good idea for Washington?"
And she said yes.
Part of the reason she knew that the trees would be an asset
to Washington was that she visited Japan when she was based in Manila
with her husband when was the governor of the Philippines.
And she also had very modern ideas
about how the city could be improved,
because Manila was a much more healthy place to live
than Washington was at the time.
And so a lot of the improvements, technologically,
that we've experienced and we enjoy today were started by the Tafts.
So she let it be known that she was interested
in receiving cherry trees, and the Japanese promptly heard about it
and put their wonderful collective energy together
and a gentleman named Jokichi Takamine, who is the inventor
of adrenaline as a stand alone drug.   I don't have a picture of him.

But he funded the gift of 2,000 trees as a gift from the City
of Tokyo to the City of Washington.
And the gentleman on the left with the two ladies is Mayor Ukio Azaki
[ spelled phonetically ]
. This was actually taken in the 30's.
But in 1909, 1910, he was instrumental
in having the first gift of 2,000 trees sent to Washington.
The gentleman on the right, also shown at a later age,
is Spencer Cosby, who was the superintendent of buildings
and grounds who said yes at First Lady Helen Taft's direction.
And he's a wonderful character.
The trees arrived, and as you can see,
they were tall and they were old.
And the idea was that they would be, because of their age,
they would bloom more quickly.
Unfortunately, they had to be trimmed.
You can see how little the root balls are.
And Fairchild believed that they probably wouldn't be able
to survive being planted.
Not only that, the Department of Agriculture inspectors looked
at them very closely and chose to make the trees an example
of being worried about bringing in pests
and diseases through imported plants.
And because the trees were old, not surprisingly, found all sorts
of diseases and bugs and nasty things.
The old things were amazing.
So they ordered the trees to be burned.
And in fact, the decision was made by the president himself,
because they knew that it would be an international incident.
Fortunately, Mayor Ozaki had the great humor to say, "Well,
if I remember correctly, your first president had a problem
with cherry trees and he surmounted it.
Surely, we can too."
So what they did was they came up with a gift of 3,000 trees
which arrived in the United States and were planted in 1912.
I have these two pictures.
First of all, certainly the gift was meant
as a generous offer acknowledging a great friendship between Japan
and America and with thanks for the American support of Japan
in the Japanese war of 1905.
But it was also, if you look on the right, that's an invoice
from a nursery and the trade in plants was huge for Japan,
and they didn't want their plants
to be considered inappropriate for importation.
So it was important to them to let the world know
that they could produce great plants.
As a matter of fact, when the second shipment came in, the Department
of Agriculture said they had never seen
such a fabulous presentation of trees.
They were perfect, and it was very impressive.
So you can see, I include this picture partly
because I just love it, and partly
so that you can see how densely the trees were planted
around the Tidal Basin and along Potomac Park.
All those little dots are cherry blossom trees.
There's a record of where each tree was planted.
Many of them have been lost due to flooding, but there are about 100
that are still around the Tidal Basin.
There's actually one from this planting which is
over by the Library of Congress facing the
[ unintelligible ]
, and there's several out by the Dalecarlia Reservoir.
There's also probably some on Hains Point.
And we're not sure whether they came with the 1910 shipment
or the 1912 shipment, but there are still some from this era.

Very quickly, the trees became -- Fairchild was right.
They were very well suited to this area, and they took hold quickly
and became a magnet for artists and photographers of all sort.
The image on the right is an image from the Library
of Congress collections, and I think it shows perfectly what the scene
has been like every year since then when the trees bloom.
The one on the left is the full version of image that's on the cover
of the book, and it's from the Sackler, if you'd like to see that.
It dates from the mid-30's.
A Japanese artist who probably never actually came to Washington
and probably did the image from a photograph, they think.
This image was taken before 1920.
It's from the archives, and I think it shows how quickly they became
beautiful and were, you know, what a photographer
at the time was able to capture.
For a period of time, the trees were illuminated and night,
and the records are poor.
So we don't know exactly when that was, but clearly that happened,
because here is a pretty postcard that shows,
there they were, lit at night.
And this is what the Japanese people d, too.
They go look at the trees in the evening and during the night.
The trees are no longer lit.
And I'm not sure I'd recommend a midnight viewing here,
but maybe early morning and dusk would certainly be good.
The festival itself was inspired by the gift of the trees, of course.
And the first one was started in 1927
with the re-enactment of the original gift.
It also celebrated the friendship between Japan and America,
just as the festival does today.
The image on the right is from the 1962 Cherry Blossom Festival
luncheon when Mrs. Kennedy was the honorary chairperson.
First ladies and top government officials have been involved all
throughout the history of the festival.
The festival hasn't exactly hasn't what I would call a linear history.
There have been some years with gaps, and it's changed according
to who was wanting to participate and, you know, of course,
during the war it was suspended.   But the idea of doing something

to celebrate the trees has been fairly consistent,
and it's certainly in the last decades has been a growing one
and is now a two-week long celebration
that is internationally known and appreciated.
There's always a parade component, and this too is not unique
to our Washington festival.   This is an image of

[ unintelligible ]
, actually, on parade and the Yoshiwara pleasure district
in Tokyo, that the idea of parading
under the cherry blossoms is something that's universally done
in Japan as well as here, especially for our festival.
In the 50's, the parade was also held at night,
and the floats were illuminated.
It went up and down K Street, and this is the float
from the District of Columbia at the time.
Today's parade takes place on Saturday in the morning
and combines, again, Japanese and American elements.
The banners are Japanese style, but can you see Elmo in the back there
with his fish in his bowl?   So it's consistent trying

to maintain the Japanese and American elements.
Frequently there are participants who come from Japan.
The Taiko drummers on the right were one
of the groups who came last year.
The Mikoshi is something we do every year just as they would
at a street festival in Japan.
What this is about is having the kami -- and if you were in Japan,
the local spirit would be taken from its permanent temple and paraded
through the city and kind of jounced up and down, the idea would be
that the kami would be spreading its spirit, its goodwill,
building the sense of community, spreading good luck to everyone
that came under its spell.
So it takes 60 people to carry our Mikoshi.
And if you go the parade, you'll see it bouncing from, you know,
curb to curb and up and down.   It's quite an amazing sight.

The Cherry Blossom Festival is also well known
for its queen and princesses.
There's a princess from every state and many territories.
This is a program sponsored
by the National Conference of State Societies.
And I didn't know this until I got into the book,
but the queen is chosen by a spin of the wheel.
And if it's not this wheel, it's one very like it.
And so it's not about, you know, anything other than the luck
of where the flapper stops.   One year -- I love this story --

one year, it stopped and one young woman thought she was the queen,
and then all on its own, the wheel started moving again
and when to another place.
And one young woman was the daughter of a senator
and the other young woman was the daughter of a governor.
So that year, there were two queens.   [ laughter ]

The queen wears a crown.
This particular one is -- she only wears briefly because it's so heavy.
It has, I have the exact number right here, 1,585 pearls.
It's 14-carat gold, and it was given by the Mikimoto Company in 1957.
So as I said, it's very heavy.
The queen wears it very briefly, just to be photographed.
And then she's given a replica, small, to wear and keep.
And it's similar to one that the Japanese Cherry Blossom Princess


A very important program
of the festival is the goodwill ambassadors.
These are young men and women who are honored for their achievement
in Japanese and American cultural awareness, knowledge,
their ability with language and they compete
to be allowed to ambassadors.
And for the two weeks of the festivals, they go to schools,
and promote understanding of things Japanese.
I think they plant trees.
They are widely involved, and they represent the festival officially
in all of its aspects.
So if you see ladies in pink jackets, and this year,
there's a young man, too, who has a big boutonniere.
They deserve your honor and applause,
because they have great achievements that are being acknowledged
by their winning that award, that assignment.
The street festival, I'm sure you've all heard of it
and I hope you'll get to go.
It takes up the blocks between Pennsylvania Avenue and 12th Street,
and as you can see, it's very popular.
There are all kinds of Japanese crafts and skills shown.
The image on the left is actually a pepper that's carved
to look like a lily.   And that's called Mukimono.

It's a kind of Japanese style of garniture.
But there's Japanese food, there's also American food.
You know, everything from funnel cakes to ice cream and hot dogs.
Sumo wrestlers were here recently, and there will be similar kinds
of Japanese events at the festival this year and every year.
There are many traditional performances.
This particular one evokes dance from a
[ unintelligible ]   and you can see an image from the

[ unintelligible ]
on the left and then a performance here in Washington on the right.
So the trees themselves are -- gosh, I wish they were blooming.
They will be soon.   They're so wonderful.

There are about, well according to the National Park Service Web site,
2,763 Yoshino around the Tidal Basin and throughout Potomac Park.
These are the ones that create the white cloudy effect.
There are some pink trees interspersed through them.
So if you see what looks like more pink, you're not dreaming.
Those are the Akebonos.   There are about nearly 500

[ unintelligible ]   and about 94 weeping cherry trees.

The image on the left shows how the trees, the Yoshinos,
progress from bud to bloom.
And the reason I include this slide is the Park Service wants us to know
that the pink bloom is really about two weeks and you can see how
that might be true, because all the blossoms don't pop all
at once necessarily.   There's some longevity to it.

The image on the right is the Akebono tree,
and you can see it's a little pinker.
The image on the left here is a tree taken in Japan,
and it shows one tree, two different colors.
I've included it because it shows how variable the trees
themselves are.
And that's why there are more than 300 varieties of cherry trees.
They just sort of naturally change.
The story that the Japanese tell about how the trees went from white
to a darker color was that a Japanese girl was loved by two men,
a scoundrel and a wonderful guy.
And the scoundrel forced her to sacrifice herself,
and in doing that, the tree that she died
under turned its blooms from white to red.
So I think that's a really charming story.
The image on the right is from the Arboretum, which is another place
to see great cherry trees in the Washington area.
And I think it's lovely and more darkly pink
than you'd see typically at Potomac Park.
The   [ unintelligible ]

are the blossoms that are the most plush.
They have about 30 petals on each bloom.
But the thing that's different about them is the foliage comes
out at the same time that the tree blooms.
So while you don't get the same cloud-like effect,
you get a more zowee   [ spelled phonetically ]

kind of effect when you see them.
I think people have this kind of tree in their gardens more often.
This is the tree that blooms the earliest,
the shidarezakura, the weeping.
The one on the left is from Filoli near San Francisco,
and the one on the right is from Kyoto.
And while it's not a Usuzumi tree, I wanted to mention the Usuzumis
because they are, there are 50 of them in Potomac Park.
And they come from a tree that's 1,500 years old in Japan.
And they were propagated and given to the United States and planted
as a very special gift in 1999 from the Japanese government.
So we as a country haven't been here long enough
to have a cherry tree that's that old, but Japan does.
Also in Japan, the famous Ryoanji Temple on the left in Kyoto,
and again, here you can see in person, the screen of the evergreens
with the cherry tree blooming in front of it.
The image on the right is the Yoshinos,
shown down on the Tidal Basin.   I wanted to point out the bark.

Each different variety has a distinctive bark.
They can be red, brown, darker gray than this.
Some of them even have a swirling effect, bigger scales.
And tree experts can tell the difference
between the trees from the bark itself.
Because of course, they spend a lot
of their year leafless and bloomless.
So it's important for them to be distinguishable by their bark.
This is the Yoshino tree that's out in the Arboretum,
and it's a favorite of many people in Washington
and just another reason to go to the Arboretum if you have a moment
to view what they offer there,
as well as visit Potomac Park and Tidal Basin.
And then, this is the last image that I wanted to show.
Of course, this view is no longer possible from the Tidal Basin.
There are two many buildings.
But there's a poem included in the book
that the current Empress of Japan wrote.
I wanted to share it with you because I love it.
I thought it would be a nice way to end this as a reminder
that the trees stand for beauty in the moment
and to enjoy their brief moment of life.
So here it goes.
"People here and there lingering as if to share.
A moment of joy.
Gazing where at the close of day the blossoms fall in time."
Thank you.
[ applause ]   [ end of transcript ]