
The Big Business of Japan’s Cherry Blossoms - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-cherry-blossoms/
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asutekku
The business around them is crazy around here. Where as in some other country
you would just pack a picnic basket and go to spend the evening under the
trees, here they order craploads of sakura themed bento, drink sakura themed
sake and beer and even be absent from the work to get wasted under the cherry
blossoms.

And that’s only the hanami itself. The stores are filled with sakura themed
stuff that is few yens cheaper than their normal counterpart and they sell
like crazy.

It really is an interesting aspect of the culture.

~~~
tokyodude
not sure why Japan is being singled out here. Nearly every culture has
celebrations that are then commercialized.

Christmas, Halloween, Valentine's Day, July 4th (USA), Spring Day, Flower Day,
Day of the Dead, St Patrick's Day, etc etc etc.

~~~
ekianjo
> not sure why Japan is being singled out here. Nearly every culture has
> celebrations that are then commercialized.

Japan takes it to another level though. In Europe I had never seen so much
products customization happening across multiple categories at the same time.

~~~
tokyodude
Do they? In the USA there's Christmas merchandise in every store for 2 months.
People buy trees, cars, tree decorations, candles, wreaths, house lights,
cakes, egg nog, etc. etc. For Halloween custom stores open all over the place
for 1-2 months, candy companies come out with all kinds of special candies,
pumpkin patches show up all over town, and on and on.

Europe has nothing like that?

~~~
GuiA
It absolutely does. Many European cities are in a Christmas Market frenzy for
the most of December.

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spectramax
Random observation: Cherry trees have done something brilliant from an
evolutionary standpoint - a symbiosis with the most intelligent species on the
planet - to appeal to humans as irresistibly beautiful and it will only lead
to more cultivation and expansion of the species.

~~~
tokyodude
What I've noticed is rather it's culture. Cherry trees blossom all over the
world as do other trees. Almonds, Plums, Jacarandas, lots of others. Nothing
special about cherry trees except they got lucky that one culture decided to
celebrate them and others didn't

almonds:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=almond+tree+blossoms&tbm=isc...](https://www.google.com/search?q=almond+tree+blossoms&tbm=isch)

plums:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=plum+tree+blossoms&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=plum+tree+blossoms&tbm=isch)

jacaranda:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=jacaranda+tree+blossoms&tbm=...](https://www.google.com/search?q=jacaranda+tree+blossoms&tbm=isch)

~~~
GuiA
Plum and peach trees are also common in Japan, and Japanese people frequently
mistake them for cherry trees.

A handy guide:

[https://m.imgur.com/a/zSpjPk0](https://m.imgur.com/a/zSpjPk0)

~~~
tokyodude
Yes, part of my point was it's just culture. I grew up in Los Angeles. I lived
in Japan for many years and got used to the various celebrations. I then came
back to Los Angeles and noticed all the trees blossoming that I and pretty
much everyone else had ignored in the past.

So re post above, it's not the cherry trees are especially pretty. It's only
that some people in Japan started appreciating them and promoting that
appreciation until it spread throughout the country. It could just as easily
have been any other blossoming tree or any other country. The only difference
is culture not trees.

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Jerry2
When I open this page in Firefox, everything works fine. But when I open it in
Chromium, I see:

    
    
        www.bloomberg.com refused to connect. ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED
    

What could be causing this? Never encountered something like this before.

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benj111
I have an ornamental cherry in my garden just outside the back window.

The kitchen has a lovely pink hue at this time of year.

Perhaps I should start charging the neighbours to come round and picnic.

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black-tea
It's not April 1st but this page has flowers floating around on it. Back to
the 90s for real then...

~~~
iddan
It’s a cool effect but it is really hard to read like that and on my iPhone it
slows down the page

~~~
trickstra
I left this page open and went to do something else. When I came back after
couple of minutes, my laptop was super hot and CPU running at max. That's the
consequence of these effects

