The single most culturally weighted kō in the entire calendar. 桜前線 (sakura zensen, the "cherry blossom front") is tracked and broadcast nationally each spring the same way a weather front would be, moving north from Kyūshū to Hokkaidō over roughly a month — this kō marks its earliest arrival in the calendar's own reference region, with the rest of the country following at its own pace over the following weeks.
Recorded hanami (flower-viewing) tradition traces to 812, when Emperor Saga held a flower-viewing banquet at Shinsen-en, according to the Nihon Kōki — the event that's generally credited with shifting elite flower-viewing away from ume (plum), the previously favored bloom, toward sakura specifically. A separate, older strand of belief among farming communities held that 田の神 (ta no kami, the rice-field deity) descended from the mountains each spring and took up residence in a sakura tree — some folklorists, though without firm documentary evidence, have proposed that 桜 itself derives from サ (sa, an old word for this same rice deity) and クラ (kura, "seat" or "throne"), though this etymology remains a modern hypothesis rather than an established one.
The character itself means "spring fish" — coming into its best season right alongside the blossoms.
Toward the end of its best season.
Toward the end of its season.
The very earliest shoots begin appearing now in warmer regions, ahead of the fuller April peak.
In good season, needing its traditional ash or lye soak before cooking.
The great majority of sakura seen in Japanese parks and along riversides today are Somei Yoshino, a single cultivar developed around 1850 by nurserymen in Somei village (in what's now Tokyo), crossing wild Ōshima-zakura and Edo-higan cherry. Every Somei Yoshino tree in the country is propagated by grafting rather than from seed, making them genetically identical clones of the original — the reason the entire cultivar blooms and peaks in such close, dramatic unison nationwide, region by region, rather than staggering unpredictably the way a seed-grown population would.
What began as an aristocratic court pastime — Emperor Saga's 812 banquet, followed by hanami becoming a fixed annual imperial event from 831 onward — spread gradually to samurai and eventually ordinary households, becoming the enormous, nationwide, largely secular picnic-under-blossoms custom recognizable today. The core of the custom hasn't changed in over a millennium: people gathering to sit beneath a blooming tree, specifically to look at it together, for exactly as long as the blossoms choose to last.
The サ (sa) + クラ (kura) etymology — "the rice deity's seat" — is a postwar folklorist's hypothesis rather than a documented historical fact, worth holding a little loosely even though it's widely repeated; the honest answer is that sakura's ultimate etymology isn't settled with certainty.
Japan's weather services publish it the same way they'd publish a storm front, with projected peak-bloom dates by location.
The custom's original and enduring form is exactly this simple — no picnic required to take part in it.
"If I could choose, I would die in spring, beneath the blossoms — around the full moon of the second month."
早咲き (early-blooming) stages draw noticeably smaller crowds than peak 満開 (mankai) weekends at popular spots.
Prime spots under well-known trees fill up from early morning on weekends during peak bloom.
Saigyō wrote this wish decades before his actual death, naming the season, the setting, and even roughly the date he hoped for — and by the accounts that survive, he died on the sixteenth day of the second lunar month, one day after the full moon he'd named, beneath blossoms, almost exactly as written. Very few people get to plan the shape of their own ending this precisely, let alone have it arrive close to as asked. What would you actually choose, if you let yourself name the conditions you'd want around any major ending in your life, the way Saigyō named his?