Fake cherry blossom viewing failure leads us to international friendship in Ueno Park

While trying to pretend to enjoy Tokyo’s cherry blossoms, Mr. Sato ends up having a touching true sakura moment.

With the international fame of Japan’s most beautiful springtime flowers, even a lot of people who aren’t linguistics know that sakura is the Japanese word for cherry blossoms. However, the word sakura has another meaning: it’s also the term used to describe a paid plant in the audience at a musical or theater performance, someone who’s secretly employed to loudly cheer in the hope that their enthusiasm will be contagious and pump up an otherwise quiet crowd. These kinds of sakura were most prominent during the heyday of kabuki, and in the modern era the term has been expanded to include people who leave paid positive reviews on e-commerce sites, social media, or other places for online evaluations.

So with sakura having two possible meanings, our crack reporter Mr. Sato got to thinking, what would it be like if a sakura (the person) went out to see sakura (the flowers)?

To find out, he headed over to Ueno Park, downtown Tokyo’s biggest cherry blossom viewing spot. We’ve had almost non-stop cold and rainy weather since this year’s cherry blossoms began blooming, but Mr. Sato was blessed by gorgeous conditions for his afternoon visit.

Mr. Sato’s goal was to pretend to be someone enjoying the cherry blossoms, a “sakura sakura,” if you will. To this end, he decided to dress in clothes that would arouse suspicion, and drawing on his wealth of experiences getting stopped on the street for random questioning by the police, he put together an ensemble of a hoodie, a flashy sukajan jacket, a mask, a cap, and a pair of sunglasses.

Ueno Park has multiple clusters of cherry blossoms, but Mr. Sato decided to set up his fake cherry blossom viewing underneath this solitary sakura tree.

Now that he’d selected his location, he pulled out his camera and began pretending to be enchanted by the flowers.

Walking back and forth under the branches, he did his best impression of someone trying to find the best composition for their quintessential sakura photo.

Apparently his act was convincing, as no one came up to tell him that they’d seen through his ruse. As a matter of fact, at one point a whole group of foreign tourists dressed in rental kimono walked by, with none of them sensing that Mr. Sato was faking it.

▼ You can see the group where the arrow is pointing here.

Moving on to the next phase of his fake cherry blossom viewing, Mr. Sato took a seat underneath the tree. Most people having cherry blossom picnics will bring a plastic tarp to sit on, but Mr. Sato hadn’t been able to find an individual-sized sheet, so he instead sat on a plastic shopping bag he’d brought with him for this purpose.

Gazing up at the tree, Mr. Sato started to feel a sense of affinity with it. Like we said, it’s the only sakura tree in that particular part of Ueno Park, but it’s not forcing itself to fit in. It’s staying true to itself, and while it may not be the biggest or most attention-grabbing cherry blossom tree in the park, no one can deny that it’s a proper sakura tree. You could say a lot of similar things about Mr. Sato, who tries to keep a live-and-let-live philosophy in life, and has become comfortable doing his own thing in a way that’s unembarrassed without encroaching on others’ ability to do the same.

Opening up a bottle of juice and taking a drink, he felt a sense of happy tranquility, reassuring and refreshing like a spring breeze.

Hold up…

…what exactly was he supposed to be doing here?

Mr. Sato’s original intent was to pretend to be doing cherry blossom viewing, to see if anyone could spot that he himself was a sakura. But here he was, enjoying the flowers to their fullest…which meant that his fake cherry blossom viewing had turned into real cherry blossom viewing! Come to think of it, how are you supposed to “fake” viewing something anyway?

Thoroughly confused, but not necessarily in a bad way, Mr. Sato stood up for a bit to try to get his bearings about what the point of his experiment was (this may be a situation we’ve found ourselves in a time or two before). As he stood there, the group of foreign tourists that he’d seen earlier passed by once again.

“Excuse me.”

Lost in thought, it took Mr. Sato a moment to realize that someone was talking to him in accented English. Looking in the direction the voice was coming from, he saw two of the tourists holding their smartphone out towards him, with the screen displaying a translation into Japanese that said:

“If you don’t mind would you take our picture? How much do we need to pay you?”

Apparently the couple, who are on vacation in Japan from Indonesia, had noticed Mr. Sato taking photos of the cherry blossoms by himself and thought that he was a professional photographer! They’d tried taking some selfies of themselves dressed in kimono under the sakura, but couldn’t quite get the angles to come out good, and so they were hoping for some help before they had to get on the bus for the next stop on their tour, which was leaving in a few minutes.

Mr. Sato told them that he’d be happy to help, and that since he’s just an amateur photographer, they didn’t need to pay him a single yen.

Time was of the essence, and Mr. Sato wishes he could have arranged the shots more artistically than he did. Still, we think it’s safe to say that there’s a special warmth to the photos, and he’s glad to have been able to help them commemorate their visit to Ueno Park at its most beautiful time of year.

And they were nice enough to take a group shot with Mr. Sato too!

Soon it was time for the couple to leave, but there were smiles all around as they exchanged goodbyes, even though odds are their paths will never cross again. The poetically minded, though, will tell you that the cherry blossoms themselves are a symbol of such things, those quick bursts of beauty that only last for a moment, or, if you want to put a more positive spin on it, the way that even brief bits of joy can be memorable and meaningful.

So in the end, Mr. Sato’s attempt to do fake cherry blossom viewing was a total failure, by nature of being a total success at all the best things about sakura.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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