I haven’t yet been lucky enough to attend a blossom party in Japan, but here’s a glimpse into one that my friend Jean-Pierre enjoyed last week:

(preparing for a barbeque under the blossoms beside the Ugui River in Shiga Ken)

(Lanterns along the river light up the blossoms as the sun sets)

Meanwhile, here in Vancouver, I’m well into the editing process of my new novel that takes place in Japan (unfortunately, research took me to Japan after the blossoms had finished last year). Also, Manga artist Nina Matsumoto is doing a manga portrait of me, which I’ll include in the back of the book. I’m really excited to see how it turns out….

I like the way people in Japan celebrate cherry blossoms. Families and friends gather under the flowering trees to stroll, take photos, admire the blossoms and picnic (it is not all quiet and contemplation, though, as there is often a lot of alcohol and the occassional portable karaoke machine).

Cherry blossom viewing has its own term, hanami. A variation of hanami is yozakura, night-time viewing. People hold parties under the trees at night, and many a haiku has been written about cherry blossoms in the moonlight. In the old days, lanterns and torches would have been added to shine light on the blossoms. Today, people bring portable generators to power spot lights. People eat, drink and talk and occassionally look up and comment on the beauty of the blossoms. The short lifespan of the flowers makes the occassion particularly special.

Celebrating the blossoms here in Canada is mostly a solitary activity (though I’m happy to say, the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival is working to make it more a part of our culture — at least here in the lower mainland). For now, I celebrate by going for extra walks down streets lined with blossoming trees and paying visits to my favourite trees. It’s hard to hold a party under the blossoms when most of the flowering trees are along streets, but just standing under them is a party for the senses.

I took the above photos the last week in March, then on April 1st and 2nd, it snowed (like nature was playing an April Fool’s joke), prompting this haiku:

snow on pink blossoms

winter, reluctant to leave

turns for one last kiss

Now, only four days later, it’s as warm as summer, and people are wearing shorts and t-shirts. It wont last, but I think it’s finally safe to say Good-bye Winter!

Vancouver Cherry Blossom site:

http://www.vancouvercherryblossomfestival.com/

I have a backlog of topics I’d like to post about, but I’ve been trying to focus on finishing my current novel, which is due next week (I’ve already asked my editor for two deadline extensions, so this is it!).

Immersion in writing about Japan has got me, not only wishing I could go back for another visit, but also craving a different Japanese food each week. Last week it was yam sushi, this week it’s Kakinotane peanuts, a few weeks ago it was yuzu (a kind of citrus fruit) tea, before that it was Gaba chocolates, vegetable tempura, and so on…..

So, for now I’ll leave you with three images to taste: a delicious cup of yuzu tea and chocolate cake (which I had at a tiny cafe in Nara after ducking in out of the rain), Gaba chocolates, and cherry blossom KitKat (apparently only available in Japan and only during cherry blossom season, and especially popular with students taking exams — as a kind of edible good luck charm).

Some women dislike birthdays. I am not one of these. In fact, although my birthday is today, I have been celebrating it the whole month of January. Yesterday I went out for lunch with friends and was greeted by this haiku chalked onto a sign hanging in front of the Naam restaurant (in Vancouver’s east side).

This morning I opened this present (below right) sent from my friend Jean-Pierre in Japan:

In keeping with the lucky cat theme, I thought I’d also share a couple photos and comments sent to me by people responding to my Quest for the Lucky Cat post. From Jodi at floatingclouds.wordpress.com in the U.S., here is a photo of Kiki, “a rescued feral calico cat and my lucky cat…which she promptly knocked off the shelf and broke as soon as I brought it home from SF Chinatown. I had to glue it all back together. How lucky is that?”

The rather spooky looking black cat at the bottom of this post is a giant Maneki-neko Jean-Pierre found in an antique store in Japan.

Craftygreenpoet.blogspot.com author, Juliet, also shared a comment about the lucky cat in her flat in Edinburgh Scotland. Lucky cats around the globe!

Making connections with people is one of the things I love about blogging.

In Japan, when people look up at the night sky they don’t see a “man” in the moon, they see a rabbit. In the day, they see a crow in the sun.

Anyone who has read this blog knows I am intrigued by crows. Before I travelled to Japan, I didn’t know whether or not I would see crows there. On my first day in Japan, I woke up to familar caws coming from the rice field outside my window. I was thrilled to discover that Japan does indeed have crows, and not just ordinary crows — but giant Jungle crows.

The crows I saw that first morning were not this kind, however, though they were a little bigger and had a slightly different pitch to their calls than the Northwestern or Common crows I see at home. My first encounter with Jungle crows did not happen until my visit to a Tokyo cemetary.

Although crows (and ravens) are often associated with prophecy, wisdom and longevity (positives for the most part), when you see the huge, heavy-shouldered, bulky-beaked black shapes swooping and skulking around an old graveyard, it’s hard to forget that they are also somethimes linked to death and bad fortune. Unnerving, to say the least (although personally, I thought they were great and spent about an hour following them around with my camera, trying, unsuccessfully, to get close enough to take a recognizable photo).

While ordinary crows may be considered bad luck in Japan (especially since they have started attacking people in Ueno Park and other areas of Tokyo), if a crow happens to have three legs, it’s a totally different story.

A Japanese legends tells of how, long ago a monster was about to devour the sun. To prevent this, the rulers of heaven created the first crow, who flew into the monster’s mouth and choked him (I assume this crow had three legs, since the “crow in the sun” is supposed to have three legs, representing dawn, noon and dusk). Another story tells of how the first Emperor of Japan was travelling through the mountains and became lost. The sun-goddess sent a three-legged crow to guide him, and from that day on, the three-legged crow became an emblem of Japanese imperial rule (and the Japanese National soccer team).

                                          Note: the top photo is a crow statue outside the shrine of Miyajima near Hiroshima, and the photo at left shows a crow and some stray cats who were “sharing” food scraps at the back of a restaurant in Ueno Park, Tokyo (see, the Jungle crows really are big!). Although the story I’m working on right now is not specifically about any of these things, I’m having fun working them in (manga-loving North American girl on an exchange trip to Japan discovers Japan is not quite what she expected…. learns a lesson from some Tokyo crows….).

Anyone who has ever eaten at a Chinese food restaurant has probably seen a lucky cat. The statue cat with one raised paw often stands inside the entrance of Chinese restaurants and stores, wlecoming or beckoning people in. I was surprised to discover that the lucky cat originates, not in China, but in Japan. There, it is called Maneki-neko, the beckoning cat.

Before I travelled to Japan last spring, I did some research about the origins of Maneki-neko. I came across a few different stories. One involves a cat who saved a geisha from a snake dropping on  her head. But the one that seems most accepted is about a cat who lived at a poor temple near the city of Edo (the old name for Tokyo) about 200 years ago.

The temple priest had a calico cat, who he was fond of and shared his meagre food with. One day the cat sat at the side of the road near the temple when it began to rain. At the same time, several samurai road up on horse back. They saw the cat raise its paw as if to beckon to them, so they followed the cat to the temple. The priest welcomed them in out of the rain and gave them tea. One of the samurai, Lord Li, was impressed by the priest, and later returned for regular visits. The lord and his family gave money to the temple, and it was never poor again. The story of the faithful cat, who brought luck and prosperity to the poor temple, spread across the land. Soon the first Maneki-neko statue appeared, and eventually the lucky statue spread from Japan to China and to North America.

I thought I might like to write a story for kids involving a statue of Maneki-neko (and perhaps a cat spirit who inhabits the statue), so on my trip to Japan I kept my eyes open for Maneki-neko statues and for real cats. My quest took me from a little antique store in the ancient town of Seki-cho, where the store owner showed me two Maneki-neko figures from the Meiji period (about 1900), to the backstreets of Tokyo, where a tiny shop was filled with lucky cats and real cats lounged up and down a market stairway, to a town beside the ancient shrine of Ise, where a giant stone Maneki-neko stood outside another store filled with lucky cats. (Hello Kitty, or Kitty-chan as she is called in Japan, was also in evidence.)

After all this, the story I ended up starting to write is not about cats (although I may write the Maneki-neko story yet). Instead, it is about (or partly about) two other things I found myself looking out for in Japan: crows and manga. I will tell the you about the crows next.