‘Sakura diplomacy’: One tree, two men, three wars |
A hundred years ago this week, on April 27, 1926, an Edwardian Englishman gave a speech in Tokyo to an elite group of business and government leaders that would help change the face of spring around the world.
The man, Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram, warned 150 members of the prestigious Cherry Association that Japan’s diverse cherry trees were "in serious danger of extinction" because of neglect and the dominance of one variety, the Somei-Yoshino tree.
He told the stunned audience that two beautiful cherry tree varieties were growing in his garden in the county of Kent that were apparently extinct in Japan. One was a variety now known as Taihaku, or the great white cherry tree. Ingram promised to try to return those varieties to Japan and to spread his cherry tree creations far and wide, which he did.
On his spring 1926 trip, Ingram also witnessed the progressive militarization of Japan, which would eventually lead to the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and to the U.S.’ entry into World War II.
Ingram had become Britain’s foremost cherry expert in the 1920s after returning from northern France at the end of World War I. There, he saw the wholesale destruction of nature and the senseless deaths of thousands of soldiers in brutal trench warfare.
“The ravages of war have laid the countryside to waste and now the rolling hills are nothing more than a treeless and lifeless expanse of rank weeds, shell-holes, trenches and graves,” he wrote. “It seems to me that war is merely........