says a Japanese embassy
hoping you'll have forgotten
their previous actions rotten.
While in our precariously peaceful world today,
we honor those who brought cherry blossoms our way
and similar words may be easier to say
but soon could they again serve as text
for even greater horrors that await us next?
hzl
3/19/16
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The Mikado/The flowers that bloom in the spring - Wikisource
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/.../The_flowers_that_bloom_in_the_spring
Apr 17, 2012 - Nanki-Poo: The flowers that bloom in the spring, Tra la, Breathe promise of merry sunshine — As we merrily dance and we sing, Tra la,The Mikado - The flowers that bloom in the spring - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbYaCD8xYZ0
May 18, 2009 - Uploaded by ABakker307
The Mikado By Gilbert and Sullivan Preformed by Sir Charles Mackerras Orchestra & Chorus of the Welsh ...
In New Jersey, Memorial for ‘Comfort Women’ Deepens Old Animosity
Two delegations of Japanese officials visited Palisades Park, N.J., this month with a request that took local administrators by surprise: The Japanese wanted a small monument removed from a public park.
The monument, a brass plaque on a block of stone, was dedicated in 2010 to the memory of so-called comfort women, tens of thousands of women and girls, many Korean, who were forced into sexual slavery by Japanese soldiers during World War II.
But the Japanese lobbying to remove the monument seems to have backfired — and deepened animosity between Japan and South Korea over the issue of comfort women, a longstanding irritant in their relations.
The authorities in Palisades Park, a borough across the Hudson River from Manhattan, rejected the demand, and now the Japanese effort is prompting Korean groups in the New York region and across the country to plan more such monuments.
“They’re helping us, actually,” said Chejin Park, a lawyer at the Korean American Voters’ Council, a civic group that championed the memorial in Palisades Park, where more than half of the population of about 20,000 is of Korean descent, according to the Census Bureau. “We can increase the awareness of this issue.”
Korean groups have been further motivated by a letter-writing campaign in Japan in opposition to a proposal by Peter Koo, a New York councilman and Chinese immigrant, to rename a street in Flushing, Queens, in honor of comfort women.
Mr. Park said that in the past week or so, his organization had received calls from at least five Korean community organizers around the country — in Georgia, Michigan, New Jersey and Texas — expressing interest in building their own memorials. These would be in addition to at least four memorials in the works in California and Georgia, he added.
The monument in Palisades Park is the only one in the United States dedicated to comfort women, borough officials said.
“Starting from Flushing, N.Y., we will continue the construction in the areas of major Korean-American communities,” said Paul Park, executive director of the Korean-American Association of Greater New York, one of the oldest Korean community organizations in the region. “We Korean-Americans observe the issue on the level of a global violation of human rights.”
Tensions between Japan and South Korea over the legacy of comfort women were reignited in December when a bronze statue in honor of victims was installed across the street from the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, the South Korean capital. Japanese officials have asked the Korean authorities to remove that statue.
Japanese leaders have said that their formal apologies, expressions of remorse and admissions of responsibility regarding the treatment of comfort women are sufficient, including an offer to set up a $1 billion fund for victims. But many Koreans contend that those actions are inadequate. Surviving victims have rejected the fund because it would be financed by private money. The victims are seeking government reparations.
Mayor James Rotundo of Palisades Park said the lobbying began obliquely late last month. Officials at the Japanese consulate in New York sent e-mails requesting a meeting with borough administrators.
“I called the secretary and said, ‘What is this about?’ ” the mayor recalled in an interview, “and she said, ‘It’s about Japanese-U.S. relations,’ and I said: ‘Oh. Well, O.K.’ ”
The first meeting, on May 1, began pleasantly enough, he said. The delegation was led by the consul general, Shigeyuki Hiroki, who talked about his career, including his work in Afghanistan — “niceties,” Mr. Rotundo said.
Then the conversation took a sudden turn, Mr. Rotundo said. The consul general pulled out two documents and read them aloud.
One was a copy of a 1993 statement from Yohei Kono, then the chief cabinet secretary, in which the Japanese government acknowledged the involvement of military authorities in the coercion and suffering of comfort women.
The other was a 2001 letter to surviving comfort women from Junichiro Koizumi, then the prime minister, apologizing for their treatment.
Mr. Hiroki then said the Japanese authorities “wanted our memorial removed,” Mr. Rotundo recalled.
The consul general also said the Japanese government was willing to plant cherry trees in the borough, donate books to the public library “and do some things to show that we’re united in this world and not divided,” Mr. Rotundo said. But the offer was contingent on the memorial’s removal. “I couldn’t believe my ears,” said Jason Kim, deputy mayor of Palisades Park and a Korean-American, who was at the meeting. “My blood shot up like crazy.”
Borough officials rejected the request, and the delegation left.
The second delegation arrived on May 6 and was led by four members of the Japanese Parliament. Their approach was less diplomatic, Mr. Rotundo said. The politicians, members of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party, tried, in asking that the monument be removed, to convince the Palisades Park authorities that comfort women had never been forcibly conscripted as sex slaves.
“They said the comfort women were a lie, that they were set up by an outside agency, that they were women who were paid to come and take care of the troops,” the mayor related. “I said, ‘We’re not going to take it down, but thanks for coming.’ ”
The Japanese consulate in New York has been reluctant to discuss its lobbying.
In interviews this week, Fumio Iwai, the deputy consul general, would not say whether the consul general had requested that the monument be removed. But he denied that the consul general had offered to help the borough in return for the monument’s removal. Mr. Hiroki “did not offer any such condition,” he said.
Mr. Iwai said the issue of comfort women, if not Palisades Park specifically, was the subject of continuing discussions “at a very high level” between the governments of South Korea and Japan.
“So,” he said, pausing as if to choose his words carefully, “things are quite complicated.”
CeCherry blossoms’ champion, Eliza Scidmore, led a life of adventure
She wore a gown of green under a black silk robe embroidered with gold and silver Japanese characters. And when the young woman walked into the Dupont Circle mansion that night, she turned every head.
It was the winter of 1894, and the occasion was a fancy dress ball hosted by a senator’s daughter for the best of Washington society. So many of the capital’s elite were expected that the event was covered by the press.
The center of attention was the bold guest who arrived in the garb of a traditional Japanese dancer: Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore. She was 37, an author, journalist, traveler and collector of the lore and artifacts of far-off lands.
Celebrated for her adventures in Alaska and the Far East — daring for a single woman of her day — she would soon gain renown in Washington for something few people at the ball knew much about.
Scidmore (pronounced SID-more) would become in many ways the mother ofthe cherry blossoms.
UNDATED PHOTO: Three-quarter length portrait in front of a painted backdrop of Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, holding a book. She has a horse-shaped pin at her collar. This image is issued by the Wisconsin Historical Society. (Photo by Wisconsin Historical Society /PHOTO BY WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY)
She is the woman whose love of their beauty sparked the first lobbying campaign to plant Japanese cherry trees at the Tidal Basin — and this month marks the centennial of her efforts realized.
Enchanted by the culture of Japan, by 1894 she had been pestering federal officials for almost a decade to plant some of the gorgeous trees she had seen in Tokyo around Washington’s reclaimed Potomac River mud flats, she would say later.
It is “the most ideally, wonderfully beautiful tree that nature has to show,” she wrote.
Princes and beggars were entranced. In Japan, people scrawled poems on paper and hung them in the tree branches.
But in Washington, bureaucrats of three administrations had been unmoved by her pleas and photographs.
“It was as one crying in the wilderness that I begged,” she wrote.
And the newspaper report of the ball that evening on New Hampshire Avenue made no mention of her crusade.
Today, it is the reason she is famous.
In 1909, 15 years after the ball, Scidmore’s “time-worn plea,” as she put it, reached the ear of the new first lady, Helen “Nellie” Taft, who was bent on beautifying Washington.
Mrs. Taft and the Cherry Blossoms
how long?8 minutes
When Helen Herron Taft became the nation’s first lady in March 1909, Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore had been vainly struggling for almost a quarter-century to interest Superintendents of the U.S. Army’s Office of Public Buildings and Grounds in planting Japanese flowering cherry trees to beautify the driveway of Potomac Park. Scidmore, an accomplished traveler, author, and reporter who had visited Japan, envisioned a scene similar to the orchard of cherry trees along the east embankment of the Sumida River in Tokyo’s Mukojima Park. Starting her entreaties anew with a new administration, she appealed to Helen Taft, who had become familiar with the beauty of Japanese cherry trees while visiting the country when her husband served as governor-general of the Philippines.1
Scidmore approached Mrs. Taft at the right time, for the first lady had already shared her ideas for the enhancement of Potomac Park with the president’s military aide, Archibald Butt, and the Commissioner of Public Buildings and Grounds, Colonel Spencer Cosby. President and Mrs. Taft were huge automobile enthusiasts and the seven-passenger White Steamer was the favorite of the White House fleet and often tested on the paved “Speedway” in Potomac Park and along the river.
Inspired by fond memories of pleasant evening carriage rides through the tree-lined streets of Manila, Mrs. Taft’s support for turning this “speedway” into a promenade led to the first public project ever undertaken by a first lady. A plan was formed and Mrs. Taft selected a site for a bandstand to hold Marine Band concerts in the park on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons.
“I have taken the matter up and am promised the trees,” Mrs. Taft told Scidmore on April 7, 1909, “but I thought perhaps it would be best to make an avenue of them, extending down to the turn in the road . . . Of course, they could not reflect in the water, but the effect would be very lovely of the long avenue.”2
Ten days later Mrs. Taft’s proposal, Potomac Drive, officially opened and became an immediate success, the most fashionable place to go and be seen in Washington from April until late October in the early 20th century.3At the same time, the cherry blossom trees proposal went forward.
Scidmore approached two Japanese acquaintances—chemist Jokichi Takamine and Japan’s consul general in New York, Kokichi Mizuno—and they helped arrange a donation of 2,000 cherry trees from the mayor and city council of Tokyo, which arrived in Washington in January 1910. Unfortunately, agricultural inspectors found the trees to be so heavily infested with insects that they had to be destroyed. Undaunted, the group secured another donation of 3,020 Yoshino cherry trees, five giant boxes of 600 pounds each, which arrived safely in Seattle in early March 1912 aboard the freighter Awa Maru. The trees were then placed on specially heated, insulated railroad freight cars to speed them to Washington.4
The plan to plant Japanese cherry trees along the drive also came to fruition with the aid and influence of Mrs. Taft. In 1910 Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo presented the first trees as a “memorial of national friendship between the U.S. and Japan.” On March 27, 1912, Mrs. Taft and the Iwa Chinda, wife of the Vicount Sutemi Chinda, the Japanese Ambassador, planted the first two of more than 3,000 Yoshino cherry trees on the northern bank of the Tidal Basin.5
The trees’ attractive branching patterns and light pink flowers continue to be enjoyed today, a living memorial to Mrs. Taft and others whose persistence and vision made possible one of the loveliest attractions in the nation’s capital.
By the 1920s Japanese cherry trees were planted throughout the Washington area and the Tidal Basin became the favored destination due to its stunning views of Washington’s monuments with the masses of cherry trees reflected in the water. Plans to cut down the cherry trees on the proposed site of the Jefferson Memorial led to objections from local civic groups and hotel trade associations, and organized protests from clubwomen.6
Groups chained themselves to the trees to disrupt workmen in November 1938.7As a compromise trees were transplanted and added on the south side of the basin to frame the Memorial dedicated in 1943. The new Memorial created a dramatic vista across the Tidal Basin to and from the White House. During cherry-blossom season the view has become perfect for picture postcards.8
Today, the National Cherry Blossom Festival has grown from a modest celebration of spring cherry blossoms to one of Washington’s most anticipated annual events to herald in the spring season. Civic groups organized the first “Cherry Blossom Festival” in 1935. However, since First Lady Helen Taft’s involvement, the first ladies have supported the cherry blossom celebrations and all first ladies in recent years have served as Honorary Chair of the festival.ting aTreasured Friendship
In 1912, Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo gave 3,000 cherry b
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