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SAKURA TIME
There was a temple in Japan where sages lived. They received those who came to seek the secrets of wisdom. The subtlety that prevailed here was to be able to explain what they wanted to say without speaking.
One day a stranger came to the door. He just stood there and waited. Intuitive meeting was believed in here, so there were no knockers or bells or bells on the door.
After a while the door opened and the sage inside looked at the stranger standing at the door. After a greeting, their silent conversation began. The stranger wanted to come in and stay here. The sage disappeared for a while, then returned with a container full of water and handed it to the stranger. This meant that we were too full to receive another seeker.
The stranger returned to the temple garden, picked a rose petal and dropped it into the water in the container. The rose petal floated on top of the water and the water did not overflow. The sage inside bowed respectfully, opened the door and let the stranger in.
Last week I was in the land of wisdom, serenity, nobility, loyalty, the land of the rising sun. It was sakura time. I couldn't have arranged it like that if I wanted to. I was a traveler who had been almost halfway around the world, but I had never been to the country of my dreams, which I wanted to visit so much...
Kabuki Theater, shy women in traditional dress, geishas, symbols of manners, culture, nobility, loyalty, devotion...
The Bushi warriors, noble soldiers of valor, courage and wisdom.
The land of fearless, daring, powerful shoguns, of loyalty to death and serenity, of those great knights and samurai who never tasted the fear of death... The land of honor and the ability to die with honor...
The country where the sun rises...
Green tea ceremonies, single-storey two-room houses in lush green gardens with a door that opens to the side, floor beds... Like everyone else, I had finally arrived in the faraway country that had decorated thousands of my dreams. There was a six-hour time difference with Turkey and our night was mixed with our day. We were sleepy, but it was worth it...
Tokyo, the capital city, was my first disappointment. It is a metropolitan city where 30 million people live during the day, 17 million stay at night and the rest are scattered in the surrounding cities and suburbs. I say at night, because Japan is now a country where you set off before sunrise in the morning and work until the wee hours of the night. A country that paid a heavy price for rising up again in the pain and agony of being reborn from the ashes after the Second World War without being bombed and with the remains of the war. A country where the only way to live is to work and where suicides are the most common, where life has become meaningless and monotonous, a country that is a victim of industry and a country that has become more and more admired for living as it grinds between the teeth of American capitalism. A new generation at the upper limit of American admiration, where young people under the age of 30 no longer want to work, prefer to have fun, travel and live a comfortable life. The backstreets where the youth hang out, where blue green orange dyed and punk haircuts are very fashionable. The American system was destroyed in the second world war with skyscrapers and no cultural fabric left. Cities replaced by skyscrapers. Giant video screens, flashing colored neon lights, high-speed trains snaking through spectacular underpasses... Each city has one or two temples and a few castles. A few palaces in Kyoto where the last shoguns lived, the kind you see in the movies. That's all... But the sakuras... The sakuras... It's worth going just for them...
Cherry trees with pink and white flowers, false cherry trees that do not bear fruit decorated with flowers. Cherry trees adorned with poems, stories, loves, philosophies, rumors...
In a world where all beauty is fleeting, sakura blossoms are as short-lived as the lives of samurai. They were first planted everywhere to remind the samurai of both life and death.
The kamikazes, who are suicide pilots, paint cherry blossoms on the fuselage of their bombers to remind them of death by looking at the flowers.
The samurai are loyal to their master, the shogun, to the death, at the cost of their own lives. When the shogun dies or is killed, as in the movie The Last Samurai, the samurai, left without a master, commit seppuku (harakiri) in honor, cutting their bellies and committing suicide. Their lives are as short as sakura.
Sakura usually stay for one to two weeks. There are a few species that can sometimes stay for a month. They first bloom on the southern island of Okinawa. The island where the world's longest-lived people live. When the flowers there are finished and turn into leaves, the flowers in Tokyo and Osaka begin to bloom. After each sakura, the Japanese realize the transience of life and try to get rid of their ambitions.
Festivals and carnivals are held all over the country during sakura time. Lovers meet under a sakura tree. Old people rest in the shade of a sakura tree and dream of youth. Hanami evenings (traditional picnics under sakura) are another beautiful time for marriage proposals and birthday celebrations.
To be ecstatic under the sakura trees, the symbol of both sadness and romance, to be in Osaka at sakura time in the transience of the world! What a marvelous thing!....
There is also Japanese culture that I admire as much as sakura trees. Their kindness, elegance, delicacy, gentleness, gentleness, serenity, gentleness, honesty and their humanity, which I don't think is left anywhere else in the world, which I haven't seen or heard of, which they still try to preserve, is the reason that made me write this article...
A week without even hearing a honk is not enough time to describe them. They use the special Ojigi (the Japanese bowing greeting) when greeting, when leaving, when saying thank you, when apologizing, even after giving you directions, when leaving after ordering your food, even the bus driver giving way to the taxi driver. And everyone tries to show respect by keeping their head lower than the other person when they are talking.
A culture where laughing loudly, talking loudly, making noise is considered shameful, where sadness, anger and resentment are not shown, but are passed over with a smile or by bowing their heads, and where respect for human beings is lived at the top.
In dozens of cars on intercity journeys, hundreds of people trying to read a book did not make a single sound, while a few dozen of us were politely silent about our train-destroying noise. In the cigarette corner of the train, they didn't enter until our group vacated the section and stood there for minutes.
On the subway, they didn't swarm our seats unless we got off and left, and they politely waited for us to get off, even if it was full to the brim.
Smoking is forbidden not only indoors but even on the streets and avenues. There are special areas everywhere. In a corner of the street or alley, in a park, in a garden, there is a section for smokers. There are seats and ashtrays. There are signs in Japanese and English apologizing and explaining the reason for the ban. The full translation is as follows:
1- Your hand holding a cigarette can be at the level of a child's face.
2- When you hit someone on the road, you can stop and apologize and make amends. But how do you apologize when your cigarette smoke hits someone?
While I was fictionalizing all this while I was still in Japan, a very interesting thing happened to me. On our last day in Japan we were returning from Osaka to Narita. I lost my cell phone at that time. There were at least 5 thousand very special photos, business documents, phone numbers and I was very upset. Our guide Honda said that if it was in the hotel or transfers, it would never be lost, but if it fell on the road, it would not be found. Exactly 8 hours later, at night, in a shopping mall, I finally remembered that I had it. We phoned, they had found it there and we could pick it up at the information desk. It was a bitter thing that what should have happened anyway, this humanity, surprised us...
We told the taxi driver who took us to the mall that we were going back right away, and his response was even more interesting: I can't do justice to my fellow taxi drivers working at the mall! Look, just around the corner and you'll see them!
They still seem to have the spirit of the noble and wise samurai or the gentle and elegant geisha from their ancestors... I hope you will always stay like this, close people of distant countries... Greetings to you!!!
Mukaddes Pekin Başdil
Researcher-Author