Japan and U.S.'s Short-Lived Friendship
Good morning. It’s March 27. On this day in 1912, in a show of friendship between two great countries, that Japanese cherry trees – a gift from the city of Tokyo – were planted along the banks of Washington’s Tidal Basin. The ceremonial planting was led by first lady Helen H. Taft and the Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador.
For a time in the late 19th century, a Washingtonian named Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore functioned as virtually a one-woman East-West center. The idea for planning cherry trees in the nation’s capital was hers. (So was the notion that Alaska offered untold riches for the United States.)
Born in the Midwest, Eliza and her brother George came to the capital city as children during the Civil War. Their father had enlisted as an officer in the Union Army; their mother ran a boarding house and volunteered at military hospitals. George went to law school and joined the diplomatic corps. His sister spent two years at Oberlin College before becoming a Washington correspondent, travel writer, and explorer.
An 1883 trip by steamer ship to Alaska changed her life. She turned her travels into a book, “Alaska, Its Southern Coast and the Sitkan Archipelago,” which was published in 1885. The same year she made the first of her many pilgrimages to Japan.
The stately promenades of Tokyo lined with cherry trees inspired Miss Scidmore to propose planting the flowering trees in her adopted hometown. For 2 ½ decades she took her idea to a succession of Army superintendents responsible for overseeing the reclaimed Potomac River waterfront. And for 2 ½ years she was ignored.
The casual sexism of the times helps explain such indifference, but Eliza Scidmore was no crank. A well-known lecturer and peace activist, she was the first female photographer for National Geographic as well as a writer for that magazine and other publications (and, later, the first woman to serve on the National Geographic Society’s board of trustees).
“She corresponded with John Muir, dined with Alexander Graham Bell, socialized with President and Mrs. Taft, received high honors from the Emperor and Empress of Japan,” notes Washington writer Diana Parsell, who is researching a book on Eliza Scidmore.
It was Helen Taft who helped her get the cherry tree project off the ground. Scidmore was in the process of trying to raise money privately to purchase the trees when she sent the first lady a note apprising her of her vision.
Having lived in Japan, Mrs. Taft knew of their beauty first-hand. The following day, she inquired of a visiting Japanese consul about the availability of cherry trees – and was promptly promised 2,000 such trees from Japan as a gift. The first lady apprised Ms. Scidmore of this development one day later, April 9, 1909, while soliciting her views about the best location for the planting.
The first batch of trees that arrived from Japan was infested with bugs and had to be burned, a decision that went all the way to the president’s desk and involved apologies all around. By March of 1912, however, a new batch had arrived. They were planted amid little fanfare.
In the early years of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, District of Columbia schoolchildren re-enacted the first planting, and by 1935, the Cherry Blossom Festival was an annual event.
Just over six years later, however, Japan and the United States were at war, suggesting that the cherry trees’ power as a symbol of friendship were limited. Or were they?
Among the casualties of that horrific war of attrition fought across the Pacific were Tokyo’s own cheery trees. In 1952, Japanese officials asked for American help in restoring the grove of Yoshino cherry trees in a place called the Adachi Ward in Tokyo. The National Park Service responded by sending grafts from the descendants of those same trees back to Tokyo.
Today, the cherry trees survive – on both sides of the ocean.
