DC Locales Touch on Japanese-American Ties, Trials
March 26, 2012
The Washington Monument appears in the distance behind the array of gorgeous trees during the city’s annual Cherry Blossom Festival.
Washington, D.C., is always a popular tourist destination, but it’s even more attractive this time of year. Literally. The spring Cherry-Blossom Festival is in full swing, and nature has cooperated. A profusion of pretty, pink blossoms rings the Tidal Basin of the Potomac River.
As many of the visitors who crowd nearby pathways to see nature’s dramatic show soon learn, about 100 of the cherry trees are very old and very hardy. They are survivors from among the 3,000 trees given to the nation by Japan as a gesture of friendship 100 years ago, in 1912.
As more and more of the aging original trees died off in the mid-1960s, Japan renewed its gift with 3,800 new ones. Resting among all the trees - old and new - there’s an ancient, pagoda-shaped stone lantern, sent from Japan in 1954, that’s lit each year at this time.
This lantern amid the cherry blossoms is lit to help commemorate the arrival of spring each year.
What many of the blossom-watchers don’t know is that there’s also a more recent Japanese connection in the city - erected a short walk away in 2000 in a little park across the street from the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.
Designed as a place for meditation and learning, the privately funded National Japanese-American Memorial to Patriotism tells two stories.
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