Sakura Sakuraさくらさくら

The whole song is one glance out of a window in spring. There is no story, no character and nothing that happens — only someone looking at cherry blossom so dense they cannot work out where flowers end and cloud begins, and saying so.

It began as a technical exercise. In the Edo period this melody was used to teach beginners the koto, the long thirteen-stringed zither played flat on the floor; it was printed in 1888 in a koto tutor from the Tokyo Academy of Music, under the title Saita Sakura. What was written as a practice piece turned out to be the most recognisable tune in Japan. The lyric sung today was fixed in a Ministry of Education songbook in 1941, and an older Edo-period text — beginning yayoi no sora wa, “the March sky” — is still occasionally heard instead.

Its unusual sound is not imagination. The melody uses the in scale, a five-note Japanese scale built with narrow half-step intervals that do not appear in a Western major or minor key. That is why a listener raised on European music hears it as unmistakably Japanese within about three notes, and why it turns up so often as musical shorthand for Japan in film and television.

For children it is a seasonal song, tied to a fortnight of the year. Blossom arrives, everyone sings it at school and under the trees at hanami gatherings, the petals fall, and the song is put away until next spring — which is a large part of why it stays memorable. A song you can only sing for two weeks keeps its occasion attached to it for life.