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 is not ancient, and it did not begin as a folk song from the fields. It was a popular urban melody of the Edo period, and it was first printed in 1888, in the Collection of Japanese Koto Music issued by the Tokyo Academy of Music — a book of pieces for the koto, the long thirteen-stringed zither played flat on the floor; beginners on the koto still learn it early. (A separate Edo-period koto piece called Saita sakura also exists, and one theory holds that this melody began as a parody of it.) What was printed as a koto 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 the older text — beginning yayoi no sora wa, “the March sky” — was placed second there and 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 few weeks of the year. Blossom arrives, the song comes out, the petals fall, and it 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.