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SAKURA, OR CHERRY BLOSSOMS, are an iconic image to the Japanese-they embody mono no aware, which means "an empathy toward things" and describes the transience of physical objects and the feeling of melancholy at their passing. Cherry blossoms, with their brief flash of beauty and quick death, have been a metaphor for mortality in Japanese culture.
In the early twentieth century, one woman's vision to bring cherry blossoms to the United States helped transform the capital of the nation and beautify a park in New York City. Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore came back from Japan in 1885 with an idea to bring...