The man who sent Japan's cherry blossoms out to the world

Japan Times

09-04-2025

Almost every day for the past seven decades, 94-year-old Masatoshi Asari has dedicated himself to creating, growing and disseminating many of the world's most distinctive and diverse cherry trees.
One of Japan's foremost living authorities on cherry trees and their blossoms, the wiry, weather-beaten Asari is a walking encyclopedia about sakura. When he leads small groups through Matsumae Park on the southern tip of Hokkaido, he comments at length on the heritage of each cherry variety as if they were his children, which, in a sense, they are.
Matsumae Park is Asari's creation. Each spring, more than 10,000 cherry trees bloom on its slopes overlooking the Tsugaru Strait. There are few more breathtaking sights than the multicolored canopies that stretch over miles of meandering paths.
Many of these cherries are the offspring of the 116 cultivars that he has created. As a group, these are known as Matsumae-zakura or Matsumae cherries.
No one in the world has created so many varieties. Yet, to Asari, a former primary school teacher and World War II historian, the cherry trees themselves are just one aspect of his passion. Equally important is what cherry trees symbolize for Japan and the world.
In the late 1950s, when Matsumae town asked Asari to create a small botanical park, he spurned the request. Instead, with the support of Hokkaido's governor, Asari turned the land into a sprawling cherry park as a symbol of international peace and friendship. The park opened in 1965.
Remorseful about Japan's aggression during the war, Asari wanted to atone.
Tens of thousands of Chinese and Koreans had been brought to Hokkaido to work in coal mines and on railway construction sites during the war, and many didn't survive. Allied soldiers captured in Asia and sent to Hokkaido had also been forced to work in inhumane conditions.
After researching Hokkaido's role in the war, Asari decided to send cherry trees to the countries from which the laborers came. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, Asari sent hundreds of trees to China, North Korea and South Korea. His gifts to Beijing and Pyongyang led to uncomfortable interviews with Japan's security services.
Matsumae Castle, the focal point of southern Hokkaido's Matsumae Park, where more than 10,000 cherry trees bloom on slopes overlooking the Tsugaru Strait. |
Jiro Moriyama
Some Matsumae trees grow in the U.S., thanks largely to Asari's friendship with Roland Jefferson, a botanist at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington. Jefferson accompanied Asari on several seed-hunting expeditions in Hokkaido. Asari also donated trees to Japanese communities in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and elsewhere.
In 1993, meanwhile, Windsor Great Park in England contacted Asari about buying his cherries. Asari immediately sent saplings as a gift, saying that he wanted to make amends for the mistreatment of former prisoners of war. Today, the U.K. boasts the largest collection of Matsumae cherries outside Japan. Among the most popular are the Beni-Yutaka, Matsumae-Fuki and Shizuka varieties.
Away from the trees in the royal park, another set of Matsumae cherries grows at Keele University in Staffordshire, England, which was visited on April 2 by Hiroshi Suzuki, Japan's ambassador to the U.K., and Paul Madden, former British ambassador to Japan. More Matsumae trees also grow in a garden in Kent that was the home of Collingwood "Cherry" Ingram, once Britain's foremost cherry authority.
Asari's legacy is also alive at Oxford University's Botanic Garden and Arboretum, which plans to plant several hundred cherry trees over the next couple of years.
Meanwhile, an English aristocrat, Jason Gathorne-Hardy, the heir to the Earl of Cranbrook, is creating a Matsumae cherry park on land he owns in Suffolk. Gathorne-Hardy planted six inaugural trees in the park in 2023.
Asari is amazed at the global interest in sakura. It's a remarkable transformation since 1931, when he was born in the Hokkaido village of Nanae. Raised by a subsistence farmer and his flower-loving wife, Asari was taught that the cherry trees in his garden symbolized love and friendship and must be revered.
Between the eighth century and the mid-19th century, Japanese gardeners created almost 300 different varieties of cherry. But many of these were forgotten or became extinct after the Meiji Restoration, which began in 1868. In their place, cloned cherry trees of one variety, called Somei-Yoshino, were planted throughout urban centers. This variety predominates in cities today.
Many of the cherries at Matsumae Park were created by Asari. |
Naoko Abe
As Japan trod the path to war, the symbolism of the cherries changed dramatically. During the second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War, soldiers were told to be prepared to fall like cherry blossoms for the emperor after a short but glorious life.
"It was all lies," said Asari, who detests any connection to the military ideology and preaches the necessity of diversity.
Asari caught the plant-hunting bug at his teacher training college in Hakodate, the present Hakodate University of Education, in the early 1950s from a botanical pioneer called Shigezo Sugawara. In 1956, on a cherry-hunting expedition on Mount Daisengen in southern Hokkaido , Asari discovered some wild cherry trees that were previously unknown in the region. That find propelled his desire to become a cherry specialist.
Many of Asari's creations were born with the help of pupils at the primary school where he taught. They collected seeds at temples and shrines and planted them at the school. One year, a sapling bore unusually beautiful pink blossoms with twice as many petals as its parent tree. It was clearly a new variety. Encouraged, Asari created other varieties by planting seeds and by artificial cross-pollination.
"Each tree had a unique drama, just like every pupil's life," he said. "And the trees helped the pupils to bond, connecting their lives to one another — and to me — over the years."
The most unusual of Asari's "sakura peace initiatives" came to light recently at a remote convent in southeastern Poland, near the Ukrainian border. In 1988, Asari sent hundreds of trees to Poland to commemorate a Catholic priest, Father Maximilian Kolbe, who the Nazis starved to death in 1941 at Auschwitz. Kolbe, who had lived as a missionary in Nagasaki between 1930 and 1936, came to Asari's attention in 1981 when he was canonized.
Most cherry trees from Hokkaido withered in Poland. But three trees are thriving, including Asari's Beni-Yutaka creation. He now talks about sending trees to Lviv, Ukraine, where Kolbe studied as a boy, after the Russia-Ukraine war is over.
"I'm just a little man from a village in the middle of nowhere in Japan, so it's hard to make a difference in the world," Asari said. "But if my cherries can help spread some happiness and avoid war, then it's all worthwhile, and I can sleep soundly."
Naoko Abe is the author of "'Cherry' Ingram, The Englishman Who Saved Japan's Blossoms." The U.S. edition is called "The Sakura Obsession." Her new book, "The Martyr and the Red Kimono," focuses on the life of Father Maximilian Kolbe and Asari's "sakura peace initiatives." A Japanese edition will be published in July.