Quote Originally Posted by nova
I heard a curious explanation about this by a japanese teacher when another student asked regarding that; in many tragic stories of love -sort of Romeo and Juliet type-, the main characters seal their forbidden love by committing suicide together under a cherry tree (while it blooms of course), the cherry tree works as symbolism of their pure love that dies young.
And how many Japanese actually know about that story ? Nobody ever told me about it, and yet I asked a lot of questions about cherry trees to many people while I was in Japan. Even if they knew about it, it never was clearly associated in their minds with the reason why they like cherry blossoms.