What is the national flower of Japan?

The cherry blossom, sakura, though it has no formal legal status - the chrysanthemum is the imperial crest and appears on the passport. Sakura's position comes from something else, which is that the whole country tracks its flowering as a national event. The meteorological agency issues a blossom forecast, the front moves north over weeks, and people book time under the trees.

The point of it is the brevity. The flowers last about a week and are considered most beautiful as they fall - an aesthetic of transience with a long literary history, and a straightforwardly Buddhist reading of impermanence. Hanami, blossom viewing, has been a public custom since at least the Heian period.

That same association was deliberately weaponised in the 1930s and 40s. The imagery of a young life falling at its most beautiful was attached to soldiers and then explicitly to the kamikaze units, whose aircraft carried painted blossoms and one of whose formations was named after a cherry variety. The trees Japan gave to Washington in 1912 were cut down in retaliation after Pearl Harbor by vandals, and later replanted - and cuttings from the Washington trees were eventually sent back to Japan to restore a grove that had been lost.