1912 Hanami, 2024

In 1912, cherry blossoms were introduced in Washington, D.C., as symbols of Japan’s diplomatic goodwill. In Korea, however, the same species were mobilized as environmental designs of colonial governance. The Yoshino cherry trees, gifted to Washington by Yukio Ozaki, then Mayor of Tokyo, were staged as diplomatic-aesthetic emblems of modernity and peace. In the early colonial period (circa 1910s–1920s), under the Government-General’s urban amenities program, Changgyeonggung was refashioned as Changgyeongwon; cherry-tree plantings formalized this conversion through a governmental park program. After crossing the Pacific, the same blossoms assumed a different mandate in Seoul—no longer as gifts of diplomacy but as tools of colonial landscaping.

These plantings were integral to the Government-General’s urban landscaping regime, reframing royal grounds as recreational amenities and disciplining perception through promenades, vistas, and seasonal spectacles. Within this regime, the blossoms at Changgyeongwon functioned not as tokens of friendship but as agents of bureaucratic landscaping, via planned planting and path-layout schemes that inscribed jurisdiction over royal grounds. Their presence overwrote Korean royal heritage and visually enshrined colonial authority, embedding jurisdiction within the colonial landscape.

The bifurcated staging—friendship in Washington, domination in Seoul—demonstrates Japan’s capacity to instrumentalize the same landscape emblem as diplomatic soft power abroad and as a mode of inscription within the colonial order in Seoul. The blossoms reconstituted the royal grounds as state-sanctioned ecological displays of governance. This dual deployment reveals how colonial regimes used an aesthetic infrastructure that framed governance as environmental inevitability. It prepared the ground for what might be called ‘common-sense ecology.’

“Common-sense ecology” denotes the colonial naturalization of engineered landscapes as self-evident and apolitical, rendering ideological design as environmentally given. Such interventions exemplify how ecological symbols, staged as benign, became administrative structures of colonial governance—aligning managerial procedures, planning protocols, and aesthetic conventions to stabilize imperial authority. This ‘common-sense ecology’ functioned as a normalizing design, binding environmental aesthetics to governmental authority. Over time, the blossoms were reappropriated into Korean cultural identity, an adaptive absorption that occluded their colonial genesis even as communities selectively adopted, modified, or resisted their meanings.

Photographic albums, postcards, and tourist brochures circulated these blossoms as visual evidence of modern governance. They turned the seasonal bloom into a recurring archive of imperial presence. In ritual and seasonal practice, these symbols migrated from coercive imposition to vernacular rearticulation, folding domestic temporality into imperial design while admitting fissures of counter-readings. This adaptive negotiation—at once affective and practical—reveals the anthropological texture of power’s modulation within everyday life. The persistence of these landscapes shows that colonial design mechanisms do not simply vanish but are reinscribed into shifting temporalities of nation-building and memory. Even after 1945, the continued presence of these trees blurred the distinction between colonial residue and national tradition, embedding ambivalence into postcolonial memory.

Common-sense ecology thus emerges as both environmental manipulation and narrative control, suturing environment to governance.