Beyond the cherry blossoms, a language barrier grows

WASHINGTON — It is often the tradition in Japan to celebrate the pale-pink arrival of the cherry blossoms by sitting beneath the canopy of a blooming tree with family and friends and pouring some sake. And some beer. And then singing and dancing — after several more rounds of sake and then more beer, late into the evening.

This is not necessarily how Washingtonians celebrate the blossoms. And in fact, the sake and beer part is very much against National Park Service regulations.

So as more and more Japanese tourists flock to the nation's capital to appreciate the fleeting splendor of cherry trees grown in U.S. soil, organizers of the National Cherry Blossom Festival are trawling universities, businesses, embassies, government agencies and even Buddhist temples to find Japanese speakers who can greet the influx of visitors and offer directions and translation — particularly concerning such matters as Washington's open-container law.

"More and more Japanese have come to realize this is quite an event. It used to be nothing more than a 10- or 15-second shot of the trees blossoming in Washington on Japanese TV. But now, Japanese tourists are coming to D.C. just for this festival," said John Malott, a former U.S. ambassador who heads the Japan-America Society of Washington.

Seeing the blossoms during the Washington festival is becoming a popular way for Japanese to visit the United States. Flights from Tokyo are packed this time of year, tour groups promote U.S. blossom tours and one Japanese university even postponed the start of its semester because of the Washington festival, this year March 25-April 9.

"We have tour brokers calling us to ask if the trees have blossomed. And we're already getting calls from groups who want to come next year ... ," said Diana Mayhew, executive director of the National Cherry Blossom Festival.

Airlines, tour groups and hotels all report increases in the number of visitors from Japan for the festival that celebrates that country's culture and its gift of thousands of cherry trees to the United States in 1912.

These visitors arrive and find their way to the Tidal Basin and the blossoms, but then often get lost in the Mall area's tangle of streets, on-ramps and traffic circles. It doesn't get much easier when they knock on the door of the National Park Service's information trailer, only to find a language barrier, said Bill Line, spokesman for the service's National Capital Region.

"We'd like to be able to help them, to have them enjoy a better experience while here," Line said.

The National Park Service has about 20 Japanese speakers as volunteers, but it needs dozens more.

One translator who helped at the festival last year and will be volunteering again is Renwick Bivings, a tall, thin 17-year-old with low-slung jeans and a killer Japanese comic book collection. In his near-perfect Japanese — his teacher in Osaka last year said she often forgets he is American — Bivings has answered questions about the White House, the FBI, fast-food restaurants and U.S. cities.

"It was really funny, explaining suburbs to them. They look around and they know they're in the nation's capital, but they can't see any houses. They keep asking me where Americans live," Bivings said.

And there is Joelle Williams, whose voice sounds as delicate as a cherry blossom when she speaks Japanese. She helps run the Japanese Exchange and Teaching Program and will be at the Tidal Basin to answer the same questions she almost always hears from Japanese visitors.

"They want to hear all about the FBI and the Pentagon and the CIA — all those things they see in movies," Williams said.

Bivings and Williams will be joined by a more polished bunch, the Cherry Blossom Goodwill Ambassadors, six young women in blossom-pink, tailored wool blazers and pumps, plus one young man (who doesn't have to wear pink). They will be at all the festival events.

For other volunteers such as Rudy D'Alessandro, an "international cooperation specialist" for the National Park Service, there is joy in teaching the visitors. There is a lovely fact few of them know — that many of the cherry trees in Tokyo that replaced those that were destroyed during World War II are the cuttings of the very trees along the Tidal Basin.

"It's a gift from one country to another, and not a lot of people know that," D'Alessandro said.