"Nothing is so beautiful as Spring," declared a poet looking about him at this time of year more than 120 springs ago. He wasn't a Japanese poet; he was an English one. Still, he seems to have grasped the essence of the season pretty well, even though in this particular sonnet he was recommending the viewing of "peartree blooms" -- a concept sure to strike cherry-blossom-loving Japan as positively deviant.
The point is that as the spring-tide peaked across Japan this past week, the literatures of many different cultures were there to remind us that it was simultaneously peaking right around the Northern Hemisphere. Poets of every language have always found the "juice and joy" of spring irresistible: English, certainly, is extraordinarily rich in literary tributes to the season of renewal. Watching pale cherry petals flutter to the ground (or into upraised sake cups) around Tokyo lately, observers steeped in the English-language tradition will inevitably have been reminded, not of Basho or Issa or Buson, but of A.E. Housman:
. . . And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.