Cherry Blossom Festivals Books

This is an excellent book if you would like to get an overview and history of Washington DC's Cherry Blossom Festival. There's some really good historical photographs and drawings and it was enjoyable to read about the development, meaning, symbolism, etc. of the Cherry Blossom Festival. I would rate this book 4.5 stars only because while there are some great photos of the spectacular trees there aren't nearly as many as there should be. This is a great book if you are new to Washington and/or looking for a gift.

Lots of illustrations and facts about the role of the cherry blossom tree in diplomacy and landscapes. Info on the trees' cultivation, how the U.S. got the trees, places outside of Washington, DC to see them.

The author has worked at the Smithsonian and is a resident of D.C.

The book is very detailed and wonderfully illustrated. It starts with the traditions and roots of Cherry Blossom Festivals from Japan. Then it explians how the cherry blossom trees came to Washington and how the US picked up the traditions of the Cherry Blossom Festival. It ends with a chapter about how to care for cherry blossoms and how they exist, not only in cities of Japan and Washington, D.C., but also in other parts of the US, such as New York and Ohio, Missouri and California. Lovely book.
Funny enough, the book was printed in China.

With great drawings, this light text proceeds through the seasons of Japan explaining the holidays. References to food, culture and customs are made throughout. Great way to learn about Japanese celebrations.

A beautiful book. Betty Reynolds is an American who was a keen observer while living in Japan. Her illustrations are wonderful and she covers the whole year and includes a lot of Japanese words (with pronunciations and explanations). There is so much information packed into a very easy to read and beautiful format. I highly recommend any of Betty Reynolds' bookds to anyone who wants to understand Japanese culture or who is studying Japanese.

The book that I ordered was SUPPOSED to have 48 PAGES. The book that I recieved in the mail ONLY has 16 PAGES. I have emailed the seller and I have not heard from them. They sold me a book that is NOT supposed to be sold, it says so on the in side the cover. I called Barns and Noble and they said that it is a copy for book stores to review before they buy many copies. I paid for a incomplete book!!!!! Very disappointed!

IF I had gotten the whole 48 page book, I believe that it would have been a really great book to teach students about the many different holidays that are celebrated in Japan. That is what I was going to use it for but since all of the pages were not there I could not use the book. I'm sure that if I had the full 48 page book I would have given it five stars and a better review.

Using the long-running Cherry Blossom Festival as a vehicle, Christine Yano assembled nothing less than a socioethnic treatise of a rather closed and close-knit segment of Hawaii, Japanese Americans. Reading more like a thesis than a book for general distribution, Crowning the Nice Girl compels the reader to examine through the contestants in the beauty pagaent the evolution of AJA societal mores (here I go sounding like the author -- and not that there is anything wrong with that), from the requirement of having a Japanese surname, to allowing a token mixed-race contestant, to allowing one to win as long as she had a Japanese surname and didn't look non Japanese, and finally to hapa Catherine Toth's wonderful breakthrough crowning in 2004.

Niceness is part of the stereotype of Japanese Americans in Hawaii. They are seen and see themselves as avoiding controversy, promoting social harmony, blending in, and working diligently without complaint. This is the stereotype of the docile plantation worker, the reliable bureaucrat, and efficient secretary. This stereotype ignores historical incidents of labor strikes led by Japanese workers. It ignores the very deliberate negotiations and maneuvering that resulted in the Democratic Revolution of 1954, which swept Japanese Americans into political office. More recently, it ignores the favoritism and cronyism of Japanese Americans in power who hand put lucrative jobs and contracts to insiders (Yano 241).

At the end of the Second World War, Japanese Americans sought to carve out a space of their own - the Cherry Blossom Festival (CBF) would be this space of "emplacement" (Yano 5, 37). In the early `50s the Honolulu Japanese Junior Chamber of Commerce (HJCC) created the CBF as a local Japanese Hawaiian event - focusing on an upwardly mobile urban elite situated squarely in Honolulu (Yano 3, 52-53). The CBF was to be the flagship event that would exemplify the qualities and self description of the local HJCC vis-à-vis the local Issei, Nisei, and Sansei in O'ahu in general but Honolulu in particular (Yano 240-242).

The book starts with the CBF beauty pageant in particular but also explores its place in the vast array of Asian American beauty pageants and deftly problematizes their place in the general practice of community formation. In the process, Yano uncovers other "issues" that entrenched in community histories, and moves to examine their transnational impact (Yano 43-44 and 128-129). Modeled on the Miss America contest, this process can be seen as a space of contestation as well as adherence. On the one hand, Yano observes the pageant becoming "Japanese" as the focus is placed on the contestants "niceness" as opposed to how well they can carry themselves in a swimsuit. On the other hand, the confusion surrounding the description of the CBF as "beauty pageant" against a "cultural pageant" still looms ominously over the same (Yano 20, 24, 238-239). Turning back to a more quotidian analysis - Yano examines the pageant throughout the decades from its inception all the way through to the 1990s. The analysis moves from describing the day to day events to the ever changing goals of the HJCC and the internal struggles of the contestants. If there is any shortcoming to be identified - it was the lack of `herstories" - extensive narratives drawn from interviews with CBF queens - that draw you into intimate conversation with the former winners and contestants. I like people - that is just me - so I just wanted to read more. The "herstories" strategy of including the stories "in her own words" is both a powerful yet intimate source of insight. Yano's intervention is unique in that it situates touchy issues such as race, ethnicity, and community and fuses these themes with the tricky notions niceness, spectacle and banality.

Yano walks a really fine line between objective academic outsider and feeling "Nice Girl" insider. The quote above almost compels her to self-censor her work in an effort to avoid offending - if at all - members of a community she is involved in. The quote above reminds us of the dangerous stereotype of the "Model Minority." My read, and this could very well be off-the-mark, is that this book placed a different texture to the whole debate of the model minority and the struggle for civil rights. It seems like one would be, like Yano herself, to not want to run roughshod over the "Nice Girls" that represent the "Nice Community." However, it is this very niceness that informed the discourse began by white civil society to coin terms like the "Model Minority" (or a close facsimile of it). The term "Problem Minority" was first used in print in the New York Times Magazine on January 9, 1966 in an article called: "Success Story: Japanese American Style" by sociologist William Peterson.

"Crowning the Nice Girl" is a sensitive analysis of the ironic need for spectacle in a realm that celebrates banality (Yano 5-7). The resilience of the pageant through its decades of development to the present within multiple frameworks of gender, class, and race/ethnicity is intimately explained (Yano 245). Yano writes, "Japanese Americans became privileged members of the mainstream, and the CBF"s very banality proved that they no longer needed to substantiate their power. Banality, then, may be considered the privilege of the already emplaced (Yano 245). An amazing archivist, Yano reaches into a broad range of primary sources to draw this picture of a community in transition. Yano utilizes the CBF annual reports, interviews with former CBF winners, contestants, and HJCC organizers. Using an ethnographic method - Yano situates herself as an insider as a volunteer in the CBF's Fiftieth Annual Festival. Using the pageant as a foil what Yano really paints is a multifaceted picture of community in flux - dynamic in its search for "emplacement." In the end, problematizing the pageant makes Yano anything but the "Nice Girl" described above but it is the Yano that I appreciate for having the courage and skill to create this work. Do not let the brevity of this review fool you into thinking I only "liked" the book - it is one of the most profound cultural examinations I have had the pleasure to read.

Miguel Llora