When West Met East and Bloomed its Cherries

Abstract

This paper builds itself on the story of Collingwood Ingram as elaborated by the journalist and non-fiction writer Naoko Abe in her book The Sakura Obsession - The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms published in the United States, in March 2019, after it had been first launched in Japan, three years earlier, in the same spring month of 2016. This is the Story, with capital S, as C.S. Lewis would have referred to it, in that that it bestows upon the reader “unexpectedness . . . that delights” (Lewis, On Stories), describing an epiphanic encounter of East and West which restored the fading colours of cherry blossoms on the ‘woodblock prints’ of the realm of the Rising Sun.