Celebrate Japanese Culture with Family Day on April 5

If your family is in the Washington D.C. area on Saturday, April 5, 2025, join us at the Library of Congress for Japanese Culture Day from 10:00 a.m. to 3 p.m. This annual celebration is one of the Library’s most popular family-friendly events, and a chance for children of all ages to learn about Japanese culture through crafts, stories, collection items and performances.

The day’s activities include origami, calligraphy, making paper cherry blossoms, and more. Cherry Blossom Festival Princesses will be on hand for a tiara-making activity. Storytelling sessions will happen at 10:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. Shamisen traditional musical instrument demonstrations take place at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. You’ll need to reserve free timed-entry passes for building entry. A limited number are released at 9:00 a.m. daily, but it’s a good idea to get them in advance to be sure of availability.

Cherry blossom season in Washington is a sure sign that spring is well and truly here, and one of the prettiest sights in the city. The area’s best-known cluster of Japanese cherry trees burst into spectacular bloom around the Tidal Basin near the National Mall and monuments, drawing crowds in their thousands. The spectacle is even more special due to the brief time the delicate pink and white flowers last. “Peak bloom” only lasts a few days, and it can be cut short by wind, rain, a late snowstorm, or unseasonable heat. The Library’s Japanese Culture Day is part of the Cherry Blossom Festival, celebrated every year with much crossing of fingers that the festival dates will coincide with the flowering of the trees.

The Tidal Basin cherry trees have a long history.  On March 27, 1912, First Lady Helen Taft and the wife of the Japanese ambassador planted the first trees there, part of a gift from Japan to the United States. You can read all about the event and how the trees came to D.C. in the blog post Field of Cherries. Two of the original 1912 trees are on Library grounds, transplanted to create more space for the seedlings at the Tidal Basin.

If you can’t join us for Japanese Culture Day this year, you can always create your own cherry blossom festival at home. The pretty, delicate flowers are perfect for homemade crafting of all kinds. Even if there are no cherry trees nearby for some real “hanami” or blossom viewing, with access to the Library website, a printer and some paper or cardstock you can come up with inventive and creative ways to celebrate this brief season.

The Library’s Free to Use and Reuse Sets of Cherry Blossoms and Japanese Prints provide plenty of copyright-free images that you can adapt however you wish. Printing out photographs or pictures is a quick and easy way to produce attractive bookmarks that would make lovely gifts packaged up with a book or two.

 Alternatively, try your hand at making paper cherry blossoms. The art of paper folding has a long history in Japanese culture, as shown in this print from the 1770s. There are many online resources for origami flowers, some of which are quite easy and quick to do after a little practice. Try making cherry blossoms from tissue, crepe or any kind of paper you have on hand, or from downloaded images from the collections. This digitized 1916 booklet of paper flowers doesn’t specifically mention cherry blossoms, but several of the templates on pages 5 and 6 are a suitable shape. Once you have a batch of flowers, tape them to some bare branches or string them together to make a decorative garland.

Your origami experiments don’t have to be limited to cherry blossoms. Colleague Jennifer Ezell was inspired by items she saw at an earlier Japanese Culture Day to create origami shrimp and cicadas. She documented the process in two blog posts which outline the steps for you to try this at home.

Even if you don’t see any blooming cherry trees in the next few weeks, we hope the images and resources above will put you in a happy, spring-like frame of mind. And remember, the Library’s Japanese Culture Day is an annual event, so we hope to see you at a future celebration if you’re unable to join us in person this year.

Additional Resources:

The Library’s huge collections include many items related to cherry trees and to Japan:

• The Asian Reading Room is home to the Japanese Collection that the Library began to acquire in the late 1800s. You can learn about some of the rarest digitized holdings here.
• The Library’s digitized collection of historic newspapers includes a research guide devoted to cherry blossom trees.
• The blog post Photographers and the Cherry Blossoms of D.C. captures images of people enjoying the Tidal Basin trees in bloom in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s.
• The exhibition Sakura: Cherry Blossoms as Living Symbols of Friendship opened to mark the centennial of the 1912 gift. Related resources include a video tour of the exhibition, and a beautiful accompanying book featuring items from the collections.
• This five-minute video looks at Japan’s centuries-old cherry blossom viewing traditions.