The Optimistic Cherry

Some time in late February, before a single bud has opened in Tokyo, the konbini turn pink. The Lawson near me swapped its winter display overnight - oden one week, a wall of pastel the next. Sakura latte. Sakura mochi. Sakura milk pudding. A pink can of beer I didn't buy. The blossoms were weeks away. The flavour had already arrived.

I've spent enough springs here to stop trusting the timing, so this year I paid attention to the taste instead. What does sakura actually taste of? Not cherries. It never did.

What's Actually In It

Bite into a proper sakura sweet and the flavour isn't fruit. It's leaf. Specifically a salt-pickled cherry leaf, sakura no ha, cured until it turns soft and translucent and gives off a smell somewhere between hay, almond and old vanilla.

That smell is one compound doing nearly all the work: coumarin.^[1] Here's the part I find genuinely good. In a living cherry leaf, coumarin is odourless - locked up, dormant, nothing to smell. It only wakes when you break the cell walls, which is what salting and drying do.^[2] So "sakura flavour" isn't the scent of a blossom at all. It's the scent of a leaf being preserved. The fragrance is a by-product of the pickling.

The leaves come mostly from one variety, the Oshima cherry, prized because it carries more coumarin than the rest.^[1] And they come, overwhelmingly, from one small place. Around 70 per cent of Japan's salt-pickled cherry leaf is produced in Matsuzaki, a town on the Izu Peninsula in Shizuoka.^[3] The leaves are picked by hand through summer, packed into barrels with salt, and left for roughly half a year before they smell of anything at all.

The curing-season scent over Matsuzaki is officially registered - it's on the Ministry of the Environment's list of the country's hundred best fragrance landscapes.^[3] The smell of spring, it turns out, is a bureaucratically recognised by-product of pickling. I love that.

If you've read Yuki on osechi, this will sound familiar. So much of what reads as "traditional Japanese flavour" is really the taste of preservation - salt, time, the chemistry of keeping food from spoiling. Sakura is the prettiest example. It's a cured leaf in a pink costume.

The Pink Wave

None of which stops the marketing, and the marketing is the real season.

The pink products land weeks before the bloom and stay weeks after. Starbucks put out its sakura line on 18 February this year - the flagship drink a white-peach Frappuccino at ¥687 takeaway^[4] - while Tokyo's first blossoms weren't expected until late March. The konbini sakura mochi was on the shelf from 24 February^[5] and stays there into May, long after the petals have gone brown in the gutters. The flavour brackets the bloom on both sides. It always outlasts it.

Most of what's sold in that window has no leaf in it whatsoever. The Starbucks drink leads with white peach; the sakura part is syrup, pink colour and a scatter of pastel shavings. It's pretty. It tastes of peach. There's a sakura KitKat that returns most springs, white chocolate dusted with cherry-leaf powder and sold as an exam-season good-luck charm - "sakura saku," the blossoms bloom, meaning you passed.^[6] That one at least has the leaf in it.

I don't begrudge any of it. Pink sells, and a pink latte in February is a small cheerful lie about how soon spring is coming. But let's be clear about what most of it is: colour and association, sold as flavour. The pink is the product. The taste is incidental.

This is the same trick as White Day, really - an industry finding a date on the calendar and filling it with things to buy. Sakura just has better branding, because the season was already beautiful before anyone tried to bottle it.

Where It Earns It

It does earn it, though. Sometimes.

Sakura mochi is the case for the defence. A soft pink rice cake around sweet red-bean paste, wrapped in one of those salt-pickled leaves - and the leaf is the entire point. It cuts the sugar. You get the floral, hay-sweet coumarin note, then a clean line of salt underneath that stops the whole thing collapsing into sweetness. Eat it with the leaf on. People debate this; they're wrong. The leaf is the seasoning.

There are two versions and they're worth knowing apart. The Kansai style, Domyoji, uses coarse-ground glutinous rice, so it's grainy and chewy. The Tokyo style, Chomeiji, wraps the bean paste in a thin smooth pink crepe.^[7] Same leaf, two textures. I prefer the Domyoji, but that's a texture preference, not a verdict - the Tokyo one is the more elegant object.

The cheapest honest version costs almost nothing. 7-Eleven's own sakura mochi is ¥188^[5] and it uses the actual salt-pickled leaf, with Hokkaido red bean and domestic rice. I'd put it up against a wagashi counter without embarrassment. It does the one thing the ¥687 Frappuccino doesn't: it tastes of the thing it's named after.

And the most honest version of all is the least pink. Sakura-yu is just hot water poured over a single salt-pickled blossom, which unfurls in the cup.^[8] It's served at weddings and formal first meetings, green tea being avoided because the word for it can suggest leaving. It's barely sweet. It tastes mostly of salt and a faint floral ghost. That, more than any latte, is what cherry blossom actually tastes like. Mostly salt. A little perfume. Not much, and honest about it.

The Verdict

Sakura isn't a flavour the way strawberry or matcha is a flavour. It's a smell - coumarin from a cured leaf - plus a colour, plus the collective agreement that spring is here and we should all feel something about it.

Buy the things that use the real leaf and skip the ones that only use the colour. A ¥188 sakura mochi is worth more than most of the pink on the shelf above it. The latte is fine. The mochi is the point.

And if you want to know what the blossom genuinely tastes of, skip the lot and steep one pickled flower in hot water. It tastes of salt and a little spring. The cherry was always optimistic about the cherry.