With Japan’s athletes shining at the Tokyo Olympics, this summer feels hotter and more fired up than usual. Not a “sacred flame,” but a flower that suits midsummer: the crape myrtles along Uchibori-dori on the Imperial Palace side of the building. About 50 trees line the roughly 200-meter sidewalk, blooming in vivid red, pink, and white.
The building takes part in Tokyo’s “Fureai Road Program” and continues to tend the plantings along the sidewalk, including the crape myrtles. The name sarusuberi—“monkey slip”—comes from the slick bark, and the trunks are as worth looking at as the flowers.
Because bloom follows bloom for a long stretch in midsummer, when few other flowers are out, it is also called hyakujitsuko, “hundred-day red.” There are several stories about another nickname, kusuguri-no-ki, “the tickle tree”—one is that the limbs look like human arms and make you want to tickle them. So many names suggest how dear the flower has been to the Japanese.