Cherry Blossoms
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40 free Cherry Blossoms trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Cherry blossoms last about a week, and that brevity is the point. In Japan the flowers have shaped poetry, picnics, coins and even weather forecasts for more than a thousand years, and the trees have since travelled the world as gifts of friendship. This quiz covers the whole story: how the trees grow and why they bloom together, the customs and foods of Japan's blossom season, the long and occasionally bumpy history of the trees in Washington, and the spring festivals now held from Georgia to northern Europe. It suits anyone planning a festival trip, teachers looking for a spring classroom round, and trivia hosts who want questions with a story behind each answer.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Japanese word names the custom, said to date from the Nara period, of picnicking under blooming cherry trees?
Hanami
Hanami means flower viewing, and the custom began among the elite of the Imperial Court before spreading to the samurai and then to ordinary people.
Q 02Why do Yoshino cherry trees planted side by side all burst into full bloom at almost the same moment?
They are clones
They are clones, each grafted from another tree rather than grown from seed, so every Yoshino has the same genes and answers spring warmth in the same way.
Q 03Why did American officials burn the first 2,000 cherry trees that Japan shipped to Washington in 1910?
They were full of insects
They were full of insects and nematodes, so inspectors had them destroyed to protect American growers, and Japan answered with a healthier gift of 3,020 trees.
Q 04The scent of cherry blossoms, which comes mainly from the compound coumarin, is usually likened to which flavoring?
Vanilla
Vanilla is the usual comparison, yet coumarin can harm the liver in large doses, which is why the blossoms are cured before anyone eats them.
Q 05Japan's national team in which sport is nicknamed the Brave Blossoms and wears a sakura emblem on its jerseys?
Rugby union
Rugby union it is: the team has worn the flower since its first internationals in the 1930s, drawn as a bud, a half-open bloom and a full one.
Q 06Which Georgia city, planted with some 300,000 Yoshino trees, calls itself the Cherry Blossom Capital of the World?
Macon
Macon owes its trees to realtor William Fickling, who found one in his own yard and gave away so many saplings that he became the city's Johnny Appleseed.
Q 07Which president's wife planted the first of Washington's Japanese cherry trees in West Potomac Park in March 1912?
Helen Taft
Helen Taft planted it beside Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador, then handed her a bouquet of American Beauty roses.
Q 08Japan's cherry blossom season opens each January in which island prefecture, months before the flowers reach Tokyo?
Okinawa
Okinawa blooms first, and forecasters then follow the so-called cherry blossom front as it sweeps north, reaching Hokkaido last.
Q 09A teasing Japanese proverb says most cherry blossom picnickers care less about the flowers than about which food?
Dumplings
Dumplings rather than flowers, the saying goes, poking fun at people who turn up for the food and drink more than the view.
Q 10Which flowering tree did the United States give Japan in return for the cherry trees planted in Washington in 1912?
Dogwood
Dogwood trees went to the people of Japan, and the exchange kept going: in 1982 Japan took cuttings from Washington's cherries to replace trees lost in a flood.
Q 11Which Washington reservoir, built to flush a nearby harbor channel, is ringed by the capital's best-known cherry trees?
Tidal Basin
Tidal Basin planting ran from 1913 to 1920 and used Yoshinos, which made up 1,800 of Japan's gift trees, while the other eleven varieties went to East Potomac Park.
Q 12Which everyday Japanese coin, switched from silver to cupronickel in 1967, has shown cherry blossoms ever since?
100 yen
100 yen coins gained their sakura in the year silver was dropped, a change that set off hoarding and the smuggling of old coins abroad to be melted.
Q 13In Japan, cherry blossoms are tied to fresh starts because which annual milestone begins in April, as the trees bloom?
The school year
Q 21In 1938, women chained themselves together in Washington to stop cherry trees being felled for which planned monument?
Jefferson Memorial
Jefferson Memorial builders settled the standoff with a compromise: more cherry trees were planted along the south side of the water to frame the new building.
Q 22During World War II, which word replaced Japanese in the name of Washington's cherry trees to deter vandals?
Oriental
Oriental flowering cherry trees was the wartime label, adopted after four trees were cut down four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Q 23Botanist David Fairchild, who trialed Japanese cherry trees in Maryland in 1906, married which inventor's daughter?
Alexander Graham Bell
The school year starts in April, as does the fiscal year, and most Japanese schools have cherry trees planted outside, so first days fall under blossom.
Q 14The Ohka of World War II, whose name means cherry blossom, was which kind of Japanese weapon?
Kamikaze aircraft
Kamikaze aircraft is the grim answer: the rocket-powered Ohka was dropped from a bomber and flown by its pilot into a ship, and Allied troops nicknamed it the Baka, or fool.
Q 15Before cherry blossoms took over in the Heian period, which tree's flowers did Japan's Nara-era elite gather to admire?
Plum
Plum blossoms came first, a taste copied from Chinese parties of poetry and wine, and Japanese still has a word, umemi, for going to see them.
Q 16Sakuramochi, a pink spring rice cake filled with red bean paste, comes wrapped in a cherry leaf prepared in which way?
Pickled in salt
Pickled in salt water, the leaf is edible, though whether to eat it or peel it off is left to personal preference.
Q 17Japan marked a historic event of 1990 by donating thousands of cherry trees to which European capital?
Berlin
Berlin received them to mark German reunification, and donations from the Japanese public paid for more than 9,000 trees along the old dividing line.
Q 18Which Nintendo video game series signals the start of spring by turning many of its trees into flowering cherries?
Animal Crossing
Animal Crossing treats the blossom as shorthand for spring, and in April 2020 Washington locals were reported getting their cherry blossom fix inside the game.
Q 19The Miharu Takizakura, a Fukushima cherry tree over 1,000 years old, is named for which natural feature it resembles?
A waterfall
A waterfall is what its pink branches suggest as they spill in every direction, and some 300,000 people a year visit the farming town of Miharu to see it.
Q 20Which president's wife accepted Japan's 1965 gift of 3,800 more Yoshino cherry trees for the city of Washington?
Lady Bird Johnson
Lady Bird Johnson received trees that were, oddly for a present from Japan, grown in the United States, and many went onto the Washington Monument grounds.
Alexander Graham Bell became his father-in-law, and the Fairchilds liked their imported trees so much that they began urging Washington to line its avenues with them.
Q 24Ornamental cherry trees belong to the genus Prunus, which also includes apricots and which widely eaten nut?
Almond
Almond trees are close cousins, and the family likeness has a dark side: cherry seeds contain amygdalin and should not be eaten.
Q 25Which former Japanese capital holds cherry blossom bloom records reaching back about 1,200 years, to the year 812?
Kyoto
Kyoto's records show full bloom holding steady for about a thousand years, then sliding steadily earlier from the 1800s onward.
Q 26Yozakura, a custom popular in Tokyo's Ueno Park, means enjoying cherry blossoms under which conditions?
At night
At night is the answer: the word means night cherry blossom, and parks hang temporary paper lanterns in the branches for the occasion.
Q 27Which New Jersey city's Branch Brook Park grew its 5,000 cherry trees from a 1927 gift by a store magnate's sister?
Newark
Newark got its trees from Caroline Bamberger Fuld, whose brother Louis ran Bamberger's department store, in what is also America's first county park.
Q 28Which Canadian city, home to about 40,000 cherry trees, has held a spring festival in their honor since 2005?
Vancouver
Vancouver's festival was founded by Linda Poole to commemorate 800 cherry trees that Japan gave the city, a stock that has since multiplied fifty times over.
Q 29Irezumi, which often pairs cherry blossoms with koi, dragons or tigers, is the traditional Japanese form of which art?
Tattooing
Tattooing was outlawed by Japan's government at the start of the Meiji period, which left irezumi and its blossoms with a lasting whiff of criminality.
Q 30Which Heian-era classic first used the Japanese word for flower viewing to mean cherry blossom viewing?
The Tale of Genji
The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu's novel, also gives a whole chapter, Hana no En, to a cherry blossom banquet, a title often translated as The Festival of the Cherry Blossoms.