Cherry Blossom Emoji

A pink cherry blossom (sakura, 桜) with five petals. 🌸 is one of the most culturally loaded emojis in the Unicode standard, compressing over a millennium of Japanese aesthetic tradition into a single pastel flower. It was approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) and inherited directly from Japanese carrier emoji sets, where it existed because cherry blossoms are a national symbol, not a decorative one.

In Japan, the emoji pulls on hanami (花見, flower viewing), mono no aware (物の哀れ, the pathos of things), and the national spring calendar. In the West, it mostly means "soft, pink, pretty." The gap between those two readings is what makes 🌸 interesting. Nobody posting a sakura emoji to their Instagram bio is thinking about Heian-period aristocrats, but the meaning the emoji carries arrived with all of that in tow.

The flower's symbolic weight is dominated by one idea: transience. Sakura bloom spectacularly for about two weeks and then scatter. That brevity is not a flaw, it's the point. 🌸 is the emoji of a culture that built an aesthetic philosophy around the fact that beauty doesn't last.

🌸 is the dominant "soft pink" emoji on the internet. On Instagram and TikTok it anchors the aesthetic cluster: pastel grids, golden-hour selfies, soft-girl summer, cottagecore, and "main character energy" springtime content. It's the most-used flower emoji in bios alongside 🌷 and 🌻, and it rarely reads as romantic in the way 🌹 does.

On Twitter/X it spikes every year in late March and early April when Japanese sakura season is active and Washington D.C.'s National Cherry Blossom Festival is running (2026 festival: March 20 through April 12). The emoji's use pattern is seasonal in a way most emojis aren't. It peaks hard for six weeks and then drifts.

In Japanese and Korean internet culture, 🌸 is specifically spring: cherry trees in full bloom, school entrance ceremonies (which start in April), and the social ritual of hanami picnics. In K-drama discourse it gets attached to romantic cherry-blossom scenes, which are a genre staple for confession and reconciliation.

When a guy sends 🌸 to a girl, it usually means beauty or spring vibes, not flirtation. Unlike the cherry emoji 🍒, 🌸 has stayed wholesome. Quillbot and Emojipedia both note that the cherry blossom has no suggestive layer, which is unusual for a pink flower.

🌸 is one of the most culturally specific emojis in Unicode, and its origin stretches back over a thousand years before any computer.

Hanami (花見, 'flower viewing') dates to the Nara period (710–794), when Japanese aristocrats gathered to admire plum blossoms imported from China. By the Heian period (794–1185), cherry blossoms had replaced plum as the preferred flower, and hanami moved from the court to the general population. The Manyōshū, Japan's oldest poetry anthology (c. 759 CE), contains over 40 poems specifically about cherry blossoms.

The philosophical layer is mono no aware (物の哀れ, 'the pathos of things'), articulated most famously by the 18th-century scholar Motoori Norinaga. Sakura became the primary example: beauty is most moving precisely because it doesn't last. This idea is central to Japanese literature, film (Kurosawa, Ozu), and gardening.

The symbol was militarized in the late 19th century when cherry trees were planted at Yasukuni Shrine, where war dead are enshrined. Through the Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa eras, the state rebuilt sakura as a nationalist symbol. During WWII, kamikaze units carried cherry petal insignia and fallen soldiers were described as 'scattered cherry blossoms.' Anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney's book *Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms* is the definitive academic treatment.

Postwar Japan gradually pried the symbol back toward its older civilian meanings: spring, school starts, hanami, national identity without militarism. By the time Japanese carrier emoji sets were built in the early 2000s, 🌸 was firmly back in the civilian-aesthetic register, and that's the version Unicode standardized in 2010.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F338U+1F338 CHERRY BLOSSOM. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Like most 6.0-era emojis, it arrived from Japanese carrier sets (DoCoMo, au, SoftBank) where cherry blossoms were a standard symbol since the early 2000s.

1. 2008Japanese carriers (DoCoMo, au, SoftBank) already include cherry blossom in their proprietary emoji sets.
2. 2010Unicode 6.0 approves U+1F338 CHERRY BLOSSOM as part of the first major emoji standardization.
3. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0. Apple ships a glossy pink five-petal design that becomes the visual template.
4. 2019Most platforms converge on the pink-petals-yellow-center look; outlier designs (Samsung's earlier flatter version) are updated to match.
5. 2022Cottagecore and 'soft girl' TikTok aesthetics push 🌸 back into the top tier of bio emojis, alongside 🌷 and 🎀.

• 📜
  812 CE: first known entry: Emperor Saga's hanami at the Shinsen-en garden in Kyoto, recorded in the [Nihon Kōki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanami). Two centuries earlier than the next-oldest comparable seasonal record anywhere in the world.
• 📚
  1406: continuous records begin: Before this year the data is patchy. After it, Kyoto bloom dates are recorded almost every spring up to the present.
• 🌸
  Day 104: average bloom day-of-year, 1500-1850: The pre-industrial baseline. Day 104 = April 14. Held nearly flat for three and a half centuries.
• 📉
  Day 85: the 2021 record: March 26, 2021. The earliest peak bloom in the entire 1,200-year record. Multiple Kyoto trees bloomed before April for the first time in any continuous run.
• 👤
  2025: a new steward: Aono passed in 2025 after decades of single-handedly maintaining the dataset. [Genki Katata](https://flowingdata.com/2026/04/17/continuing-the-cherry-blossom-data-alive/) at the University of Tokyo has taken it over and committed to continuing both the historical work and the annual logging.

• •Japan's cherry blossom forecast — sakura zensen (桜前線, 'cherry blossom front') — is produced by the Japan Meteorological Corporation and tracked like weather. The 2026 forecast predicts Kyoto peak bloom on April 1, about three days ahead of the 30-year average.
• •In 1912, Tokyo Mayor Yukio Ozaki sent 3,000 cherry trees to Washington D.C. as a symbol of U.S.–Japan friendship. The trees were planted around the Tidal Basin and are now the centerpiece of the National Cherry Blossom Festival, which draws roughly 1.5 million visitors a year.
• •Kyoto's 2021 peak bloom fell on March 26, the earliest in over 1,200 years of continuous records. Climate scientists cite the Kyoto dataset as one of the longest phenological records in the world, and it has become a surprisingly precise proxy for regional warming.
• •During World War II, Japanese kamikaze units were named after cherry blossom varieties (Hatsu-zakura, Waka-zakura), and the manned suicide glider was called ōka (桜花). Military planes carried cherry petal insignia. Falling petals were re-framed as fallen soldiers — one of the most documented examples of symbol militarization in modern history.
• •Sakura Haruno from Naruto and Sakura Matou from Fate/stay night are two of anime's most recognizable 'cherry blossom girls.' The trope is so common it has its own TV Tropes page: a gentle, pink-adjacent character whose introduction involves falling petals.
• •The Japanese government's seal uses a paulownia flower, but stylized cherry blossoms appear throughout Japanese officialdom: on police rank insignia, Self-Defense Forces emblems, and the 100-yen coin. Sakura is arguably the unofficial national flower, though no flower holds that status legally.
• •Cherry blossoms are edible. Sakura mochi, salt-pickled sakura leaves, sakura tea, and pink sakura KitKats all appear each spring in Japan. Starbucks Japan runs an annual sakura menu every February–March that sells out almost immediately.
• •The emoji ranks around 59th globally in general-purpose frequency but is one of the top five most-posted emojis in Japan during March and April, per Unicode's frequency data.
• •Cherry trees rarely produce edible cherries from the varieties bred for ornamental bloom. The Yoshino (Somei Yoshino), the most common sakura variety in Japan and D.C., is a sterile hybrid that has to be cloned. Every 'original' Yoshino tree in the world is genetically identical.
• •The first recorded imperial hanami took place in 812 CE at Emperor Saga's Shinsen-en garden in Kyoto. The same year is the start of the Aono cherry blossom dataset, now one of the longest continuous phenological records in the world.
• •Climate scientist Yasuyuki Aono taught himself classical Japanese script to read 1,200-year-old hanami diaries. After his 2025 death, Tokyo biophysicist Genki Katata took over the project to keep the record continuous.
• •Of the 3,020 cherry trees Tokyo gifted to Washington D.C. in 1912, only about 100 of the original trees still survive at the Tidal Basin. The rest have been replaced over the past century, mostly with cuttings from descendants of the originals.
• •Japan's national sakura forecast was a Japan Meteorological Agency public service for decades, but JMA stopped issuing it in 2010. Private firms (Japan Meteorological Corporation, Weather Map, Weathernews) now publish competing forecasts every February, with the JMC version cited most by tour operators.

• •Naruto — Sakura Haruno — One of three main characters, named 'spring field of cherry blossoms.' Pink hair, pink aesthetic, established the 'sakura girl' archetype in global anime consciousness.
• •Fate/stay night — Sakura Matou — A central love interest whose arc is framed around cherry blossoms as metaphors for hope and ruin. Studio ufotable's sakura scenes are famous for their animation quality.
• •Cardcaptor Sakura — CLAMP's 1996 manga and anime whose protagonist and aesthetic made pink-sakura magical girls a genre pillar.
• •Sword Art Online, Your Name, Hanasakura, Bleach — Cherry blossom scenes are an anime cliché strong enough that TV Tropes catalogs them as 'Cherry Blossoms' — a visual shorthand for emotional climax, confession, or farewell.
• •SZA — 'Snooze' and 'Blind' — Spring-themed music videos and press imagery often lean into sakura aesthetics. 🌸 appears in fan-made edits across Stan Twitter.
• •Cherry Blossoms (2008 film) — Doris Dörrie's German-Japanese drama about grief and hanami. One of the most literary uses of sakura in Western cinema, grounded in mono no aware.

• •🌸 is U+1F338U+1F338. Unicode name: CHERRY BLOSSOM. Common shortcodes: :cherry_blossom::cherry_blossom: (Slack, Discord, GitHub, Twemoji).
• •For CSS: use Noto Color Emoji or Apple Color Emoji to get consistent rendering. Android's pink is slightly warmer than Apple's.
• •Don't confuse with U+1F4AEU+1F4AE (💮 WHITE FLOWER, the gold-star variant) or U+1F33CU+1F33C (🌼 BLOSSOM, the daisy-style flower).

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.