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his garden friends was Georges Clemenceau, president of France, who also could boast of a stand of double-flowered, pink Japanese cherries. The banker Albert Kahn had his Village Japonais in Boulogne, not far from the Rothschilds, who had their cherries in a garden in the same Japonaiserie style. In England Leopold de Rothschild had a Japanese garden, and others were found at Tully House, Tatton Park, Heale House and elsewhere in England as well as in Ireland and Scotland. In the German cities of Berlin and Leverkusen, other European interpretations of Japanese garden art were found. Flowering cherries stood among the Japanese-style lanterns, garden bridges, and potted bonsai trees. With so much interest in Japanese gardening among the artistic elite, who frequently had a cultural link with Japan, it is no surprise that a general appreciation of flowering cherries developed in the 1920s and 1930s. Following colorful trends in flower gardening and a popular interest in the exotic, and floating on the waves of an oncoming modernism, cherries such as 'Kanzan' became commonplace garden plants that even appeared in roadside planting schemes of the British Garden City movement. A bright feeling of internationalism and optimistic progress was felt in Japan in these days as well, and again the nation's flower helped in giving expressions to it. In Tokyo, an exhibition with cherries as a theme in artistic painting was held in a department store in 1914 to an unexpectedly enthusiastic appraisal by the public. Newspapers that only recently reported the successful planting of cherries at Potomac Park in the United States could hail again the glory of the country's flower. Encouraged by this highbrow event that elevated popular cherry enthusiasm above the increasingly licentious and boisterous partying under the cherries of the Ueno park, a group of business leaders and scientists set up a cherry club called Sakura Kwai. The club held its first and founding conference on 23 April 1917 in the Tokyo Imperial Hotel. Flowering branches of forty-three cherries were displayed at this occasion, with books, paintings, and illustrations. Speakers gave their opinions on cherries for the assembled public: the mission was to spread a loving protection and a taste for the country's flower to the lowest classes of society. The conference took place in the large banquet hall of the splendid art-deco hotel building still under construction after a design by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (18691959). Among prominent club members were the manager of the hotel, Mr. Hayashi, and a Tokyo City Park official,