Everyone knows Washington, D.C.‘s cherry blossoms came from Japan.Almost nobody knows the story nearly ended in a bonfire.In 1910, Tokyo sent 2,000 cherry trees to America as a gift.Inspectors found them infested with insects.President Taft ordered every single one burned.Two thousand gifts. Ashes.Imagine the diplomatic disaster. The wounded pride.Here is what Tokyo’s mayor, Yukio Ozaki, actually did:He apologized. For the condition of his own gift.Then his city grew 3,020 new trees, healthier and finer,grafted and inspected and perfect,and sent them across the ocean again.Not a word of resentment. Try again, properly. Those are the trees you photograph every spring at the Tidal Basin.Two of the 1912 originals are still standing.But the story doesn’t end there. It comes full circle.The parent grove in Japan, on the banks of the Arakawa River,was devastated during World War II.So in 1952, America cut budwood from the Washington treesand sent it back to Japan, to resurrectthe very grove the gift had come from.When a flood damaged the Japanese trees again in 1982,Washington sent more cuttings home.Read that again.The daughters of the burned gift saved their mothers.Today the two rivers, the Potomac and the Arakawa,are officially sister rivers.Their trees carry each other’s blood.One hundred and fourteen years of two countriesquietly taking care of the same flowers.That’s what sincerity looks likewhen you give it a century to bloom.’