In the shade of cherry flowers: sakura, VSUES, Toyama

The sakura blossom has long become a landmark of VSUES. For fifteen years, the university has been pleasing with the beauty of Japanese cherry not only its students and staff, but also residents and guests of Vladivostok. Shrouded in pink clouds, the sakura alley becomes a place of pilgrimage every spring for those who want to admire this real miracle. People walk, take pictures, admire.

Sakura Alley is one of the many open spaces created on the VSUES campus - comfortable, well-groomed, and accessible to the entire city. In 2013, residents of Primorye included our extraordinary cherry alley in the top 10 man-made wonders of the region.

- Today we cannot imagine VSUES without a sakura alley and a Japanese rock garden, but I remember those times when a road passed here, and there were abandoned buildings of an agar-agar plant and several dilapidated houses nearby, - says the President of VSUES, Doctor of Economics, Professor Gennady Lazarev . - When the territory was handed over to our university, we immediately took up the improvement.

The creation of the cherry blossom alley was one of the projects in cooperation with Toyama Prefecture. It all started with Seattle. I was there many years ago and, it seems, then the beauty of the blossoming Japanese cherry - sakura struck most of all. It grows there everywhere, on city streets and on university campuses. There is a huge cherry blossom garden in front of the main building of the University of Washington, and its bloom is an incredible sight.

Colleagues said that the Japanese gave them beautiful trees as a sign of the post-war thaw in relations between the two countries.

When I found myself in the Land of the Rising Sun twenty years later, I recalled this story in a conversation with my Japanese colleagues. They smiled politely, and after some time an official letter arrived at VSUES, informing that the budget of Toyama prefecture added an item of expenditure for sakura seedlings, which it was decided to donate to our university.

In 2005, a hundred trees were delivered to Vladivostok directly from the mountainous regions of Hokkaido. Together with representatives of the prefecture, we planted this cherry blossom alley.