Hanami Trace

About

Hanami Trace (お花見ﾄﾚｽ in Japanese), also known as “I’m the Only One From 5AM” (俺だけ5時から in Japanese), is a digital art meme featuring various depictions of a young Japanese man playing a handheld gaming device while participating in the springtime cherry blossom viewing tradition hanami.

Origin

In March of 2014, a Japanese television station interviewed people who had gathered outdoors to partake in “hanami,” the practice of viewing cherry blossoms in spring. During the segment, a man laying by himself wearing a green jacket revealed he had arrived at 5 a.m. that morning to find a spot to view the flowers. On March 29th, Twitter user @_kazuka_ tweeted several screen captures from the interview segment (shown below). Within the first 48 hours, the tweet gained over 16,800 retweets and 8,700 favorites.

新しいトレースの材料きたぞお前ら pic.twitter.com/A4T4lqlfvO
— 和花＊ (@_kazuka_) March 29, 2014

Spread

Later that day on March 29th, 2014, other Twitter^[1]^[2]^[3] users began posting illustrated parodies of the screen captured images, many of which featured Japanese anime and manga characters (shown below).

Those posting illustrated depictions of the man began referring to the meme as “hanami trace” (お花見ﾄﾚｽ in Japanese) and “I’m the only one from 5am.” According to the Twitter analytics site Topsy, there were over 1,170 tweets containing the keywords “お花見ﾄﾚｽ” posted on March 29th.

On March 30th, YouTuber IbisPaintUser049 submitted a hanami trace speed painting video (shown below). On March 31st, the video game news blog Kotaku^[5] published an article highlighting several notable examples from the series.