The Cherry Blossom Festival will celebrate its centennial next year, and in honor of 100 years of pink blossoms, we’ll be getting two and a half times more festival—-the two-week celebration is being extended to five weeks. And the Japanese ambassador is pretty jazzed:

Ichiro Fujisaki, the Japanese ambassador to the United States, noted that the festival was less than six months away.

“I’m so . . . excited,” he said. “ I feel like an 8-year-old boy.”

“There are many things good in Washington,” he said, but the festival “is the very best, because it’s nothing but beauty and friendship.”

The festival runs from March 20 to April 27.

Photo by Peter Lee via Flickr / Creative Commons Generic Attribution License 2.0