Hanasaka Jiisan

Improve your Japanese reading with the classic folk tale 'The Old Man Who Made Trees Bloom' (花咲か爺). This app gives you a side-by-side bilingual reading experience — natural Japanese with its English translation, sentence by sentence. Follow the story of a kind old man whose ashes make withered cherry trees burst into full bloom. With built-in vocabulary lookups, audio, and furigana-style readings, it's a perfect way to practise reading Japanese while enjoying a timeless tale. Part of a growing collection of Japanese folk tales, drawn from the classic Gutenberg edition of Ozaki's 'Japanese Fairy Tales'.