A kamikaze plane with a cherry blossom mark. Some of the planes were even named after cherry trees.

Cheerleaders holding cherry blossom offerings to the young men leaving to die.

Part of the power cherry blossoms wielded over the Japanese imagination had to do with the flower’s association with another metaphor for the self: rice. From ancient times, cherry blossoms were thought to forecast the condition of the rice crop. The term sakura (cherry blossom) even derives from the Chinese characters that mean “the seat of the Deity of Rice Paddies.” Consequently, the ritual of cherry blossom viewing (hanami) originated as a religious ritual, and the drinking of rice-wine that accompanies this ritual signals that the deity and humans drink together the sacred wine, made from the deity’s body.

Thus, within the Japanese imagination, cherry blossoms eventually become rice, and since rice is the physical and metaphorical “body” of the Japanese people, the cherry blossoms are the soul: that which comes before, and remains after, the body.

We can also read about this association between cherry blossoms, rice, and the soul in Japanese religious texts. In the Kojiki, the Sun Goddess Amaterasu sends her famous grandson Ninigi-no-Mikoto to “transform a wilderness into a country of rice stalks” with ears of rice grown from the seeds from heaven. After planting the rice, the grandson falls in love and marries a female deity named “A Blossom on a Cherry Tree,” Konohana-no-Sakuya-Bime, and together they create humans.

Kamikaze pilots holding cherry blossoms.

Humans are made of rice and cherry blossoms, which is why our lives are cut short. In the Nihonshoki version of the story, the union between these two beings is given as one of the reasons humans do not live long. It’s the Japanese version of original sin.

Material Resonance

So we can already see a link between cherry blossoms and a short life. But it’s not only the mythopoeic power that affords cherry blossoms their significance: their shape, color, and rubbery materiality help to legitimize their spiritual significance. Cognitive scientists and cultural historians have written of the need to overcome our rigid worldview that sees material things as mere props for culture and language. Ideas, stories, and myths do not precede the material things, but rather are “helped into being” by the material world (Boivin 2008). Material surfaces, like cherry blossom petals, are therefore not completely ‘arbitrary’ in relation to the concepts they signify but play an active role in the construction of meaning. Certain sensuous qualities of substances may be ‘bundled’ together and mobilized within systems of value. The white and pink, rubbery petals, for example, look and feel like human skin, whiteness signifies purity, and the smell of the cherries accompanies music and food during spring festivals and graduation ceremonies. In his book Entangled, Ian Hodder (2012) uses the term ‘resonance’ to describe the process by which, “at a non-discursive level a subtle “coherence” occurs across domains in historically specific contexts.” Fleshy, white and pink falling blossoms resonate with graduation ceremonies, with the planting of rice, with joyful, drunken partying with family and friends, but also with values associated with whiteness, rice, milk, bones, semen, purity, fleetingness, and death.

Brainwashing Textbooks

Ohnuki-Tierney looks at elementary school textbook themes and their obvious shifts from “nationalism without militarism,” to “nationalism with militarism (but without cherry blossoms),” and finally to textbooks released from 1933–1943 that suddenly relied heavily on cherry blossom imagery juxtaposed with solders and suns and Mount Fuji. She also looks at the school music, which was even more powerful than the textbooks at communicating the ideology, “because it appealed to the people at an emotive level.” She shares some of the song lyrics that used the symbolism of cherry blossoms for ideological purposes, like the popular evocation “to fall like a beautiful cherry petal for the emperor.” Onuki-Tierney:

“The military construction of blooming cherry blossoms as apotheosized soldiers at the Yasukuni Shrine is most astonishing in that it represents a reverse of the ancient cosmological scheme.”

Onuki-Tierney recounts that in Japanese myths, the Yama-no-Kami “Deity of the Mountains” would come down to the rice paddies on the petals of cherry blossoms to offer his own soul, embodied in the rice grains, to humans. The cosmological cycle of the “gift exchange of the self” was initiated by the Deity’s sacrifice for humans. “In the Yasukuni scheme, it is the humans who fall/descend and sacrifice for the emperor, the “manifest deity.” The soldiers’ deaths are expressed through falling cherry blossom petals; these petals then ascend to become divine cherry blossoms, which in ancient times grew only in the mountains and thus represented the Deity of the Mountains.”

Pilots as Cherry Blossoms

The military deployment of cherry blossoms developed since the beginning of the Meiji period but saw its most exaggerated expression in the kamikaze tokkotai operation. Important military generals made a systematic effort in this regard by using cherry blossoms to name the corps, planes, and bombs. One of the plane designs is called Okah, meaning Cherry Blossoms.

At the museum, I read some of the poems described in Ohnuki-Tierney's book. The final poems written by the pilots, as well as their wills and journals, all reflect this new obsession with cherry blossom imagery, and there are several references to falling cherry blossoms as the metaphor of their deaths. “I am a man who is falling like cherry petals,” “I must share the fate of falling cherry blossoms,” “Like beautiful cherry blossoms, I will fall and be reborn,” and so on. Love poems, letters, diaries– one soldier's diary he left behind read: “I will do my best in order to die for the emperor as soon as possible like falling cherry petals.” Another entry reads: “I heard that her [the daughter at an inn frequented by the soldiers] brother perished like falling petals.” Another: “I shall plunge into the enemy vessel and fall like petals for the emperor.” One soldier wrote in his will: “Many soldiers (senpai) are gone like falling petals. I do not hesitate to sacrifice myself. I am pleased. For the emperor, I shall fall like cherry blossoms.”

“In the process of accelerating militarisation, cherry blossoms were called into duty to aestheticize soldiers’ deaths on the battlefield, followed by their resurrection at Yasukuni Shrine — like cherry blossoms which fall after a brief life, the young men sacrificed their lives for the emperor but were promised to be reborn as cherry blossoms at the shrine where the emperor would pay homage.”

The museum includes a recreation of the barracks and dining halls where the solders reportedly partied the night before their final flight. However, despite published wills, photos, and films in which we see smiling pilots saluting or waving goodbye before their final mission, the following description provided by Ohnuki-Tierney tells a different story. It is a letter written in 1995 by eighty-six year old Kasuga Takeo. He was drafted into the navy and was given the assignment of looking after the meals, laundry, and other daily affairs of the student soldiers at the Tsuchiura Navy Airbase, similar to the one at Chiran. He describes the night before their final flights:

“At the hall where their farewell parties were held, the young student officers drank cold sake the night before their flight. Some gulped the sake in one swallow, others kept gulping down [a large amount]. The whole place degenerated into chaos. Some broke hanging lightbulbs with their swords. Some lifted chairs to break the windows and tore white tablecloths. A mixture of military songs and curses filled the air.“While some shouted in rage, others cried aloud. It was their last night of life. They thought of their parents, their faces and images, lovers’ faces and their smiles, a sad farewell to their fiancées — all went through their minds like a running-horse lantern. Although they were supposedly ready to sacrifice their precious youth the next morning for Imperial Japan and for the emperor, they were torn beyond what words can express — some putting their heads on the table, some writing their wills, some folding their hands in meditation, some leaving the hall, and some dancing in frenzy while breaking flower vases. They all took off with the rising sun headband the next morning. But, this scene of utter desperation has hardly been reported. I observed it with my own eyes, as I took care of their daily life, which consisted of incredibly strenuous training, coupled with cruel and torturous “corporal punishment” as a daily routine.”

Kasuga Takeo has never recovered from the effect of innumerable beatings he himself received. His superiors told him that corporal punishment would instill the spirit of a soldier in him. His letter is invaluable for describing how the “volunteers” felt the night before their deaths.

26 May 1945. Corporal Yukio Araki, holding a puppy, with four other pilots of the 72nd Shinbu Squadron at Bansei, Kagoshima. Araki died the following day, at the age of 17, in a suicide attack on ships near Okinawa.

Four actual kamikaze planes were recovered from the ocean floor and are on display in the museum. The others are miniaturized and look like toys on pedestals or hanging from the ceiling. The walls are adorned with black and white pictures of all 1,038 strapping young men. Vitrines are filled with the letters they wrote while at the camp, their “death poems,” some possessions, and their clothes.

The largest wall of the museum is covered in a photograph of Satsuma Fuji, the miniature Mount Fuji that overlooks Satsuma–the last view of mainland Japan all the student soldiers saw from their planes before reaching Okinawa to die. The large photograph turns the wall into a window, and we are perhaps then looking out of someone's eyes, positioned inside someone's head. Suddenly, the entire museum becomes an inner world filled with airplanes, toys, friends, dreams.

As we left for Yakushima the next morning on a high-speed Jet Ferry, a “jet aircraft of the sea” developed by a US aircraft manufacturer, we saw the mountain, the exact same mountain.

See Part 1: Rice, Semen, and Material Religion in Japan