I have selected as an example the symbolism of cherry blossoms, which became the master trope of Japan's imperial nationalism at the beginning of the Meiji period - "You shall die like beautiful falling cherry petals for the emperor." Many tokkōtai pilots flew to their deaths with blooming cherry branches adorning their uniforms.
[...]
The pilots were the intellectual crème de la crème. They were students from top universities whom the government graduated early in order to draft.
[Navi vice-admiral] Onishi Takijirō and his right-hand men thought the Japanese soul, which had been built up to possess a unique strength to face death without hesitation, was the only means available for the Japanese to bring about a miracle when the homeland was surrounded by American aircraft carriers whose sophisticated radar systems prevented any other method to destroy them. When the operation was instituted, not a single officer from the military academy volunteered to sortie as a pilot; they knew too well that it was a meaningless death.
Even non-Christian pilots eagerly read about Christianity. Not only were the most influential-intellectual leaders in Japan's modern times Christians, but the young men's quest for the meaning of sacrifice often led them to Christianity. They turned to Christianity also because none of the Japanese religions offered them even the slightest vision of what was to happen to them after death - to their soul and the body - a central theme in Christianity.
The word for "meal" also means "rice" in Japanese and Chinese, so does the word "flower" mean cherry blossom, the queen/king of flowers in Japanese.
At the collective level, although each social group in the mosaic of Japanese society has its own tradition of cherry blossom viewing, the flower also became a dominant symbol of the Japanese as a whole by the end of the Edo period. It rose to the consciousness of the Japanese during the ninth century as a result of their discourse with the Chinese, against whom they sought to establish a distinctive identity. They chose cherry blossoms in opposition to the Chinese plum blossoms, which had been espoused by the Japanese elite.
Originally a shaman who guaranteed a good crop of rice because of his or her power to communicate with the more powerful deities, the Japanese emperor had been one of the millions of deities. The Meiji constitution elevated him to the status of an Almighty God, a concept that was and is alien to the utterly "secular" religiosity of many Japanese, who sought earthly benefits from their deities. He was made even more powerful than the European kings, who were conduits of divinity rather than divinity itself. In order to buttress the newly assigned nature of the emperor, the oligarchs adopted the advice of Lorenz von Stein, the chief German consultant, and developed the native religion of folk Shinto into a centrally orchestrated state Shinto while attempting to stamp out all "foreign" religions, including Buddhism and Christianity. While "God the Father" was an utterly alien concept to the Japanese, the Meiji state adopted the pastoral model of governmentality and promoted the notion that the emperor was the father of all the Japanese people.
Aestheticization facilitated méconnaissance, a common phenomenon in symbolic communication in which actors fail to recognize that they are reading different meanings of the same symbol. The pilots endorsed the aesthetics of Japanese nature, and of cherry blossoms as a dominant symbol of nature, without realizing how these symbols were locked into the pro rege et patria mori ideology. Neither side - pilots or the state - was fully aware of the phenomenon. The young men found aesthetics in the purity of devotion to their country without realizing that such devotion was exactly what the state wanted so that they would die for the emperor qua Japan - not their Japan, but imperial Japan.
Yet neither the pilots themselves nor the Japanese public considered their acts to be acts of suicide. They were killed in action, just as foot soldiers were killed on the battlefield.
These "chronicles" were commissioned by the Tenmu emperor (r. 672-86) in order to establish a Japanese identity distinct from the Chinese, whose "Great Civilization" was engulfing Japan at the time. He did so by adopting folk oral traditions in which rice, introduced from the Asian continent, was appropriated as indigenous to Japan. That is, rice was grown in heaven by Japanese deities, whose names all bear reference to the ear of rice. Thus, a foreign element, rice, was turned into the marker of Japanese identity. This cosmogony, drawing on folk agrarian cosmologies at the time, established the official agrarian cosmology, which became the symbolic foundation of the political economy for centuries, and in fact, even today.
Some scholars further suggest that sa in sakura (cherry blossoms) is the same root as sa in such terms as "to prosper" (sakaeru), "to be prosperous" (sakan), "good fortune" (sachi), and "rice wine" (sake), all signifying a positive power.
In cherry blossom viewing, hanami, the symbolic association between the flower and love is most conspicuously expressed.
Kabuki, whose golden age was the Edo period, is a performing art characterized by costumes in brilliant colors and by highly stylized dramatic movements on the part of the actors.
Kabuki also uses the flower in a complex way; for example, a broken branch of cherry with its blooms is a standard sign of approaching death. Willows stand for the capitol, geisha, and madness - all of which are also represented by the cherry, whereas the pine is a contrasting metaphor, signifying eternity and stability.
According to Yanagita, a fairly common folk belief was that a dead person goes to the mountains to rest and becomes "truly dead" after thirty-three years, during which time the impurity incurred by death is thoroughly removed. After thirty-three years, the individual identity of the dead merges with the collective identity of the "ancestors", represented by the aforementioned Deity of the Mountain, who comes down to the village in the spring as the Deity of Rice Paddies.
In The Tale of Genji, of the aesthetics of pathos over evanescence, symbolized by falling cherry blossoms, was responsible for the beautification of the death of young men and of not clinging to life, and hence for acceptance of the military motto.
[...]
It was The Tale of Genji that placed at the center of the Japanese ethose the aesthetics of pathos (monono aware), the acute sense of the fleeting and ephemeral beauty of all living things.
[...]
There are some instances in the Genji in which the ephemeral nature of cherry blossoms is pointed out, but this is seldom done only to aestheticize their short life. In other words, they truly lament the brevity of blooming rather than celebrate it through aestheticization. The sentiment is sorrow rather than aestheticized pathos.
Aestheticization is the mechanism that firmly anchors the alternative imagination in the minds of the people, who nevertheless may not be fully conscious of those subversive forces. In other words, cherry blossoms, the very symbol of the normative order, are also a potent symbol that, by offering provocative alternatives for imagination, destabilizes the universe by calling the normative order into question.
The loss of self through madness is another phenomenon associated with cherry blossoms (Watanabe Tamotsu 1989: 181) as expressed in a well-known phrase, "the flower [cherry blossom] turns people's blood crazy."
During medieval times, the term kuru'u meant both "to go insane" and "to dance" and dancing in turn was an act to communicate with the deities.
During the medieval period, wealthy and powerful temples kept a number of young men, called chigo, for an average of four to five years each, until they were about fifteen to seventeen years old. During these years they applied cosmetics like women and learned flower arrangement and other forms of art for women as well as how to manage and control their bodies and behavior. The ultimate goal of the daily training was to nurture them to become like idealized court ladies. Some were made partners of older homosexual monks, who were referred to as "the fire in the abyss" (mumyū no hi) whereas the boys in this situation were referred toi as "the flower of trurth (hottushō), in other words, cherry blossoms.
We recall cherry blossoms began to be associated with the pathos of evanescence during the medieval period. In the case of the geisha, however, their world is even more intensely ephemeral. The relationship may last only until the dawn; perhaps it is for this reason that dawn at Nakanochō is a favorite theme in these woodblock prints. Moreover, the world of geisha is predicated upon its own nonreproduction, individually and collectively, that is, biologically or socially.
[...]
The night cherry blossoms of the geisha represent the height of "life," or "desire" in a more fashionable parlance today, underscored by its ephemerality both in the temporal sense and in the sense that it is divorced from "real" life.
The Japanese style of painting called Yamato-e, which developed during the latter half of the ninth century, was a conscious effort on the part of Japanese artists to develop their own style of art in order to break free of the tradition dominated by the Chinese style of painting, kanga, in which cherry blossoms did not have a place. Cherry blossoms became an important and frequently used motif in Yamato-e. Again we see that cherry blossoms were chosen as a symbol of the Japanese and their art as opposed to Chinese art. The Yamato-e tradition focused on the depiction of the four seasons and the months of the year, each of which is represented by flowers and other features of nature.
polysemic symbols: different meanings of symbols and use depending on context and social agents.
The dynamics of a polyseme, then, does not lie in the static fact of having many meanings but in the fact of interpenetration among many meanings, including the palimpsest, as it were, of the normative world with an underlay of its subversion. This dynamics is the very site of the power of a social agent to mobilize symbols. It is precisely because cherry blossoms stand for life, predicated by death and rebirth, that the Japanese military could tip the scale in the symbolic representations by cherry blossoms and foreground death, instead of life, without people realizing that this important shift had taken place.
[end of 16th century] Some who discretely enjoyed meat did so by giving the names of flowers to animal meat, such as cherry blossoms for horse and peony for wild boar - a custom retained even today.
The Yasukuni Shrine occupies an important place in the historical processes that led to the aestheticization of the notion of pro rege et patria mori.
The shrine was built at a time when the remaining forces of the shugunate were still fighting against the new government, whose officials were often the targets of assassination attempts. There was a need to mark heroes and enemeis within. The government instituted rituals called the "rRitual for Soldier-Deities" (Gunshin-sai) at the imperial palace for the purpose of the apotheosis of these soldiers at the shrine.
in order to overthrow the shogunate, the oligarchs used the rhetoric of the "restoration of the ancient imperial system" (kodai ōchō). However, in reality they instituted an entirely new imperial system best suited for a strong central government to ward off the foreign barbarians.
