Book Reviews

IGARASHI Yoshikuni/Vanderbilt University

Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalism: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History,by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, xviii+411 pp., $20.00

(ISBN 0226620913)

doi:10.1093/ssjj/jyh031 Published online September 3, 2004

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s book is conceived as a project to find intersections between the political

and cultural histories of modern Japan by analysing discourses on a single cultural symbol, the

cherry blossom. The book argues that the Japanese modern state manipulated the symbol in order

to naturalize its demand for the imperial soldiers’ self-sacrifice. They were supposed to fall beautifully

like cherry petals for the nation’s sake; and the state presented the kamikaze pilots as the pinnacle

of this aesthetic of self-sacrifice. The first half of the book traces Japan’s history from the ancient period

to the 20th century to demonstrate the ways in which the symbol gained cultural currency in

Japanese society and to show how the state later redefined it in its effort to distil its nationalistic

ideology in the minds of the Japanese. In the second half, Ohnuki-Tierney offers close readings of

five kamikaze pilots’ writings in order to instantiate a claim about the historical affinity between

cherry blossoms and state ideology. Although the book is noteworthy for its effort to humanize the

Kamikaze pilots by documenting their intellectual struggle with the political situation of wartime

Japan, a number of factual errors and totalizing claims greatly reduce its value as a historical analysis.

Despite the effort to engage with recent cultural theories, the book in effect reproduces a problematic

interpretation of the Asia Pacific War which has historically promoted the victimhood of the Japanese.

Many in the early post-war years, particularly the left, eagerly embraced the self-serving version of

history that they had been coerced into an unwanted war by the state and the military. The present

book under review in effect reproduces a similar view by emphasizing the totality of the state ideology

and the powerlessness of the young kamikaze pilots in their intellectual resistance.

The author attempts to refashion the clichéd history of the war through the cultural symbol of the

cherry blossom. Her argument seems to work backward from the modern to antiquity. In order to

foreground the completeness of the state ideological operation in appropriating the meaning of the

symbol, the book produces an essentialist interpretation of the history leading to the modern era.

Despite its insistence on the multivalence of the cherry blossom’s symbolic meaning, the book ends up

making a surprisingly totalizing claim: ‘Cherry blossoms’ first occupation of a space in the Japanese

cultural landscape took place as an important emblem of the Japanese. Ever since the Japanese continued

to reify the uniqueness of cherry blossoms as an expression of their own uniqueness’ (emphasis

added, p. 57). Ohnuki-Tierney is insistent that a total symbolic connection had existed between

cherry blossoms and ‘the Japanese’ prior to the mid-nineteenth century. Examination of the historical

evidence, from Kojiki to Edo courtesans, may demonstrate that cherry blossoms emerged as an

important cultural symbol in the geographical regions that are today known as Japan in historical

Social Science Japan Journal Vol. 7, No. 2, pp 283–323 2004

© Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo 2004

284 Book Reviews

time; however, the book offers no effort to historicize the concept of ‘the Japanese’ (there is no dis-

cussion about the historical process in which this concept was constructed). The author disregards the

historical and anthropological insights of recent criticism that problematizes the totality of Japan as

such. Who historically constituted ‘the Japanese’? Does the author include the historically marginalized

populations in this category? (The author gestures that she is not unaware of the problematic nature

of the concept by marking it with quotation marks [p. 282]. Yet she offers no discussions about the

term, while liberally using it.) Though the book is ostensibly about the manipulation of the past for

nationalistic causes, its totalizing claims inadvertently replicate the 19th and 20th centuries’ national-

istic discourses that retroactively discovered and constructed cherry blossoms as a national symbol.

The totality of the symbolic field posited in the book is the sine qua non for the author to prove

the completeness of the state’s manipulation of the cultural symbol. Similar to the designation of

‘the Japanese’, the term ‘the state’ appears in the text numerous times without a single explanation

as to what actually constituted it during wartime. The state (the term interchangeably used with ‘the

power holders’) was deemed singularly responsible in coercing the Japanese into accepting the ideology

of self-sacrifice. In the final sections of the book, the author discusses the historical embeddedness

of agents in order to reinforce the point that the kamikaze pilots were not active reproducers of

imperial nationalism. Ohnuki-Tierney insists: ‘The examples in this book testify beyond doubt that

historical agents are localized in a particular socio-economic milieu at a particular moment in

history’ (p. 294). This fine theoretical caution does not apply to the group of people whom she calls

‘the power holders’ or to ‘the state’ that they controlled. The examples in the book seem to testify

that the state single-mindedly imposed imperial nationalism by appropriating the pre-existing cultural

field; therefore, it exercised full agency in its coercive project. By positing the state as the ultimate

embodiment of an evil will and reducing it into an abstract entity, the book naturalizes the history

of wartime Japan and takes the kamikaze pilots and other Japanese off the hook. The framework of

the book excludes the possibility that the masses internalized (and even exceeded) the state ideology

in modern Japan as their own. By reifying the state’s will, the book perpetuates the postwar myth

that the Japanese somehow ‘fell prey’ to the state’s canny ideological tactic.

In Ohnuki-Tierney’s description, the state’s will is so ubiquitous and naturalized in wartime Japan

that its effects are compared to that of rain: ‘Like fine but continuous rain, the imperial ideology

penetrated primarily under the disguise of patriotism’ (p. 241). In this passage, the state is compared

to a natural phenomenon which humans own no means to change or challenge. The contrast between

‘imperial ideology’ and ‘patriotism’ which appears in the passage is also a key device in the book to

isolate the state’s intent from the general populous. That is, using the Latin terms, the author arbitrarily

distinguishes ‘the patriotism of pro patria mori—to die for one’s country—that was espoused by

individual [kamikaze] pilots, from the political nationalism that was fostered from above and that

promoted pro rege et patria mori—to die for emperor/king and country’ (p. 7). The author’s primary

concern in this distinction is to prove that the kamikaze pilots may have reproduced the political

nationalism through their action, but they did not embrace and reproduce it in their thought; and, in

order to prove this point, she engages in rather questionable readings of the texts left by five pilots.

In the section where she subjects the texts to her analyses, the author refuses to recognize pro regeet patria mori in them unless it is presented in toto. None of the pilots explicitly announce that

they would die for the emperor; therefore, she claims, they did not embrace imperial nationalism.

When she detects traces of imperial nationalism in their writings, Ohnuki-Tierney presents them

as examples that testify to the coerciveness of the state’s ideological operation (which nullified the

pilots’ internal resistance) rather than as evidence of the pilots’ affinity with imperial nationalism. In

dissociating the pilots from the state’s will, the book makes some forceful moves. For example, when

detecting the elements of imperial nationalism in the writing by Nakano Taketoku, who died

in a kamikaze mission on 4 May 1945, the book dismisses them, for he did not embrace them in an

extreme form: ‘If Nakano sounds as if he were leaning toward the pro rege et patria mori ideology,

his underlying thought processes were far from those embraced by ultra-nationalists like Okawa

Shumei and Kita Ikki’ (p. 225). By using the extreme position of ultra-nationalists as the standard,

the book easily dismisses the signs of affinity toward the imperial nationalism in Nakano’s writing.

Similarly, in examining the writing left by Wada Minoru, the navy ensign who volunteered to be a

Kaiten pilot and died in a training session on 25 July 1945, the book also makes another problematic

claim. Encountering the numerous terms that had strong associations with the emperor and imperial

history, the book again dismisses them by claiming that ‘the term ko (imperial) might have been such

a common expression during wartime that some individuals used it without subscribing to the pro regeet patria mori ideology’ (p. 229). Indeed the author could have made the same claim by substituting

the term ko with cherry blossoms, denying one of the book’s central claims that the state used the

cultural symbol of the cherry blossom in order to disguise imperial nationalism as patriotism: cherry

blossoms were so ubiquitous that they probably did not mean much to the pilots.

Another central claim of the book—that the state regarded the kamikaze pilots as cherry blossoms

—is simply not sustainable. The whole connection between the cultural symbol and the pilots in the

end hinges on the historical evidence that Ohnuki-Tierney misrepresents. Realizing that the kamikaze

corps that had names associated with cherry blossoms were a minority, she forcefully argues that: ‘Although

names of the tokkotai corps include designations other than cherry blossoms, the centrality of cherry

blossoms is undeniable when we take into account their use as the exclusive visual symbol for the

tokkotai operation. Thus, the military chose as a design for the tokkotai planes a single cherry blossom

in full bloom painted on the side of the plane in pink against a white background’ (emphasis in original,

p. 165). The information about the design on the planes is incorrect: ‘a single cherry blossom in full

bloom’ was not painted on them, except for on Oka (cherry blossoms), the glider bombs equipped

with rocket propellants (later with jet engines). From the single example of the Oka displayed at the

Yushukan War Museum at Yasukuni Shrine (a photo of which is included in the volume), the author

misconstrues the total relationship between the cherry blossoms and the kamikaze missions. The

references to cherry blossoms in the five pilots’ writings are indeed scarce. Although the author finds

several examples in the hundreds of pages of each pilot’s writing, they do not amount to the core

of their intellectual struggle in making sense of what they faced.

There are a number of misrepresentations in the book concerning the special attack operations.

Although they may not be individually fatal, they collectively cast serious doubt on the quality of

the book’s research on the topic. For example, during the operation at Pearl Harbor, five midget

submarines did not ram into US ships as the book claims (p. 139). After launching the two torpedoes

that they each carried, there was no point in ramming battery-powered ‘midget’ submarines into

enemy ships. Four of them were lost in action and one was found shored up on the Oahu beach.

The Kaiten was not ‘lowered into the water’ from a mother ship ‘when an American warship was

spotted nearby’ (p. 160); it was launched underwater from the back of an I-type submarine that

carried it. The term kaiten does not mean ‘“returning to heaven,” a brutal euphemism for the death

of the pilot’ (p. 161); it means to bring a revolutionary change in society.

Although Ohnuki-Tierney’s totalizing claims about cherry blossoms are unsustainable, the flowers

did emerge as one of the important cultural symbols of modern Japan and acquired some associations

with the military ideals. It is important to be reminded of one set of meanings attached to the symbol

that postwar society privileged but the book refuses to acknowledge. The association of the kamikaze

pilots and young soldiers with cherry blossoms casts the young men as feminine, non-aggressive

Book Reviews 285

victims that had no recourse to resist the inhuman war machine. Perhaps this association was already

there in the war years when the kamikaze pilots imagined themselves as falling cherry petals. Their

bereaved families and close friends confirmed their status as victims through accepting the association

between the cultural symbol and the young pilots. By casting a sympathetic gaze on the plight of

the young pilots, post-war society vicariously appropriated their status as victims; and, a similar gaze

seems to have produced this book, which serves better as an example of a post-war discourse about

the kamikaze pilots than as an historical inquiry into their lives.

TSUJIMURA Shinobu/Tokyo University

Zen War Stories, by Brian Daizen Victoria. London: Routledge Curzon, 2003, 272 pp., $27.95

(paperback ISBN 0700715819), $80.00 (hardback ISBN 0700715800)

doi:10.1093/ssjj/jyh032 Published online August 27, 2004

Is religion powerless in the face of war? Are religionists powerless in the face of war? These piercing

questions, critical as they are, mark the beginning of this stimulating book by Brian Victoria. This

work is the follow-up to Zen at War, a book which caused quite a shock in the Zen community in

both the West and the East when it was published in the US in 1997, and subsequently translated

into German, French, Italian and Japanese. Using detailed historical records, Victoria showed that the

supposedly virtuous Japanese priests, especially the Zen masters, had in fact been staunch supporters

of Japanese militarism up to and throughout World War II. This discovery had a profound emotional

impact on the Zen Buddhist community, and led many Zen practitioners to question how they them-

selves would have responded in such a situation.

Victoria was deeply aggrieved by what his reputable forerunners had done during the war. He

was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and first visited Japan as a missionary of the

Methodist Church. Eventually, he converted to the Soto Sect of Zen Buddhism. When he decided

to become a Soto priest, he had no idea that former leaders of Zen Buddhism had praised militarism

and had supported the war. Upon learning of the wartime activities of his sect, he decided to

examine and make known the deeds of his fellow Buddhists.

Part 1, Chapters 1–7, depicts the activities of Zen masters during the war and shows how Zen

Buddhism contributed to the formation of Japanese militarism. The army and Zen masters alike were

aware that Japanese Buddhism, Zen in particular, possessed certain values that were also essential to

forming the ideal soldier—one who is faithful to his nation and able to pursue his mission without

hesitation. Chapters 1 and 3–6 tell us about the ideas of particular Zen masters. Each chapter features

one Zen figure: Yamamoto Gempo, Fukusada Mugai, Omori Sogen, Yasutani Haku’un and, again,

Yamamoto Gempo. This is the style Victoria employed in his previous work, and there are ample

references to the thought of D. T. Suzuki throughout.

Chapter 1 ‘Zen Master Wept’ describes the war experiences of a Zen priest, Nakajima Genjo, who

enlisted in the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1936. Victoria met Nakajima and read his autobiography,

only to learn that his experiences on the battlefield meant nothing to his realization of the great enlight-

enment. Victoria was most disappointed to learn that Genjo had not changed his mind, or even worse,

did not hesitate joining the war, where he ended up killing others. He and his master Yamamoto

Gempo did not see any contradiction in Genjo’s wish to achieve enlightenment while supporting the

286 Book Reviews