Part 3: Tree Flowers

Here are a few more examples of how landscape elements affect identity. While in Japan this winter, I visited the Chiran Kamikaze Peace Museum, which stands at the place where all 1,038 Japanese student pilots gathered, partied, and rested for three days before dying in their kamikaze planes. The museum is surrounded by cherry blossom trees, and I took a few pictures of the cherry blossom kamikaze plane trinkets available in the gift shop. I found the focus on the flowers interesting after having read Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (University of Chicago Press, 2002).  

Ohnuki-Tierney argues that contrary to popular belief, the Japanese government appropriated the symbolic power attributed to cherry trees and falling cherry blossoms to convince the student pilots to kill themselves. These kids were not stupid, but they were brainwashed into the symbolic power and logical weight of the falling cherry blossom.  This is a good review of her book, and her interview on youtube is fantastic! I strongly suggest you read it if you are at all interested in Japanese history or in the way substances from the landscape influence social and personal identity/behavior.  Her 140 page masterpiece Rice as Self  is also worth a peek.

Four of the actual kamikaze planes were recovered from the ocean floor and are on display in the museum. The others are miniaturized and look like toys. The walls are adorned with black and white pictures of all 1,038 strapping young men, along with the letters they wrote while at the camp, their "death poems," and their clothes. The largest wall of the museum is covered in a picture of SatsumaFuji, the miniature Mount Fuji here in Satsuma, which was the last view of Japan the student soldiers saw before reaching Okinawa to die. My friend and I saw the mountain on our way to Yakushima.

Here we see the young kamikaze pilots holding cherry blossoms, and the cheerleaders are pictured below holding blossoms in a pretty famous photograph. 

A kamikaze plane with a cherry blossom mark. Some of the planes were named after cherry trees, and the cherry blossom symbols represented the boys through their uniforms, but also through its subconscious association with Japanese semen, soul, and rice-fields.  

We also visited the location where Ganjin, the great Chinese monk who codified Buddhism in Japan, first landed his ship in 753. The classically erotic James Bond, You Only Live Twice (1967) was filmed at the same place. The small town is conflicted, and its museum for Ganjin is mostly a tribute to James Bond. That corner was definitely the part of the museum that got the child's attention in front of us. I saw America and Japan's historic connection in yet another freaky way. The monument for the largest battle ship ever made, Yamato, is down the street, and it includes a strange stone sculpture of a young naked girl standing in solute. From that memorial site one can see where the record breaking ship sank due to American torpedoes.

We visited the shinto shrine, Kirishimajingu, founded by Jinmu, the first emperor of Japan and great grandson of Ninigi-mikoto, the first human to descend to earth from heaven. In the myth, Ninigi touched the earth at Takachiho mountain and then went to  Sastuma. We saw the place where he touched down and sticking up out of the ground is a sword, the legendary Amano Sakahoku sword of Izanagi and Izanami, the vajra phallus from whose tip dripped the islands of Japan. And in a way, you can still see the earth dangle like semen from the tip of the mythic, phallic sword. Every kid on teh island looks forward to that feild-trip day.

The sword is memorialized like Excalibur, but probably antedates the Arthurian version. Maybe not. After all, the "sword in the stone" image can reach way back. It can symbolize the stone age of man, and the power of the stone spirits and "elementals" with which we are in constant symbiosis. And we see the theme in King David and his seminal stone, or in Thor and his hammer.  We spent the afternoon at the Totoro-themed go-cart park next to the shrine. It's where all the kids really want to go.

Here, the earth is still dangling from the tip of God's vajra.

Yakushima was beyond a dream. We took a jet-boat accross the sea. Then we hiked through the "White Valley of Spirit Water," upward into the Mononoke-mori, the "Forest of Wild Things." Suddenly, out of nowhere, we reached the summit, standing on a stone outcropping not unlike the one the boar god stands on in the film Princess Mononoke. Small deer appear everywhere. I just read that the word deer meant basic "animal" or "not-human" in old English, and the etymology of the word "wilderness" contains this older version, doer. The spirit of the wilderness is visualized in the movie as a deer with a human face and huge antlers somehow connected to all life and death. The "spirit of the forest" also appears in the old Gilgamesh epic.

 Here is Hiroshige's version of our exact view from The Yanagi's house in Minami-Satsuma, I kid you not.  This beautiful print is all over the small town's tiny museum, but no postcards of it are sold, which was frustrating.

Another version with Satsumafuji, or Satsuma's mini-version of Fuji, in the background, and to the left is Ganjin's famous track to Japan.

the Deer (Wilderness) Spirit from the film Princess Mononoke.

James Bond monument across from Ganjin's in Sastuma

Hiking the "White Valley of Spirit Water" into...

the "Forest of Wild Beasts," Mononoke-mori!

 Can you find the deer?

 That sign literally says "Female God Cedar"

We did not have time to visit onsen or the legendary Jomonsugi, a 7,000 year old tree in the middle of the island.