The Sakura Obsession by Naoko Abe

Author:Naoko Abe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

The infantry soldiers’ collar was scarlet, the same colour as some cherry petals. And Yoshino was a popular cherry-viewing destination, which Collingwood Ingram had visited in 1926. The ‘Yamato race’ was a nationalistic term, used mostly to distinguish settlers of mainland Japan from other races.

Papa recalled the cherry trees at his secondary school, especially one that seemed to stand guard over the pupils at the entrance. ‘We marched around the school playgrounds for hours, sang military songs and did some military training,’ he told me. ‘The teachers put objects on the ground and we had to crawl through them.’

Papa’s secondary school, which he entered at the age of twelve, was the best in the region, from where the brightest boys were expected to move on to the elite Imperial Japanese Naval Academy in Hiroshima Prefecture, or to related academies in Tokyo or Kyoto. Papa was top of the class academically.

‘The problem was that I wasn’t very sporty and I was slow,’ he continued, ‘so the teachers often hit me in the face. We all knew that we’d eventually have to join the military and fight.’

Papa wanted to join a naval institute. It was more appealing than the army. He and his friends all devoured a best-selling book, Kaigun, about one of the nine young naval soldiers who had died in the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and had become national heroes.

‘The way that navy officers saluted was much smarter than the army officers,’ Papa laughed, raising his right hand to his cheek, rather than to the top of his head, like the army salute. Closing his eyes, he started singing again, this time a verse from a popular wartime ditty, ‘Cherry Blossom Brothers’ (Dōki no Sakura). In later life, Papa, a liberal journalist and an academic, had been fiercely against the war and had reviled the emperor-oriented ideology that had caused millions of deaths. Yet the words had lingered and another verse came tumbling out, as though it was 1942:

You and I are cherry blossom brothers

Even if we fall separately on different battlefields

We’ll meet again at Yasukuni Shrine

As cherry blossoms, in the treetops in spring.

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