Yamaguchi #5: Sakura and Graveyards

April 2009

There is no denying that sakura, or cherry blossoms, are beautiful. No matter how hard I try, no photograph can ever capture the impression they make. Each blossom is individually gorgeous, but when you see them together, thousands of tiny translucent petals bunched together on dozens of trees, it’s magical. I can’t quite describe what it’s like, riding near the river on a sunny day with rows and rows of sakura trees in full bloom, a soft white veil hanging over your head.



But there is also a deep sadness ingrained in sakura. As soon as the flowers reach the height of their beauty, the petals are already falling. But it’s not just that sakura dies quickly, for many other flowers do as well. No, what makes it sad for me is the human associations that come with it. I lost my grandpa around the time I first saw sakura bloom. The second time I saw sakura blooming in Japan, I came back to my school to find, to my surprise, that some of my teachers had left while I was on vacation. This year, more teachers left, and some of my favorite ones as well, making it all the more painful. No, happy as I am to see the lovely cherry blossoms, sakura will always be seared into my mind as a symbol of loss.

So it was fitting perhaps that on this day, I was hunting down the graves of the heroes and martyrs of the Bakumatsu.* I pushed my bicycle up a hill and found a small, obscure little graveyard. I knew the names on the headstones and I knew their stories. I also knew the age they passed away, and that’s what made the graves particularly tragic.



The headstone read Takasugi Shinsaku. He negotiated the treaty of Shimonoseki (I visited the place of the battle in the last email) and was nearly murdered by his own countrymen for it. A year later, he would lead those same people in a battle against the Shogun, which they would decisively win. He mixed peasants with samurai to create a fierce army and he trained them in the ways of modern warfare. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 28.



Another one read Yoshida Shoin. He was Takasugi’s teacher, and also the teacher of Ito Hirobumi, Kido Takayoshi, and anyone who would become anyone in Choshu at that era. He plotted to assassinate the Shogun, got caught, and stupidly confessed his scheme. He was executed and made a martyr by the Shogun just before Choshu really became involved in the effort to overthrow the Shogunate. He was 29.



I went to a temple called Toko-ji and, in the back, just before the more impressive display of stone lanterns, I found a small area with monuments to samurai who had died for the revolution. I didn’t know their names and couldn’t read the signs very well, but I did figure out their ages. It’s kind of sobering reading about people who were your age or just a little older than you when they died.



Kido Takayoshi (also called Katsura Kogoro) was one of the “three great nobles of the restoration,” and I had some of his diaries with me. In the first year of Meiji** 1868, at the culmination of all his years efforts to restore the Emperor to the throne, Kido wrote: “…the Restoration was fully realized only after many loyal and benevolent men had sacrificed their lives in the service of the Imperial family. Several dozens of my friends fell as martyrs to the cause of the Empire, but by chance I have survived to this day.” He did not survive much longer, though. Nine years later, he died too, at the ripe old age of 43.



They say that a samurai’s life should be like a cherry blossom: beautiful, but brief. I find this ideal morbid, but in this case the metaphor is apt. These men lived short, intense lives, and even now I mourn their death, people who died a hundred years before I was born in a country I didn’t know. Why did they have to die so young and so violently? It doesn’t seem fair.

It’s rarely mentioned, but even as the petals are falling, green leaves are shooting from the branches of the sakura tree. By the time the last cherry blossom is gone, the tree has a healthy crown of leaves that will last it all summer. I wonder if it’s the same thing with these samurai. Even as they died, new people were being born into an age that would be the beginning of a new Japan. Cherry blossoms can’t live forever, there must be leaves, there must be fruits. The beautiful sacrifice of the flower sustains the life and the health of the tree.



*Bakumatsu: The last years of the Shogunate. It dates from 1853, when Admiral Perry’s “black ships” entered Tokyo Bay, until 1867, when the Shogun abdicated and the Emperor was restored. The time is characterized by foreign pressure from outside Japan and revolutionary forces from within.

**Meiji: The era following the Bakumatsu, from 1868-1912. It’s characterized by the modernization of Japan, politically, economically, and militarily. During this time, Japan fought and won two foreign wars: the Sino (China)-Japanese War and the Russo (Russia) –Japanese War. The era began with the restoration of the Emperor Meiji and ended with his death. He was posthumously named after the era.