Flowers That Kill: Communicative Opacity in Political Spaces by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (review)

This clearly written, wide-ranging book explores communicative opacity—“an absence of communication or mutual understanding” by individuals who draw “different meanings from the same symbol, or, more often, due to an absence of articulation in their minds of the meaning they are drawing. This leads to an unawareness of the absence of communication among the social actors involved” (p. 2). The author analyzes examples from Japanese culture together with counterparts in European history, loosely organized under the metaphor “flowers that kill.” In this view, the polysemous cherry blossom, often associated with agrarian productivity, romance, or the evanescence of life, was reconfigured into a military imperative during World War II: Japanese suicide pilots “were to fall, like beautiful cherry petals, in order to protect the beautiful land of cherry blossoms” (p. 3). Yet, the author argues, the young soldiers failed “to notice that the meaning of the flower had changed under the military government” into flowers that kill (p. 3). This instance of communicative opacity and many others throughout the book form a provocative and highly plausible thesis about the failure of symbols to communicate, as writers from Charles Baudelaire to Pierre Bourdieu have acknowledged, even though the absence of something can be difficult to verify empirically.

In developing her argument, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney draws on deep readings in anthropological, historical, literary, and other materials, while also revisiting research topics pursued earlier in her career, such as Ainu communities, rice and monkeys in Japanese culture, and the aesthetics of tokkMtai (kamikaze) tactics during World War II (the book’s extensive bibliography includes references to 24 writings by the author, spanning 1964–2006). The essence of Flowers That Kill is contained in the first four chapters, where the twinned ideas of communicative opacity and flowers that kill are best developed; the remaining three chapters, on collective identities, the Japanese emperor, and religious and political authority, stand somewhat apart. A chapter on Japanese cherry blossoms contends that “the beauty of falling petals represented the sublimity of patriotic sacrifice” in wartime and that “the sublimity of sacrifice was hardly recognized even by those who were to lose their lives” (p. 25), some of whom were pilots with cherry blossoms painted on the sides of their aircraft.

Ohnuki-Tierney catalogues numerous references to cherry blossoms in premodern Japanese literature, drama, and art to show their multiple meanings, then points to a radical wartime shift whereby they were made to symbolize “soldiers’ sacrifice of their lives … with hardly anyone noticing it” (p. 36). Cherry blossoms were used “to aestheticize deaths of soldiers on the battlefield, followed by their resurrection at Yasukuni Shrine” (p. 53). The author concludes that this “switch in emphasis was not consciously perceived” (p. 55), although how such an absence of awareness can be known is unclear. She contrasts the Japanese cherry blossom with the rose in European cultures, especially in German romanticism, and with the red rose, a symbol of revolutionary movements culminating with the Socialist International, likely after 1917. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler each appeared in propaganda photos with children and women offering bouquets of roses, emphasizing paternal oversight of their people and deflecting attention from how flower imagery solidified their dictatorships. By contrast, the famous anti-Nazi resistance movement in 1942–43 at Munich likely used white roses because they were associated with Catholicism and because in Germany white represented “purity of the self against repressive regimes” (p. 80).

Compared with flowers, the monkey offers even more overt, if seldom more readily recognized, alternative meanings in Japanese culture. As Ohnuki-Tierney puts it, “the monkey as a clown who turns itself into an object of laughter while challenging the basic assumptions of culture and society … creates ambiguity, opacity, and even an absence of communication as the Japanese read different meanings” (p. 84). Monkey performances in kyōgen drama and street theater display multiple meanings that cause communicative opacity (p...