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175 Manidoo Envoy Ronin and Bogart became the mobile music men of the Ginza and Hibiya Park. Their unusual union, a bushido veteran with poor vision and the hafu son of an interpreter with the occupation, was reported on television and in several feature newspaper stories. The Native American Press, a native newspaper with many readers on the White Earth Reservation, recounted some of the adventures and tricky protests of Ronin Browne, a generation after Nightbreaker and Bogart in Hiroshima. Miko told me that for several weeks the two returned to the same route with the black van and broadcast gospel, blues, and rock music on the streets. Many people waited at the end of the day for the mobile concert, and some even waved and praised the black vans. Hibiya Park was the last concert of the day. The van circled the park and broadcast ‘‘Pretty Woman’’ by Roy Orbison. Gingko came out of the trees to beat her brow. She shouted the tune and laughed at the words. The black shirts heard cultural decadence in the music and resented the generation of liberty. Bogart and Ronin were denounced by the nationalists. The mobile excursions were terminated, but the music continued for a few more weeks on the Ginza. They bought a boom box and carried their music around the streets, parks, theaters, restaurants, and department stores, but the public soon lost interest in the same old blues tunes. ‘‘Go Tell it on the Mountain’’ was lost in the rush to the subway. ‘‘Rock and Roll Music’’ was wasted on the street, the rocker beat was out of mind. ‘‘Pretty Woman’’ caught no one by surprise. ‘‘The Man in Black’’ was passed over as a ruse of the nationalists. The Ginza police convinced them that the pleasure was not in the music alone, but in the original protest of the noisy black vans. They retreated to the frenzy of pachinko parlors. Bogart saluted a photograph of Lieutenant Uemara Masahisa, a kamikaze pilot in the Special Attack Corps. That regular salute of a photograph in the war museum was the sentiment of a warrior, an aesthetic signature of bushido tradition and a cultural contradiction of memory. The Japanese state used the imagistic metaphor of a falling cherry blossom to ‘‘promote the sacrifice of soldiers for the 176 emperor,’’ wrote Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney in Kamikase, Cherry Blossoms , and Nationalisms. The tokkotai, or tokubetsu kogekitai, Special Attack Forces, ‘‘sent thousands of young men to their deaths.’’ Most of them were ‘‘student soldiers’’ and many were the ‘‘intellectual elite.’’ The ‘‘tokkotai operation’’ of student soldiers ‘‘cannot be fathomed without considering the impact of their deaths upon their parents, wives, lovers, siblings, and in very few cases, children .’’ The tokkotai is ‘‘known as kamikaze outside of Japan.’’ Ronin was inspired by the samurai traditions of bushido, or courage and loyalty, but he was a ronin of native survivance, not of termination or victimry, although he was a dramatic artist of serial, symbolic suicides or figural kamikaze flight. He convinced some of his new friends, in other words, that his sudden absence from time to time was an act of suicide rather than creative truancy. The word kamikaze means ‘‘divine wind,’’ a cultural metaphor associated with the kami spirits that twice in seven years roused a typhoon to defeat the Mongol forces of Ghengis Khan. The mighty kamikaze typhoons were the kami spirits of the ‘‘divine wind.’’ The Japanese stories of divine intervention, mythic kamikaze virtues , and the notable presence of kami spirits are the cultural foundations of an ideology of absolute loyalty to the once-divine emperor. Naturally, the kami spirits would be summoned by the emperor as a kamikaze force to defeat the third menace to the nation, the conceivable invasion by soldiers of the United States of America. The Special Attack Corps of kamikaze pilots was created in desperation to defeat another invader of the country. Some four thousand pilots, loyal to the emperor and touched by kami spirits, died in suicide attacks at the end of the war. Their spirits are now venerated as gunshin, or war deities, at Yasukuni Jinja. Ronin bought a tee shirt at the souvenir booth with the poetic statement ‘‘I Am a Glorious Cherry Blossom’’ printed on the front, and on the back the imperial crest of the chrysanthemum. Japanese cherry blossoms are a season of delight and a cultural metaphor of impermanence. The delicate spring flowers are ‘‘closely associated with the samurai, for whom...

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