THE SIGNIFICANCES OF JAPAN’S CHERRY BLOSSOMS: PART FIVE
Beauty claimed for State-mandated death-in-battle: Blossom, blossom, everywhere – yet none who pause to think
Continue Reading THE SIGNIFICANCES OF JAPAN’S CHERRY BLOSSOMS: PART FIVE
Beauty claimed for State-mandated death-in-battle: Blossom, blossom, everywhere – yet none who pause to think
Japan’s cherry-blossom, and a second ‘place of evil’: The Yoshiwara-quarter: a ghetto entirely dedicated to non-procreational hetero-eros
Here, we shall encounter Japan’s cherry-blossom as not only unstable in what it has been seen as embodying. Throughout Japanese cultural history, it has simultaneously embodied instability – instability of authority, of sex as ‘necessarily’ procreative, and of gender.