Book smart

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, William F. Vilas Research Professor, anthropology, “Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History,” University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Near the end of World War II, almost 1,000 highly educated student soldiers “volunteered” to serve as pilots in Japan’s tokkotai (kamikaze) operations, even though Japan was losing the war. In her examination of the role of symbolism and aesthetics in totalitarian ideology, Ohnuki-Tierney shows how the state manipulated the time-honored Japanese symbol of the cherry blossom to try to convince people that it was an honor to “die like beautiful falling cherry petals” for the emperor.

However, the pilots defied or “misrecognized” this imperial ideology, Ohnuki- Tierney finds, drawing on diaries never before published in English. Devoted to cosmopolitan intellectual traditions, the pilots saw the cherry blossom not in militaristic terms, but as a symbol of the painful beauty and unresolved ambiguities of their lives. Ohnuki-Tierney expands understanding of symbolic communication, nationalism, and totalitarian ideologies and their execution.

These findings contradict the image of the “kamikaze” pilots as uneducated fanatic nationalists who willingly plunged to death, Ohnuki-Tierney says. “That they did not commit suicide and did not die for the emperor is clear in their diaries.”

Ohnuki-Tierney’s book was one of five nonfiction nominees for this year’s Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.

— Karen Faster

Larry Nesper, assistant professor of anthropology and American Indian studies, “The Walleye Wars: The Struggle for Ojibwe Spearfishing and Treaty Rights,” University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Despite being shot at, stoned and otherwise threatened, Ojibwe spearfishers persisted in exercising the treaty-guaranteed right, upheld by an appeals court in the 1980s, to fish off-reservation.

Nesper saw the proceedings firsthand, conducting his research on the Lac du Flambeau reservation in northern Wisconsin. “I first became involved as a supporter of the Indian effort to exercise their treaty rights. Then I began to see spearfishing as an important aspect of self-determination,” he says.

His book, winner of the 2003 Wisconsin Historical Society Distinguished Service in History Award of Merit, delineates the conflict, drawing on the historical roots, cultural significance and importance of treaty rights. His work demonstrates why Ojibwe and non-Natives view the situation in entirely different ways.

In the classroom, Nesper says, “I use the research for teaching students how long-standing cultural dispositions in Indian societies have great significance in contemporary life.”

The same interplay between tradition and the modern world is manifest in the tribal court on the Lac du Flambeau reservation. The court is the subject of Nesper’s next project: “I’m interested in the way in which custom and law are at work, and are at times at odds, in the court, and how Indian people are shaping contemporary reservation society,” he says.

— Barbara Wolff

To submit a tome for consideration, e-mail wisweek@news.wisc.edu.