Muninn, I just posted a more equivocal take on utopianism from the book I’m reading on the etiology of genocide.

Before the Heian period most Japanese people never really saw sakura up close — they were mysterious, short-lived, ghostly pink clouds in the mountains, which probably helped their association with the spirit world… that goes back to before they became the It Flower, IIRC.

Still, we all know how the sakura were co-opted (or would you just say “modernized”?) in the early-mid 1900s, and it would be very interesting to learn how hanami changed during that time as a result…

That is really interesting that Sakurakai, which is a famous and important organization (a military officer I looked into once because of his connection to the traitor Kawashima Yoshiko was a member), was listed!

As for the failure of “universalist political or religious ideology married to states” up until now, the past attempts (the biggest being of course Communism) that is certainly true, although it may be noted that Communism never succeeded in getting rid of nationalism anyways (thus the ironic fact that a global scheme based on class solidarity still managed to have plenty of national conflicts). It shares with nationalism though, a tendency towards the absolutist thinking of the modern enlightenment.

I am a radical anti-nationalist – but don’t have any illusions that the destruction of the nation-state system will result in some happy anarchy or a benevolent world government. I don’t think either are necessarily possible or desirable. I’m just sick and tired of people assuming that the principle that “democracy is the worst political system – except for all the others” which I am perfectly willing to subscribe to, also somehow holds true for the nation-state “nation-states suck, but the alternatives are worse” – I simply don’t by that at all! Which is why, at some point when I can devote the time and muster the resources and support for it, I plan to create a “society for the study of alternatives to the nation state”

I think, however, the disentegration, for all the bad news of late, is already well on its way, and this will be something of an organic process that needs gentle but firm prods in “safer” directions.

I think an important part of the process though is education, and even before that a “decentering” or a loosening of the naturalized status that nation has.

Before nations could rise, the lack of a strong nation had to be recognized as a blight, a shame, and an obstacle to the advancement of the people.

Before nations can fall, they must be recognized for the malignant cancer that they are.

I’m just starting on a book I picked up in my last visit to a Tokyo bookstore, Manus Midlarsky’s The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge UP, 2005). Looks to be a provocative, though drily analytical, take on a subject no one can regard with placid equanimity.

Scattered bits of aesthetic impressions have recently combined to plant the seeds of a suspicion about hanami and nationalism in Japan. I wonder whether you could either sprinkle a bit more fertilizer on them, or uproot them and cast them out. On a visit to the Soun Museum in Ashikaga, I noticed that Soun (who exhibited a painting of Mt. Fuji at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in the 1880s IIRC) seems to have depicted many stands of ume in bloom, and none of sakura. Even in that bastion of nationalist ideology, Mito, the Tokugawa-era Kairakuen is awash in ume, not sakura (except for the more recently landscaped surrounding areas outside the old garden). Although I’m far from being conversant in Chinese painting, the smidgen I’m familiar with frequently depicts ume, but rarely sakura. Is it no coincidence that one of the nationalist groups before the war called itself the Sakurakai and that wartime propaganda involved much sakura imagery? (When I was inducted into the US Army 1969, I remember seeing the Sakurakai on a list of organizations that I had to affirm I did not belong to.) Did hanami make a transition at some point, starting perhaps in early Meiji times, from elitist, Sinocentric umemi to populist, Japanocentric sakurami, as Japan attempted to exit the Sinosphere and join the Eurosphere? Has someone already studied this putative trend, or are my speculations off base?

http://www.asahi.com/national/update/0526/TKY200605260086.html

“Nations dont kill people. States do.” – I would recommend reading any book with a decent discussion of the impact of nationalism on state violence and inter-state violence. The horrors and atrocities of pre-nation violence simply can’t hold a candle to it.

Like I said, though, I’m happy to leave nationalism be once it is severed from the state, unfortunately, nationalism severed from the state and not in a position of wanting to become a state is not really nationalism any more. It would become like any other regional or ethnic idenity. We could then at least then move on to focus on (the already widespread but smaller scale) ethnic violence in the world which doesn’t have professional military or the powerful institutions of the modern state at its call.

So we severe the Nation from the State. Fine – how then does the State operate? From where will it derive its laws, mores, norms, etc? Nations are the repository of intangibles of this sort and one might as well hope to severe a fetus from its mother.

[…the nation find ourselves continually narrating its violence in the tragic mode…]

The \”tragic mode\” is a Statist franchise. Nations dont kill people. States do.