„A severed head”

There is a shrub that flowers in winter. White everywhere around it, tree branches stripped bare, earth frozen hard, birds gone silent. It stands with its head held high, with leaves thick and glossy as if someone had varnished them, with red blossoms fully open. Below it, on the snow, lie a dozen or so heads already fallen. Because these flowers have one peculiar habit. They do not drop like cherry petals, slowly and one by one. They fall whole. The entire head detaches from the stem, slides off in a single motion and lands on the ground with a dull thud. And this, the legend says, is what a certain samurai once saw. He was returning from battle, passing such a shrub. In that instant he realised that the fallen heads looked exactly like what remains after a clean cut in combat: red, round, severed from the body. From that day on the entire warrior class feared the plant. No one planted it in castle gardens. No one brought it in bouquets to the court. No one set it beside the bed of a wounded comrade. The shrub stubbornly kept re-enacting the scene of their death.

Quite a story, isn’t it? Philosophical, vivid, suggestive. Except that I have just told you a myth. And a surprisingly young one. From the entire two and a half centuries of the Edo period, not a single record of such a taboo survives. The rumour was invented by jealous Tokyoites in the first years after the Meiji Restoration, somewhere around 1870, as a political jibe at the new officials from southern Japan, who happened to love camellias. The invention proved so clever that within a single generation it sank into the very tissue of the culture. Today the Japanese believe it. Tourists believe it. Guidebook writers and some bloggers on East Asian aesthetics believe it. The English-speaking internet repeats this fairy tale with the same confidence it would muster for Einstein’s theory of relativity.

And the truth, as it usually is, turns out to be several orders of magnitude more interesting than the most colourful lie. The real history of the Japanese camellia begins in the year 720, when an emperor orders shrubs to be cut down and made into war hammers. In the following centuries the flower passes through monasteries in a variety known as the “warrior’s camellia”, through the tea rooms of a sixteenth-century master, and through the oldest Japanese poetry anthology, in which the camellia appears in nine poems as a sign of native longing. It moves through the Edo period, when shōguns breed thousands of varieties and samurai swap rare specimens the way European aristocrats would later swap tulips. It passes through bestiaries of spirits, where an old camellia bears a woman’s name and prophesies misfortune to villages. Then comes Meiji, the political hatred of a single generation, and performs a trick: it turns a beloved flower into a taboo. And then it arrives at Kurosawa, where red blossoms drifting down a stream are the signal for slaughter. This is an essay about how a myth grows. About how it can be beautiful and colourful, and yet how the truth may be even more so.

The myth we all know

This question carries weight, because the tale of samurai aversion to the camellia belongs today to that category of facts-about-Japan which circulate online like unwatermarked banknotes: everyone accepts them. Type “samurai” and “camellia” into a search engine in any Western language and you will get a dozen variants of the same story. Warriors avoided planting camellias in castle grounds. Visitors to castles did not bring bouquets of this flower. Doctors did not place it beside a wounded bushi’s bed. The reason was always the same: a blossom falling whole looked too much like a severed head.

Novels. Guidebooks. Academic essays. Television programmes. Everything built on the same observation about the falling flower, as if it were something between botany and memento mori.

Yet when you start to dig, the source of this knowledge turns out to be oddly recent. In Japanese chronicles of the Edo period (1603–1868), in countless gardening treatises, in samurai diaries, in letters of castle servants, in descriptions of daimyō residences – there is not a single line about it. Silence.

In Edo the opposite was happening. The samurai elite adored camellias. They planted them in their thousands. They traded rare varieties the way European aristocrats two centuries later would trade tulips. They published one monograph after another devoted to this single flower: in 1630 the monk Sakuden brought out Hyakuchin-shū (百椿集), the most famous camellia monograph of the era, describing a hundred varieties. Before the year 1700 appeared Chinka zufu (椿花図譜), an illustrated compendium of seven hundred varieties. By the mid-nineteenth century the catalogues counted more than a thousand.

Something doesn’t add up.

The ancient camellia as weapon

The Edo scene is only half the story. Because if we go back further, to the oldest written tradition of Japan, the camellia turns out to be something even more surprising. Not an ornamental flower. A weapon.

In 720 the imperial court completes work on Nihon Shoki (日本書紀), the chronicle of Japanese history from the beginning of the world. In the eleventh book, in the account of the twelfth emperor, Keikō (景行天皇), we find the following passage. The emperor leads a campaign in southern Kyūshū against the tsuchigumo (土蜘蛛) – a derogatory term the Yamato court used for local tribes who refused to submit (more about them here: Forgotten Wars of Ancient Japan – The Emishi Versus Yamato). The rebels are hiding in a cave near the village of Hayami. The emperor calls a council. They decide the attack must be swift and merciless.

"Trees of camellia were cut down and made into hammers, to be used as weapons. The most valiant warriors were chosen and given those hammers. They went through the mountains, parted the thickets, fell upon the earthen caves of the tsuchigumo* and overcame them at the headwaters of the Inaba river. They slew them all, and the blood flowed up to their ankles."

 - Nihon Shoki, Book 7, chapter on Emperor Keikō, 720 CE

*Tsuchigumo – literally “earth spiders” (土 tsuchi, earth + 蜘蛛 kumo, spider). The Yamato court used this name for indigenous inhabitants of Japan who refused to submit to its rule. They often lived in caves and earthen dwellings, hence “earth”. “Spider” was the insulting metaphor: someone wild, hiding in the dark, unworthy of civilisation.

From camellia wood they fashion tsubaki no tsuchi (椿の槌, literally “hammers of camellia”). Harder than oak. Heavy. Unbreakable. The place where the hammers were made is then named Tsubaki-ichi (海石榴市, “camellia market”). The site of the bloody reckoning is from then on called Chita (血田, “blood field”). Both names have survived to this day as toponyms in Ōita prefecture.

Camellia wood is indeed one of the hardest among Japanese broadleaf trees. Fine-grained, springy, dense – to this day it is used for the handles of hammers and axes. Carpenters cut from it the grips of seals, smiths the handles of their tools. What for a Western tourist is an ornamental shrub, for a Japanese craftsman was, and still is, a material of high hardness.

In the imperial Shōsōin (正倉院), the temple storehouse in Nara, long ceremonial staves called uchi-zue (打杖) still rest, carved from camellia wood. Function: an amulet to ward off evil spirits. On the first day of the Hare, at New Year, the emperor would touch his servants with them. A purifying gesture. Camellia wood in the imperial cult was used to beat demons.

The blood of warriors – contrary to the myth of “samurai aversion to the camellia” – was literally what the camellia in ancient Japan defended itself against.

The sacred camellia

In Manyōshū (万葉集), the first great anthology of Japanese poetry from the eighth century, the camellia appears nine times. Not once as a symbol of death. Sakato no Hitotari (坂門人足) – a court official of the Nara dynasty – writes:

巨勢山の つらつら椿 つらつらに 見つつ偲はな 巨勢の春野を

Kose yama no / tsuratsura-tsubaki / tsuratsura ni / mitsutsu shinohana / Kose no haru no o

"On Mount Kose

rows of camellias –

gazing on them attentively,

let us remember together

the spring fields of Kose."

- Manyōshū, vol. 1, poem 54,

Sakato no Hitotari, ca. 701 CE

It is a poem of memory and absence. It was composed in autumn, when the camellias were not in bloom, during the pilgrimage of the “retired” Empress Jitō to Kii Province. The author, travelling with the court, sees the bare shrubs on a mountain slope and imagines the spring field of the same place in full red flower. The camellia here is a marker of the landscape’s identity, the thing that allows one to remember it. In the same anthology, almost half a century later, Ōtomo no Yakamochi (大伴家持), the editor of the collection and one of the greatest poets of late Nara, writes during a feast at a friend’s house:

あしひきの 八つ峰の椿 つらつらに 見とも飽かめや 植ゑてける君

Ashihiki no / yatsuo no tsubaki / tsuratsura ni / mi tomo akameya / uetekeru kimi

"I gaze long

at the camellias on the eight peaks of the mountains,

never tiring of the sight,

and likewise I shall never tire

of you, who planted them."

- Manyōshū, vol. 19, poem 4481,

Ōtomo no Yakamochi, ca. 757 CE)

In Genji monogatari (源氏物語), Murasaki Shikibu’s novel from around 1010, the camellia appears in the chapter “Wakana jō” (若菜上) as an ingredient of tsubai-mochi (椿餅), rice cakes wrapped between two of its leaves. Culinary tradition counts these as the first documented wagashi (和菓子), a Japanese sweet. Tsubai-mochi are still served in traditional shops today, in February, at the onset of spring.

In the Shintō geography of Japan there are forty-three shrines with “camellia” in their names. The scholar Sawada Yōko spent twenty-four years (from 2000 to 2024) visiting each of them and describing them in her doctoral dissertation. The most famous is Tsubaki Ōkami Yashiro (椿大神社) in Suzuka, in Mie prefecture. In terms of popularity among worshippers it is second in all Japan only to the Grand Shrine of Ise. Before the main pavilion grows a sacred camellia. On the hill behind the shrine, five thousand more of the same species.

The word tsubaki is written today with the character 椿 – “tree of spring”. It is a national character, a Japanese kokuji (国字), absent from classical Chinese. It was composed in Japan, specifically for this plant, in the eighth century, to hold its local, native flavour. The other historical writing, used in Nihon Shoki, is 海石榴 (the characters literally mean “sea pomegranate”). That writing is of Chinese origin, a loan from the continent. When the Japanese wanted to say “this is ours”, they made up their own character. Out of tens of thousands of plants, only for the camellia did they take the trouble.

Edo. The golden age of the camellia

Back to the Tokugawa era. The first three shōguns of that line – Ieyasu, Hidetada and Iemitsu – were keen botanists. The second of them, Hidetada (徳川秀忠, ruling 1605–1623), loved camellias above all other flowers. His passion spread to the court, the court passed it to the daimyō, the daimyō to the middle samurai, and they in turn to the wealthy townspeople. Within a single generation the camellia moved from temple grounds and aristocratic gardens to become an object of nationwide fashion.

In the Hosokawa clan, which ruled Higo province (today’s Kumamoto prefecture), successive lords encouraged their samurai to cultivate camellias. From this effort came specific local varieties, known to this day as higo-tsubaki (肥後椿). Six of them, together with the Higo chrysanthemum, Higo iris and Higo peony, still form higo rokka (肥後六花), the six flowers of Higo – a cultivated tradition of the provincial warrior aristocracy.

In Denkō-ji temple in Nara, founded in 1585 by Hōshunni, the mother of the prematurely deceased daimyō Tsutsui Junkei (1549–1584), a stately camellia still grows. Hōshunni planted it on her son’s grave as her favourite variety. Soon it was noticed that this particular shrub fell apart differently from classical camellias – not as a whole, but petal by petal, like a cherry. Monks and warriors took this as a sign. They named the variety bushi-tsubaki (武士椿, also read mononofu-tsubaki) – “the samurai camellia”. The reason: shedding petal by petal reminded them of samurai isagiyosa (潔さ), the “purity of resolve”, a virtue captured in the popular proverb:

花は桜木 人は武士

(Hana wa sakuragi, hito wa bushi)

“among flowers, the cherry; among men, the warrior”

Note the name. The samurai camellia (or “the warriors’ camellia”, to be more precise). Given in 1585 from a mother’s love, continued by successive generations of monks and samurai. It is hard to imagine deeper proof that classical Japanese warrior culture not only did not avoid the camellia – it sought in it its own image and confirmation.

In Edo also appeared the most famous camellia monographs of all time. Hyakuchin-shū by the monk Sakuden (1630) – one hundred varieties. Chinka zufu (before 1700) – seven hundred. Kadan kōmoku by Mizuno Motokatsu (1664). Chinka hin’i by Okumura Kanae (around 1810). Thousands of illustrations, thousands of breeders’ names, a desperate fight to preserve varieties that would otherwise be forgotten by everyone. Most of them, ironically, exist today only in these books – the camellias themselves have died out or been replaced by later crossings.

In samurai houses, family crests with camellia motifs were popular: mitsu-tsubaki (三椿, three camellias arranged in a circle), mukai-tsubaki (向い椿, two camellias facing each other), tsubaki-mon (椿紋) in various designs – furled, ringed, stylised into a circle. They were most common in the Wakizaka, Imagawa and Hatakeyama clans. The same camellias appear on battle banners, formal kimonos, official seals.

Put differently: the two hundred and fifty years of Edo were not an era of fear of the camellia. They were an era of its cult. They cultivated, collected, painted, recorded. Sold. The rarest varieties cost as much as a craftsman’s house. The samurai were the main customers of the nurseries.

So where, then, did the famous taboo come from?

Sen no Rikyū

Before we answer that, one more thread. One cannot speak of camellia culture in Japan without Sen no Rikyū (1522–1591), the greatest master of the tea ceremony. Rikyū loved camellias so deeply that he placed them first in the hierarchy of chabana (茶花) – the flowers of the tea. From late autumn through early spring, when the host of a chashitsu places chabana in the tokonoma, the niche of honour, the camellia is queen (more about tokonoma here: Close the World Behind the Door. Tokonoma – The Japanese Art of Emptiness in Your Home).

Here, however, Sawada Yōko, in her most recent book Tsubaki to Nihon Bunka (椿と日本文化, “Camellia and Japanese culture”, 2026), points out a fascinating detail. Modern chadō (茶道) tradition prescribes that only closed camellia buds be used for chabana, never fully opened blossoms. Why, the scholar asked mistresses of the art for years. The answer was always the same: “that is how it is done”. It is done that way because it is done that way. The aesthetic wisdom of generations.

Sawada studied illustrations of chabana from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. It turned out that in the Muromachi period (1333–1568), when the tea ceremony was only being born as an art form, camellias were used in full bloom. In the Edo period too. Masters of the Rikyū line set splendid, open blossoms in the tokonoma. The change came only after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when the tea ceremony, until then a masculine, samurai, scholarly practice, was being transformed into a refined art for young women – an element of girls’ education. She writes:

After the Meiji Restoration, only buds of the camellia began to be used in *chabana*. This reflected the changes occurring in women’s education under the influence of Confucianism imported from China, and a new emphasis on modesty and restraint in the tea practice itself.

(Sawada Yōko, *Tsubaki to Nihon Bunka*, 2026)

The open, red camellia was too sensual for the new, feminine tea. The bud – more modest, restrained. Rikyū used the full flowers. The samurai used the full flowers. Meiji said that was not done.

A small thing. But it tells us where to look for the rest of the explanation of this misunderstanding.

How the myth was born

Twenty years ago Takiguchi Yōsuke, a researcher at the Hyōgo Prefectural Flower Centre, decided to take this question seriously. He went through inventories of daimyō gardens of the Edo period, collections of drawings from clan residences, bakufu diaries, etiquette treatises, manuals on visiting the sick, funerary iconography. He looked for a single record showing that the camellia was avoided in the warrior’s home. A single voice from early Edo.

He found nothing.

The first documented mention of a “samurai taboo on the camellia” comes from bakumatsu, the last years of the Edo period, and only blossoms in the first decades of Meiji. Takiguchi’s findings were published on 8 January 1993 in Kobe Shinbun, in the evening edition. The researcher pinpoints the time and place of the myth’s birth precisely: the late 1860s, in Edo (renamed Tokyo shortly thereafter).

The year is 1868. The old order has just collapsed. The Meiji Restoration returned nominal power to the emperor and handed real power to young samurai from south-western Japan, mainly from the provinces of Satsuma (薩摩, today’s Kagoshima) and Chōshū (長州, today’s Yamaguchi). The people of Edo, just recently the heart of the country, now watch as the city is ruled by people they had looked down on, the provincial outsiders. Politicians from Satsuma and Chōshū take over the offices, parade in new uniforms, change the laws, take decisions. The Edokko lose influence, status, income.

What irritated them especially: these newcomers from the south loved camellias. Those were their native flowers. Yamaguchi (capital of Chōshū) had the camellia as its city flower. Kumamoto and Kagoshima (Satsuma) – as the prefectural tree-symbol. In the gardens of former daimyō from the south, now turned into residences for officials, the camellias bloomed lushly. The winners of history were planting their favourite flowers on the neck of the defeated city.

And that is when the rumour began to circulate. A true warrior, a true bushi, did not stand for camellias. Because the way the flower falls resembles a severed head. Because it is a bad omen. Because if the camellia had been worthy of warriors, they would have planted it in their gardens. If the new rulers love it, that means they are not real warriors. They are usurpers. Everyone who likes this flower is a stranger.

The rumour was deft. It sounded archaic, it had its own aesthetic logic (the comparison of a falling head to a severed head is genuinely suggestive), it hinted at vague “warrior traditions”. It caught on quickly. Producers of sazanka (山茶花), a tree that competed with the camellia in producing red flowers, threw in their own. They spread the word that tsubaki was engi ga warui (縁起が悪い), a flower of “ill omen”, good for foreigners, not for native Tokyoites. By the first manuals of hanakotoba (花言葉, “the language of flowers”) published in Meiji, this fresh card had already been promoted to the rank of ancient wisdom.

In 1906 Natsume Sōseki (夏目漱石), a Tokyo writer born just before the Restoration, publishes the novel Kusamakura (草枕, “The Grass Pillow”). One of its passages contains the following description of the camellia:

Whenever I see a camellia deep in the mountains, I think of a sorceress. With her black eyes she pulls you toward her, and without your knowing how, she enchantingly slips poison into your veins. By the time you notice you have been deceived, it is already too late.

(Natsume Sōseki, *Kusamakura*, chapter 6, 1906)

The historian and writer Handō Kazutoshi, a specialist on the Shōwa period, in his book Nagai Kafū no Shōwa (永井荷風の昭和, 2000) reads this passage as a coded political critique. Sōseki, born in Edo, painfully felt the presence of officials from the south. The black eyes of the sorceress, the poison in the veins, the trap noticed too late – this is not only a description of a flower. It is a description of the men of Satsuma and Chōshū. One has only to substitute one for the other in the text, and the whole metaphor begins to resonate with the political context of the era.

The myth of “samurai aversion to the camellia” is therefore the child of the political jealousy of the defeated townsmen of Edo. Invented against the winners of Meiji. Adopted by those winners as supposed ancient wisdom. Today, in 2026, it circulates around the world as a “fact about Japanese culture”, repeated in tourist guides, blogs on East Asian aesthetics, anthologies of hanakotoba and the slogans of large flower shops.

Botany has been dragged into a culture war that nobody remembers anymore.

The old camellia, the true ghost

In the actual folk tradition of yōkai, the demons and spirits of Japan, the camellia was never a symbol of a severed head. Toriyama Sekien, the greatest illustrator of bestiaries of spirits in the Edo period, included in Konjaku gazu zoku hyakki (今昔画図続百鬼, 1779) a print depicting furutsubaki-no-rei (古椿の霊, “the spirit of an old camellia”).

An old camellia, having lived to a great age, attains consciousness. It can take the form of a beautiful woman, to lure travellers. It may also appear in its true form: a tree whose trunk is covered with red, swollen faces of the dead. At night it wails, and this lament is a warning to the village: a tragedy approaches.

Notice what is happening here. In the folk imagination the camellia gives heads, it does not take them away. Instead of the image of an executioner severing a samurai’s head – the image of a tree on which the faces of the long dead live on. Instead of the announcement of one’s own death – a warning for the community. These are altogether different categories. Deeper ones.

The camellia in folk Japan belonged to the world of passage, the liminal, to what stands on the border of the human and the non-human. An old, long-lived camellia was a tree-spirit, worthy and dangerous, but never evil. If it wept at night, it meant it knew something the people did not yet know. A prophetic tree, a guardian tree. A tree with memory.

The Meiji myth reduced all this to a single flat meaning: severed head, death, taboo. The myth of the Edo gossipers won out over Toriyama Sekien’s vision from two centuries earlier. It won because it was simpler. It won because it can be told in one sentence. It won because it requires no cultural knowledge, only a gesture of recognition.

That is usually how younger myths beat older ones.

Kurosawa and the controlled transformation of the myth

In 1962 the director Akira Kurosawa performed a fascinating move – he consciously seized the Meiji myth of the camellia as a symbol of blood and turned it into a work of art. In the film Tsubaki Sanjūrō (椿三十郎), the sequel to Yojimbo, the protagonist played by Toshirō Mifune enters the plot unnamed. Asked for his name, he looks through the window at a camellia bush and replies: “Tsubaki Sanjūrō, thirty years old.” Though, as he admits a second later, he is closer to forty.

The camellia in this film is not a decoration but a signal. A group of nine young samurai, allied with the hero against a corrupt faction, are to attack the enemy residence at precisely the moment they see red camellias drifting on the surface of a stream. The stream connects the residence garden with the field where the warriors wait. Sanjūrō plucks blossoms from the bush, throws them into the water, the waiting group sees the sign.

Kurosawa wanted the camellias to be red. They were meant to be the only colour in a black-and-white film, an aesthetic accent. The technology of 1962 did not allow it. So they were painted black instead, to stand out against the white of the water – black in the role of red, a sign of convention.

In the final duel scene, Mifune kills his opponent, played by Tatsuya Nakadai (仲代達矢), with a single, lightning stroke of the sword. At the same instant, from Nakadai’s chest spurts a tall geyser of “blood”, like the rushing jet of a fountain. It was a mechanical failure. The pump controlling the amount of artificial blood gave way and released everything at once. The whole crew froze. Kurosawa thought for a moment. “We keep it.”

The scene entered the history of cinema. Thirty seconds of a white shirt being slashed open by a long, dark stream. Every later samurai film borrowed a great deal from it – Tarantino admits as much openly when shooting Kill Bill.

But this is not merely a beautiful accident. Kurosawa deliberately builds the whole around the convergence of camellia and blood that comes from the Meiji myth. The action of Tsubaki Sanjūrō takes place in late Edo, when the world of the warrior is dying out. Sanjūrō knows his time is limited – it shows in his cynicism, his dismissive look at the younger men. The young samurai he has allied with do not yet understand. The camellia – the symbol that in the film plays the role of war signal, sign of action, of blood – is the work of Kurosawa and at the same time of the Meiji myth of the falling warrior’s head.

It began as a political jibe at officials from the south. Fifty years later it became the aesthetic signature of a farewell to old Japan in one of the greatest samurai films ever made. The myth grew up. It entered world cinema. We look at red camellias on the water and see blood in them, as if it had to have been so forever.

In Shōjo Tsubaki (少女椿, “Camellia Girl”), the manga by Suehiro Maruo from 1984, young Midori sells bouquets of camellias on the streets of Tokyo to support her sick mother. The manga is a classic example of the ero-guro nansensu current: brutal, oneiric, piercing. The camellia here is a sign of destroyed innocence. Two film adaptations (1992, 2016) carry the motif further. Contemporary popular culture has found new uses for the same basic convergence: a blood-red flower, the fragility of falling, a young woman, death.

In each of these layers the camellia means something different. In each it has been carried to that meaning – from outside, by context, by history.

A red head on the snow

What really is a camellia, when one strips away all these layers?

A broadleaf plant. Evergreen. Growing naturally in Japan, China, Korea and Vietnam. Four native Japanese species: yabu-tsubaki, yuki-tsubaki, sazanka and hime-sazanka. Flowers red, white, pink, sometimes yellow. An exceptionally long blooming period – from November to May. Low temperatures do not hurt it. The wood hard, dense, used for the handles of tools. From its seeds an oil is pressed – tsubaki-abura (椿油), to this day a popular natural hair care product in Japan. The flower, when it falls, falls whole, because the petals are fused at the base and the entire calyx slides off the branch as one “botanical unit”.

That is all. The rest – meaning, history, symbol, myth – that has happened in the heads of people who looked at this flower.

In Manyōshū, the women poets of Nara looked at it and saw their country. In Genji, the Heian aristocrats looked at it and saw an early-spring meal and aesthetic subtlety. In Edo, gardeners and breeders looked at it and saw an object of passion and a source of income. Sen no Rikyū looked at it and saw the essence of winter. Toriyama Sekien looked at it and saw an old ghost dwelling in a decayed tree. The townsmen of bakumatsu Edo looked at it and saw the insufferable winners from Satsuma. Sōseki looked at it and saw black-eyed officials injecting poison into his veins. Kurosawa looked at it and saw a red fountain of blood and the end of an era. Suehiro Maruo looked at it and saw a girl sold by fate.

Each of them was right, each of them about his own camellia. Even though it was still the same plant.

This may be the deepest lesson of this strange history. A symbol is a vessel. Every generation of a culture pours different content into it. And then forgets that it was the one that poured it.

A Pole, were he to look from the Japanese camellia garden into his own, would see plenty too. The poppy, after Monte Cassino – a flower of blood and memory – though before 1944 it had only been a red weed of the fields. The birch, after 2010 – a restless, political, divided tree – though for centuries it had been only a modest, kindly neighbour of homes. The rose, when Grechuta sings it, means something else than the rose in Sienkiewicz. The flowers the same. The people different.

The Japanese camellia, tsubaki, is three things at once today. It is a plant – hard, beautiful, long-lived. It is a myth – young, false, indefatigable. It is a symbol – open, ready to take on the next meaning.

A red head, when it falls from its stem, lands on the ground with a heavy sound. Boto, in Japanese. In that sound one can hear everything. The severing of a head. The end of an era. A prayer for spring. One can also hear nothing. One can simply look.

Some say that this is exactly how the camellia should be looked at.

Sources

1. Sawada Yōko, 椿と日本文化 (Tsubaki to Nihon Bunka, “The Camellia and Japanese Culture”), Chiisagosha, Tokyo 2026 [the most recent academic monograph on the camellia, based on the author’s doctoral dissertation at Aichi Gakuin University].

2. Takiguchi Yōsuke, study on the origin of the myth of samurai aversion to the camellia, published in 神戸新聞 (Kobe Shinbun), evening edition, 8 January 1993 [key source debunking the Meiji origin of the myth].

3. Handō Kazutoshi, 永井荷風の昭和 (Nagai Kafū no Shōwa, “Shōwa of Nagai Kafū”), Bungei Shunjū, Tokyo 2000 [political reading of Sōseki].

4. Sakuden, 百椿集 (Hyakuchin-shū, “Collection of One Hundred Camellias”), Kyōto 1630 [the first great Edo monograph on the camellia].

5. Anonymous, 椿花図譜 (Chinka zufu, “Illustrated Collection of Camellia Flowers”), before 1700 [seven hundred cultivars; scholarly reprint and edition: Watanabe Yoshimaru, 1969].

6. Blacker, Carmen, The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan, George Allen & Unwin, London 1975 [the fullest study of the Japanese folklore of sacred trees and plant-spirits].

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 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

Write us...

Ciechanów, Polska

dr.imyon@gmail.com

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