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history, tried carefully to answer the question of what happened to the meaning that flowering cherries now carried. Nevertheless, he also created much cherry mythology. Typical reasoning of the period is illustrated by 'Sumizome'. For Yamada this probablyseventeenth-century cherry originated as a garden form in the ninth century, giving it the same date as the classic poem from which its name was derived. Among the mixed-up theories on the etymology of sakura, the Japanese word for cherry, a popular interpretation traced its origin to the Asama Shrine at Mount Fuji, which enshrines a mythical goddess named Kono hana no sakuya hime. A local tradition holds that the word sakura was derived from the word sakuya in the goddess's name, but it is clearly the other way round. Her name translates literally ''goddess that makes the flowers (namely, cherries) bloom." The goddess is of local origin and emerged to make the spectacular flowering of the wild stands of Prunus incisa intelligible. These cherries were on the slopes of Mount Fuji before there was a goddess. Of course, P. incisa had escaped the attention of the average nationalist, who carried an image of P.×yedoensis as the flowering cherry, but the sakuya-sakura etymology closely related the cherry to the mythical gods who created Japan. Also appealing to the Great-Japan ideology was the story's mention of a supreme symbol of Japan, Mount Fuji. Another confusing discussion of the years under nationalist ideology concerns the origin of the national flower, 'Somei-yoshino', or Prunus ×yedoensis. It started with a fragmentary herbarium specimen of a cherry collected by a certain Père Taquet in 1908 on the Korean island of Cheju. It resembled P.×yedoensis and was taken by Koidzumi as proof that this plant came from Korea. Considering Japan's occupation of Korea, it was for some the ultimate proof that Korea was Japanese; for others it was difficult to think that this cherry did not originate from Yoshino in the Yamato region. No such cherries have been found since on Cheju. It was only in the 1960s that breeding experiments between the Oshima cherry (P. serrulata var. speciosa) and the Edo-higan cherry (P. pendula f. ascendens) gave similar cherries and led to the conclusion that 'Someiyoshino' is a hybrid of these two, as Wilson had suggested before. In the last years of the war, Japan was completely ruined but still desperately fighting. Lacking steel, it armed its soldiers with bamboo spears and the aircraft industry experimented with ceramic jet engines. An exhausted population drained of all its resources, and bereft of its sons who