Constantine Vaporis, director of the Asian studies program and professor of history, was featured in a blog post on the PBS blog “The Rundown.” The post was entitled “For Hundreds of Years, Cherry Blossoms Are Matter of Life and Death.”
Vaporis said that as seppuku (ritual suicide) became a key part of the samurai’s Bushido code, the samurai “identified with the cherry blossom particularly because it fell at the moment of its greatest beauty, an ideal death.”
