Cleyera japonica is a floweringevergreen tree native to warm areas of Japan, Taiwan, China, Myanmar, Nepal, and northern India. It can reach a height of 10 m. The leaves are 6–10 cm long, smooth, oval, leathery, shiny and dark green above, yellowish-green below, with deep furrows for the leaf stem. The bark is dark reddish brown and smooth. The small, scented, cream-white flowers open in early summer, and are followed later by berries which start red and turn black when ripe. Sakaki is one of the common trees in the second layer of the evergreen oak forests. It is considered sacred to JapaneseShintō faith, and is one of the classical offerings at Shintō shrines.
Uses
Sakaki wood is used for making utensils, building materials, and fuel. It is commonly planted in gardens, parks, and shrines. Sakaki is considered a sacred tree in the Shinto religion, along with other evergreens such as and. Shinto shrines are traditionally encircled with consisting. In Shinto ritual offerings to the "gods; spirits", branches of sakaki are decorated with paper streamers to make tamagushi.
Linguistic background
The Japanese word sakaki is written with the kanji character and is a kokuji 国字 'Japanese logograph.' Ideograms and kokuji are two of the rarest logographic types, each constituting a small percentage of a typical written Japanese sample. First, the idea of sakaki is expressed with a melding of boku or ki 木 'tree' and shin or kami 神 'god; divine, sacred' ; comparable to a graphic fusion of the wordshinboku 神木 'sacred tree.' Second, the sakaki 榊 ideograph is a kokuji 'national logograph' rather than a usual kanji 漢字 'Chinese logograph' borrowing. Kokuji often denote Japanese plants and animals not native to China, and thus not normally written with Chinese logographs. The kanji 榊 first appears in the Konjaku Monogatarishū, but two 8th-century transcriptions of the word sakaki are 賢木, meaning "sage tree", and 坂木, meaning "slope tree". Sakaki is the title of Chapter 10 in The Tale of Genji. It comes from this context.
"May I at least come up to the veranda?" he asked, starting up the stairs. The evening moon burst forth and the figure she saw in its light was handsome beyond describing. Not wishing to apologize for all the weeks of neglect, he pushed a branch of the sacred tree in under the blinds. "With heart unchanging as this evergreen, This sacred tree, I enter the sacred gate." She replied: "You err with your sacred tree and sacred gate. No beckoning cedars stand before my house." And he: "Thinking to find you here with the holy maidens, I followed the scent of the leaf of the sacred tree." Though the scene did not encourage familiarity, he made bold to lean inside the blinds.
The etymology of the pronunciation sakaki is uncertain. With linguistic consensus that the -kisuffix denotes 木, the two most probable etymologies are either sakae-ki, from ; or saka-ki, from – an older form of modern reading sakai, from the way that trees were often planted at a shrine's boundary line. Carr cites Japanese tradition and historical phonology to support the latter etymon. The Shogakukan Kokugo Dai Jiten Dictionary entry for this term also notes that the pitch accent for sakayu – the origin of modern sakae – is different than what would be expected, suggesting that may be the more likely derivation.
