kamikaze & cherry blossom

I heard a TV presenter mention that kamikaze pilots used to fill there cockpits with cherry blossom before an suicide mission. They would then open their cockpit as they dived and the blossom would flow out into the sky as they crashed.

Kamikaze means "divine wind" after the typhoons that saved Japan in 1274 and 1281 by driving off Kublai Khan's invasion fleet.
Te Japanese state manipulated the symbol of the cherry blossom to convince young soldiers and sailors that it was their honor to "die like beautiful falling cherry petals" for the emperor. Their fiery descents into American fleets were likened to falling blossoms in the spring wind.

The pilots were often university students, motivated by obligation and gratitude to family and country. They prepared by holding ceremonials, writing farewell poems, and receiving a "thousand stitch belt" — cloth into which 1,000 women had sewn one stitch as a symbolic uniting with the pilot. Then, in planes wrapped around 550 pound bombs, they would fly off to die.

26 May 1945. Corporal Yukio Araki(right), holding a puppy, with four other pilots of the 72nd Shinbu Squadron at Bansei, Kagoshima. Araki died the following day, at the age of 17, in a suicide attack on ships near Okinawa.