Imperial Japanese Quotes

After March in 1945, the Japanese felt threatened by possibility of the people of Indochina rising against them. Therefore, they stated: “We of the Imperial Japanese Army have only invaded other Asian countries in order to remove the European and American white man from Asia! Stick with us Japanese and together we shall make Asians great while we kick the whites out of the entire region!” (A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume Two)

King Norodom of Cambodia replied, “Lt. General Kawamura of the Japanese Imperial Army, It is my understanding that you Japanese are granting my people a partial freedom which is always subject to the approval of any laws we make by the Japanese Government in Tokyo!” (A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume Two)

The quote, “Death is lighter than a feather, but Duty is heavier than a mountain” is not original with Robert Jordan. It is from the 1882 Japanese Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, which states that "duty is heavier than a mountain; death is lighter than a feather." See Wikipedia entry "Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors.

finally defeat Japanese imperialism only through the cumulative effect of many offensive campaigns and battles in both regular and guerrilla warfare,

My grandfather knows about hauntings, it occurs to me now. Here was where he knew his sisters, here was what he remembered, every day, in his Imperial school, as the Japanese grammar spread inside him, as he learned the language of the people who took his sisters and destroyed them. All his thoughts come to him in Japanese first, his dreams in Japanese also... I think of how every single thing he says in Korean comes across a pause where the Japanese is stilled and the Korean brought forward. Each part of speech a rescue

The Japanese had no idea what elements of Western culture and institutions where the crucial ones, so they ended up copying everything, from western clothes and hair styles to the European practice of colonizing foreign people. Unfortunately, they took up empire-building at precisely the moment when the cost of imperialism began to exceed the benefits.

Japanese had never seen a Western-style circus, and most of them had probably never seen foreigners, either.

There are no civilians in Japan.

In all, Yamamoto deployed 162 ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, practically its entire fighting force, in support of the Midway operation. (No

There are a number of good books that draw upon fox legends -- foremost among them, Kij Johnson's exquisite novel The Fox Woman. I also recommend Neil Gaiman's The Dream Hunters (with the Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano);  Larissa Lai's unusual novel, When Fox Is a Thousand; Helen Oyeyemi's recent novel, Mr. Fox; and Ellen Steiber's gorgeous urban fantasy novel, A Rumor of Gems, as well as her heart-breaking novella "The Fox Wife" (published in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears). For younger readers, try the "Legend of Little Fur" series by Isobelle Carmody.  You can also support a fine mythic writer by subscribing to Sylvia Linsteadt's The Gray Fox Epistles: Wild Tales By Mail.  For the fox in myth, legend, and lore, try: Fox by Martin Wallen; Reynard the Fox, edited by Kenneth Varty; Kitsune: Japan's Fox of Mystery, Romance, and Humour by Kiyoshi Nozaki;Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative by Raina Huntington; The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts: Ji Yun and Eighteenth-Century Literati Storytelling by Leo Tak-hung Chan; and The Fox and the Jewel: Shared and Private Meanings in Contemporary Japanese Inari Worship, by Karen Smythers.

After his sisters were taken away, the Japanese occupying force sent my grandfather to Imperial Schools. My first language is Japanese, he tells me. English far away. Sometimes, right after he told me, I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts.

Some even tried to use opium to commit suicide, swallowing large doses as poison. Others turned to crime to support their addiction, causing a wave of banditry to sweep through Nanking. After making conditions ripe for banditry in Nanking, the Japanese used the epidemic of crimes to justify their occupation, preaching the need for imperial law and order.

At a time when the US Navy was finally jettisoning the prewar bureaucrats in the officer corps, allowing the wartime performers to rise to the top, the Imperial Japanese Navy was facing the opposite problem – it was running out of its talented, veteran officers.

Inoue was standing at the point of a spear composed of irate Japanese geeks, and he was pleased to see that the principal reaction on her face was a fizzing, imperious outrage.

Our farmers make enough rice to feed all of us, yet we must eat millet and barley. All that rice goes to feed the Imperial soldiers sent the Japanese residents...some even gets sent back to Japan...and the prices they charge us for the little rice that remains! Did you see the look of satisfaction on Captain Narita's face as he looked at these coarse little cookies?

It was Daisuke's conviction that all morality traced its origins to social realities. He believed there could be no greater confusion of cause and effect than to attempt to conform social reality to a rigidly predetermined notion of morality. Accordingly, he found the ethical education conducted by lecture in Japanese schools utterly meaningless. In the schools, students were either instructed in the old morality or crammed with a morality suited to the average European. For an unfortunate people beset by the fierce appetites of life, this amounted to nothing more than vain, empty talk. When the recipients of this education saw society before their eyes, they would recall those lectures and burst out laughing. Or else they would feel that they had been made fools of. In Daisuke's case it was not just school; he had received the most rigorous and least functional education from his father. Thanks to this, he had at one time experienced acute anguish stemming from contradictions. Daisuke even felt bitter over it.

The idea that everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief occupant. Perhaps there may have been some unrealized sanitary reason for this practice. Another early custom was that a newly built house should be provided for each couple that married. It is on account of such customs that we find the Imperial capitals so frequently removed from one site to another in ancient days.

Period: Mid-twentieth century Ruling power: United States Rising power: Japan Domain: Sea power and influence in the Asia-Pacific Outcome: World War II (1941–45) Imperial Japan, bolstered by decisive victories in the Sino- and Russo-Japanese wars and a growing sphere of influence that included Korea and Taiwan, became aggressively hegemonic in the twentieth century. As Japanese expansion, particularly into China, threatened the American-led “Open Door” order in the Pacific, the United States became increasingly hostile toward Japan in the 1930s. After the US sought to contain Japan by embargoing its raw material imports, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, drawing the hitherto reluctant Americans into World War II.

Back in 1943, Prince Mikasa Takahito, the youngest brother of Emperor Hirohito, spent a year as a staff officer at the Nanking headquarters of the Japanese Imperial Army’s expeditionary force in China, where he heard a young officer speak of using Chinese prisoners for live bayonet practice in order to train new recruits. “It helps them acquire guts,” the officer told the prince.

The Heian Period (794–1185) was Japan’s classical era, a time of peace and opulence, when the imperial court in Heian-kyō (“Capital of Peace and Tranquility”: later Kyoto) was the fountainhead of culture, and the arts flourished. Toward the end, however, political power slipped from the aristocracy to the warrior class, the decline of the imperial court led to the decay of the capital, and peace gave way to unrest. This was the part of the Heian Period that interested Akutagawa, who identified it with fin-de-siècle Europe, and he symbolized the decay with the image of the crumbling Rashōmon gate that dominates his story. Director Kurosawa Akira borrowed Akutagawa’s gate and went him one better, picturing it as a truly disintegrating structure, entirely bereft of its Heian lacquer finish, and suggestive of the moral decay against which his characters struggle. His film Rashōmon (1950) was based on two of Akutagawa’s stories, “Rashōmon” and “In a Bamboo Grove.” Both—themselves based on tales from the twelfth century—reach far more skeptical conclusions than the film regarding the dependability of human nature and its potential for good. (Jay Rubin)

LIBERATION IS PERHAPS not the right word to describe the end of the war in colonial societies. Most Asians were more than happy to be rid of the Japanese, whose “Asian liberation” had turned out to be worse than the Western imperialism it temporarily replaced. But liberation is not quite what the Dutch had in mind for the Dutch East Indies in 1945, or the French for Indochina, or the British for Malaya.

In AD 812 the imperial family hosted a cherry-blossom viewing party for the first time, establishing a link with the cherry culture that continues to this day. The Japanese aristocracy, which sought to forge a national identity away from Chinese influence, celebrated cherries as their own special flower. At their annual hanami gatherings they wrote poems about the flower and about life, and then read them aloud.

The surprise pointed up a continuing of American Intelligence. The various intelligence agencies poured a vast amount of information into Washington; they knew the numbers of divisions, guns, tanks, and naval craft of potential enemies. But this intelligence could not be evaluated because Washington had not even one pipeline into official circles of enemy capitals; they could not even estimate what the potential aggressor was thinking or might do. This was no change from the past. In December 1941, American Intelligence knew that strong carrier task forces of the Imperial Japanese Navy had left port. But not understanding official Japanese thinking, the fact had meant nothing to Washington. The situation in 1950 was no change from the past, and there would be little change in the future. Now, Sunday morning 25 June, there were observers in Washington who recalled a similar shock on another Sunday eight and one half years before.

The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, can escape that terrible knowledge. Our freedom is not entirely our own; in some sense it is mortgaged from those who paid the ultimate price for its continuance. My own life of security, freedom, opportunity, and relative affluence certainly has been made possible because a grandfather fought and was gassed in the Argonne; an uncle in the Marines died trying to stop Japanese imperialism on Okinawa; a cousin in the Army lost his life at twenty-two trying to stop Hitler in France; and my father in the Army Air Force flew forty times over Japan hoping to end the idea of the expansive Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. I have spent some time these past decades trying to learn where, how, and why they and their generations fought as they did—and what our own obligations are to acknowledge their sacrifices.

A venerable Japanese proverb declares, “The silkworm-moth eyebrow of a woman is the axe that cuts down the wisdom of man.” Likewise, the oldest surviving collection of Chinese poetry, The Book of Odes, features an entomological tribute to a noblewoman’s face: “Her forehead cicada-like / her eyebrows like [the antennae of] the silkworm moth / What dimples, as she artfully smiled!” Throughout China’s imperial history, the attraction of a woman’s éméi (蛾眉)—her “moth-feeler eyebrows”—was a persistent theme.

Despite a seemingly pervasive belief that only people of colour ‘play the race card’, it does not take anything as dramatic as a slave revolution or Japanese imperialism to evoke white racial anxieties, something as trivial as the casting of non-white people in films or plays in which a character was ‘supposed’ to be white will do the trick. For example, the casting of Olivier award-winning actress Noma Dumezweni to play the role of Hermione in the debut West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child got bigots so riled up that J. K. Rowling felt the need to respond and give her blessing for a black actress to play the role. A similar but much larger controversy occurred when the character Rue in the film The Hunger Games was played by a black girl, Amandla Stenberg. Even though Rue is described as having brown skin in the original novel, ‘fans’ of the book were shocked and dismayed that the movie version cast a brown girl to play the role, and a Twitter storm of abuse about the ethnic casting of the role ensued. You have to read the responses to truly appreciate how angry and abusive they are.- As blogger Dodai Stewart pointed out at the time: All these . . . people . . . read The Hunger Games. Clearly, they all fell in love with and cared about Rue. Though what they really fell in love with was an image of Rue that they’d created in their minds. A girl that they knew they could love and adore and mourn at the thought of knowing that she’s been brutally killed. And then the casting is revealed (or they go see the movie) and they’re shocked to see that Rue is black. Now . . . this is so much more than, 'Oh, she’s bigger than I thought.’ The reactions are all based on feelings of disgust. These people are MAD that the girl that they cried over while reading the book was ‘some black girl’ all along. So now they’re angry. Wasted tears, wasted emotions. It’s sad to think that had they known that she was black all along, there would have been [no] sorrow or sadness over her death.

The idea that everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief occupant. Perhaps there may have been some unrealized sanitary reason for this practice. Another early custom was that a newly built house should be provided for each couple that married. It is on account of such customs that we find the Imperial capitals so frequently removed from one site to another in ancient days. The rebuilding, every twenty years, of Ise Temple, the supreme shrine of the Sun-Goddess, is an example of one of these ancient rites which still obtain at the present day. The observance of these customs was only possible with some form of construction as that furnished by our system of wooden architecture, easily pulled down, easily built up. A more lasting style, employing brick and stone, would have rendered migrations impracticable, as indeed they became when the more stable and massive wooden construction of China was adopted by us after the Nara period.

Within a few generations, the Chinese allowed their naval and merchant fleets to wither; in 1500, an imperial edict made the construction of vessels with more than two masts a capital offense. In 1525, another decree forbade the building of any oceangoing vessel. Where navies are absent, pirates pillage. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Japanese wako marauders so terrorized China's coastline that to this day women in Fujian province hide their faces with blue scarves originally designed to shield the wearer from the lecherous gaze of foreign bandits

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

Although he always talked about technology and Oracle with passion and intensity, he didn’t have the methodical relentlessness that made Bill Gates so formidable and feared. By his own admission, Ellison was not an obsessive grinder like Gates: “I am a sprinter. I rest, I sprint, I rest, I sprint again.” Ellison had a reputation for being easily bored by the process of running a business and often took time off, leaving the shop to senior colleagues. One of the reasons often trotted out for Oracle’s success in the 1990s was Ellison’s decision to hire Ray Lane, a senior executive credited with bringing order and discipline to the business, allowing Ellison just to do the vision thing and bunk off to sail his boats whenever he felt like it. But Lane had left Oracle nearly eighteen months before after falling out with Ellison. Since then, Ellison had taken full control of the company—how likely was it that he would he stay the course? One reason to be skeptical was that Ellison just seemed to have too many things going on in his life besides Oracle. During the afternoon, we took a break from discussing the future of computing to take a tour of what would be his new home—nearly a decade in the making, and at that time, still nearly three years from completion. In the hills of Woodside, California, framing a five-acre artificial lake, six wooden Japanese houses, perfect replicas of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century originals in Kyoto, were under construction. The site also contained two full-size ornamental bridges, hundreds of boulders trucked in from the high Sierras and arranged according to Zen principles and an equal number of cherry trees jostling for attention next to towering redwoods. Ellison remarked: “If I’m remembered for anything, it’s more likely to be for this than Oracle.”3 In the evening, I noticed in Ellison’s dining room a scale model of what would become his second home: a graceful-looking 450-foot motor-yacht capable of circumnavigating the globe. Already the owner of two mega-yachts, bought secondhand and extensively modified (the 192-foot Ronin based in Sausalito and the 244-foot Katana, which was kept at Antibes in the South of France), Ellison wanted to create the perfect yacht. The key to achieving this had been his successful courtship of a seventy-two-year-old Englishman, Jon Bannenberg, recognized as the greatest designer of very big, privately-owned yachts. With a budget of $200 million—about the same as that for the Japanese imperial village in Woodside—it would be Bannenberg’s masterpiece. Bannenberg had committed himself to “handing over the keys” to Ellison in time for his summer holiday in 2003.

On the afternoon of August 9, hearing the news that Nagasaki had been bombed, Emperor Hirohito called an imperial conference at which his ministers debated the wisdom of surrender. After hours of talk, at 2 a.m. Hirohito stated that he felt Japan should accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, terms of surrender proposed in late July by Truman (who had only become president on Roosevelt’s death in April). But Potsdam called for the emperor to step down; and his ministers insisted that their acceptance depended on Hirohito being allowed to remain as sovereign—an astute demand that would ensure a sense of national exoneration. James F. Byrnes, the U.S. secretary of state, did not deal directly with this, and on August 14 Japan surrendered at Hirohito’s command. The next day, the entire country heard with astonishment the first radio broadcast from a supreme ruler, now telling them squeakily, in the antiquated argot of the imperial court, that he was surrendering to save all mankind “from total extinction.” Until then, Japan’s goal had been full, all-out war, as a country wholly committed; any Japanese famously preferred to die for the emperor rather than to surrender. (One hundred million die together! was the slogan.) Today the goal was surrender: all-out peace. It was the emperor’s new will. Later that day a member of his cabinet, over the radio, formally denounced the United States for ignoring international law by dropping the atomic bombs. In 1988, on the forty-seventh anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when the mayor of Nagasaki accused Hirohito of responsibility for the war and its numerous atrocities, he inadvertently stirred up petitions for his own impeachment, and nationwide protests and riots calling for his assassination. A month afterward, in January 1989, Hirohito died at age eighty-seven, still emperor of Japan. Eleven days later the mayor, whom the Nagasaki police were no longer protecting, was shot in the back. He barely survived.

The initial result of this dynamic, quite clearly, is a rapid development of the traits of concentration within American imperialism. The simultaneously political and economic control over other countries exercised by U. S. finance capital; the increasing role of the American State in the establishment of this control; the direct stranglehold over German, Japanese, and Italian capital; the acceleration of vertical and horizontal concentration imposed by the need to control and regulate more and more completely its sources of raw materials and its domestic as well as foreign markets; the expansion of its military apparatus, the likelihood of "total" war, and a war economy; the need for increased exploitation of the working class imposed by the falling rate of profit — all these factors drive the American economy beyond capitalism "run by the monopolies" (just as these monopolies went beyond the stage of competitive capitalism) in order to arrive at the stage of a universal monopoly that is identical with the State. A new crisis of overproduction -more acute even than the present crisis- but, above all, war, will signal an extraordinary acceleration of this process.

In May 1944 a contract was placed with Shigaraki Buki Pottery Co for 980,000 mine bodies for delivery over the next year. The firm’s 17 small factories produced them by hand, including the use of plaster-of-paris molds on potter’s wheels and, not surprisingly, fell behind.

There was no real wish to dismantle the imperial institution itself, for this had a useful role in keeping the nation together, in maintaining national morale and also in legitimizing Occupation policy. The Japan specialists in the State Department were not unaware of the deep-rooted importance to Japanese people of the exercise of power being legitimized by high authority such legitimization, anarchy might prevail and expose the nation to communism.

The imperial heir in 1954, Bao Dai, was a nationalist who had abdicated after the Japanese occupation ended in 1945, giving his benediction to Ho Chi Minh. This conferred a legitimacy on Ho that proved troublesome when Bao Dai briefly returned to head the French-backed government of South Vietnam. From 1949 until 1955, the faux emperor failed to shake his image as an interloper. Ho had been designated the national leader, and Bao Dai was now seen simply (and correctly) as an agent of the French.

This letter provided peace of mind, for Harry’s schooling was predicated on service in the Japanese Imperial Army. “Unique” among nations, diplomat historian Ulrich Straus would write, Japan had instituted requisite military training in secondary school that was led by active-duty officers. Harry served under a lieutenant colonel, warrant officer, and master sergeant. Harry, an avowed American citizen, would undergo four years of Japanese-style ROTC training, but this was not the same as serving in the Japanese army.

Midway was merely a convenient target chosen by Yamamoto to draw the Americans out, and both sides’ objectives were attritional attempts to degrade their opponents’ carrier units. Nevertheless, the result created space for the Americans to begin their cautious advance back across the Pacific. This started with Guadalcanal and proceeded along two axes. Nimitz would command the larger and predominantly naval effort across the central Pacific, and island fortresses such as Saipan and Iwo Jima would soon go down in military legend. To the south, General Douglas MacArthur led a campaign across New Guinea and the Philippines, with a more land-based focus. Notwithstanding that, it was off Leyte Gulf in the Philippines in October 1944 that the Imperial Japanese Navy suffered a fatal blow in the largest naval battle in history, during which four carriers and three battleships were lost.

In an episode characteristic of the U.S. tactical intelligence effort during Midway, the attacks on this modest force had repeatedly been reported as being against one or two “battleships”. It was only later in the evening that aerial photography confirmed the sunken vessel had been the heavy cruiser Mikuma, with her damaged sister ship Mogami getting away. The brave defense of this little force over two days, and the fact that three out of the four ships eventually made it back to port, stands testimony to the professionalism and abilities of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

The definition of war crimes had included and continues to include atrocities such as rape, abduction of women and girls for forced prostitution, and coercion to prostitution. Japan’s government is therefore responsible for the atrocities committed against not only the Dutch military sex slaves for the Imperial Japanese Military, comfort women, but women from other countries as well.

In December 1941 the Japanese poet Takamura Kōtarō summed up the Japanese view of the conflict with the West: We are standing for justice and life, While they are standing for profits, We are defending justice, While they are attacking for profits, They raise their heads in arrogance, While we are constructing the Great East Asia family.

The complex Japanese aircraft designation systems proved confusing during and after the war. Several forms of nomenclature applied to Imperial Navy aircraft, but just two are important. The first system (“short form”) comprised a letter, number, letter (e.g., A5M). The first letter identified mission (A = carrier fighter, B = carrier bomber, G = land-based bomber, etc.). This was followed by a numeral indicating the numerical sequence of that model for the mission (5 = fifth carrier fighter). The second letter designated the manufacturer (the most important were A = Aichi, K = Kawanishi, M = Mitsubishi, N = Nakajima). The second major system was the type number from the year of service introduction under the Japanese calendar. By the Japanese calendar, 1936 was Year 2596, from which “96” was taken as the year of introduction. The year 1940 was Year 2600, hence the famous designation of the Mitsubishi A6M Carrier Fighter as the Type “0” or “Zero.” Imperial Army aircraft bore a Kitai (airframe) number (e.g., Ki-27), a type number/mission designator based on the Japanese calendar (Army Type 97 fighter had a 1937 year of introduction), and sometimes a name. The Imperial Navy resisted the use of names before capitulating to this system in 1943. To unify and simplify the identification of Japanese aircraft, the United States adopted a system by 1943 of providing male (fighters) and female (bombers) names for Japanese aircraft. Hence, the A6M “Zero” became officially the “Zeke” (although the Zero alone of Japanese aircraft continued to be widely known by that designation), while the “Nell” stood for the G3M and “Betty” for the G4M. This system has become so entrenched in decades of literature about the Pacific War that it will be used here for purposes of clarity.

Hundreds of thousands of Korean girls and women were captured and used as sex slaves for needy Japanese imperial troops.

Nishida has been sharply criticized after the war for lending his support to the imperial (ist) ideology of the Japanese government, but these criticisms have not led—as in Heidegger's case—to a thorough questioning of his philosophy.

defense of threatened class interests.76 But even if imperial Japan indubitably drew upon fascist models and shared important features with fascism, the Japanese variant of fascism was imposed by rulers in the absence of a single mass party or popular movement, and indeed in disregard of, or even in opposition to, those Japanese intellectuals who were influenced by European fascism.

Some clans even owned more lands than the imperial family.

The seat of the imperial state was Yamato (Honshu). Around 270 CE,

In 1890, Emperor Meiji passed the “Imperial Rescript on Education,

Initial recommendations promoted Confucian ideals of conformity and obedience to imperial authority,

is interesting to note that China was breathing its last in terms of imperial

Regardless of the scale of their deployment, the British simply did not have the requisite capabilities to withstand Japanese air-naval superiority; extra resources could not have offset the gap between the Royal and the Imperial Japanese Navies.

While the nation would be told by President Roosevelt’s radio address that the “United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan,” it was the USS Ward (DD-139) that suddenly and deliberately attacked and sank a vessel of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Before the modern period, Mahayana was a socially and politically conservative force. In Japan during the Meiji period that led to World War II, for example, Mahayana Buddhism blended into Japanese neo-Confucianism and Shintoism in support of state imperialism, colonialism, and aggression against other Asian nations, as well as aggression against the West. Nor did it prove itself to be the champion of the poor and oppressed in the feudal societies of China and Japan. The ethical failure of the goal of compassion in the Bodhisattva ideal was largely due to an almost totally spiritualized interpretation of the meaning of compassion. That is, the way one showed compassion was to provide spiritual help and guidance that would lead others to enlightenment rather than through actions that sought to correct social injustice. This failure was not unique to Buddhism. It can be found in the premodern ethics and spirituality of other religions as well.

Professor Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University isolated umami as glutamic acid while studying kombu, giant Japanese sea kelp. He commercialized this finding as monosodium glutamate (MSG), but you need not eat headache powder to taste the wonder (and healthfulness, when organic) of umami. Tomatoes, parmesan, and chicken broth all have high glutamate content. There are also mimics: shiitake mushrooms have umami-like nucleotides that allow them to impart a similar taste.

The local Red Cross chapter volunteered to publish his book. It came out in a deluxe, gold-embossed, Japanese-paper edition to remind the reader of human artistry, which can be a refuge from evil and a source of new, platonic stirrings. One copy was reserved for His Imperial Majesty Nicholas II. (The Tsar fairly devoured mystical works, believing that hell could be avoided by a combination of education and deceit.) "The Book of Kings and Fools," p. 136.

In 1940, under Churchill’s inspired, indomitable, incomparable leadership, the Empire had stood alone against the truly evil imperialism of Hitler. Even if it did not last for the thousand years that Churchill hopefully suggested it might, this was indeed the British Empire’s ‘finest hour’. Yet what made it so fine, so authentically noble, was that the Empire’s victory could only ever have been Pyrrhic. In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire’s other sins?

In Japan during the Meiji period that led to World War II, for example, Mahayana Buddhism blended into Japanese neo-Confucianism and Shintoism in support of state imperialism, colonialism, and aggression against other Asian nations, as well as aggression against the West. Nor did it prove itself to be the champion of the poor and oppressed in the feudal societies of China and Japan. The ethical failure of the goal of compassion in the Bodhisattva ideal was largely due to an almost totally spiritualized interpretation of the meaning of compassion. That is, the way one showed compassion was to provide spiritual help and guidance that would lead others to enlightenment rather than through actions that sought to correct social injustice. This failure was not unique to Buddhism. It can be found in the premodern ethics and spirituality of other religions as well.

Why do Japanese commandos fire Czech machine guns at Puerto Rican passengers departing an Air France flight in an Israeli airport? To strike at American Imperialism!” p. 155, footnote 13

Wars stopped slavery in America and liberated Europe and put an end to Japanese imperialism and killed Hitler and Mussolini and Pol Pot and Che Guevara and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That’s why we have them.

General Hideki Tojo ordered that the Sen Jin Kun, the Imperial Army's Battle Ethics, be distributed to all officers and men both at home and abroad. This order made the unwritten code of the samurai as interpreted by the Japanese High Command the required conduct of all Japanese servicemen. It ordered Japanese troops to embrace death warmly for the sake of the emperor-god and of the nation

You can’t go home again,” wrote Thomas Wolfe, and he might as well have been writing about the newly minted Imperial Japanese Navy aviator, resplendently clad in blue and brass, returning home to visit his family. Of course his parents and siblings were overjoyed to see him, and he them. He had done them a great honor, lifting the status of his entire clan in the eyes of neighbors, colleagues, and friends. He was bigger, stronger, tougher, older, wiser. But his homecoming was inevitably poignant, and more than a little strange. He might have dreamed of home every night he was away, clasping it in his imagination as a sanctuary from the brutality of his tormentors and the unremitting toil of his training. Once there, however, he was inevitably taken aback by the comfort, the ease, the disorder, the aimlessness. The reality of home had steadily diverged from the image he had carried in his mind. It contrasted too sharply with the harsh, purposeful life to which he had grown accustomed. He loved his family as much as he ever had, and they loved him as much as they ever had, but he was aghast at how much space had grown between them. They could never fully understand what he had done and endured, or what he had become. That was a secret known only to his classmates, his fellow survivors, who had shared in the long crucible of his training—the fatigue, the humiliations, the beatings, the deprivations, the chronic dread of expulsion, the ecstasy of flight, and the inconceivable joy he had felt upon receiving those blessed wings. He might never admit it, but his fellow airmen were closer to him now than his own kin. He belonged with them. He could not go home again because now the navy was his home.

Emi’s grief was buried beneath Jeju International Airport. At the time it was a military airfield, abandoned by the Japanese imperial air force when they left the island after the Second World War ended. More than seven hundred political dissidents were held there,

After March in 1945, the Japanese felt threatened by possibility of the people of Indochina rising against them. Therefore, they stated: “We of the Imperial Japanese Army have only invaded other Asian countries in order to remove the European and American white man from Asia! Stick with us Japanese and together we shall make Asians great while we kick the whites out of the entire region!

King Norodom of Cambodia replied, “Lt. General Kawamura of the Japanese Imperial Army, It is my understanding that you Japanese are granting my people a partial freedom which is always subject to the approval of any laws we make by the Japanese Government in Tokyo!

As the rise of the shoguns and the power of the shugo and the jito increased, imperial power decreased.

I have directed Commodore Perry to assure your imperial majesty that I entertain the kindest feelings towards your majesty’s

Being one of the few Asian people in Mount Shasta had its drawbacks. I never felt like I fit in." He blinks. "Do you feel like you fit in Japan?" "Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no." It's hard to shake the feeling of otherness, telling me I am a tourist in my own life. Growing up in America, Princess Izumi will never be truly Japanese, an imperial biographer recently wrote. I faced the same in Mount Shasta. Izumi will never be truly American. Truth? Sometimes I question if I should even be a princess of Japan. If I am laying claim to something that isn't mine. Maybe I will never be Japanese enough. My throat is scratchy, and I curl my fingers into my palms. No. This is my right. I was raised in America, but my father is the Crown Prince, and Japanese values are still a deep pool within me. Entrenched in my blood. People can say what they want. That I am not enough. They can talk, but I stay silent, quietly digging deeper, pulling up my roots, satiating my thirst.

While America’s imperial power might degrade, power of this magnitude does not collapse quickly except through war. German, Japanese, French, and British power declined not because of debt but because of wars

There was always an unspoken expectation that I would return one day and follow in my father's footsteps as an imperial guard. My mother grew ill, forcing my father into early retirement. I did my duty." "That seems unfair." He huffs out a breath. "It feels unfair. But my parents were older when they had me. You know, the last remnants of a postwar generation, brought up to value sacrifice, discipline, and duty." "Whoa. Gimu. Peak Japanese." Japanese language is subtly nuanced. There is a myriad of words to describe duty, and among them is the gimu----a lifelong obligation to family or country.

My two weeks here are filled with activities. Private lessons in Japanese history, language, and arts. Tours of shrines, temples, and tombs. A visit to the imperial stock farm and wild duck preserves. Assorted banquets. Outings with my father---a baseball game, public art exhibit opening.

You know of gimu. But have you studied ninjō?" It's hard to think the way he's looking at me. I rack my brain. "Ninjō?" "Ninjō is human emotion, and often conflicts with gimu. A classic example is a samurai who falls for a shogun's daughter. Bound by duty, he cannot act on his feelings." "Or an imperial guard who wishes to change careers but cannot out of familial obligation?

In the early 1980s, historian Jon Halliday asked Genaro Carnero Checa, a radical Peruvian writer and frequent traveler to the DPRK who published a book on the country in 1977 entitled Korea: Rice and Steel, his honest opinion of North Korea. Checa replied, “They fought the North Americans; they have done incredible things in the economy; it’s the only Third World country where everyone has good health, good education and good housing.” Halliday then asked Checa about his view of North Korea as a poet. Checa said, “It is the saddest, most miserable country I’ve ever been in in my life. As a poet, it strikes bleakness into my heart.” Checa’s statements reflect what many in the Third World thought of North Korea during the Cold War era. On one hand, this small nation overcame Japanese imperialism, brought the mighty U.S. military to a standstill in a three-year war, and rapidly rebuilt itself into a modern socialist state. For many struggling peoples in the Third World that recently overcame decades of Western colonialism and imperialism, North Korea’s economic recovery and military prowess were justifiably admirable. On the other hand, the oppressiveness and brutality of the North Korean political system undermined the appeal of the DPRK’s developmental model to the Third World. The growing inefficiencies of North Korea’s economic system also became too obvious to ignore. In fact, Kim Il Sung’s Third World diplomacy may have furthered the DPRK’s domestic economic troubles. A former member of the North Korean elite, Kang Myong- do, said after his defection to South Korea that “excessive aid to Third World countries had caused an actual worsening of North Korea’s already serious economic problems.

According to Eden’s personal secretary, Oliver Harvey, his master was ‘horrified’ by Churchill’s plan and tried to talk him out of it. He failed. In despair, he rang the US ambassador, John Winant, who, similarly taken aback, advised that such a visit would not be appropriate until the New Year at the earliest. Harvey too was appalled, noting, ‘I am aghast at the consequence of both [Churchill and Eden] being away at once. The British public will think quite rightly that they are mad.’ If Eden called off his Moscow mission, however, it would send the wrong message entirely to the Kremlin, since ‘it would be fatal to put off A.E.’s visit to Stalin to enable PM to visit Roosevelt. It would confirm all Stalin’s worst suspicions.’20 Eden persisted. He phoned the deputy prime minister, Clement Attlee, who agreed with him wholeheartedly and undertook to oppose the prime minister’s scheme at Cabinet. His objection had no effect: nothing would divert Churchill from his chosen course. When Cadogan spoke to him later that evening, to explain that Eden was ‘distressed’ at the idea of their both being out of the country at the same time, Churchill brushed him aside, saying, ‘That’s all right: that’ll work very well: I shall have Anthony where I want him.’21 Though he did not put it quite so bluntly when discussing this personally with Eden, Churchill left him in no doubt that ‘a complete understanding between Britain and the United States outweighed all else’.22 This conviction was reinforced by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and, according to the new CIGS, Brooke, the pressing need ‘to ensure that American help to this country does not dry up in consequence’.23 Eden’s opposition to Churchill’s visit had genuine diplomatic validity, but neither was he entirely disinterested, for, as Harvey put it, the prime ministerial trip would ‘take all the limelight off the Moscow visit’.24 The unfortunate Foreign Secretary was not only unwell but also disconsolate as HMS Kent set off into rising seas and darkening weather. The British party of Eden, Cadogan and Harvey, accompanied by Lieutenant General Sir Archibald Nye (the newly appointed Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff) and a phalanx of officials, set foot on Russian soil on 13 December. Their arrival gave Cadogan (who was not a seasoned

In the entire history of man, only two human institutions approach continuous existence and succession for more than two thousand years: the Japanese Imperial Succession and the papacy.

That wasn’t the American way. Americans were good at sticking their nose into other people’s business when things weren’t right. The Nazi’s didn’t defeat themselves, neither did the Boxers, the Soviets, the Imperial Japanese Army, the Taliban, ISIL, the MLF, the Sons of Mao, or countless others. Americans had big egos and an overpowering sense of right and wrong. The United States of America was gone, but not dead. Americans didn’t just care about themselves.

The Tungans’ weapons were a motley lot. One was a Winchester .303, an old sporting model and clearly the legacy of an expedition. There was an ancient Japanese service rifle, several Snyders, a German rifie (1890), and a Lee-Endeld from the Indian frontier very approximately dated by the initials VR. But the most intriguing of all was a Remington marked 1917 and stamped clumsily with the double eagle of Imperial Russia.

in the 1930s, as successive governments used the popularity of sakura, and its imperial links, as propaganda tools among an unquestioning people. Rather than focusing on cherry blossom as a symbol of life, the songs, plays and school textbooks now focused more on death. Classic poems were deliberately misinterpreted, and it became the norm to believe that the Yamato damashii, or ‘true Japanese spirit’, involved a willingness to die for the emperor–Japan’s living god–much as the cherry petals died after a short but glorious life.

The Tungans’ weapons were a motley lot. One was a Winchester .303, an old sporting model and clearly the legacy of an expedition. There was an ancient Japanese service rifle, several Snyders, a German rifie (1890), and a Lee-Enfield from the Indian frontier very approximately dated by the initials VR. But the most intriguing of all was a Remington marked 1917 and stamped clumsily with the double eagle of Imperial Russia.

In the last analysis, this stereotyped image of American culture as “sick” owed its existence to critics from the New Left.* America now displayed all the characteristics of a decadent modernity, or Zivilisation , as well as a decaying Faustian empire. Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Richard Barnet, and Richard Slotkin all explained that American culture glorified violence, imperialism, and genocide. It practiced a vicious form of capitalism and technological repression (described by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden), a bankrupt liberalism (scathingly criticized by Roberto Unger), a manipulative consumerism (laid bare by Christopher Lasch and William Leach), as well as racism and a hatred of all minorities and subordinate groups. Not only blacks but American Indians, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Hispanics, and women suffered unendurable humiliations at the hands of mainstream American society.

In a crowded cave, one grenade might do the work of twenty bullets. Sword-wielding officers beheaded dozens of willing victims. There were reports of children forming into a circle and tossing a live hand grenade, one to another, until it exploded and killed them all. In a cave filled with Japanese soldiers and civilians, Yamauchi recalled, a sergeant ordered mothers to keep their infants quiet, and when they were unable to do so, he told them, “Kill them yourself or I’ll order my men to do it.” Several mothers obeyed.94 As the Japanese perimeter receded toward the island’s northern terminus at Marpi Point, civilians who had thus far resisted the suicide order were forced back to the edge of a cliff that dropped several hundred feet onto a rocky shore. In a harrowing finale, many thousands of Japanese men, women, and children took that fateful last step. The self-destructive paroxysm could not be explained by deference to orders, or by obeisance to the death cult of imperial bushido. Suicide, the Japanese of Saipan earnestly believed, was the sole alternative to a fate worse than death. The Americans were not human beings—they were something akin to demons or beasts. They were the “hairy ones,” or the “Anglo-American Demons.” They would rape the women and girls. They would crush captured civilians under the treads of their tanks. The marines were especially dreaded. According to a story circulated widely among the Japanese of Saipan, all Marine Corps recruits were compelled to murder their own parents before being inducted into service. It was said that Japanese soldiers taken prisoner would suffer hideous tortures—their ears, noses, and limbs would be cut off; they would be blinded and castrated; they would be cooked and fed to dogs. Truths and half-truths were shrewdly wedded to the more outrageous and far-fetched claims. Japanese newspapers reproduced photographs of Japanese skulls mounted on American tanks. A cartoon appearing in an American servicemen’s magazine, later reproduced and translated in the Japanese press, had suggested that marine enlistees would receive a “Japanese hunting license,” promising “open season” on the enemy, complete with “free ammunition and equipment—with pay!”95 Other cartoons, also reproduced in Japan, characterized the Japanese as monkeys, rats, cockroaches, or lice. John Dower’s study War Without Mercy explored the means by which both American and Japanese propaganda tended to dehumanize the enemy. Among the Japanese, who could not read or hear any dissenting views, the excesses of American wartime rhetoric and imagery lent credibility to the implication that a quick suicide was the path of least suffering. Saipan was the first Pacific battlefield in which Americans had encountered a large civilian population. No one had known what to expect. Would women and children take up weapons and hurl themselves at the Americans?

I was too young not to believe every word. I believed absolutely that this heroic family had saved our homeland. Kim Il-sung created everything in our country. Nothing existed before him. He was our father’s father and our mother’s father. He was an invincible warrior who had defeated two great imperial powers in one lifetime – something that had never happened before in five thousand years of our history. He fought 100,000 battles against the Japanese in ten years – and that was before he’d even defeated the Yankees. He could travel for days without resting. He could appear simultaneously in the east and in the west. In his presence flowers bloomed and snow melted.

The American sociologist Barrington Moore proposed a longer-term explanation for the emergence of military dictatorship in Japan. Seeking the ultimate roots of dictatorship and democracy in different routes toward the capitalist transformation of agriculture, Moore noted that Britain allowed an independent rural gentry to enclose its estates and expel from the countryside “surplus” labor who were then “free” to work in its precocious industries. British democracy could rest upon a stable, conservative countryside and a large urban middle class fed by upwardly mobile labor. Germany and Japan, by contrast, industrialized rapidly and late while maintaining unchanged a traditional landlord-peasant agriculture. Thereafter they were obliged to hold in check all at once fractious workers, squeezed petty bourgeois, and peasants, either by force or by manipulation. This conflict-ridden social system, moreover, provided only limited markets for its own products. Both Germany and Japan dealt with these challenges by combining internal repression with external expansion, aided by the slogans and rituals of a right-wing ideology that sounded radical without really challenging the social order. To Barrington Moore’s long-term analysis of lopsided modernization, one could add further short-term twentieth-century similarities between the German and Japanese situations: the vividness of the perception of a threat from the Soviet Union (Russia had made territorial claims against Japan since the Japanese victory of 1905), and the necessity to adapt traditional political and social hierarchies rapidly to mass politics. Imperial Japan was even more successful than Nazi Germany in using modern methods of mobilization and propaganda to integrate its population under traditional authority. Moore’s perceived similarities between German and Japanese development patterns and social structures have not been fully convincing to Japan specialists. Agrarian landlords cannot be shown to have played a major role in giving imperial Japan its peculiar mix of expansionism and social control. And if imperial Japanese techniques of integration were very successful, it was mostly because Japanese society was so coherent and its family structure so powerful. Imperial Japan, finally, despite undoubted influence from European fascism and despite some structural analogies to Germany and Italy, faced less critical problems than those two countries. The Japanese faced no imminent revolutionary threat, and needed to overcome neither external defeat nor internal disintegration (though they feared it, and resented Western obstacles to their expansion in Asia). Though the imperial regime used techniques of mass mobilization, no official party or autonomous grassroots movement competed with the leaders. The Japanese empire of the period 1932–45 is better understood as an expansionist military dictatorship with a high degree of state-sponsored mobilization than as a fascist regime.

Whatever their fears about the war’s resolution, most Japanese were inclined to see it as a war of liberation not only for Japan but for the whole of Asia. This was understandable, especially for soldiers. Who would not prefer to believe that one was dying for a meaningful cause, rather than a misguided one? Sure enough, the so-called Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere began with great fanfare as the Western colonial possessions fell one by one to Japanese military advances from late 1941 to early 1942. Almost all the nations in the sphere—including Burma (now Myanmar), British Malaya (Malaysia and Singapore), the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), and the Philippines—had been part of Western colonial empires (though the last was no longer a colony at the time of Japanese invasion). So the Japanese occupiers could conveniently claim that they were finally freeing their oppressed Asian brothers and sisters in order to help them reorganize their societies into a viable cultural, economic, and political bloc under Japan’s leadership. Though cloaked by a veneer of a civilizing mission, however, the sphere was first and foremost about Japanese economic imperialism, meant to strengthen its hold over much of the Southesast and East Asian resources needed for Japan to continue fighting. That need would grow all the more pressing with time. The

The Japanese defeat in World War II left 2.4 million Koreans stranded in Japan. They belonged to neither the winning nor the losing side, and they had no place to go. Once freed, they were simply thrown onto the streets. Desperate and impoverished, with no way to make a living, they attacked the trucks containing food intended for members of the imperial Japanese armed forces and sold the booty on the black market. Even those who’d never been violent before had little choice but to turn into outlaws. In a strange sort of way, all this illegality actually set these people free.

As the American Aryan’s desire to expand across the Pacific grew, Christian ministers observed that heathen Japan needed salvation and that Japan’s seclusion policy was not God’s way. The missionary Samuel Wells Williams wrote, “I have a full conviction that the seclusion policy of the nations of Eastern Asia is not according to God’s plan of mercy to these peoples, and their government must change them through fear or force, that his people may be free.”13 In 1852, the secretary of the Navy, John Kennedy, wrote that Japan must recognize “its Christian obligation to join the family of Christendom.”14 Echoing similar arguments made earlier about Native American gold mines, the secretary of state, Daniel Webster, argued that Japan had “no right” to refuse the U.S. Navy’s “reasonable” request to commandeer Japanese sovereign soil for its coaling stations because the coal at issue was “but a gift of Providence, deposited, by the Creator of all things, in the depths of the Japanese islands for the benefit of the human family.

During World War II pets were allowed aboard British war ships and Blackie was the HMS Prince of Wales's ship's pet cat. . In August 1941 he became famous after the ship carried Prime Minister Winston Churchill across the Atlantic to Canada where he net Franklin D. Roosevelt to agree on the Atlantic Charter. After the declaration of the Charter, as Churchill prepared to depart from the ship, Blackie approached him at the gangway and bid Prime Minister Churchill farewell. In honor of that moment Blackie was renamed Churchill. Later Blackie survived the sinking of Prince of Wales by the Imperial Japanese Naval Air Service later that year, and was rescued and taken to Singapore with the other survivors

Above all else, the sinking of Force Z demonstrated that the dominance the battleship had enjoyed in naval warfare had finally come to an abrupt end. For almost half a century, the battleship had reigned supreme as the arbiter of victory at sea. Throughout its life the torpedo had been a relatively ineffective weapon, and one which could be countered with relative ease, but which was now becoming increasingly effective when used by destroyers and submarines. Also, a new generation of aircraft had entered service which had the speed, capacity and agility to launch highly effective torpedo attacks. The torpedo bomber was a weapon that had finally come of age. What this battle demonstrated was that relatively cheap, mass-produced aircraft, if flown with skill and daring, and used in sufficient numbers, could prove more than a match for a hugely expensive battleship. So, 10 December 1941 marked a real historical milestone. In geopolitical terms, the sinking of Force Z signalled the imminent end for the British defence of Singapore – its surrender to the Japanese in turn marking the start of the disintegration of the British Empire. In the field of military and naval history, that date marked something of equally momentous importance. It was the day when the battleship ceased to be the dominant arbiter of naval power. In effect, 10 December 1941 marked the death of the battleship.

It was the bicycle which allowed the Japanese Imperial Army to do what everyone else had said was impossible: traverse virgin jungle.

GI’s were returning to the United States and many others were being shipped to the Pacific to finish what looked to be a difficult battle ahead. The Japanese soldiers were a formidable foe, many of whom were willing to die for their country. On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and three days later dropped one on Nagasaki. The Imperial Japanese Navy was now unable to continue conducting operations and their army would no longer be able to withstand an Allied invasion of the Japanese islands. Less than a week later, on September 2, 1945, Japanese Foreign Affairs Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the Japanese Instrument of an unconditional Surrender on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo harbor. In the United States, everyone celebrated VJ Day, Victory over Japan Day, and the end of the war.

Thus a pattern of migratory labor grew up in California—starting with the wheat ranches—in which large numbers of migrant workers would converge on an area at harvesttime, perform the work, then move on to another crop. It was a world of single men, bunking in barracks while on the job, then shoving off, their belongings and bedrolls slung across their shoulders. Photographs from the 1880s and 1890s reveal these men to be predominantly whites and Chinese. Photographs from the early 1900s show that Japanese and East Indian workers were now in the fields. Photographs from the 1920s show even further diversification: Filipinos, especially on the Monterey Peninsula; African Americans in the southern San Joaquin; Mexicans throughout Southern California, including the newly irrigated Imperial Valley.

Even when Kim Il-sung did something particularly brutal or horrific, no one raised an eyebrow. “Remember the time of Japanese colonial rule!” “Never forget the cruelty of American imperialism!” Without any other information at their disposal, young North Koreans simply fell for the propaganda.

Some three hundred leading Japanese citizens were removed from jail by these voluntary efforts of the missionary descendants. It wasn’t that they liked Japanese, or that they feared Imperial Japan less than their neighbors. It was just that as Christians they could not sit idly by and watch innocent people maltreated.

During the Second Sino-Japanese War, which raged from 1937 to 1945, the Japanese Imperial Army slaughtered 23 million ethnic Chinese.

If we train her, honing her skills as a chef to the very utmost of her considerable ability... ... then it's possible we could delay the day the storm takes her. We must raise Erina to be the greatest chef the Nakiri Family has ever produced! And to do so, we must find them! Find the perfect rocks that will polish her to a mirror shine... A Veritable Generation of Diamonds! Professor Hayama. I hear your student Shiomi has found an intriguing boy overseas." "S-Sir Senzaemon! How did you...?!" "Oh, I simply happened to overhear it. Have you thought of bringing that boy to Japan and enrolling him here?" "What?! B-but, sir! Not only is Akira a foreigner, he's an orphan of unknown origins! Is such a thing even possible?!" "I will speak with the Ministry of Justice. Whether it be through bribery or sheer force... I will see to it that they grant Akira Hayama Japanese citizenship." "Darling... You know that boy from the harbor pub? Now Alice is insisting that he come with her back to Japan, and she won't listen to reason. Father is right. For Mana's sake... ... I will help him with his plan. If Alice wants to bring Ryo Kurokiba, then so be it! He will learn at Totsuki alongside her! I've heard all the rumors about them, you know. So you have not one but two highly talented nephews? How wonderful! Their futures look bright indeed. Say... have you thought of sending them to our Institute? I'm sure the Aldini Brothers would do well there." "Okay, okay. You win. Geez. Stubborn old coot. But don't come crying to me... ... if Soma flips the tables on your grandkid and uses her as a steppingstone." Competing against Erina just may destroy the confidence of these children, but so be it! I'm fully aware that this plan is an imperious use of my power for personal gain... ... but I'm willing to make any sacrifice! I will do whatever it takes to make Erina into a light of hope! Then I will show her to Mana... Through her own daughter she will see... ... that there is yet hope and promise in cooking!"

Much later, Emperors reigned from the kikukamonsho, the Chrysanthemum Throne, a name which referred to the throne itself as well as the imperial chrysanthemum crest (kiku). When the later Japanese thought of their nation as a political unity at all they imagined the god-descended individual who sat upon the kikukamonsho and ruled according to divine mandate.

The need for international engagement became all the more urgent in 1931, when the Japanese army, at its own initiative, invaded and occupied Manchuria and established an imperial colony, crowned by a puppet state, in this vast northern corner of China. Unable to have the occupation sanctioned by the League of Nations, Japan left the organization in 1933. Reporting back to the foreign office from the Los Angeles games, Japan’s consul, Satô Hayato, declared that, ‘This Olympic Games has been very beneficial in erasing anti-Japanese sentiment.’ Alternatively, for the more liberal and cosmopolitan wing of Japanese society, this kind of impact meant that the games could be ‘an opportunity for a national people’s diplomacy’, making peaceful inter-societal connections when the inter-state realm was so bellicose.3 However, Consul Satô spoke for many in the imperial bureaucracy, armed forces and ultra-nationalist circles, arguing that, ‘The best way to get the Americans to understand the real Japan is to defeat America and show them the true strength of the Japanese. Rational discourse is completely useless. Americans probably first understood the true strength of the Japanese when the Rising Sun flag was raised . . . during the Olympic Games.

ON DECEMBER 8, 1941, cinemas and theaters in Japan were made to temporarily suspend their evening performances and broadcast a speech recorded by Prime Minister Tojo Hideki earlier that day. U.S. films—films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which the Japanese relished in easier times—were now officially banned. That night, audiences were confronted with the voice of a leader who hardly resembled Jimmy Stewart. Tojo was a bald and bespectacled man of middle age with no remarkable features other than his mustache. His exaggerated buckteeth existed only in Western caricatures, but he did not look like a senior statesman who had just taken his country to war against a most formidable enemy, and his voice was memorable only for its dullness. He recited the speech, “On Accepting the Great Imperial Command,” with the affected diction of a second-rate stage actor. Our elite Imperial Army and Navy are now fighting a desperate battle. Despite the empire’s every possible effort to salvage it, the peace of the whole of East Asia has collapsed. In the past, the government employed every possible means to normalize U.S.-Japan diplomatic relations. But the United States would not yield an inch on its demands. Quite the opposite. The United States has strengthened its ties with Britain, the Netherlands, and China, demanding unilateral concessions from our Empire, including the complete and unconditional withdrawal of the imperial forces from China, the rejection of the [Japanese puppet] Nanjing government, and the annulment of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. Even in the face of such demands, the Empire persistently strove for a peaceful settlement. But the United States to this day refused to reconsider its position. Should the Empire give in to all its demands, not only would Japan lose its prestige and fail to see the China Incident to its completion, but its very existence would be in peril. Tojo, in his selective explanation of the events leading to Pearl Harbor, insisted that the war Japan had just initiated was a “defensive” war. He faithfully echoed Japan’s deep-seated feelings of persecution, wounded national pride, and yearning for greater recognition, which together might be called, for the want of a better phrase, anti-Westernism. It was a sentimental speech, and it was notable for what was left unsaid.

The construction of the Death Railway was one of the greatest war crimes of the twentieth century. It was said that one man died for every sleeper laid. Certainly over sixteen thousand of us British, Australian, Dutch, American and Canadian prisoners died on the railway – murdered by the ambitions of the Japanese Imperial Army to complete the lifeline to their forces in Burma by December 1943. Up to a hundred thousand native slaves, Thais, Indians, Malayans and Tamils also died in atrocious circumstances. Even Japanese engineers

Feeling they were being treated as inferiors by the West, and suffering from American and European racism, the Japanese concluded that they had to make their own place in the world, using force to pursue the manifest destiny of the `imperial way'.

To encourage addiction and further enslave the people, the Japanese routinely used narcotics as payment for labor and prostitution in Nanking. Heroin cigarettes were offered to children as young as ten. Based on his research, the University of Nanking history professor Miner Searle Bates concluded that some fifty thousand people in the Nanking area were using heroin—one-eighth of the population at the time. Many of the downtrodden citizens of Nanking fell prey to drugs because it gave them the means to escape, if only temporarily, from the misery of their lives. Some even tried to use opium to commit suicide, swallowing large doses as poison. Others turned to crime to support their addiction, causing a wave of banditry to sweep through Nanking. After making conditions ripe for banditry in Nanking, the Japanese used the epidemic of crimes to justify their occupation, preaching the need for imperial law and order.

While Buddhism has not engaged in the kind of repression of indigenous polytheisms that has characterized Christianity and Islam, a legacy of subordination and even demonization of indigenous Gods and spirits by Buddhists can be seen throughout the region. (Tibetan Buddhist discourse about the indigenous Bon tradition would be one example.) Responsibility for historical injustices, such as imperial Japanese expansionism, or earlier Mongolian aggression, will be assigned to the native religion, which because it is not explicitly universalistic is regarded as implicitly nationalistic and xenophobic.