Glorifying nikutai, as Tamura did with spellbinding effectiveness, amounted to a complete repudiation of kokutai, a shocking inversion of the body (tai) to be worshipped. Now the only body deserving of veneration was the “flesh” (niku)—the sensual body—of the individual. The abstract “nation body” or nation state was meaningless, and all patriotic blather about it was duplicitous. What mattered—all that was indisputably real, honest, fundamental—was the solitary physical individual. For a people who had been deformed by a long tradition of so-called spiritual ideas, Tamura explained at one
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