Until the surrender, the state and its ideologues had dictated that the primary love a human should feel was patriotism or love of country, ultimately expressed through devotion to the emperor. To the very moment of surrender, official myths about parents and wives gladly sending sons and husbands off to war with patriotic fervor, and men happily giving their lives for the emperor, had prevailed. Only later did accounts slowly emerge of soldiers and sailors sobbing in their billets in the dark after receiving letters from home, and of dying men calling out their mother’s names, not the
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