For many, sudden confrontation with the hitherto unspeakable words maketa sensō—“lost war”—was almost stupefying. Since the early 1930s, the Japanese had been told they were fighting for the purest and most noble of objectives—that they were a “great country” and a “great empire,” a “leading race” destined to overthrow Western imperialism and bring about a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” a people possessed of a unique and indomitable “Yamato spirit.”
