The explicit glorification of death in battle—death as an end in itself—was a recent phenomenon in Japanese culture, as were the “no surrender” principle, massed suicide attacks, and the master race ideology of imperial bushido. None of those ideas was anchored in the samurai tradition. The pre-Meiji samurai had fought only his fellow Japanese. He had no occasion to indulge in racial chauvinism, and he did not think at all of foreign conquest. He would have been puzzled by the suggestion that he and other Japanese were somehow cosubstantial with the divine emperor.
