Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

Frequent repetition on the radio and at patriotic rallies might have left the impression, especially to younger Japanese, that “Umi Yukaba” and the sentiments it contained had an ancient lineage. Actually, the lyrics dated back to an eighth-century poem, but that poem had previously been obscure, and had only been set to music in 1937. 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. Traditional bushido extolled humility, and the virtues of knowing and respecting one’s enemy. It did not preach an attitude of thickheaded truculence, or an expectation of heaven-sent victory. But those elements of the ancient warrior codes did not serve the purposes of the ultranationalist junta, so they were simply whitewashed out of history, education, and civic discourse.