During his two years of military training in the 20th Infantry Regiment of Kyoto-fu Fukuchi-yama, he was taught that “loyalty is heavier than a mountain, and our life is lighter than a feather.” He recalled that the highest honor a soldier could achieve during war was to come back dead: to die for the emperor was the greatest glory, to be caught alive by the enemy the greatest shame. “If my life was not important,” Azuma wrote to me, “an enemy’s life became inevitably much less important.... This philosophy led us to look down on the enemy and eventually to the mass murder and ill treatment of
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