Walter Skya, PhD is Associate Professor of History & Director of Asian Studies at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Book by Walter Skya Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shintō Ultranationalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. “Japan’s Holy War is an absolutely outstanding and necessary work, a major contribution to international scholarly debate.”—Klaus Antoni, University of Tübingen Click here for information on how to purchase from Amazon.com

Has anybody seriously looked inward to the root causes of this war? To this day, seventy-three years later—incredible as it may seem—Japanese have never really come to terms with their wartime past.

There seems to be a kind of national amnesia. And shockingly, Americans too have not even identified the ideology of their adversary in the Pacific War.

How can you explain such intense loyalty to the emperor even after the unimaginable suffering from the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the near devastation of the Japanese state?

Who did the masses blame for the defeat in war? In typical Japanese fashion—themselves! Would the Germans have bowed down and apologized to the Führer and Reich Chancellor of the German People (Führer und Reichskanzler des deutschen Volkes) had he not chosen to take his own life? And, what happened to Mussolini?

The second historical component that made the Japanese people susceptible to the radicalization of Shintö nationalism is what I describe as a “culture of death.” This culture of death developed in the feudal period of Japanese history. 

The purest form of bushidō, the code of the warrior, is found in the book Hagakure (In the Shadow of the Leaves), an early eighteen century collection of sayings, episodes, and recordings compiled into eleven volumes. This book was required reading for Japanese students in the prewar period. The most famous words from contain the essence of bushido:

The essence of bushidō is to seek death. This means that when a warrior is faced with a choice between life and death, he chooses death. It is as simple as that. To say that death without achieving one’s aim is a death in vain—a dog’s death—is the kind of calculating bushidō practiced in the Kyōto area. When pressed with a choice between life and death, it is not necessary to gain one’s aim.

Thus, according to Hagakure, the purpose of life of a bushi (samurai) was to be constantly prepared for death. That is to say, for the military aristocracy, achieving victory in battle was not one’s ultimate aim. Further, when one’s lord died, vassals would follow him in death.

There is a special word for this kind of death in Japanese: junshi. It specifically meant following one’s lord in death. In other words, life had no meaning for the samurai after the death of one’s lord. There are countless examples of this in Japanese history. For example, when Nabeshima Katsushige, lord of Saga feudal domain died in 1661, 36 vassals followed him in death.

As we find in the above quote, Hagakure taught that the true bushi does not think of victory or defeat. “He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death.” 

The Japanese culture of death is seen in the ritual practice of hara-kiri or seppuku, which goes back deep in the history of the bushi to the Ashikaga period (1336-1573). This was an excruciatingly painful method of dying and was at the center of bushi culture. When a bushi had no choice but to pay the ultimate price for his actions, it was the supreme honor to kill the self by his own hands rather than being executed.

Radical Shintō ultranationalists did not conceive of the notion that dying for the emperor was a sacrifice of the self for the emperor. According to Fundamentals of Our National Policy (1937), “Offering our lives for the sake of the emperor does not mean so-called self-sacrifice, but the casting aside of our little selves to live under his august grace and the enhancing the enhancing of the genuine life of the people of the State.” It is the “dying to self and returning to [the] One.”