Horizon

I read about this VC being awarded in last week's paper and yes, in a sidebar it said that they do make them from two captured Russian guns from the Crimea.

Incidentally - and this is worth keeping in mind the next time that the A-Bomb attacks are discussed - I understand that the US forces are still using the surplus Purple Hearts that were mass-produced by the hundreds of thousands in 1945 in expectation of the vast casualties that would be suffered in an Allied invasion of Japan.

Late last year I read A Diary of Darkness, by Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, a Japanese intellectual who had spent a great deal of time in the US working for Japanese-language newspapers.

The diary covers the period from the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor to his death in late May 1945. He's connected with the foreign ministry, and has access to American and British papers, which gives him some insight into both sides' perception of the war.

You really start to understand how twisted the regime was when Kiyosawa deals with the mass suicide at Saipan. This — and other such "honorable deaths" — was touted as an act of spiritual warfare which would inflict greivous blows on Western war-spirit. Kiyosawa has access to the mournful accounts of the suicides in western papers and compares that to the Japanese propaganda about the world standing in awe of their noble deed.

This gets much creepier when the island-hopping campaign gets closer to Japan. Rather than this spiritual warfare nonsense being discredited, the military leaders play it up more in plans for defeating the allied invasion of the home islands. Probably more than a dozen times in 1945, Kiyosawa laments "honorable-deathism", and several times talks of leaders bragging of 100,000,000 "honorable deaths" in the home-island invasion, like this snippet from 1945-02-27:

The morning radio program, as usual, is military people talking. This morning a lt. general named Nakai Ryotaro said America was a devil and vigorously attacked the advocates for peace, loudly insisting upon one hundred million honorable deaths.

On that last, there's some interesting stuff in a Google search for ichioku gyokusai.

And more, an excerpt from what looks like a fascinating, if perhaps impenetrable book. Sakai, N. (1997) Translation and Subjectivity: On 'Japan' and Cultural Nationalism

There is no doubt that, during the fifteen-year war (1931-45), "dissolving into the whole" immediately suggested the physical erasure of the self or kyoshi, which could mean one's own death. The slogan ichioku gyokusai or "the total suicidal death of one hundred million," another version of "the final solution," was propagated all over Japanese territories toward the end of the Second World War, and, in view of the manner in which Watsuji conceptualized authenticity in his ethics, it was no coincidence that the final moment of the total suicidal death was imagined as the aesthetic experience of ultimate communion. Death was appropriated into an experience in which one dissolved and got integrated into the body of the nation: death was transformed into the imagined experience of togetherness and camaraderie; the resoluteness toward one's own death was translated into the resoluteness toward identification with the totality. Death was consequently aestheticized so that it could mediate and assimilate one's personal identity into national identity. Finally, the nation was turned into the community of destiny (unmei kyodotai) toward death.

Wow. ¡Viva la muerte!