Dying “well”?

“Mom, today I can’t say anything anymore. In the end — and for the first time in my life — I’ll try to be a good son: I’ll go with a smile. Don’t cry; tell the little household altar that ‘he did well,’ and put out rice dumplings.”

There is no wartime heroism here. There is the logistics of the last hours: a boy who has run out of words awkwardly tries to comfort his mother. Or another — tries to force his tears back inside, so that no one will see. One of them wanted to be a teacher. Another didn’t know what he wanted to become, but he loved picnics on the hills of Fukushima. They were not Sengoku-period samurai.

In military documents these boys are “special units,” their death is an “honorable departure.” And in their letters — rice dumplings, a little younger sister, an unfulfilled love, shame at crying, regret for what might have been mixed with a hysterical adoration of the Emperor, wishes of health for the family. Their twenty-year-old bodies were meant to replace the lack of fuel, airplanes, time, and chances, and grown-up words about honor were supposed to make that lack sound like a choice. And if something strikes you here, it is not pathos but the scale of the mistake: war can take kids, teach them how to die “well,” and then call it a virtue — even though on the other side of the paper you can see only a life that no one will ever return.

“Even I, whom nothing should move, when I think of you, Fumi, cannot stop my tears. But Fumi — please, don’t cry. Taichi is leaving happily, having his appointed place in death.

Special Kaiten Corps, Kikusui unit — Imanishi Taichi. At this moment I am departing. Father, dear little sister — I pray that you will be healthy and that only happiness will meet you.”

Today we will meet a few of them — “soldiers” of the special-attack units — through their letters written on the last day before death.

"Manned torpedo"

「愛機の内より大君の鎮まり居ます御國の愛を拝し奉り候ひて大君の万才と大日本帝国の必勝を祈り候えば髣髴として湧き興る敵國の山河人々の顔唯唯目頭熱くなり候ひて、撃砕せずんば止まざるの念を更に固め申し候。」

“From within my vehicle I bow before the love of the country in which the Supreme Sovereign abides; as I cry ‘Banzai!’ and pray for the certain victory of the Great Empire of Japan, in an instant there rise before me the mountains and rivers of the enemy country and the faces of its people — and for that alone my eyes grow hot beneath the lids.

(…)

And yet I further harden within myself the thought that I must shatter them — and that I must not stop until I have done so.”

This is one of those testimonies that, in official circulation, fit neatly “on a banner”: there is the Emperor, there is a prayer for victory, there is the order to “carry out the task.” But it is impossible to miss a detail that is needed neither by propaganda nor by military form. In the middle of the phrase — in the very core of the sentence — an image appears: “the mountains and rivers of the enemy country, the faces of people.” Not a “target,” not a “ship,” not an “opponent.” Faces.

This is not a declaration of fraternizing with the enemy, nor compassion written out plainly. It is rather a brief short-circuit in the mind of a young man pressed into the only possible script. In that script he is allowed to think of his homeland and of the Emperor; he is allowed to think of “hisshō” — certain victory — though in the spring and summer of 1945 that certainty was already more a form of magical incantation. He is not allowed, however, to think that on the other side there are people as real as his mother and siblings. And yet the thought comes by itself. And it remains in the sentence, as if the author did not manage to erase it in time.

In the next line the mechanism snaps shut again at once: “I must shatter — and I cannot stop.” This is the moment when you can see how institutional violence works, even without shouting. First there is a brief humanity — an involuntary act of imagination. Then the screw tightens immediately: the decision is hardened, the return to duty, the reinforcement of resolve. In this way one can force into the role of a “weapon” even someone who can still see a human being in the enemy.

Minoru Mori was a “kaiten” pilot — a weapon designed so that a human being became the final element of guidance. This type of “special attack” did not consist in a theatrical flight toward a ship’s deck, but in entering a metal cylinder, sealing the hatch, and setting off toward a target from which there is no return. In such a place a person dies in a tight, dark, closed “tin can” not as a lofty hero, but as one component of a mechanism. Words about the Emperor and victory function in this procedure like a uniform: required, expected, safe. But the faces of “those people” are not part of any regulation. And that is why they catch our attention.

This is one of the first fissures through which one can go further: toward the question of who, in truth, the people thrown into tokkō really were. Not “symbols,” not “fanatics,” not “heroes.” Twenty-year-olds who still had the reflex to imagine the far shore — and who had to crush that reflex at once, because otherwise the entire mechanism would not have worked for a single day.

“Now is the time”

母上様御元気ですか。永い間本当に有難うございました。我六歳の時より育て下されし母、継母とは言へ世の此の種の母にある如き不祥事は一度たりとてなく、慈しみ育て下されし母、有難い母、尊い母。俺は幸福だった。ついに最後迄「お母さん」と呼ばざりし俺、幾度か思い切って呼ばんとしたが、何と意志薄弱な俺だったらう。母上お許し下さい。さぞ淋しかったでせう。今こそ大聲で呼ばして頂きます。お母さん、お母さん、お母さんと。

“Mom — how are you?

Thank you for everything you did for so long. You raised me from the time I was six. Though you were my stepmother, there was never, not once, anything in you of the misfortune people can suspect in such a word.

You were for me a mother tender, good, dear. I was happy.

To the very end I did not call you ‘Mom.’ A few times I resolved that I would, but what a weak will I must have had. Mom, forgive me. How lonely it must have been for you.

Now is the time for me to call you out loud: ‘Mom, Mom, Mom.’”

This is a “private” letter in the most literal sense: there are no cries for victory, no declarations about “flowers in the southern sky,” no grand words about the state. There is a reckoning of conscience for one small neglect of language. And precisely in this simplicity lies the system’s violence: war can compress an entire young life into a few unspoken syllables, and then force a person to make up for them on the threshold of death.

The author of this letter, Corporal Nobuo Aihana, writes to a woman who was formally his stepmother (his biological mother died of illness). He draws attention to something Japanese culture, with its hierarchy of family and duty, can name without euphemism: the lack of a full filial “repayment” for love and care. He knows he was “raised” and “loved,” but he also knows he could not name it. He speaks openly of his own weakness (“I must have been weak”), and openly admits he understands the psychological cost on the other side (“how lonely it must have been for you”). This is not a rebel writing a manifesto. This is a boy who has just realized that he will never again have the chance to correct his mistakes. And he chose this one relationship to close it, at the end, with honesty.

This letter is also a document of pressure that works all the more effectively the quieter it is. Aihana does not describe politics or orders; he does not have to. The very situation of a “last letter” speaks for him: the system brought him to a point where the greatest loss is no longer even his own life, but the fact that in that life there was not enough room for ordinary, family tenderness expressed without shame. In the practice of the special-attack units (tokkō), such letters were written in a short, compressed time, under conditions in which young people sorted out family matters the way one sorts equipment before a sortie — quickly, matter-of-factly, often with a guilt that can no longer be “made up.”

“Today is my last day.”

父母様 喜んで下さい。勲はいゝ立派な死に場所を得ました。今日は最後の日です。皇国の興廃此の一戦に在り、大東亜決戦に南海の空の花と散ります。

“Father, Mother — rejoice. Isao has obtained a splendid place in which to die. Today is my last day. The rise or fall of the Imperial realm rests upon this one battle; in the decisive war for Great Asia I will scatter like a flower in the sky above the southern seas.”

This is the beginning of the final letter of Isao Matsuo, a naval aviator (Flying Petty Officer 1st Class) of the 701st Air Group, written on October 28, 1944 — “in Manila, on the eve of departure” for a special mission.

In the sentence itself you can hear the military formula and the schoolbook grandiloquence of the era — but something more private also strikes you: the boy speaks of himself in the third person (“Isao…”) and asks his parents to “rejoice,” as if he had to help them accept news no parent would ever want to accept. This letter is not a “legend of heroism” — it is a document from the last hours of a twenty-something who, the next day, flew toward warships and never returned.

“Is it only my weak nature?”

急に特攻隊員を命ぜられ、いよいよ本日沖縄の海へむけて出発いたします。命ぜられれば日本人です。 とはいえ、やはりこのうるわしい日本の国土や、人情に別離を惜しみたくなるのは私だけの弱い心でしょうか。

“Suddenly I have been assigned as a member of the special-attack unit, and today, at last, I depart toward the sea of Okinawa. If an order is given — I am Japanese.
And yet… is it only my weak heart that grieves to part from this beautiful land of Japan and from human kindness?”

The first thing that strikes you in this passage is the absence of a “heroic tone” on the emotional level. There is a dry fact: “I was assigned” and “today I depart” — and immediately after, an attempt to bring himself to order: “if an order is given.” This is not a manifesto. This is a young man who knows he no longer has another week ahead of him. And precisely for that reason the sentence about “weak nature” is so hard: in one motion he acknowledges sorrow, and in the next he tries to invalidate it, as if the emotion itself were an offense.

The author is 海軍少尉 山口輝夫 (Yamaguchi Teruo) — born in 1923 on the Gotō Islands (Nagasaki Prefecture), raised by a stepmother; he studied in Tokyo at Kokugakuin University, and then entered aviation service. Sources state that his letter was written “just before takeoff,” at the moment he was unexpectedly assigned to a suicide mission and directed toward Okinawa.

In the same letter (later) a clearly more bitter tone appears: Yamaguchi can call life in service a life of resignation and self-denial, “certainly uncomfortable” — and he writes outright that if these words sound bitter, it is because before he entered the military he had already come to know “the sweetness of life.”

Then he turns to politics: he leaves a sentence about the “distaste” he feels at the thought of deceptions practiced against innocent citizens by “clever politicians,” and immediately adds that despite this he will carry out the orders of the leadership — even of politicians — because he believes in Japan’s system/national identity. This is not a “refusal” nor a publicistic rebellion; it is a record of awareness that the mechanism he is part of is dirty, and yet it works like a steel hoop: an order is an order.

“Nineteen years”

今日、トランプの占いをしたならば、御優しい、日本一の御母様。日本一の御母様、何時までも御元気で居て下さい。

日、別れると思うと、実に淋しいもの…短いようで長い十九年間でした。山を眺めると福島の景が想い出されます。永久にサヨーナラ。

“Today, if I were to tell fortunes from cards… it would come out that you are lucky — you, good, the best mother in Japan. Mom, always be healthy.

When I think that the day of parting will come, it becomes truly lonely. Nineteen years — short, and yet long. When I look at the mountains, the landscape of Fukushima returns to me. Farewell forever.”

In a few sentences from this boy there is no legend. There is a very simple core: “Mom, be healthy,” “I am lonely,” “Fukushima returns to me.” It is the language of someone trying to keep his voice under control, though he knows he is writing “for the last road” — and therefore he hides, in banal images (mountains, a hometown landscape), something that cannot be said directly.

The author of the letter was Teruo Usami (宇佐美輝夫) — an Army soldier-pilot, a trainee of the Army Youth Pilot program (Rikugun Shōhi), 14th class. He was 18 years old (by the Japanese reckoning 19, since one counts that a person is 1 year old at birth), and came from Fukushima Prefecture. At the end of the war he was assigned to the 180th Shinbu Special Attack Squadron, a unit intended for “special” attacks (tōkkō).

In other fragments of Usami’s letter the words “filial gratitude” return — gratitude he did not manage to show — and the idea that he wants to “repay” his parents’ debt with “combat results.” It does not sound like fanaticism — rather like an attempt to press family love into the only language the institution permits: the language of merit, orders, and “repayment.”

Usami took off on July 1, 1945 from Miyakonojō East Airfield as the pilot of a Nakajima Ki-84 Hayate (“Frank”) fighter and died in a “special” attack off the coast of Okinawa. He was posthumously promoted to second lieutenant. In his squadron, that day only two flew on the mission and to their deaths — he and Sukeo Nitta.

“Books I would still like to read”

あなたの幸せを願う以外に何物もありません。無駄に、過去のことや過去の義理にこだわってはいけません。あなたは過去に生きるのではありませんから。勇気をもって過去を忘れ、将来に新しく生きる場を見出すことです。あなたは今後の、一時一時の現実の中に生きるのです。穴沢は現実の世界にはもう存在しません。

いまさら何を言うのかと自分でも考えますが、ちょっぴり欲を言ってみたいです。１、読みたい本、「万葉」「句集」… ２、観たい画、ラファエルの「聖母子像」、狩野芳崖の「悲母観音」 ３、智恵子。会いたい、話したい、無性に。今後は明るく朗らかに。自分も負けずに朗らかに笑って征きます。

“I desire nothing except your happiness. You must not, pointlessly, cling to the past or to past obligations. You are not to live in the past. Have courage — forget what has been, and find in the future a new place to live. From this moment on, you are to live within each successive, concrete moment of reality. Anazawa no longer exists in the real world…

I myself wonder what I am saying at this late hour, but I would like to voice a small wish. First: books I would still like to read — the ‘Manyōshū,’ collections of haiku… Second: paintings I would still like to see — Raphael’s ‘Madonna and Child,’ Kanō Hōgai’s ‘Hibo Kannon.’ Third: Chieko. I want to see you, I want to talk with you — unbearably, insistently. From now on, be bright and cheerful. I too will not be outdone — I will go, smiling cheerfully.”

This is a fragment of a letter by Captain Toshio Anazawa (穴澤利夫), a twenty-three-year-old in the Imperial Army, writing on the day of departure to his fiancée, Sonoda Chieko. In the official language of the era such letters were supposed to be a simple “last will” — a brief record of loyalty, gratitude, calm. Anazawa directly orders her to live on and not to turn him into a burden, as if he knew that the greatest cruelty of this war is not the moment of death itself, but what remains in those who must survive — and be left alone.

In the very middle appears a list of three “small wishes.” Books and paintings: the “Manyōshū,” poetry collections, Raphael, Kanō Hōgai and his “Hibo Kannon.” Not equipment, not promotion, not a medal, not “great history.” Hunger for knowledge and curiosity about the world — like someone who was meant to be a student, a reader, a person of culture, and not part of a “procedure.” And then the third point, the simplest and the most human: “Chieko.” It is not ornamentation nor a romantic pose; it is information about someone from whom time was taken before he had the chance to become an adult.

Anazawa does not write: “I am afraid,” nor: “this is senseless.” He cuts the subject off with one sentence: “Anazawa no longer exists in the real world.” This is how the institution of “special attacks” works: it pushes a person into a state in which he must cross himself out, even before he is physically crossed out. This letter, like many others, shows that fanaticism was not necessary here at all. An order, a ritual, pressure — and a young man who, to the end, tries to keep his face, while smuggling the truth about himself into what is “unnecessary”: the titles of books, the name of a painter, a single sentence about how he wants, still, simply to talk.

Anazawa took off on April 12, 1945 from Chiran and died the same day in a “special” attack over waters in the Okinawa area. His letter reached Chieko a few days after his death. A certain detail returns in the records about him: he flew wearing her scarf.

Not the symbol of the Emperor for whom he was to give his life. Chieko’s scarf.

Uemura to his daughter Motoko

素子（もとこ）、素子は私の顔をよく見て笑いましたよ。私の腕の中で眠りもしたし、またお風呂に入ったこともありました。（中略）
素子という名前は私がつけたのです。素直な、心の優しい、思いやりの深い人になるようにと思って、お父さまが考えたのです。私はお前が大きくなって、立派な花嫁さんになって、幸せになったのを見届けたいのですが、もしお前が私を見知らぬまま死んでしまっても、決して悲しんではなりません。（中略）
父は常に素子の身辺を守っております。優しくて人にかわいがられる人になってください。追伸、素子が生まれた時おもちゃにしていた人形は、お父さんが頂いて自分の飛行機にお守りにしております。だから素子はお父さんと一緒にいたわけです。素子が知らずにいると困りますから教えて上げます。

“Motoko — you looked closely at my face and often smiled. You slept in my arms, and I bathed you. (…) It was I who gave you the name Motoko: your father thought of it hoping you would become someone straightforward, kind-hearted, deeply considerate. I wanted to live to see the day you grow up, become a splendid bride, and be happy. I will die before you know me, but you must not be sad. (…)
Your father will always protect you. Please: become gentle, someone people will love. P.S. The doll you played with when you were born — I took it and I carry it with me as an amulet in the airplane. So you were with me. I write this so that one day you will know it.”

It is a father’s letter that remembers concrete things: the weight of an infant on the forearm, the warmth of bathwater, a smile that has no military function whatsoever. In the language you can see the mechanism the war tries to impose even on intimacy: the daughter’s future is described in terms of “you should be happy,” “you must not be sad” — as if comfort could be enforced by an order in the same way death can. And yet there is no pathos here. There is a simple attempt to leave behind a trace: a name, a memory, and a small thing — an amulet that is meant to prove to the child that her father truly existed, physically, not as a symbol.

The author of this letter, Masahisa Uemura (植村真久), was 25. He wrote to a daughter who was still an infant. Uemura departed on a mission in October 1944 and died off the coast of the Philippines.

After the war, the letter ceased to be only a document. It became something like a contract that the daughter could one day try to “fulfill” on her side. Uemura wrote (later in the letter) that if one day she wished to “meet” her father, she should go to Kudan, to a place linked with Yasukuni. And indeed: as an adult, Motoko did exactly what her father wrote, and then made a gesture of remembrance in a space that, for him, had been part of the military promise of meaning. After graduating from Rikkyō University in 1967, she went to Yasukuni Jinja to “tell” about her growing up and — according to the account associated with this story — performed a buyō dance there in memory of her father.

“Even I cannot stop my tears”

お父様
フミちゃん
太一は本日、回天特別攻撃隊の一員として出撃します。日本男子と生まれ、これに過ぐる光栄はありません。勿論生死の程は論ずるところではありません。私達は今の日本が、この私達の突撃を必要としているという事を知っているのみであります。

お父様、フミちゃんのその淋しい生活を考えると、なにも言えなくなります。けれど日本は非常の秋（とき）に直面しております。日本人たる者、この戦法に出ずるは当然の事なのであります。日本人としてこの真の生き方の出来るこの私、親不孝とは考えておりません。淋しいのはよくわかります。しかしここ一番こらえて頂きます。太一を頼りに今日まで生きてきて下さったことも充分承知しております。それでも止まれないものがあるのです。

フミちゃん、立派な日本の娘になって幸福に暮らして下さい。これ以上に私の望みはありません。お父様のことよろしく御願いします。私は心配をかけっ放しでこのまま征きます。その埋め合わせお頼み致します。…何にも動ずる事がない私もフミちゃんのことを思うと、涙を止めることが出来ません。けれどフミちゃん、お父様泣いて下さいますな、太一はこんなにも幸福に、その死所を得て征ったのでありますから。

回天特別攻撃隊菊水隊、今西太一 只今出撃致します。お父様、フミちゃん御元気で幸あれかしと祈っております。

"Father, Fumi,
Today Taichi departs as a member of the Special Attack Unit “Kaiten.” To be born a Japanese man — there is no greater honor. There is no point at all in debating life and death. We know only one thing: Japan today needs our strikes.

Father — when I think of your lonely life, of you and of Fumi, I have no words. But Japan stands face to face with the autumn (time) of crisis. For a Japanese person, stepping into this method of warfare is only natural. I do not consider it a failure to fulfill filial duty. I know it will be lonely for you. I understand that. But precisely now I ask you to endure it. I also know well that you have lived until today relying on me. And yet there is something I cannot stop.

Fumi — live happily; become a proper Japanese girl. I desire nothing more. Please take care of Father. I will go, leaving you only worry — I ask that you “make up for it” in my stead. (…) Even I, whom nothing should move, when I think of you, Fumi, cannot stop my tears. But Fumi — please, do not cry. Taichi is leaving happily, having obtained his appointed place of death.

Kaiten Special Attack Corps, Kikusui Unit — Imanishi Taichi. At this moment I am departing. Father, Fumi — I pray that you will be healthy and that happiness will be yours.”

In this letter (addressed to his father and his younger sister Fumi), the author tries to sustain the official tone, and yet he breaks in the middle. In one place he commands his father: “please, don’t cry” — because, after all, it is “happiness” to receive a “place of death” and to “go.” In the next sentence he betrays that despite the entire construction of words and poses, despite rehearsed calm, the thought of his sister produces a physical reaction: tears. And this is precisely the moment the myth stops working: the state formula is meant to drown out the fact that someone is saying farewell to life not as a symbol, but as a human being.

Taichi Imanishi was a naval ensign, a kaiten pilot — a manned torpedo, one of the most literal forms of a “single-use weapon.” Before he entered the kaiten program, he had been a student at Keiō Gijuku University. In November 1944 he was assigned to the “Kikusui” Special Kaiten Corps. This is a different perspective from the aviators of Chiran: here a man does not sit in an airplane cockpit, but is sealed inside a steel cylinder underwater, where “exit” is not even theoretical.

From the kaiten base on Ōtsushima, the submarine I-36 went to sea on November 8, 1944 with four kaiten pilots. The operation was to strike an American aircraft carrier in the area of Ulithi Atoll. In practice, the very mechanics failed: of the four kaiten aboard I-36, only one could be launched — the one in which Imanishi sat. He was “released” at dawn on November 20, 1944. A kaiten did not return from such missions; in this case, moreover, there is no certainty that the target was even hit — and that too is part of the truth of “special attacks”: death often brought no benefit at all, not even tactical.

Imanishi died that day, at 25 years old. And if anything remains of the man in his letter beyond slogans, it is precisely this one sentence: that “nothing moves him,” and yet tears come when he thinks of his sister. It is not an anti-war commentary. It is proof that beneath the words about duty there was still a life the boy had to strangle consciously — and that sometimes it rose to the surface in spite of all discipline.

Who have won?

The “tokkō” campaign, in an operational sense, lasted a short time: from the autumn of 1944 (the first coordinated strikes at Leyte) to the summer of 1945 (Okinawa and the last flights in July–August). In October 1944 the attacks produced isolated breakthroughs, but they soon became a routine of consuming people and machines: in total, around 2,600 airplanes were expended in kamikaze missions and around 4,000 pilots died, and the strikes hit around 350 Allied vessels, of which 47 were sunk, the rest damaged.

The human scale: these were mostly boys just out of secondary school and university students. In commemorative material that covers only one narrow part of the phenomenon — the Army sent from bases in southern Kyushu to Okinawa — it speaks of 1,036 pilots, “mostly twenty-year-olds,” who took off and died in the sea off Okinawa. In the Chiran museum’s study we see that the average age was 21.6. This is not a complete statistic for all tokkō — but it is a cross-section sufficient to capture one rule: the age was young, and the time to prepare for death — very short.

The manner of death was technically simple. In the most widely known version it was “tai-atari”: an airplane loaded with a bomb or other charge entered its final dive and struck the deck, the superstructure, the funnel, sometimes the area of hangars or ammunition magazines; the pilot died, and the target — either sank or fought on.

“Tokkō” was not a single tool, but an entire family of “single-use” tools. Alongside ordinary fighters and bombers there were also designs intended specifically for death: the most famous was the rocket-powered aircraft-missile Yokosuka MXY-7 “Ōka,” built in a number of about 852. The sea had its equivalent: the manned torpedo kaiten — in this program 106 pilots died (including training accidents), and the weapon itself — despite its enormous cost — produced limited effects.

Along the coasts, strikes by explosive boats were also anticipated: more than 11,000 shin’yō craft were planned, about 6,197 built; in practice these were motorboats with a charge in the bow, steered to contact. In the plans for the defense of the home islands there also appeared people intended to die underwater — fukuryū, “divers with a mine on a pole”; 6,000 were planned for training, about 1,200 were trained before capitulation.

The method of operation was similar in all variants: simplify the task as much as possible, shorten training, shift the burden of effectiveness from skill to “determination,” and build into the mechanism an element that cannot be recovered: a human being. On the other side, the response was likewise simple: strengthening fighter patrols, forward “radar pickets” on destroyers, increasingly effective anti-aircraft artillery, ruthless attacks on airfields and — above all — rescue procedures aboard ships that meant even a hit vessel often did not sink.

What remains of it today? There are museums and archives, especially places like Chiran, which arrange letters, photographs, and “final writings” into a narrative of interrupted life, emphasizing the value of peace and the fact that most of the dead were very young. There was also a dispute over meaning: whether “tokkō” is above all the tragedy of wasted lives, or symbolic capital that can easily be rewritten into pride. The dispute, it seems, is no longer current — it has been closed by the bleak statement that these young people needlessly gave up their time on this planet. They could have lived.

We also have many letters — thousands of short documents in which, alongside the language of the era (lofty and full of pathos), private life remains — names, fear about effectiveness, shame, unfinished plans, and simple sentences that begin with “Mom…”

In numbers, the “kamikaze” campaign did not change the outcome of the war: the ships that were sunk were, for the most part, replaceable, and the industrial and logistical advantage of the Allies grew faster than the pace of producing “single-use” people. In the end — both states survived — both the USA and Japan, and in the 21st century they are doing quite well. The only ones who lost were those young boys and their families.

>> SEE ALSO SIMILAR ARTICLES:

Kamikaze – Two Divine Typhoons of Life, One Grim Wind of Death

The Real Sengoku – What Was Life Like for the Swordless in the Shadow of Samurai Wars?

Seishin — from samurai clarity to the corporate muzzle. On strength of spirit disfigured by institutions. 

Bōsōzoku – When Japan’s Motorcycle Gangs in Kamikaze Coats Took Over Tokyo’s Night Streets

The Samurai Rite of Genpuku – When a Boy Receives His Name, His Weapon, and the Fate of a Warrior

"Strong Japanese Women"

see book by the author

of the page

    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

Write us...

Ciechanów, Polska

dr.imyon@gmail.com

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