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Notes -
Your write ups have reminded me of someone I think the motte would enjoy learning about: Ichizo Hayashi. He was a kamikaze pilot in the Japanese Navy and---oddly---a committed Christian. He has been particularly useful to historians because he kept a diary and wrote letters to his mother about his training regimen.
Just several days before his kamikaze mission, he wrote:
I added the bold. It's a quote from the bible that is quite well known in American Christianity, and widely recited by American chaplains on the eve of deployments. It still boggles my mind that this young Japanese man found meaning in his kamikaze mission via Christianity. And that Christians today who would otherwise find Hayashi incredibly foreign and evil derive the same meaning for the same work but an "enemy" cause.
This type of primary source history from the Japanese side is probably not what your actually interested in reading right now, but the book I read about this is Listen to the Voices from the Sea. It's got a lot more of Hayashi's diary entries and a handful of other authors as well.
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