Shinyou-tai (Japanese Suicide Attack Boat Volunteers)
maryan54 > albums > Corregidor Valor Memories
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The Japanese stress on the beautiful death: Beauty and sadness in death is another dimension of the Japanese principle of transcendent dying, as expressed in the principle of “mono no aware”, meaning “the pathos of things” or “the sad beauty” or “suchness” of existence. This principle pervades Japanese culture, and is often expressed in the ritual “farewell poem” that has characterized dying Japanese heroes from the very beginnings of recorded history to the kamikaze pilots of World War II. The semimythical Prince Yamato Takeru (ca. 72 A.D.), died in poignant, lonely circumstances. A farewell poem attributed to him contains the still remembered lines, “Oh, lone pine tree!/ Oh, my brother!” That early death-centered romanticism was combined with cultural principles of loyalty, as suggested by a passage from Manyoshu, a poetic anthology of the 8th century: “He who dies for the sake of his Lord does not die in vain, whether he goes to the sea and his corpse is left in a watery grave, or whether he goes to the mountain and the only shroud for his lifeless body is the mountain grass.” This passage made its way down through Japanese history, and was eventually incorporated not only into the samurai code but also into the ideology of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalism, militarism, & fascism. During World War II, for instance, after every engagement in which large numbers of Japanese lives were lost, survivors sang a song entitled, “If I go out to sea” (Umi Yukaba), taken from the old poem. (Taken from http://books.google.com.ph/books?id=WPiL tmZrGG0C&pg=PA396&lpg=PA396&dq=Japanese+ poem+World+War+II&source=bl&ots=gDp3XRgG _Z&sig=bTW9LQ67TrdwMGNdokfN9RzBl7w&hl=en &ei=Ry4YSrDEE4WGkQXHueH2DA&sa=X&oi=book_ result&ct=result&resnum=10#PPA396,M1)
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