ruler could feel entirely safe with such dangerous zealots at large within his borders, and so by imperial edict these fierce warriors accepted the lump-sum termination offered them to hang up their swords and become merchants, lawyers, doctors, or bureaucrats. But they did not remain long suppressed, for the Meiji Restoration, in perhaps the most astonishing national turnabout in history, had embraced in one swoop the entire apparatus of the once-despised Western civilization. Everything invented or developed by the “Round Eyes” since Greece, Rome, and the advent of the Christian Era—their science, industry, culture, political institutions, methods of education, business practices, economics, dress, and even sports—was swallowed whole by Nippon.
Despite the undoubted exuberance of this nonviolent social revolution (sometimes comical to a Westerner at first sight of a smaller Japanese going to his daily workplace in a tuxedo hanging on him like a scarecrow’s suit and a top hat reaching down to his ears), the change was outward only; Japan, for all of its pretensions to democracy, remained a paternalistic, authoritarian state. The secret police organized in the 1600s may have been banned, but the new Japan replaced them with Thought Police, censors and spies sniffing out sedition and “suspicious” activity like tireless bloodhounds, and empowered like the Samurai of old to put to death anyone caught doing “anything different.” In classrooms and army barracks young Japanese were taught to glory in Nippon’s military traditions, to believe that dying on the battlefield for the emperor was the most sublime fate to which a man could aspire.
Inevitably the spirit of the Samurai returned and their code of Bushido was revived. Soldiers of a mainly peasant army, both officers and men, were trained in the hard, selfless Samurai school, taught to think of themselves as heirs of that departed warrior class. Officers adopted a so-called Samurai saber, much like the two-handed long sword of old, as their badge of rank. Properly sharpened and even though wielded by diminutive Japanese, it could sever a prisoner’s head at a single stroke, and this summary execution of captives—usually after they had been tortured for information—became one of the least gruesome features of Japan’s new, Samurai -led army as it took the field in pursuit of territorial conquest and the raw materials and markets in which Nippon, for a modern industrial nation, was so deplorably deficient. Eventually the chief officers among them emerged as the War Lords of Japan. In collusion with the zaibatsu —leading politicians, bureaucrats, and industrialists such as the Mitsubishi and Mitsui families—the War Lords ruled the country through the figurehead of Hirohito.
This career of territorial aggrandizement by an authoritarian coalition began in 1879 with Nippon’s annexation of the Ryukyu Islands, of which Okinawa was the largest. Sixty-six years later three typical Samurai took charge of defending this last barrier between American armed forces and the Home Islands of Japan.
Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima—commander of the Japanese Thirty-second Army—may be said to have been the Samurai beau ideal. Ramrod-straight and lean, sharp-featured with a graying military brush mustache, he was able to awe subordinates by his unshakable composure and iron self-control. Yet he was a considerate man whose staff not only respected but even revered him. Ushijima’s style was low-key. He abstained from the rough-and-tumble of staff discussions of policy, plans, or operations; in which, as had happened during the Guadalcanal disaster, irate officers could actually come to blows. Rather, he let his aides make the decisions, which he would either approve or reject. But he always took responsibility for the results, good or bad. In their unreserved admiration of him, his idolizing staff compared him to Takamori Saigo, a celebrated hero of the