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plain. 18
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    December 8, 1941, 11:00 a.m., 19,000 feet somewhere over the South China Sea
in the cockpit of an Imperial Navy A6M2 Zero fighter
    It was not a lonely impulse of delight that had sent SaburSakai aloft to make tumult in the clouds. It was duty, a sense of obligation born of both politics and myth.
    The myth begins in heaven before the world was the world. Looking down one day, the celestial kami (gods) created a new domain: the Eight Great Islands at the Center Of The World, a misty land of emerald hills and jade valleys known to moderns as Dai Nippon, great Japan.
    The rest of the earth, so the Shinto myth goes, was mere matter, seafoam and mud, but Nippon, the issue of the gods, was sacred soil, superior to all other lands, the aegis of Amaterasu, the goddess of the sun.
    Amaterasu sent her grandson, Ninigi no Mikoto, to consolidate her domain, then she named her great-great-grandson, Jimmu Tenno, to rule there. By heavenly charge he became “emperor,” the first of Amaterasu’s earthly line. Grateful for the appointment, Jimmu Tenno made his “illustrious” foremother a promise: he and his semidivine seed would extend the rule of heaven “to embrace” the entire earth.
Hakko-ichi-u,
“the world under one roof,” they called it, the plan of a people blessed by heaven and ruled by the descendants of the goddess of the sun. 19
    The myth of Amaterasu instilled in the Japanese an unfaltering feeling of uniqueness,
Yamato-damashi,
“the spirit of being Japanese.” The feeling, more powerful than any sense of self, stirred every Nipponjin, especially Japan’s fighting men, men like Petty Officer First Class SaburSakai.
    The twenty-five-year-old Imperial Navy fighter pilot, flying south with a squadron of Mitsubishi Zeros on the late morning of December 8, 1941, marveled at his luck. It was a perfect day for an attack, bright sun, clear sky. 20
    Just before 11:30 a.m., Sakai looked down and saw “the PhilippineIslands hove into view, a deep green against the rich blue of the ocean.” Then “the coastline slipped beneath” him, “beautiful and peaceful.” 21
    It was the opening hours of what the Japanese would call “the Greater East Asian War” or “the Great Pacific War.” The Japanese had marshaled four armies and fleets to strike American, British, and Dutch targets in the central and southwest Pacific, as far south and west as Malaya and as far east as Hawaii—a battle zone shaped like an immense fan some four thousand miles long and seven thousand miles wide with Tokyo as its pivot. The fan covered a large slice of the globe, all the way from Burma west to Hawaii, six major meridians of time into the heart of the vast Pacific.
    SaburSakai, stick in his right hand, throttle in his left, was part of this great effort, the effort to bring the world under one roof and, myth and religion aside, to take the territory and resources Japan claimed were hers by right and necessity. A holy war and a fight for survival rolled into one and draped with a cloak called honor.
    The atavists in the army, and there were many of them, liked to use history and an old injury to advance their agendas and aims. They looked back a century, to July 8, 1853, when the ambitious Commodore Matthew C. Perry sailed into Edo (Tokyo) harbor with four black-hulled warships and orders from the president of the United States to open Japan, a closed and feudal society, to the West. Those black ships and Perry’s implied threats shamed the Japanese, and to recover their honor and preserve their independence, they moved quickly to make themselves modern.
    In the four decades that followed, they cast aside the feudal shogunate, the moribund military autocracy that had governed Japan since the twelfth century, and replaced it with a constitutional monarchy. Then, with help from the French, British, and Prussians, they created a modern, Western-style army and