Preparing a Perfect Place To Die: One Soldier's Engagement with the Requirement for Death under the kokutai

For Japanese soldiers in the Pacific War, yielding to the call to soldiering meant adhering to the principles of the kokutai. Underlying this all-encompassing ideology was a requirement to accept death as the ultimate act of loyalty to the emperor. Since the Meiji Restoration, the citizens of Japan had been told that death in war was a noble and glorious deed, and that sacrificing one’s life for the emperor, a living god no less, was to achieve true purification, for the soldier involved and for his own and his family’s wider reputation. Under the kokutai the rewards for a glorified death were death’s recognition as an ultimate sign of honour, masculinity and virility, and on a spiritual level, death in war promised eternal deification to those who died in accordance with the teachings of the kokutai.