The stock picture of the Japanese soldier in China is a uniformed fanatic who is taught from birth that dying for his Emperor automatically gives him a ticket into the Shinto heaven. At home, his relatives are pictured as accepting with happy little Japanese smiles the news of his death at the front.
That war morale among the Children of the Rising Sun may not be quite that bright is strongly hinted in a Japanese war diary, not yet published in English, called Wheat and Soldiers, written by Sergeant Ashibei Hino. In it Japanese readers got their first realistic, human picture of...
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