One sunny day in 1945, a young kamikaze pilot named Masayuki Nagare was taking time off from war. As he strolled down the runway at the Japanese naval airbase on Kyushu, he idly picked up a stone. With the age-old Japanese reverence for the texture and shape of stone, he felt it in his hand and found an overwhelming sense of tranquility, an "odd composure" at a time when squadron after squadron of his buddies, with ceremonial samurai swords stowed in the cockpits of their Zeroes, roared off on one-way missions to Okinawa. From...
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