Colonel Masao Kusunose, 58, was about to be tried by the Allies. On New Britain, in 1942, he had authorized the bayoneting of 140 Australian prisoners. But the Colonel, according to his peculiar code, was a man of honor; for him there was only one possible course: suicide. He could not commit hara-kiri because his samurai saber had been confiscated by the enemy. Death by drowning or jumping in front of a train would be improper. He decided to end his life by starvation and exposure (the weather was sub-zero).
While Allied authorities hunted him, Kusunose went to the foot of Fujiyama, to a deserted army barracks, where he had soldiered as a youth. He sat down facing the great mountain, which rose so steeply above him that he had to bend his head back to see the splendor of the sunlit, snowcapped summit. Kusunose sat down on Dec. 9. On Dec. 17 or 18, Death, which had been creeping nearer for nine days, sat down beside him.
As he sat dying, Kusunose covered 15 pages of his small black Japanese army notebooks with entries. He had been a soldier; he was dying as a soldier. The last entries concerned food and hunger. On the last two days, he mentioned pains in his stomach and legs. His last entry was scrawled in red crayon: "Heaven will preserve Japan and the Emperor."
When an Allied search party reached the barracks at the foot of Fujiyama, they found an old straw sandal, a chopstick and a rusty can (Japanese lacking Kusunose's peculiar sense of honor had long since looted everything else). The searchers also found Kusunose's body. But it no longer faced the sacred mountain. Before he died, Kusunose had found the "strength to turn away. The diary explained why: "It would be disrespectful if I died in the presence of revered Fuji."
Kusunose's left eye had been eaten away by rats.