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Lots of mindless, pointless paperwork for everything. If you want a new phone contract, for example, come back in two weeks because the phone company had to contact the manager of the branch, who has to contact the district manager, who has to contact the regional manager, who has to contact the president of the company to approve it, and all of them have to hanko (sign via a special stamp) the documents approving you. (This may be slightly exaggerated, but only slightly.)
Despite the numerous published testaments, photographs, and films that depict smiling pilots saluting or waving goodbye as they take off on their final mission, a rare description of the night before departure tells a very different story. It occurs in a letter written on June 21, 1995, by Kasuga Takeo, who was eighty-six years old at the time, addressed to Umezawa Shōzō.Kasuga was drafted and assigned to look after the meals, laundry, room cleaning, and other daily tasks for the tokkōtai pilots at the Tsuchiura Naval Air Base. He describes the night before their final flights:
Immediately after the war, a large number of medical clinics were set up in Japan to treat wounded Japanese soldiers.
Of approximately 30,000 patients seen in these clinics, around 10,000 of them suffered from mental illnesses, such as “war neurosis.”
The Japanese government did their best to suppress any knowledge of said psychological trauma (indeed a 1938 Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) statement declared how Japanese soldiers did not suffer war neurosis unlike Western soldiers).
For the IJA, “war neurosis” was something that detracted from the “masculinity” of the IJA, and it was utilized and associated with “hysteria,” which was often used as a blanket diagnosis for women in the West.
In Japan, there’s the salary you get from your company. And if you are a married man, there’s the salary you get from your wife. It’s called “okozukai”, which is sometimes translated as “pocket money”. Think of it as a husband salary.
After the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, the aggressive and disciplined Japenees troops had already managed to take Shanghai, and had just taken the city of Nanking (Nanjing), the capital of Nationalist China. With a retreat of Chinese forces the Japanese took the city with relative ease.
I’m not a violent or evil man. I’ve paid all my taxes, never got into fights, never joined gangs, reported found wallets, helped the disabled, etc. Didn’t even drink till I was 20!
As I was going to work, a guy stopped me and asked me if I was (my name). I told him yes. He told me he was with customs. Then 5-6 guys surrounded me as to prevent me from fleeing. Another guy came up to me and showed me a search warrant (later fond out he was the leader of the search party). I had to oblige as I thought saying no would just make things worse.
37-year-old Ishii Yuichi is a father to over 25 families and a husband to over 600 women – but none of them are his real family members.
Together with the 1,200 actors he employs at his company Family Romance, he has played every part from stand-in father for a wedding, missing dad to long lost son and even make-believe groom in his job as a companion for hire.
