Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Chakras

seven main chakra centers,different levels: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual,color vibrational frequency,ligned along the spinal column,chakra’s vitality level.,hakra (color) vibration,the aura
INTRODUCTION
A person can collect energy from several different levels of vibrations–including color–that are utilized in various parts of the body. Throughout our body we have main energy centers, which are connected to major organs or glands that govern other body parts. Each of these main energy centers are referred to as chakra–chakra is a Sanskrit word which means wheel. A chakra is a wheel-like spinning vortex that whirls in a circular motion forming a vacuum in the center that draws in anything it encounters on its particular vibratory level.

It is said that our body contains hundred of chakras that are the key to the operation of our being. These “spinning wheels” draw-in coded information from our surroundings. Coded information can be anything from a color vibration to ultra-violet ray to a radio or micro wave to another person’s aura. In essence our chakras receive the health of our environment, including the people we are in contact with (that’s why other people’s moods have an affect on us!). As well our chakras also radiate an energy of vibration.

It is also believed that we have seven main chakra centers and that each main center is connected to our being on several different levels: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. On the physical level each chakra governs a main organ or gland, which is then connected to other body parts that resonate the same frequency.

Every organ, gland and body system is connected to a chakra and each chakra is connected to a color vibrational frequency. For example, the heart chakra governs the thymus gland and it is also in charge of the functioning of the heart organ, lungs, bronchia system, lymph glands, secondary circulatory system, immune system as well as the arm and hands. And the heart chakra resonates to the color green.

The seven main chakra centers are aligned along the spinal column. If there are disturbances on any level, this shows in the chakra’s vitality level. Also each of the seven main chakras is their own intelligence center. This means that each chakra is not only associated with our physical health but also controls aspects connected to our emotional, mental and belief system.

To help balance a chakra–whether on an emotional, intellectual, physical or spiritual level–we need to bring in the chakra (color) vibration, which resonates at the same frequency.

In the study of the anatomy of the aura it is important to understand the significance of the chakra system and the language of colors expressed in the aura.

The names of the seven main chakras and the master organ that each one governs is as follows:

Sunday, March 23, 2014

starchild skull

http://youtu.be/u9EAtybBq90

Ancient Aliens

At the end of 2013, in the midst of his fight with cancer, Lloyd Pye gave one last interview for the History Channel's program "Ancient Aliens." There is no clearer sign of Lloyd's dedication to the Project and to solving the mystery that is the Starchild Skull.
In the last Facebook post Lloyd authored before his sad passing he wrote:
"...We all have to face the grim reality that I am leaving all of our lives. I thank you so much for the help you've given me to help the STARCHILD PROJECT get funded. Please continue."
Lloyd Pye was an exceptional man, and the Starchild Project Team intend to finish the work he started with the Starchild Skull. We are continuing to raise funds for the DNA testing that Lloyd believed was the only way to prove, once and for all, what the Skull is, and also taking advantage of free and inexpensive complimentary tests whenever they become available.
Lloyd's shoes are im


Tokyo Joe (1949)

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9407E7D6113CE23BBC4F51DFB6678382659EDE&scp=3&sq=Tokyo%2520Joe&st=cse
MOVIE REVIEW

Tokyo Joe (1949)

At the Capitol

Published: October 27, 1949

Coming to bat for the second time as an independent producer-actor. Humphrey Bogart has a picture which sputters more than it sizzles in "Tokyo Joe," which opened yesterday at the Capitol. Lively stretches of rough and tumble adventure in post-war Japan give the wild, incredible plot a certain measure of excitement, but not enough to compensate for the unbecoming romantic mooning that Mr. Bogart does to the haunting refrain of "These Foolish Things Remind Me of You."
The melodramatic nip-ups in "Tokyo Joe" might have been easier to swallow had the story been presented as an unabashed fiction. But the Army of Occupation figures quite prominently—and not a little foolishly at times—in the proceedings, thereby introducing a note of reality which is embarrassingly at odds with the major and markedly synthetic elements of the plot.
Without further delay, however, it should be mentioned that Mr. Bogart has found a new and exciting leading lady in Florence Marly. The low whistles which came from the upper reaches of the Capitol when Miss Marly made her sultry appearance on the screen signified the arrival of a personality who captured the fancy of the gallery gods. They didn't wait to see whether she could act, but we are happy to pass along word that Miss Marly qualifies in that respect, too.
Returning to Japan to resume operation of his pre-war gambling joint (Tokyo Joe's), Joe Barrett finds the Army doesn't want him around, that the wife he walked out on back in 1941 and believed to be dead is alive and married. Right off, Joe tells Trina and her husband that he's going to get her back. In order to accomplish this mission it seems that he has to stay around Tokyo. To do that he has to have some good reason that the Army will approve, and it seems that the former head of the Japanese secret service can fix it by financing Joe in an air freight operation. Before too long Joe is really in a pickle, for he discovers that Baron Kimura has a secret, incriminating file on Trina and that, moreover, the airline is set up to smuggle some notorious war criminals back into the country.
The more involved the story gets the less credible it becomes and the more one's interest wanders from the picture. Mr. Bogart is, of course, full of vinegar when the going is tough, but he's pretty poor company when he's alone with his memories. Alexander Knox gives a competent performance as the occupation official who married Trina on the rebound. Sessue Hayakawa, long absent from the Hollywood scene but a prominent personality in the dim past, plays the Baron with what might be described as typical Japanese malevolence. The big weakness of "Tokyo Joe," however, is a script which does not neatly come together, but squanders its good points amidst a field of corn.
Lena Horne heads the Capitol's stage show, which also presents Gil Maison, The Dunhills and 'Skitch' Henderson and orchestra.

TOKYO JOE, based on a story by Steve Fisher; adaptation by Walter Doniger; screen play by Cyril Hume and Bertram Millhauser; directed by Stuart Heisler; produced by Robert Lord; a Santana production; presented by Columbia Pictures.
Joe Barrett . . . . . Humphrey Bogart
Mark Landis . . . . . Alexander Knox
Trina . . . . . Florence Marly
Baron Kimura . . . . . Sessue Hayakawa
Danny . . . . . Jerome Courtland
Idaho . . . . . Gordon Jones
Ito . . . . . Teru Shimada
Kanda . . . . . Hideo Mori
General Ireton . . . . . Charles Meredith
Colonel Dahlgren . . . . . Rhys Williams
Anya . . . . . Lora Lee Michel
Nani-San . . . . . Kyoko Kamo
Kamikaze . . . . . Gene Gondo
Major Loomis . . . . . Harold Goodwin
M. P. Captain . . . . . James Cardwell
Truck Driver . . . . . Frank Kumagal
Takenobu . . . . . Tetsu Koma
Hara . . . . . Otto Han
Goro . . . . . Yosan Tsuruta

Laurens Van Der Post The Seed and The Sower

http://www.amazon.com/Seed-Sower-Vintage-Classics-ebook/dp/B005F3GKTC/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1395594283&sr=8-2&keywords=The+Seed+and+The+Sower

Laurens Van Der Post The Seed and The Sower

Contents

About the Book

This is war as experienced in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Java in 1942, but, above all, war as experienced in the hearts and souls of men.
This is the story of two British officers whose spirit the Japanese try to break. Yet out of the terrible violence and hardship strange bonds of love and friendship are forged between the prisoners – and their gaolers.
This is a battle for survival that becomes a battle of contrasting wills and cultures as the intensities of the men’s relationships develop.

About the Author

Laurens van der Post was born in South Africa in 1906, the thirteenth of fifteen children in a family of Dutch and French Huguenot origins. Most of his adult life was spent with one foot in Africa and one in England. His professions of writer and farmer were interrupted by ten years of soldiering in the British Army, serving with distinction in the Western Desert, Abyssinia, Burma and the Far East. Taken prisoner by the Japanese, he was held in captivity for three years before returning to active service as a member of Lord Mountbatten’s staff in Indonesia and, later, as Military Attaché to the British Minister in Java.
After 1949 he undertook several official missions exploring little-known parts of Africa, and his journey in search of the Bushmen in 1957 formed the basis of his famous documentary film and The Lost World of the Kalahari. Other television films include All Africa Within Us and The Story of Carl Gustav Jung, whom he met after the war and grew to know as a personal friend. In 1934 he wrote In a Province, the first book by a South African to expose the horrors of racism. Other books include Venture to the Interior (1952), The Heart of the Hunter (1961), and A Walk with a White Bushman (1986). The Seed and the Sower was made into a film under the title Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, and, more recently, A Story Like the Wind and A Far-Off Place were combined and made into the film A Far-Off Place.
Sir Laurens van der Post was awarded the CBE in 1947 and received his knighthood in 1981. He died in 1996.

Also by Laurens van der Post

In a Province
Venture to the Interior
The Face Beside the Fire
Flamingo Feather
The Dark Eye in Africa
The Lost World of the Kalahari
The Heart of the Hunter
Journey into Russia
The Hunter and the Whale
The Night of the New Moon
A Story Like the Wind
A Far-Off Place
A Mantis Carol
Jung and the Story of our Time
First Catch Your Eland
Yet Being Someone Other
A Walk With a White Bushman
About Blady: A Pattern Out of Time
The Voice of the Thunder
Feather Fall

The Seed and the Sower

Laurens van der Post

Et venio in campos et lata
Praetoria memoriae.
St Augustine
 
And I come to the fields and wide palaces of memory.
 
 
Missing Images
The book as a whole to my wife
INGARET GIFFARD
for editing this Christmas trilogy with such concern for its meaning;
A Bar of Shadow, as it was when first published, to
WILLIAM PLOMER
 
 
 
 
Note
Grateful thanks are due to the Editor and Publishers ofThe Cornhill, in which A Bar of Shadow first appeared. for permission to reprint it.

A Bar of Shadow

Christmas Eve

A Bar of Shadow

AS WE WALKED across the fields we hardly spoke. I, myself, no longer had the heart to try and make conversation. I had looked forward so eagerly to this Christmas visit of John Lawrence and yet now that he was here, we seemed incapable of talking to each other in a real way. I had not seen him for five years; not since we said good-bye at our prison gates on release at the end of the war, I to return to my civilian life, he to go straight back to the Army on active service. Until then for years he and I had walked as it were hand in hand with the danger of war and endured the same bitter things at the hands of the Japanese in prison. Indeed, when our release came we found that our experience, shared in the embattled world about us, fitted like a measured garment to the great and instinctive coincidence of affection we felt for each other. That moment of rounded nearness had stayed with me. There was no separation in it for me, no distance of purple leagues between him and me. I knew only too well the cruel and unnecessary alliance (unnecessary because either one of them is powerful enough) that time and distance contract for waging their war against our brief and brittle human nearnesses. But if I had managed to stay close, why should he have been set so far apart? For that is precisely what I felt. Although he was so near to me that I had but to half-stretch out a hand to take his arm, never in five years of separation had he seemed so far away as now.
I stole a quick glimpse of him. The suit of pre-war tweeds, which still fitted him perfectly, sat on his tall broad frame more like service uniform than becoming country garments and he was walking like a somnambulist at my side, with an odd unconscious deliberation and purposefulness, a strange, tranced expression on his face. His large grey eyes, set well apart under that fine and wide brow in a noble head, were blue with the distance between us. Even the light of that contracting December afternoon, receding from the day like the grey tide of a stilled sea from a forgotten and forlorn foreshore fuming silently in the gathering mists of time, glowed in his eyes not like a light from without so much as the fading tones of a frozen wintry moment far back in some calendar of his own within. Their focus clearly was not of that moment and that place and the irony of it was almost more than I could bear without protest.
I don’t know what I would have done if something unknown within me, infinitely wiser and more knowledgeable than my conscious self marching at his side in bitter judgement over this resumption that was not a resumption of our relationship, had not suddenly swept into command and ordered me to ask: ‘You have not by any chance run into “Rottang” Hara again?’
The question was out before I even knew I was going to ask it and instantly I felt a fool at having put it, so irrelevant and remote from that moment did it seem. But to my amazement, he stopped short in his tracks, turned to me and, like someone released from an emotion too tight for him, said with obvious relief:
‘It is curious you asking me that! For I was thinking of him just then.’ He paused slightly and then added with an apologetic laugh, as if he feared being misunderstood: ‘I have been thinking of him all day. I can’t get him out of my mind.’
My relief matched his, for instantly I recognized a contact that could bridge his isolation. Here was a preoccupation I could understand and follow a long way even if I could not share it to the end. Just the thought of Hara and the mention of his name was enough to bring the living image of the man as clearly to my senses as if I had only just left him and as if at any moment now behind me that strange, strangled, nerve-taut, solar-plexus voice of his which exploded in him when he was enraged, would shriek ‘Kura!’ – the rudest of the many rude ways in Japanese of saying: ‘Come here, you!’
At the thought the hair on the back of my neck suddenlybecame sensitive to the cold air and involuntarily I looked over my shoulder as if I really expected to see him standing at the gate by the Long Barn beckoning us with an imperious arm stretched out straight in front of him, and one impatient hand beating the air like the wings of a large yellow butterfly in its last desperate flutter before metamorphosis into a creeping and crawling thing on earth. But the field behind us, of course, was empty, and the great, grey piece of winter, the tranquil and tranced benediction of a rest well earned by eager earth long wooed and well-beloved by man, lay over the tired and sleeping land. The scene indeed in that gently shrinking moment of daylight stood over itself as if it were an inner dream in the inmost sleep of itself, as if circumstances had contrived to make it conform absolutely to that vision which had made England a blessed thought of heaven on earth to us when we were in prison under Hara, and a rush of bitterness, rudely brushing aside the relief I had felt, went straight to my heart that Hara’s twisted, contorted shape should still be able to walk this intimate and healing scene with us.
I said ‘in prison under Hara’ for though he was not the Commandant he was by far the greatest of the powers that ruled our prison world. He himself was only a third-class sergeant in His Imperial Japanese Majesty’s forces and nominally we had a young subaltern in charge, but that slight young man more resembled an elegant character out of the novels of the great Murasaki or the pillow book of her hated rival than a twentieth-century Samurai. We seldom saw him and his interest in us seemed focused only on the extent to which we could add in variety and number to his collection of wrist-watches. John Lawrence, who had once been assistant military attaché in Tokyo, said he was certain our Commandant was not born in the great hereditary military classes of Japan but was probably a second-class Custom’s official from Kobe or Yokohama who could therefore not be dishonoured as a real soldier would have been by an ignominious appointment to command a camp of despised prisoners of war. But Hara, he said, was the real thing, not of the officer class, but the authentic feudal follower, unhesitatingly accompanying his master and overlords into battle. He had served his masters long and well, had fought in Korea, Manchuria, China, and this unexacting job now, presumably, was his reward.
I don’t know how right Lawrence was, but one thing stood out: Hara had no inferiority complex about his officer. One had only to see them together to realize which was authentic, predestined military material and which merely deriving colour and benefit from war. Scrupulously correct as Hara was in his outward behaviour to his officer, we had no doubt that inwardly he felt superior. He never hesitated to take command of a situation when he thought it necessary. I have seen him on inspections walk rudely in between the Commandant and our ranks, haul out someone who had unwittingly transgressed his mysterious code of what was due on these occasions, and in a kind of semi-conscious epilepsy of fury beat the poor fellow nearly to death with anything that came to hand, while his disconcerted officer took himself and his refined Custom-house senses off to a more tranquil part of the parade-ground. No! Not he but Hara ruled us with a cold, predetermined, carefully conditioned and archaic will of steel as tough as the metal in the large, two-handed sword of his ancestors dangling on his incongruous pre-historic hip.
It was he, Hara, who decided how much or rather how little we had to eat. He ordained when we were driven to bed, when we got up, where and how we paraded, what we read. It was he who ordered that every book among the few we possessed wherein the word ‘kiss’ or mention of ‘kissing’ appeared, should be censored by having the offending pages torn out and publicly burned as an offence against ‘Japanese morality’. It was he who tried to ‘purify’ our thinking by making us in our desperately under-nourished condition go without food for two days at a time, confined in cramped and over-crowded cells, forbidden even to talk so that we could contemplate all the better our perverse and impure European navels. It was he who beat me because a row of beans that he had made my men plant had not come up and he put the failure down to my ‘wrong thinking’. It was he who, when drunk, would babble to me endlessly about Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich whose faces haunted him. He who questioned me for hours about Knights of the Round Table, ‘606’, Salvarsan and the latest drugs for curing syphilis. He mounted and controlled our brutal Korean guards, gave them their orders and made them fanatical converts, more zealous than their only prophet, to his outlook and mood. He made our laws, judged us for offences against them, punished us and even killed some of us for breaking them.
He was indeed a terrible little man, not only in the way that the great Tartar Ivan was terrible but also in a peculiarly racial and demoniac way. He possessed the sort of terribleness that thousands of years of littleness might seek to inflict on life as both a revenge and a compensation for having been so little for so long. He had an envy of tallness and stature which had turned to an implacable hatred of both, and when his demon – an ancient, insatiable and irresistibly compelled aspect of himself that lived somewhere far down within him with a great yellow autonomy and will of its own – stirred in him I have seen him beat-up the tallest among us for no other reason save that they were so much taller than he. Even his physical appearance was both a rejection and a form of vengeance on normality, a vaudeville magnification and a caricature of the Japanese male figure.
He was so short that he just missed being a dwarf, so broad that he was almost square. He hardly had any neck and his head, which had no back to it, sat almost straight on his broad shoulders. The hair on his head was thick and of a midnight-blue. It was extremely coarse and harsh in texture and, cut short, stood stark and stiff like the bristles on a boar’s back straight up in the air. His arms were exceptionally long and seemed to hang to his knees but his legs by contrast were short, extremely thick and so bowed that the sailors with us called him ‘Old Cutlass-legs’. His mouth was filled with big faded yellow teeth, elaborately framed in gold, while his face tended to be square and his forehead rather low and simian. Yet he possessed a pair of extraordinarily fine eyes that seemed to have nothing to do with the rest of his features and appearance. They were exceptionally wide and large for a Japanese and with the light and polish and warm, living, luminous quality of the finest Chinese jade in them. It was extraordinary how far they went to redeem this terrible little man from caricature. One looked into his eyes and all desire to mock vanished, for then one realized that this twisted being was, in some manner beyond European comprehension, a dedicated and utterly selfless person.
It was John Lawrence, who suffered more at Hara’s hands than any of us except those whom he killed, who first drew our attention to his eyes. I remember so clearly his words one day after a terrible beating in prison.
‘The thing you mustn’t forget about Hara,’ he had said, ‘is that he is not an individual or for that matter even really a man.’ He had gone on to say that Hara was the living myth, the expression in human form, the personification of the intense, inner vision which, far down in their unconscious, keeps the Japanese people together and shapes and compels their thinking and behaviour. We should not forget two thousand and seven hundred full cycles of his sun-goddess’s rule burnt in him. He was sure no one could be more faithful and responsive to all the imperceptible murmurings of Japan’s archaic and submerged racial soul than he. Hara was humble enough to accept implicitly the promptings of his national spirit. He was a simple, uneducated country lad with a primitive integrity unassailed by higher education, and really believed all the myths and legends of the past so deeply that he did not hesitate to kill for them. Only the day before he had told Lawrence how in Manchuria the sun-goddess had once lifted a train full of soldiers over an undetected Chinese mine laid for them on the track and put them all down again safely on the other side.
‘But just look in his eyes,’ Lawrence had said: ‘there is nothing ignoble or insincere there: only an ancient light, refuelled, quickened and brightly burning. There is something about the fellow I rather like and respect.’
This last sentence was such heresy among us at the time that I protested at once. Nothing Lawrence could say or explain could wash our bête noire blanche or even jaunefor that matter, and I would have none of it.
‘The troops do not call him “Rottang” for nothing,’ I had reminded him severely. ‘Rottang’ is the Malay for the kind of cane Hara was seldom without. The troops christened him that because he would at times, seemingly without cause, beat them over the head and face with it.
‘He can’t help himself,’ John Lawrence had said. ‘It is not he but an act of Japanese gods in him, don’t you see? You remember what the moon does to him!’
And indeed I remembered. The attraction, both the keen conscious and the deep, submerged attraction that all the Japanese feel for the moon seemed to come to a point in Hara. If ever there was a moon-swung, moon-haunted, moon-drawn soul it was he. As the moon waxed – and how it waxed in the soft, velvet sky of Insulinda, how it grew and seemed to swell to double its normal gold and mystically burning proportions in that soft, elastic air; how it swung calmly over the great volcanic valleys like a sacred lamp, while the ground mist, mingling with the smell of cloves, cinnamon and all the fragrant spices of Insulinda drifted among the soaring tree trunks like incense round the lacquered columns of a sequined temple – Yes! as this unbelievable moon expanded and spread its gold among the blacknesses of our jungle night, we saw it draw a far tide of mythological frenzy to the full in Hara’s blood. Seven days, three days before and three days after and on the day of the full moon itself, were always our days of greatest danger with Hara. Most of his worst beatings and all his killings took place then. But once the beating was over and the moon waning, he would be, for him, extraordinarily generous to us. It was as if the beating and killing had purged him of impurities of spirit, of madness and evil in some strange way and made him grateful to them. In fact, the morning after he had cut off the head of one of us, I remembered seeing him talking to Lawrence and being struck by the fact that he had an expression of purified, of youthful and almost springlike innocence on his face, as if the sacrifice of the life of an innocent British aircraftman the night before, had redeemed him from all original as well as private and personal sin, and appeased for the time the hungry bat-like gods of his race.
All this passed through my mind like a dream with the speed and colour of a dream and it was almost as a man half-asleep that I heard Lawrence continue: ‘Yes. It is curious that you too should think of him just then; for I have an anniversary of Hara in me today, that I am not allowed to forget, try as I may. Have I ever told you?’
He had not and, eager to consolidate any contact between us, even this grim, precarious bridge, I said quickly: ‘No! Please tell me.’
Well, it was exactly seven years ago, he said, seven years within an hour or so, allowing for differences of Insulinda and Greenwich mean time. He was lying in a dream beyond the deep, raw, physical pain in his bruised and outraged body, when far away, like a bird perched on the daylight rim of a deep well into which he might have been thrown, he heard the first chee-chak call. Yes, that was it: a chee-chak, one of those agile, translucent little lizards that lived in every hut, house and even deepest dungeons in Insulinda. There were two of them in his cell and he loved them dearly. They had shared his solitary confinement from the beginning and in his affection for them he fancied he could tell them apart, the male from the female, just by the sound of their voices. They were the only living things not Japanese or Korean, not an active, aggressive enemy that he had seen for many weeks. So real had they become to him that he christened them Patrick and Patricia. He knew instantly when he heard the sound, that the sound came from Patricia, and at once he was out of the dream that had consoled and drugged his pain, and back on the damp stone floor with his bruised, stiff, aching and tired body, so tired that it could hardly take note even of the dismay which clutched at his heart the moment Patricia called. For she called like that only when it was well and truly dark, only when the jungle outside had closed its ranks and fallen back on its own black shadows between the purple volcanoes, the better to withstand that sheer, utter obliteration of outline and shape brought about by the overwhelming invasion of the moonless tropical night in the valley outside. It was as if then Patricia herself was afraid and wanted Patrick quickly to rejoin and reassure her that this great black nothingness abolished only the vision of the nearness of her mate and not the nearness itself. There! Patrick had answered her, and Lawrence knew his fear was justified. For this was the hour at which the Japanese usually came for him; this was the time of night when they usually did their torturing. Yes, the details of it were not important, he said, but for weeks they had been torturing him, and the interesting thing was they did it always at night.
I might smile and think him fanciful as I did about his belief that Hara was an embodiment of a myth more than a conscious individual being, even though I had seen for myself how moon-swung Hara and his countrymen were. But that was by no means all there was to it. That was only the elementary beginning of it all. The more complete truth was: they were all still deeply submerged like animals, insects and plants in the succession of the hours, the movement of day into night and of the days into their lunar months and the months into their seasons. They were subject to cosmic rhythm and movement and ruled by cosmic forces beyond their control to an extent undreamt of in the European mind and philosophy. He would have more to say of that presently, but all he had to stress at the moment was this: it was only at night that people so submerged in the raw elements of nature could discover sufficiently the night within themselves – could go down far enough with sun and sunlight into that deep, deep pit of blackness in time and themselves to the bottom of their own unlit natures, where torture was not only natural but inevitable, like the tides of the sea. I may not recognize it, he said, but Patricia and Patrick knew in the nerves and very swish of their tidal tails that a moment of great and ancient dread in the movement of the spheres had come. And hardly had they called, when he heard thejack-booted steps, untidy and slurred as if the boots were mounted on an orang-utan and not a man, coming down the corridor towards his cell.
‘Our Father which art in heaven,’ his lips moved instinctively. ‘Once more please be thou my shepherd.’
As he said this prayer for the third time to himself, the door was unlocked and a Korean guard called out, in a mixture of the crudest Japanese and Malay and in the most arrogant and insolent tone: ‘Kura! You there, come here! Lakas! Quick!’
He got up slowly. He could not in his condition do otherwise, but it was too slow for the guard who jumped into the cell, pulled Lawrence angrily to his feet and pushed him out into the corridor, prodding him with the butt of his rifle and saying again and again: ‘Lakas! Lakas!’ and ‘Quick! Quick!’ as well as making other strange irritated abdominal noises at him. In a few minutes he was marched into the Commandant’s office and there sitting at the Commandant’s desk was not that girlish young subaltern, but Hara himself with a section of the guard, hat in hand and rifles at the side standing respectfully behind him. Lawrence, his eyes hurting as if stung by bees in that fierce electric light, looked round the room for the rest of the inquisition as he called them, that expert band from the Kempeitai, the headquarters of the secret-police, who did the real torturing, but there was not a sign of any of them.
For the first time a feeling of hope so keen and unnerving that his conscious mind would not allow it, assailed him fiercely. True, Hara was one of the band but not the worst. He joined in too but only when that deep sense of an almost mystical necessity to participate in all that a group or herd of his countrymen did, forced him to identify himself with what was going on. It was as if they all were incapable of experiencing anything individually; as if a thought or deed in one was instantly contagion to the rest and the fated plague of cruel-doing like a black or yellow death killed their individual resistance in an instant. Hara, after all, was the Japanese of the Japanese among them and he too would have to join in the torturing. But he never started it and Lawrence knewsomehow that he would have preferred killing outright to protracted torture. With all this in his mind he looked at Hara more closely and noticed that his eyes were unusually bright and his cheeks flushed.
‘He has been drinking,’ he thought, for there was no mistaking in Hara’s cheeks the tell-tale pink that drink brings so easily to the Japanese face. ‘And that accounts for the glitter in his eye. I had better watch out.’
He was right about the flush in Hara’s cheeks but wrong about the light in his eye, for suddenly Hara said, with a curl of the lip that might have been a smile strangled at birth: ‘Rorensu-san: do you know Fazeru Kurīsumasu?’
The unexpected use of the polite ‘san’ to his name so nearly unnerved Lawrence that he could hardly concentrate on the mysterious ‘Fazeru Kurīsumasu’ in Hara’s question, until he saw the clouds of incomprehension at his slowness, which usually preluded frenzy, gathering over Hara’s impatient brow. Then, he got it.
‘Yes, Hara-san,’ he said slowly. ‘I know of Father Christmas.’
‘Heh-to!’ Hara exclaimed, hissing with polite gratification between his teeth, a gleam of gold sparkling for a moment between his long lips. Then sitting far back in his chair, he announced: ‘Tonight I am Fazeru Kurīsumasu!’ Three or four times he made this astonishing statement, roaring with laughter.
Lawrence joined in politely without any idea what it really meant. He had been lying there in his cell alone, under sentence of death, for so long that he hardly knew the hour of the night beyond the fact that it was normal torture hour, and he had no idea of the date or month; he certainly had no idea that it was Christmas.

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Saturday, March 22, 2014

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merry_Christmas,_Mr._Lawrence

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence poster Japanese.jpg
Original Japanese poster
Directed byNagisa Oshima
Produced byJeremy Thomas
Written byNagisa Oshima
Paul Mayersberg
Story byLaurens van der Post
StarringDavid Bowie
Tom Conti
Ryuichi Sakamoto
Takeshi Kitano
Music byRyuichi Sakamoto
CinematographyToichiro Narushima
Editing byTomoyo Oshima
Distributed byUniversal Pictures (U.S.)
Palace Pictures (UK)
Running time123 minutes
CountryJapan
United Kingdom
LanguageJapanese
English
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (Japanese: Senjō no Merī Kurisumasu (戦場のメリークリスマス?, "Merry Christmas on the Battlefield"), also known in many European editions as Furyo (俘虜, Japanese for "prisoner of war"[1])) is a 1983 Japanese film directed by Nagisa Oshima, produced by Jeremy Thomas and starring David BowieTom ContiRyuichi Sakamoto and Takeshi Kitano.
It was written by Oshima and Paul Mayersberg and based on Laurens van der Post's experiences during World War II as a prisoner of war as depicted in his works The Seed and the Sower (1963) and The Night of the New Moon (1970). Sakamoto also wrote the score and the vocal theme "Forbidden Colours", featuring David Sylvian, which was a hit single in many territories.
The film was entered into the 1983 Cannes Film Festival in competition for the Palme d'Or.[2] Sakamoto's score also won the film a BAFTA Award for Best Film Music.[3]

Plot[edit]

The film deals with the relationships among four men in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during the Second World War — Major Jack Celliers (Bowie), a rebellious prisoner with a guilty secret from his youth; Captain Yonoi (Sakamoto), the young camp commandant; Lieutenant Colonel John Lawrence (Conti), a British officer who has lived in Japan and speaks Japanese fluently; and Sergeant Hara (Kitano) who is seemingly brutal and yet humane in some ways and with whom Lawrence develops a peculiar friendship.
Just as Celliers is tormented with guilt, Yonoi is haunted with shame. Having been posted to Manchuria previously, he was unable to be in Tokyo with his Army comrades, the "Shining Young Officers" of Japan's February 26 Incident, a 1936 military coup d'état. When the coup fails, the young army officers were executed. Yonoi regrets not being able to share their patriotic sacrifice. Jack Celliers had betrayed his younger brother while the two of them were attending boarding school. Although Celliers confesses this only to Lawrence, Captain Yonoi senses in Celliers a kindred spirit. He wants to replace the current British camp commandant with Celliers as the spokesman for the prisoners.
As Celliers is interned in the camp, Yonoi seems to develop a homoerotic fixation with him, often asking Hara about him, silently visiting him in the small hours when Celliers is confined. However, later on, Yonoi becomes enraged by Celliers' behaviour and has him and Lawrence thrown into the punishment cells under the charge of possessing a wireless. Celliers, who is known by the nickname of "Strafer" Jack (a strafer is a "soldier's soldier"), instigates a small number of rebellious actions, one of which is supplying the men with food after their rations have been suspended for two days for their actions during the seppuku, which Yonoi deems as "spiritually lazy". Yonoi's batman suspects the mental hold that Celliers has on Yonoi so he tries to kill Celliers but fails in the attempt. Celliers manages to escape his cell and rescues Lawrence, only to be thwarted by Yonoi unexpectedly. Yonoi challenges Celliers to single combat saying "If you defeat me, you will be free" but Celliers refuses. Yonoi's batman then commits seppuku in atonement after urging Yonoi to kill Celliers before Celliers can destroy Yonoi.
It is Christmas Eve and Sgt Hara is drinking heavily and orders both Celliers and Lawrence to be brought to him. Hara then advises them that he is playing "Santa Claus" and is ordering their release because a prisoner confesses having the radio. He then calls out in English for the first time "Merry Christmas Lawrence".
Sgt Hara is later reprimanded by Yonoi for exceeding his authority. The whole camp is paraded on Yonoi's order. All prisoners are prompted to form lines outside the barracks, including sick and moribund ones. The climax of the film is reached when Yonoi is ready to kill the POW's commander for not having all the men present for parade. Celliers breaks the rank and walks decisively in Yonoi's direction, between him and the man about to be executed and ends up resolutely kissing him on the cheek with a straight face. This is an unbearable offence to Yonoi's bushido honor code; he reaches out for his katana against Celliers, only to collapse under the conflicting feelings of vindicating himself from the offence suffered in front of his troops and his own feelings for Celliers. Celliers is then attacked and beaten up by the Japanese soldiers.
Captain Yonoi himself is then redeployed and his successor who declares that "he is not as sentimental as Captain Yonoi" immediately has Celliers buried in the ground up to his neck as a means of punishment and then left to die. Captain Yonoi goes to Celliers when there is no one around and cuts a lock of hair. He then pays his respects and leaves, and Celliers dies shortly afterwards.
In 1946, four years later, Lawrence visits Sergeant Hara, who has now been imprisoned by the Allied forces. Hara has learned to speak English whilst in captivity and reveals that he is going to be executed the next day for war crimes, stating that he is not afraid to die, but doesn't understand how his actions were any different from those of any other soldier. Lawrence tells him that Yonoi had given him a lock of Celliers' hair and told him to take it to his village in Japan, where he should place it in a shrine. Hara reminisces about Celliers and Yonoi. It is revealed that Yonoi himself was killed just before the war ended. Hara reminisces about that Christmas Eve and both are very much amused. The two bid each other farewell for the last time and just before Lawrence leaves, Hara calls out again, "Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence".

Refugees and the immigrant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FipFCfQaL4

Link:

http://youtu.be/9FipFCfQaL4

Refugee Children Escape from Persecution and War

Friday, March 21, 2014

BUSHIDO

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido
Bushidō (武士道?), literally "military scholar road", is a Japanese word for the way of the samurai life, loosely analogous to the concept of chivalry.
Bushido, a modern term rather than a historical one, originates from the samurai moral values, most commonly stressing some combination of frugalityloyaltymartial artsmastery, and honor unto death. Born from Neo-Confucianism during times of peace in Tokugawa Japan and following Confucian texts, Bushido was also influenced by Shintoand Zen Buddhism, allowing the violent existence of the samurai to be tempered bywisdom and serenity. Bushidō developed between the 16th and 20th centuries, debated by pundits who believed they were building on a legacy dating from the 10th century, although some scholars have noted "the term bushidō itself is rarely attested in premodern literature."[1]
Under the Tokugawa Shogunate, some aspects of warrior values became formalized into Japanese feudal law.[2]
The word was first used in Japan during the 17th century.[3] It came into common usage in Japan and the West after the 1899 publication of Nitobe Inazō's Bushido: The Soul of Japan.[4]
""n Bushido (1899), Nitobe wrote:
...Bushidō, then, is the code of moral principles which the samurai were required or instructed to observe.... More frequently it is a code unuttered and unwritten.... It was an organic growth of decades and centuries of military career.
Nitobe was not the first person to document Japanese chivalry in this way. In his text Feudal and Modern Japan (1896), historian Arthur May Knapp wrote:[5] "The samurai of thirty years ago had behind him a thousand years of training in the law of honor, obedience, duty, and self-sacrifice.... It was not needed to create or establish them. As a child he had but to be instructed, as indeed he was from his earliest years, in the etiquette of self-immolation."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku#In_literature_and_film
Seppuku (切腹?, "stomach-cutting") is a form of Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment. Seppuku was originally reserved only for samurai.[1]Part of the samurai bushido honour code, seppuku was either used voluntarily by samurai to die with honour rather than fall into the hands of their enemies (and likely suffer torture), or as a form of capital punishmentfor samurai who had committed serious offenses, or performed for other reasons that had brought shame to them. The ceremonial disembowelment, which is usually part of a more elaborate ritual and performed in front of spectators, consists of plunging a short blade, traditionally a tantō, into the abdomen and moving the blade from left to right in a slicing motion.[2]

European witness[edit]

The first recorded time a European saw formal seppuku was the "Sakai Incident" of 1868. On February 15, eleven French sailors of theDupleix entered a Japanese town called Sakai without official permission. Their presence caused panic among the residents. Security forces were dispatched to turn the sailors back to their ship, but a fight broke out and the sailors were shot dead. Upon the protest of the French representative, financial compensation was paid and those responsible were sentenced to death. The French captain was present to observe the execution. As each samurai committed ritual disembowelment, the violent act shocked the captain, and he requested a pardon, due to which nine of the samurai were spared. This incident was dramatised in a famous short story, Sakai Jiken, by Mori Ōgai.
In the 1860s, the British Ambassador to Japan, Algernon Freeman-Mitford (Lord Redesdale) lived within sight of Sengaku-ji where theForty-seven Ronin are buried. In his book Tales of Old Japan, he describes a man who had come to the graves to kill himself:
I will add one anecdote to show the sanctity which is attached to the graves of the Forty-seven. In the month of September 1868, a certain man came to pray before the grave of Oishi Chikara. Having finished his prayers, he deliberately performed hara-kiri, and, the belly wound not being mortal, dispatched himself by cutting his throat. Upon his person were found papers setting forth that, being a Ronin and without means of earning a living, he had petitioned to be allowed to enter the clan of the Prince of Choshiu, which he looked upon as the noblest clan in the realm; his petition having been refused, nothing remained for him but to die, for to be a Ronin was hateful to him, and he would serve no other master than the Prince of Choshiu: what more fitting place could he find in which to put an end to his life than the graveyard of these Braves? This happened at about two hundred yards' distance from my house, and when I saw the spot an hour or two later, the ground was all bespattered with blood, and disturbed by the death-struggles of the man.
Mitford also describes his friend's eyewitness account of a Seppuku:
There are many stories on record of extraordinary heroism being displayed in the harakiri. The case of a young fellow, only twenty years old, of the Choshiu clan, which was told me the other day by an eye-witness, deserves mention as a marvellous instance of determination. Not content with giving himself the one necessary cut, he slashed himself thrice horizontally and twice vertically. Then he stabbed himself in the throat until the dirk protruded on the other side, with its sharp edge to the front; setting his teeth in one supreme effort, he drove the knife forward with both hands through his throat, and fell dead.
During the Meiji Restoration, the Tokugawa Shogun's aide committed Seppuku:
One more story and I have done. During the revolution, when the Taikun (Supreme Commander), beaten on every side, fled ignominiously to Yedo, he is said to have determined to fight no more, but to yield everything. A member of his second council went to him and said, "Sir, the only way for you now to retrieve the honour of the family of Tokugawa is to disembowel yourself; and to prove to you that I am sincere and disinterested in what I say, I am here ready to disembowel myself with you." The Taikun flew into a great rage, saying that he would listen to no such nonsense, and left the room. His faithful retainer, to prove his honesty, retired to another part of the castle, and solemnly performed the harakiri.
In his book Tales of Old JapanMitford describes witnessing a hara-kiri:[20]
"As a corollary to the above elaborate statement of the ceremonies proper to be observed at the harakiri, I may here describe an instance of such an execution which I was sent officially to witness. The condemned man was Taki Zenzaburo, an officer of the Prince of Bizen, who gave the order to fire upon the foreign settlement at Hyōgo in the month of February 1868,—an attack to which I have alluded in the preamble to the story of the Eta Maiden and the Hatamoto. Up to that time no foreigner had witnessed such an execution, which was rather looked upon as a traveller's fable.
The ceremony, which was ordered by the Mikado himself, took place at 10:30 at night in the temple of Seifukuji, the headquarters of the Satsuma troops at Hiogo. A witness was sent from each of the foreign legations. We were seven foreigners in all. After another profound obeisance, Taki Zenzaburo, in a voice which betrayed just so much emotion and hesitation as might be expected from a man who is making a painful confession, but with no sign of either in his face or manner, spoke as follows:
I, and I alone, unwarrantably gave the order to fire on the foreigners at Kobe, and again as they tried to escape. For this crime I disembowel myself, and I beg you who are present to do me the honour of witnessing the act.
Bowing once more, the speaker allowed his upper garments to slip down to his girdle, and remained naked to the waist. Carefully, according to custom, he tucked his sleeves under his knees to prevent himself from falling backwards; for a noble Japanese gentleman should die falling forwards. Deliberately, with a steady hand, he took the dirk that lay before him; he looked at it wistfully, almost affectionately; for a moment he seemed to collect his thoughts for the last time, and then stabbing himself deeply below the waist on the left-hand side, he drew the dirk slowly across to the right side, and, turning it in the wound, gave a slight cut upwards. During this sickeningly painful operation he never moved a muscle of his face. When he drew out the dirk, he leaned forward and stretched out his neck; an expression of pain for the first time crossed his face, but he uttered no sound. At that moment the kaishaku, who, still crouching by his side, had been keenly watching his every movement, sprang to his feet, poised his sword for a second in the air; there was a flash, a heavy, ugly thud, a crashing fall; with one blow the head had been severed from the body.
A dead silence followed, broken only by the hideous noise of the blood throbbing out of the inert heap before us, which but a moment before had been a brave and chivalrous man. It was horrible.
The kaishaku made a low bow, wiped his sword with a piece of rice paper which he had ready for the purpose, and retired from the raised floor; and the stained dirk was solemnly borne away, a bloody proof of the execution. The two representatives of the Mikado then left their places, and, crossing over to where the foreign witnesses sat, called us to witness that the sentence of death upon Taki Zenzaburo had been faithfully carried out. The ceremony being at an end, we left the temple. The ceremony, to which the place and the hour gave an additional solemnity, was characterized throughout by that extreme dignity and punctiliousness which are the distinctive marks of the proceedings of Japanese gentlemen of rank; and it is important to note this fact, because it carries with it the conviction that the dead man was indeed the officer who had committed the crime, and no substitute. While profoundly impressed by the terrible scene it was impossible at the same time not to be filled with admiration of the firm and manly bearing of the sufferer, and of the nerve with which the kaishaku performed his last duty to his master.



Japanese Feudal Laws John Carey Hall, The Tokugawa Legislation, (Yokohama, 1910), pp. 286-319

Ikegami, Eiko, The Taming of the Samurai, Harvard University Press, 1995. p. 278


Bushidō (武士道?), literally "military scholar road", is a Japanese word for the way of the samurai life, loosely analogous to the concept of chivalry.
Bushido, a modern term rather than a historical one, originates from the samurai moral values, most commonly stressing some combination of frugalityloyaltymartial artsmastery, and honor unto death. Born from Neo-Confucianism during times of peace in Tokugawa Japan and following Confucian texts, Bushido was also influenced by Shintoand Zen Buddhism, allowing the violent existence of the samurai to be tempered bywisdom and serenity. Bushidō developed between the 16th and 20th centuries, debated by pundits who believed they were building on a legacy dating from the 10th century, although some scholars have noted "the term bushidō itself is rarely attested in premodern literature."[1]
Under the Tokugawa Shogunate, some aspects of warrior values became formalized into Japanese feudal law.[2]
The word was first used in Japan during the 17th century.[3] It came into common usage in Japan and the West after the 1899 publication of Nitobe Inazō's Bushido: The Soul of Japan.[4]

Friday, Karl F. "Bushidō or Bull? A Medieval Historian's Perspective on the Imperial Army and the Japanese Warrior Tradition" The History Teacher, Vol. 27, No. 3 (May, 1994), pp. 340
In Bushido (1899), Nitobe wrote:
...Bushidō, then, is the code of moral principles which the samurai were required or instructed to observe.... More frequently it is a code unuttered and unwritten.... It was an organic growth of decades and centuries of military career.
Nitobe was not the first person to document Japanese chivalry in this way. In his text Feudal and Modern Japan (1896), historian Arthur May Knapp wrote:[5] "The samurai of thirty years ago had behind him a thousand years of training in the law of honor, obedience, duty, and self-sacrifice.... It was not needed to create or establish them. As a child he had but to be instructed, as indeed he was from his earliest years, in the etiquette of self-immolation."

Historical development[edit]

Early history to 12th century[edit]


Bushidō written in kanji
The Kojiki is Japan's oldest extant book. Written in 721, it contains passages about Yamato Takeru, the son of the Emperor Keiko. It provides an indication of early Japanese military values and literary self-image, including references to the use and admiration of the sword by Japanese warriors.
This early concept is further found in the Shoku Nihongi, an early history of Japan written in 797. The chapter covering the year 721 is notable for an early use of the term "bushi" (武士?) (albeit read as "mononofu" at the time) and a reference to the educated warrior-poet ideal. The Chinese term bushi had entered the Japanese vocabulary with the general introduction of Chinese literature, supplementing the indigenous terms tsuwamonoand mononofu. It is also the usage for public placement exams.
An early reference to saburau — a verb meaning to wait upon or accompany a person of high rank — appears inKokin Wakashū, the first imperial anthology of poems, (early 10th century). By the end of the 12th century,saburai ("retainer") had become largely synonymous with bushi, and closely associated with the middle and upper echelons of the warrior class.
Although many of the early literary works of Japan contain the image of the warrior, the term "bushidō" does not appear in early texts like the Kojiki. Warrior ideals and conduct may be illustrated, but the term did not appear in text until the Tokugawa period (1600-1868).[6]

"The Zen of Japanese Nationalism," by Robert H. Sharf, in Curators of the Buddha, edited by Donald Lopez, pg 111

William Scott Wilson, Ideals of the Samurai: Writings of Japanese Warriors (Kodansha, 1982) ISBN 0-89750-081-4

13th to 16th centuries[edit]

From the literature of the 13th to 16th centuries, there exists an abundance of references to military ideals, although none of these should be viewed as early versions of bushido per se. Carl Steenstrup noted that 13th and 14th century writings (gunki monogatari) "portrayed the bushi in their natural element, war, eulogizing such virtues as reckless bravery, fierce family pride, and selfless, at times senseless devotion of master and man."
Compiled over the course of three centuries, beginning in the 1180s, the Heike Monogatari depicts a highly fictionalized and idealized story of a struggle between two warrior clans, the Minamoto and Taira, at the end of the 12th century—a conflict known as the Genpei War. Clearly depicted throughout the Heike Monogatari is the ideal of the cultivated warrior. The warriors in the Heike Monogatari served as models for the educated warriors of later generations, although the ideals depicted by them were assumed to be beyond reach. Nevertheless, during the early modern era, these ideals were vigorously pursued in the upper echelons of warrior society and recommended as the proper form of the Japanese man of arms.
Other examples of the evolution in the Bushidō literature of the 13th to 16th centuries included:
The sayings of Sengoku-period retainers and warlords such as Kato Kiyomasa and Nabeshima Naoshige were generally recorded or passed down to posterity around the turn of the 16th century when Japan had entered a period of relative peace. In a handbook addressed to "all samurai, regardless of rank," Kato states:
"If a man does not investigate into the matter of Bushido daily, it will be difficult for him to die a brave and manly death. Thus, it is essential to engrave this business of the warrior into one's mind well."
Kato was a ferocious warrior who banned even recitation of poetry, stating:
"One should put forth great effort in matters of learning. One should read books concerning military matters, and direct his attention exclusively to the virtues of loyalty and filial piety....Having been born into the house of a warrior, one's intentions should be to grasp the long and the short swords and to die."[7]
Naoshige says similarly, that it is shameful for any man to die without having risked his life in battle, regardless of rank, and that "Bushidō is in being crazy to die. Fifty or more could not kill one such a man." However, Naoshige also suggests that "everyone should personally know exertion as it is known in the lower classes."[7]

19th and 20th centuries[edit]

Recent scholarship in both Japan and abroad has focused on differences between the samurai class and the bushidō theories that developed in modern Japan. Bushidō in the prewar period was often emperor-centered and placed much greater value on the virtues of loyalty and self-sacrifice than did many Tokugawa-era interpretations.[10] Bushidō was used as a propaganda tool by the government and military, who doctored it to suit their needs.[11] Scholars of Japanese history agree that the bushidō that spread throughout modern Japan was not simply a continuation of earlier traditions.
More recently, it has been argued that modern bushidō discourse originated in the 1880s as a response to foreign stimuli, such as the English concept of "gentlemanship," by Japanese with considerable exposure to Western culture. Nitobe Inazo's bushidō interpretations followed a similar trajectory, although he was following earlier trends. This relatively pacifistic bushidō was then hijacked and adapted by militarists and the government from the early 1900s onward as nationalism increased around the time of the Russo-Japanese War.[12]
The junshi suicide of General Nogi Maresuke and his wife on the death of Emperor Meiji occasioned both praise, as an example to the decaying morals of Japan, and criticism, explicitly declaring that the spirit of bushido thus exemplified should not be revived.[13]
During pre-World War II and World War II Shōwa Japanbushido was pressed into use for militarism,[14] to present war as purifying, and death a duty.[15] This was presented as revitalizing traditional values and "transcending the modern."[16] Bushido would provide a spiritual shield to let soldiers fight to the end.[17] As the war turned, the spirit of bushido was invoked to urge that all depended on the firm and united soul of the nation.[18] When the Battle of Attu was lost, attempts were made to make the more than two thousand Japanese deaths an inspirational epic for the fighting spirit of the nation.[19] Arguments that the plans for the Battle of Leyte Gulf, involving all Japanese ships, would expose Japan to serious danger if they failed, were countered with the plea that the Navy be permitted to "bloom as flowers of death."[20] The first proposals of organized suicide attacks met resistance because while bushidocalled for a warrior to be always aware of death, but not to view it as the sole end, but the desperate straits brought about acceptance.[21] Such attacks were acclaimed as the true spirit of bushido.[22]
Denials of mistreatment of prisoners of war declared that they were being well-treated by virtue of bushido generosity.[23] Broadcast interviews with prisoners were also described as being not propaganda but out of sympathy with the enemy, such sympathy as onlybushido could inspire.[24]
Yukio Mishima, the famous writer, was outspoken in his by-then anachronistic commitment to bushido in the 1960s, until his ritual suicide by seppuku after a failed coup d'état in November 1970.

Oleg Benesch. "Bushido : the creation of a martial ethic in late Meiji Japan." PhD dissertation completed at the University of British 

Columbia, 2011.[2}

John W. DowerWar Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War p1 ISBN 0-394-50030-X
Richard OveryWhy the Allies Won p 6 ISBN 0-393-03925-0
Edwin P. HoytJapan's War, p 334 ISBN 0-07-030612-5
Edwin P. Hoyt, Japan's War, p 356 ISBN 0-07-030612-5