    3

    In 1945 the Japanese had been fighting American soldiers for six

    years.  They had known they could not lose.  Their gods2 had made

    them a superior people.  They had swept through China and the Pacific

    Islands in the 30's like an avenging wind, taking vast territories,

    conquering hordes of "inferior" peoples, showing the heaven-given

    supremacy of their race.  The enemy who faced them was a

    contemptible lot--unblessed by the divinity that buoyed Japan, and

    crippled by racial impurity.

    Yet the mongrels from the West were accomplishing the un-

    thinkable.   They were beating down the warriors of Japan.  By the time

    the Americans reached Okinawa, the Japanese could see that heaven

    had deserted them.  The shame was unendurable.  Four thousand

    Japanese killed themselves in Okinawa's underground naval

    headquarters.  Another 30,000 military men and civilians threw

    themselves from a nearby cliff.3

    On the Japanese homeland, pilots volunteered to keep the

    American marines in Okinawa from getting supplies.  Those flyers

    were promised honor...and death.  Their mission was to guide their

    planes to the enemy and stay at the controls as the explosive-laden

    aircraft slammed into the enemy's ships.  "I will be doing my duty by

    dying," they wrote in final letters to their families.  Fifteen thousand of

    them fulfilled that fatal obligation.  One commentator, describing the

    kamikaze experience forty years after the fact, explained that, "Japan is

    a society of groups, not individuals."

    To us the kamikazes' ultimate devotion seems baffling, alien,

    something that could never happen here.  But it has happened here.

    Patrick Henry was declaring his loyalty to his fellow revolutionaries

    and their cause when he said, "Give me liberty or give me death."  He

    was confessing that the social organism of which he was a part was

    more important than his own existence.

    Suicides in 1929, the year of The Great Crash, tended to be

    flamboyant and highly publicized.   There was the head of the

    Rochester Gas and Electric Company who asphyxiated himself with

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