The Tent of Orange Mist by Paul
West, 1995, Excerpts
When questioned in class, a Staff College student at once
sat to attention and shouted “Sir!” firmly grasping each arm of his chair, and
fixing his eyes on the back of the person in front of him. He then bawled out
what seemed a carefully rehearsed answer predicted on the taught doctrine that
the Japanese were a race morally superior to all others and that the soldiers
of this race, their leaders above all, were a thing apart.
After seven and a half years of the most strenuous, the most
exacting and the most spartan of all military training, infantry officer-cadets
at last reach the rank of second lieutenant. During these impressionable years,
they have been walled off from all outside pleasures, interests or influences.
The atmosphere of the narrow groove along which they moved has been saturated
with a special national and a special military propaganda. Already from a race
psychologically far removed from us, they have been removed still further and
scarcely still belong to the humanity they came from.
Young officers were schooled for death, not stagnation in a
peacetime army; but most of the Japanese Imperial Army had fought little in the
past thirty years. Their officers despised socialism, which they thought
effeminate, and burned to reinstate the sword as the heroic insigne. Only a
military dictatorship headed by the Emperor would suit them, and this they
proposed to achieve through a coup d’état mounted by junior officers. Hence the
Blood Pledge Corps of 1932. Sword-making once again became a cherished art
while communism became a favorite target. Japan began to buy aluminum, lead,
nickel, and zinc, tin and chrome, spikes for barbed wire, tank engines, ball
bearings, and, from the activated-charcoal industries of British Malaya and the
Dutch East Indies, filters for gas masks.
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