Do you find cherry blossoms beautiful?
There’s something I always think about when I watch cherry blossoms, especially when their petals fall.
At 1423 on 07 April 1945, the Japanese battleship Yamato – the largest battleship ever built – sank off the coast of southern Kyushu, after being bombarded by dozens of US bombs and torpedoes.
She was leading a 10-vessel flotilla on a one-way mission to attack Allied positions in Okinawa.
The 4,000+ sailors of this force were not necessarily fanatics determined to die for the Emperor and the nation’s honor.
They included graduates of the nation’s finest universities who questioned the meaning of such a desperate mission.
According to Mitsuru Yoshida’s book “Requiem for the Battleship Yamato”, a heated argument on this matter in the battleship’s junior officers’ wardroom turned into a full scale brawl.
Their supervising officer, Lieutenant Iwao Usubuchi (posthumously promoted to Lieutenant Commander), reputedly broke up the fight with this speech (my translation):
“When you stop moving forward, there is no way you can win.
When you’re in that rut, the best thing you can do is to taste defeat and wake up.
Our country has neglected progress for way too long. We stuck too closely to our selfish sense of purity and virtue. We have forgotten what true progress really means.
We need to taste defeat and wake up. How else can our country be saved?
If we don’t wake up now, when will our country ever be saved?
We are going to lead that awakening.
When we die, it is going to be the dawn of our country’s rebirth – what could be better than that?”
May we stay awake and never lose sight of who we are in God’s eyes – as individuals and as nations.