EDITOR’S PREFACE
MUCH is being said just now about the Japanese as a war-loving nation, likely to become aggressors in the struggle for the control of the Pacific. This little book of Lieutenant Sakurai’s will, perhaps, help to set us right in regard to the spirit in which the Japanese soldier fights. The story was told originally, not for a foreign audience, but to give to his own countrymen a true picture of the lives and deaths, the joys and sorrows, of the men who took Port Arthur. Its enthusiastic reception in Japan, where forty thousand copies were sold within the first year, is the justification of translator and editor in offering it to the American public.
The tale, so simply told, so vivid, so characteristically Japanese in spirit and in execution, is the work of a man of twenty-five who sees the world with all the glow and courage and enthusiasm of youth. Its honesty speaks in every line and word.
If, as seems now possible, the great new lesson set for the Twentieth Century is to be the meeting and mutual comprehension of Eastern and Western civilization and ideals, there can be no better textbook for us Americans than “Human Bullets,” a revelation of the inmost feelings of a Japanese soldier of remarkable intelligence, spirituality, and power of expression. No better opportunity can be found for the study of Japanese psychology and for the gaining of a sympathetic insight into what the loyal sons of Japan love to call “Yamato-Damashii,” the Spirit of Old Japan.
A. M. B.
INTRODUCTION
RECENTLY a retired officer of the Russian army and a correspondent of the “Russ” came to call upon me. When war broke out between Russia and Japan he was at Harbin; soon afterward he was summoned to Port Arthur and set out thither. But by that time communication had been cut off by our army, and in consequence he was obliged to return to Vladivostock. According to my visitor’s story the railway trains from the Russian capital were loaded with decorations and prize money, and the officers and men traveling in the same trains were in the highest of spirits, as if they had been going through a triumphal arch after a victory accomplished. They seemed to believe that the civilized Russian army was to crush into pieces the half-civilized forces of Japan and that the glittering decorations and jingling gold were soon to be theirs. They did not entertain in the least the feeling with which a man enters a tiger’s den or knocks at death’s door. The Japanese fighters, on the contrary, marched bravely to the front, fully prepared to suffer agonies and sacrifice their lives for their sire and their country, with the determination of the true old warrior who went to war ready to die, and never expected to come back alive. The Russian army lacked harmony and cooperation between superiors and inferiors. Generals were haughty, and men weary; while officers were rich, soldiers were left hungry. Such relations are something like those between dogs and monkeys.[1] On the other hand, the Japanese army combined the strictest of discipline with the close friendship of comrades, as if they were all parents and sons, or brothers. Viewed from this standpoint, the success or failure of both armies might have been clearly foreseen even before the first battle. My Russian guest spoke thus, and his observations seem to the point.