A challenge: Scan Japanese history in search of freedom fighters. You won't find many. Not freedom but submission was the proud Japanese ideal.
It was the "way of the warrior." A 16th-century poem declares, "For the samurai to learn / there's one thing only — to face death unflinchingly." The "Hagakure," an 18th-century book of maxims, exhorts the samurai to "devote himself totally and single-mindedly to service of his lord, to cherish him above all else."
Freedom? Who in old Japan was free? Hermits. Monks. Poets. Misfits. Vagabonds. Madmen.