Has ever a civilized people lived in greater intimacy with death than the Japanese?
"Every day without fail one should consider oneself as dead," says the "Hagakure," an 18th-century military treatise. Mortal combat is life's sublime climax, its peak, its raison d'etre. A warrior's first conquest must be his own instinct of self-preservation. To value life is to corrupt it.
Early in the 17th century something new and strange came to Japan: peace. For 400 years civil war had raged, death had reigned supreme; Japan "lived as though in a graveyard," says the eminent scholar Wm. Theodore de Bary. Exhausted, the country entered a new phase.