I was drawn to Tanabe Seiko's (田辺聖子) memoir for its title—『欲しがりません勝つまでは』。I've been fascinated by that phrase ever since I first heard it several years ago, from a friend that I worked with at our gift shop in San Francisco. (At the time I didn't hear him right, and I thought he said「星がありません勝つまでは」。And I'd thought, man, Japanese people must have had it rough if they didn't even have stars until the end of the war. (OK, I'm stupid.))
Tanabe's memoir points to the "thing" about an ideology to sacrifice wants for the sake of a war being fought in the name of an emperor, a living god: no matter how much you believe in that ideology, you're still hungry at the end of the day. Now that
is rough...
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