Glossary

Words you need in order to read the fragments — the ones that keep coming back, explained where you meet them. What we could not verify, we do not write.

• Ōshō — the call-up With one sheet of paper, a farmer’s son becomes a soldier.
• Gakuto shutsujin — students to the front From the university desk, straight to the war.
• Ihin henkan — the return of personal effects A notebook takes sixty years to come home.
• Kinban — posted to Edo, alone A samurai posted away from home — which is why the diary is all about food.
• Rokaku bunsho — captured documents Words that survive only in the enemy’s translation.
• Mokkan — wooden documents Before paper was cheap: write, shave off, write again, discard.
• Island hopping — the leapfrog strategy Not attacked. Bypassed. The island was left behind.
• Kamuy yukar — songs of the kamuy The kamuy tells its own story, in the first person.
• Furyo yūbin — prisoner-of-war mail A censored postcard: the boundary between the Japanese you may write and the Japanese you may not.
• Tenmonkata — the shogunate's bureau of astronomy The office that kept the calendar. When no one inside could reform it, they brought in an outsider.
• Yokaren — the navy's flight preparatory course The navy's flight preparatory trainees. Divided into three grades — eighteen months, thirty months, six months — set out by imperial ordinance. The third grade drew only from men already serving in the navy.
• Gunki hōshō — the burning of the colours Records exist of regimental colours being burned. At Iwo Jima on 14 March, inside a cave. At Lameng at six in the evening on 7 September. In both cases the record ends there.
• Jigo shōsoku fumei — “no word thereafter” What happened next is unknown. This is how the official record ends.
• Koseki no teisei (Correcting a Family Register) Correcting a family register required a court's permission, not just a clerk's.
• Bōchō (Counterintelligence) The side keeping the secret starts by questioning its own students.

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