The young Japanese men, many of them conscripts with little love for their militaristic government, found in Musashi a hero they identified with. From this one might expect the book to be soaked in blood and nationalism, but in fact it is a highly individualistic, even romantic tale, and its hero spends more pages questing for spiritual enlightenment than fighting with sword. Musashi was soon released in book form and was very popular among soldiers on the front. The author was Eiji Yoshikawa, a bestselling writer who had already won a large audience with his adventurous Secret Record of Naruto. In 1936, just before the outbreak of war with China, Japan's Asahi Shimbun newspaper began serializing a novel about the folk hero Musashi. If we can attain a spirit of the caliber of Musashi's, we won't have any trouble getting over the defeat.
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