MUCH is being said just now about the Japanese as a war-loving nation, likely to become aggressors in the struggle for the control of the Pacific. This little book of Lieutenant Sakurai’s will, perhaps, help to set us right in regard to the spirit in which the Japanese soldier fights. The story was told originally, not for a foreign audience, but to give to his own countrymen a true picture of the lives and deaths, the joys and sorrows, of the men who took Port Arthur. Its enthusiastic reception in Japan, where forty thousand copies were sold within the first year, is the justification of translator and editor in offering it to the American public. The tale, so simply told, so vivid, so characteristically Japanese in spirit and in execution, is the work of a man of twenty-five who sees the world with all the glow and courage and enthusiasm of youth. Its honesty speaks in every line and word. If, as seems now possible, the great new lesson set for the Twentieth Century is to be the meeting and mutual comprehension of Eastern and Western civilization and ideals, there can be no better textbook for us Americans than “Human Bullets,” a revelation of the inmost feelings of a Japanese soldier of remarkable intelligence, spirituality, and power of expression. No better opportunity can be found for the study of Japanese psychology and for the gaining of a sympathetic insight into what the loyal sons of Japan love to call “Yamato-Damashii,” the Spirit of Old Japan. A. M. B. INTRODUCTION