 Two Western misinterpretations of the political theory behind Japan’s imperial polity illustrate the point. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Westerners first encountered the Japanese ideology of the emperor, they noted the emperor was referred to as kami, a term translated as “god” when it refers to a celestial deity. The (mistaken) inference was that the Japanese believed the emperor, like Yahweh or Zeus, was deemed to be a transcendent being in an external relation to the state and the people in it. That interpretation missed the internal relation between the emperor and the Japanese people that establishes their logical inseparability such that neither could maintain its full identity without the other. Thus, in the logic of the kamikaze pilot, dying for the emperor was not a simple act of sacrificing one’s self to a higher being or even a higher value. Instead, to die for the emperor could not be completely separated from dying for oneself and dying for all other Japanese. To deny that connection would reduce the pilot to a crescent of his full identity, that is, for him to die for the emperor was an act of self-fulfillment rather than self-sacrifice.