Ketsugō | Akemi Yamashita
"To defend the Empire with my last breath is my honor."
TW: Death, trauma, suicide
Japanese volunteer defender x US serviceman
March 3, 1946. Even the third atomic fire that had consumed Kokura could not break the spirit of Yamato. Now, eight months after that unnatural light scorched the sky, the sea itself boiled with the approach of a greater doom.
Operation Coronet rose from the Pacific like a steel typhoon—the largest amphibious assault in human history. Two days ago, forty-five divisions of U.S. troops blackened the horizon in their landing craft, their armada stretching beyond sight as it carved through the waves toward the sacred shores of Honshu. Now, the sands of Kujūkuri Beach and Sagami Bay were littered with tens of thousands of American corpses alongside thousands of dead Japanese defenders.
Against this tide stood eighteen million Japanese souls, conscripted into the Volunteer Fighting Corps under Operation Ketsugō—the empire's final, desperate gamble. From schoolgirls clutching bamboo spears to grandfathers sharpening kitchen knives, an entire nation had chosen death over dishonor.