Banzai charge

"long live His Majesty the Emperor"), and was shortened to banzai, specifically referring to the tactic used by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Pacific War.

This tactic was used when the Japanese commanders of infantry battalions foresaw that a battle was about to be lost, as a last ditch effort in thwarting Allied forces.

[5] The origin of the term is a classical Chinese phrase in the 7th-century Book of Northern Qi, which states "丈夫玉碎恥甎全", "A true man would [rather] be the shattered jewel, ashamed to be the intact tile.

With the revolutionary change in the Meiji Restoration and frequent wars against China and Russia, the militarist government of Japan adopted the concepts of Bushido to condition the country's population to be ideologically obedient to the emperor.

[7] During the Siege of Port Arthur human wave attacks were conducted on Russian artillery and machine guns by the Japanese which ended up becoming suicidal.

[8] Since the Japanese suffered massive casualties in the attacks,[9] one description of the aftermath was that "[a] thick, unbroken mass of corpses covered the cold earth like a coverlet".

[11] During the war period, the Japanese militarist government disseminated propaganda that romanticized suicide attacks, using one of the virtues of Bushido as the basis for the campaign.

[14] During the Guadalcanal campaign, on August 21, 1942, Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki led 800 soldiers in a direct attack on the American line guarding Henderson Field in the Battle of the Tenaru.

By the following day, only 28 remained of the Japanese force which had originally numbered roughly 2,600 - the rest having been killed in battle or committed suicide, while the Americans lost 549 combatants out of the 15,000 of the 7th Infantry Division which had landed to retake the island.