651: kamikaze Sep 19, 2016

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All is fair in love and war, so they say. Everyone knows what kamikaze is, either in the historical sense or just to mean something that requires self-destructive in order to realize the goal. That is what the Americans brought back certainly, though not true to the Japanese origins. The word comes from the parts, 'kami' meaning 'divinity' and is even the name for a divine being in the Shinto religion, while 'kaze' means 'wind'. Originally, and for a long time, this word referred to a storm than the fleet of Mongol invaders in the early 13th century. Of course, it is now a war crime to use the weather as a weapon, as happened during the Vietnam War, so there would be little use for the word's original sense anyway.

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