Hasuda Zenmei

In 1945, Hasuda's platoon advanced to Shōnan where he was assigned to a mortar regiment headquartered at the Royal Palace of Johor. Immediately after Hasuda and his men arrived in Singapore, one of his subordinates got into a fight with an officer of the Kenpeitai and injured him. When the subordinate was about to be punished by the regimental authorities, Hasuda suggested that he, as the platoon commander, was responsible for the subordinate's negligence, and he and his Captain went to personally apologize. The subordinate's punishment was dropped.

Through Shimizu Fumio [ja], Hasuda became acquainted with the young Hiraoka Kimitake, later known as Yukio Mishima. On October 25, 1943, Hasuda was called to active service in the Imperial Japanese Army. Before his departure for Southeast Asia, he reportedly said to Mishima, "I entrust the future of Japan to you" (日本のあとのことをおまえに託した, Nihon no ato no koto o omae ni takushita). Kuriyama Riichi [ja] recalled Hasuda raging as he prepared to leave, saying "Those American bastards..." (あのアメリカの奴め等が…, A no Amerika no yatsume ra ga…).

After entering college in 1923, he became influenced by the professor of literature Saitō Kiyoe [ja] and developed an interest in kokugaku, by that time a mostly abandoned discipline, and studied the writings of Motoori Norinaga. Hasuda was strongly impressed by the historian Ishihara Shikō's book on the Shinpūren Rebellion, League of the Divine Wind: A History of Blood and Tears (神風連血涙史, Shinpūren Ketsuruishi). Ishihara elaborated upon the teachings of the nativist Hayashi Ōen, according to whom the affairs of government ought to be entirely subordinated to the affairs of Shinto through systematic divination, a position that Hasuda respected.

In 1918, he contracted pleurisy and took a leave of absence from school until the following year. Around this time he wrote one of his early poems, People Are Made to Die (人は死ぬものである, Hito wa shinumono dearu). Pleurisy haunted him for the remainder of his life, and several years before his death he was found to have lesions in his hilar nodes.

Hasuda Zenmei (蓮田 善明, 1904–1945) was a Japanese nationalist, Shinto fundamentalist, and scholar of kokugaku as well as classical Japanese literature. He was also a historian, author, and military officer.

Hasuda was born in 1904 into the family of Hasuda Jizen (蓮田 慈善, 1851–1938), abbot of the Ōtani Jōdo Konrenji (金蓮寺) temple in the town of Ueki. His father possessed a sword that once belonged to Katō Kiyomasa.