The sword in this sergeant's hand looks like an ancestral samurai blade, but the truth is more modern. As Japan's militarist government revived the samurai ideal in the 1930s to steel the nation for war, it put a sword back on the belt of every officer and senior NCO — yet few were the centuries-old family katanas of legend. The great majority were shin guntō, "new military swords": machine-made blades turned out by the thousand in arsenals and factories, dressed up in traditional style. The sword was above all a badge of authority and a token of the warrior spirit the army demanded. It could kill in close combat, and did — including, notoriously, in the murder of prisoners — but as often as not it was manufactured tradition, worn to look ancient.

The sergeant stands in tropical whites and sun cap, drawn blade in one hand and scabbard in the other — the picture of the NCO who drove Japanese infantry forward, the hardest and most feared rank in an army that ran on harsh discipline. He leads from the front: put him at the head of the Banzai charge, over the riflemen he commanded like the Soldier at Ease, alongside the Machine Gunner anchoring the line. In a diorama the drawn sword reads instantly — this is the man about to give the order to go.

Model: JN070 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set