Donald Sensing compares and contrasts the Japanese soldier during WW2 and the Islamists of today's war.

The Japanese soldier was impelled by a religious faith, too: extreme devotion to the emperor. But there was no promise of reward in the afterlife to the Japanese. In Eastern religions generally, life after death is not envisioned as in either Christianity or Islam, both of which teach the prosperity of the individual's soul. Life after death in both those faiths is life after death as you, as me. But not in WW 2 Japanese bushido militarism. Life after death was thought of as existence of one's spirit in a great chain of ancestor spiritism. Heroic death was intended to honor not oneself, as it does for Islamists, but the emperor first of all, and one's family after that. The reward of such a death to a Japanese soldier was that one's ancestors would not be shamed, and that future generations would ritually honor him along with all the other ancestors. But the honoring was collective, not individual.