A banzai charge
Banzai was a tactic employed by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. This tactic was inspired by the death and suicide of the leader of both the Satsuma Domain and of the old samurai during the Meiji Restoration, Saigō Takamori, during the Battle of Shiroyama last battle of the Satsuma Rebellion. This inspired the nation to idealize and romanticize his death in battle and to consider suicide an honorable final action. In keeping with the medieval Japanese bushido code, Japanese troops would die fighting rather than surrender, and they used either bayonets or katana swords in suicidal human wave attacks against Allied soldiers. While the tactic had been used as early as the 1905 Russo-Japanese War and the Second Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s, it became infamous during the Battle of Guadalcanal and the ensuing island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific Ocean, during which the US Marine Corps gunned down thousands of charging Japanese troops.