Harukichi Shimoi

"Harukichi Shimoi is one of those Japanese that other Japanese consider short in stature. So short that D'Annunzio, in order to embrace him, had to bend down (!) and, after going up to him shouting, with his arms raised: "Brother! ... My brother! ... " he looked at him, thought about it and added:" Although not blood brother... ". (Indro Montanelli)"

"Shimoi, do you remember our race, in the fast and roaring boat, across the gray lagoon, to land at the camp of S. Nicolo where I had my Wings and Arms? We talked about suffering Italy, we talked about our sacrifice, our blood, our desperate days and our unconquered hopes. Do you remember? All of a sudden I saw two living tears flowing from your impenetrable foreign eyes. And suddenly I recognized you as my brother; and my heart opened. Now I say to you - on this day of anxious spring - I say to you that no poet of your land ever composed couplets on dew more heavenly than those tears of yours. (Gabriele D'Annunzio)"

"The bitter war that calls for blood and slaughter and destroys nations, races and civilizations, sometimes takes place miraculously, as in this case, in removing the difference of race, nationality and language, to tighten the adversaries in a sublime affection, not only as friends, but as brothers. (The Italian Front as Seen by a Japanese Samurai)"

"Masses of people, seen wandering in the dark, on the vast bed of the fast flowing Piave - bursts, cannonade, fires, searchlights giving a sinister glow to the black black sky — a field full of corpses, where we had to pass, silent, trampling them — walking in the dark, in woods and wild fields, hearing the groans and the heartbreaks — shadows of soldiers passing in the dark, silent, carrying the wounded — a pause in the tiring path, called by suffering comrades ; — all this seemed to me as if I had found myself in Dante's Inferno. The solemnity, the grandeur of the Divine Poem, I could feel it fully on that evening on the Piave. (The Italian Front as Seen by a Japanese Samurai)"

"Most will never know the experience of seeing a field of corpses, not a few, but innumerable [...] At one point, you couldn't cross the riverbed except by stepping on the dense piles of flesh and bone rolling in blood. That's the terror of war! (The Italian Front as Seen by a Japanese Samurai)"

"“The virtuous love the mountains and the intelligent the water.” says Confucius, the great Chinese philosopher, because the mountains are stable and constant while water is mobile and variable. When this stability, constancy and mobility, variability makes a perfect harmony, there is an ideal beauty in Nature. (The Italian Front as Seen by a Japanese Samurai)"