In this passage, the novel draws several explicit connections between Ryuji’s departure and Japan’s national destiny. The most obvious are the flag and the sun (Japan’s national symbol). But Noboru’s comment about dreams also references both Ryuji’s dreams of glory and the Japanese Empire’s dreams of global domination. Similarly, Fusako’s vision of the ship as a divine blade cleaving up the shore also references the Japanese Empire’s aspiration to conquer and divide up the world. After all, just two decades earlier, this same image of a Japanese ship sailing off into the sunset would have represented its navy heading off to fight for glory in World War II. Fusako and Noboru’s perspective on the ship changes as it turns, to the point that it looks like an entirely different object. If the ship’s departure represents Japan’s advance into the future, then these changing perspectives represent the wide variety of different possibilities inherent in the nation and its people. Through all of these associations, the novel presents Ryuji’s departure as both the beginning of a heroic quest for glory and a new starting point for the nation itself.