Joe says: "I had just read "Sun and Steel" by Yukio Mishima, and in his poetry there's a description of this temple. He killed himself out of rabid nationalism, and I was thinking about how towards the end he was consciously rejecting Western influences while still clearly affected by them in regard to his writing. While pondering this 'West-rejecting' on Mishima's part I had also just discovered those very 'East-embracing' Japanese print copies Van Gogh did, so I was trying to work all that in, the paradoxical nature of culture bias and where it leads -- into the side opf an aircraft carrier at high velocity, etc. -- but I wasn't a good enough songwriter, frankly, to pull it off."

He adds: "There's also an element of revisiting my Nipponese interests from early high school, when I seriously wanted to go to the Gymkhana in Tokyo to study Jiu-Jitsu. This desire left me not long after Ephram Suarez, a judoka who was in the after-school Karate Club I started at Don Bosco Tech, pummeled me repeatedly in judo and jiu-jitsu bouts [which we held despite his 60+ pound advantage out of boredom when nobody else turned up week after week].

I still like the idea of the Kamikaze pilot flying over and recognizing a Temple near his house on his way to self-immolation for the good of the Nation."