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> "Banzai!" - to me it looks a bit out of place for a national propaganda in a Korean state.

Nope, you weren't the only one, and it of course reminded me of these famous series of sketches from the Italian television back in the '90s. [1]

[1] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10153366722576634 (sorry for the FB link but apparently there's nothing about that show on YT anymore)

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FWIW, they're shouting '발사' (balsa), i.e. launch/fire, not 'banzai'.

To me, it sounded like 発射 (hassha) in Japanese. I guess that's how you'd write 발사 in Hanja.

Yes, it’s those characters (in Kanji/Japanese), in Hanja/Korean it would have been 發射, the glyph for the first character is different even though it’s the same ideograph in Unicode (due to Han unification).

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/發 shows each of the three variants for CJK.

Reminds me of using balsa wood to make the fins on model rockets as a kid.

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