Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze, and: Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers (review)

Correcting historical misperceptions can be a difficult business for historians. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, many commentators compared al-Qa'ida's attack on the World Trade Center to Japan's kamikaze attacks of 1944-1945. Superficially these human missile tactics were similar: the terrorists traded pilots for buildings; the Japanese pilots for ships. Assigned to the Special Attack Corps, the kamikazes represented Japan's last realistic hope of reversing an increasingly desperate war situation. To many, these attackers are remembered as unbridled fanatics who willingly sacrificed their lives for the Emperor. Two recent books, however, provide a human face to the Japanese kamikaze pilots and debunk the mythology tying them to twenty-first-century terrorism.

M. G. Sheftall's Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze is an expansive work of oral histories. The author draws on two main groups for his narrative: kamikaze pilots who did not complete their missions (due to mechanical failure, being shot down, or the war ending); and the squadron mates and friends of those kamikaze pilots who died during their missions. While the book primarily profiles kamikazes who flew conventional aircraft, selected chapters discuss pilots of the Kaiten human torpedo and the Oka rocket propelled bomb. The result of Sheftall's efforts is a powerful narrative on the background, recruiting, training, and conflicting emotions of being a kamikaze and knowing that their lives will end after one mission. Certainly this work is not a comprehensive history of the Japanese use of the kamikaze. Instead, the author describes the human dimension of a select group of kamikazes, individuals that were not devoid of emotion and merely blindly following their orders, but men who suffered tremendous mental anguish as they prepared to carry out the extraordinary grim duty of their final mission. In the end, about 4,000 pilots perished in kamikaze attacks.

While purportedly volunteers, many pilots were dragooned into the Special Attack Corps through peer pressure and shame. Few professional Japanese Army and Navy aviators served as kamikazes. Instead pilots were drawn from two principal sources. Most were enlisted boy pilots, recruited from high school cadet programs. Many in this group would perish before their eighteenth birthdays. The other group was comprised of a thousand student soldiers, officer candidates from elite universities, enlisted when draft deferments ended in December 1943. Both groups suffered the unfortunate coincidence of completing their pilot training when kamikaze attacks were at their height, and thus became the necessary fodder for these attacks.

Due to their young age and sparse leisure opportunities outside of their very structured military life, the boy pilots left few writings on their experiences. The opposite was the case for the six student soldiers who serve as the focus of Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney. Products of a rigorous academic environment, these six student soldiers, considered the best minds of their generation and the future leadership class of Japan, were reflective of their contemporaries. The end of their deferments meant these university students were destined for military service, and for many who underwent flight training, their fate was to end as kamikazes. Unlike the boy pilots, many student soldiers were older—in their early twenties—and left extensive writings on their experiences, from higher school, through university, and up to their final days. Highly educated in Western and Asian intellectual traditions, many were cosmopolitan and political progressives who disdained the Emperor worship of a militarized Japan. Caught up in extraordinary events, these student soldiers desperately employed their intellectual faculties to rationalize their doomed fate. Ohnuki-Tierney moves the narrative along, placing in context the anguish, frustration, and resignation...