War flourishes through caricature and some of these wartime creations live on long after their political usefulness is over. One such is the grinning, suicidal kamikaze pilot, fanatically eager to die, devoted wholeheartedly if mindlessly to the emperor.
As the author of this startling and necessary new book states: "A major strategy of the state from the beginning of the Meiji period was to transfer the notion of love, loyalty and indebtedness from parents to the emperor." He was represented as some kind of national father because the people of Japan could thus be constituted as one family.
Through such fictions, the Japanese state managed to inculcate the idea that all Japanese, but particularly soldiers-to-be, must sacrifice their lives for their family -- the country. In German military tradition, the state told soldiers to kill, but in Japan soldiers were told to die. And they were punished if they did not.
As early as 1872 surrender, escape, and all other actions by which soldiers might save their lives in situations of unavoidable defeat were punishable by death. Such extreme military measures were later augmented by a series of rewards for having loyally died. Monetary compensation was paid to the families of those soldiers who volunteered and died as kamikaze (tokkotai, "special attack corps"). The government had adopted a policy of posthumously promoting the pilots by two ranks, which greatly increased the amount of financial compensation provided to survivors and offered some motivation to the so-called volunteers.
When the kamikaze operation was instituted in October 1944, not a single officer trained at the military academies volunteered to sortie as a pilot. Since Japan was steadily losing the war, it thus became necessary to create volunteers. Young men were lectured on patriotism and sacrifice for the emperor and told to step forward. Of the 4,000 tokkotai pilots, some 3,000 were the so-called "boy pilots," drawn from newly conscripted and enlisted soldiers -- including 1,000 students who graduated early from university so that they could be included in the draft.
If a soldier managed to be courageous enough not to volunteer, he knew he would be sent to the battlefield where death was guaranteed anyway. Some nonetheless did say no, but their refusal was disregarded when their zealous officers desired to present a 100 percent volunteer rate. As the author of this book states: "The tokkotai pilots were forced to volunteer. None of them wholeheartedly espoused the emperor-centered military ideology." Or, as one of these pilots wrote in his diary: "I cannot say that the wish to die for the emperor is genuine . . . however, it is decided for me that I die for the emperor."
The author of "Kamikaze Diaries" is familiar with what remains from this doomed band. Author of the superb "Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History" (2002), Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has long studied the relevant material, including the letters and diaries that the sacrificed young men left behind.
The present volume is an evaluation of much of this material, the author focusing on seven students and their own accounts. Theirs is a tragic record of efforts made to find meaning in their predicament. Ironically, many of these soldiers were well-read and so turned to philosophers from the West. One, seeing a friend salute the Meiji Shrine, writes that if he had really understood his Nietzsche he would not have done so.
Another looks around him and sees those preparing to die. They just want to go home, he reflects, yet "with what ease they believe that they are brave soldiers to protect their country. . . . It is just cheap sentimentalism. By comforting themselves in this way, they are spared from regretting the waste of their youth."
True cannon fodder, these tokkotai pilots were the product of a military caste that knew it was losing. These thousands were all doomed last-ditch efforts. And the grinning caricature that for a time symbolized them was perhaps as welcome to the Japanese military as it was to the Allied propagandists.
We are now given, in Ohnuki-Tierney's admirable book, the truth behind the image. With enormous analytical skill she rebuilds these ruined lives to create a kind of anthropology of the sacrificed. At the same time -- and here is the real power of her account -- she is much more than the dedicated scholar.
During the creation of this book, she writes: "I was sustained by my admiration for these young men, and by the rage I felt against the forces that terminated their short lives," and by thoughts of further application of what she had learned "in the hope that such a colossal tragedy would not happen again in Japan or elsewhere."
Now, as nations plainly prepare for the commercial advantages of World War III, it is salutary to listen to this moved and outraged voice as she presents the case against the forces that created the tokkotai and the grinning caricature that still defaces it.
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