It may only bring a wary smile to the face of 72-year-old Midori Yamanouchi when she sees young revelers at drinking bashes toast the legendary kamikaze missions.
But the soft-spoken anthropology professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania gets terribly upset when she hears Americans say these pilots were "mindless, robotlike figures who simply followed orders and died."
This gross misperception of the pilots and other wartime Japanese, she said, is what she hopes to correct when her book hits U.S. stores in a few weeks.