For more than six decades, Kazuo Odachi had a secret: At the age of 17, he became a kamikaze pilot, one of thousands of young Japanese men tasked to give their lives in last-ditch suicide missions near the end of World War II.
As he built a family and a career as a Tokyo police officer, he kept his secret from virtually everyone, even his wife, who knew only that he had served as a Japanese Navy pilot. The experience, he felt, would be too hard to explain to a society that mostly viewed the kamikaze as maniacal zealots who volunteered for an unthinkable sacrifice.
But over the years, as Japan’s complex relationship with the war changed, Odachi gradually began to share his story with a small group of friends. In 2016, he published a memoir, recounting how he had fallen asleep each night wondering if tomorrow it would be his turn to die for a lost cause. The book was released in English translation in September, the 75th anniversary of the conflict’s end.