Banzai!
Debunking the kamikaze myth
By Bennett Richardson and Fumiko Hattori
MABALACAT, Philippines - Like many violent acts during wartime, the Japanese
kamikaze attacks of World War II have been vilified or conveniently dismissed
as a freakish aberration that cannot be understood in rational terms. The
self-sacrifice of the young Japanese pilots has been written into popular
history as derived from an extreme interpretation of the samurai code and the
wartime belief that the Japanese emperor was a living god.
"Banzai!" or "Long Live the Emperor", was their battle cry, or so
popular mythology has it.
But the way the pilots who survived the war tell it, their prime motivation was
simply desperation to protect the people they loved from coming to harm in a
war that was rapidly - and very clearly - deteriorating into defeat. If they
could keep the Allies from their shores and loved ones, they would have
achieved their purpose.
In interviews conducted in Japan, some of the would-be kamikazes expressed
relief, sadness even today that their comrades had died, and even some survivor
guilt.
A handful of veteran Japanese pilots and their families gathered here on
October 25 to pay tribute to that sentiment, at the spot where the first
kamikaze mission took off exactly 60 years ago from a nondescript airfield
about 80 kilometers north of Manila.
Local historian and artist Daniel Dizon witnessed the departure of the original
kamikaze pilots on their missions when he was a boy of 14. He said most of the
pilots "acted like they were going on a picnic". Dizon has been instrumental in
creating kamikaze memorials in the area, and last month he helped to unveil a
statue of a kamikaze pilot, a memorial largely funded by Filipino admirers in
of what they consider the pilots' extraordinary courage.
"How can you forget something like that? They were brave - it's difficult to
describe," Dizon told Asia Times Online.
One of the pilots at the memorial, Tsukasa Abe, now 77, said, "I am extremely
grateful that the local people have erected this statue for us ... I am
grateful that relations haven't been ruined despite what the Japanese did" in
the Philippines.
After successive defeats across the Pacific, Japanese commanders had recognized
by October 1944 that it was only a matter of time before the United States
would invade the main islands of Japan itself. As the number of operational
planes diminished and the Allies increasingly focused on the Pacific theater,
senior Japanese navy air commanders decided there was no alternative but to
create a special-forces unit to crash dive planes, armed with 250-kilogram
bombs, into the flight decks of enemy carriers. These aircraft and the men who
flew them came to be known as the kamikaze, named after a divine wind that
saved Japan from a Mongol invasion in 1274. This legendary wind, probably a
typhoon, destroyed Kublai Khan's fleet as it lay at anchor off the southern
Japanese island of Kyushu.
The kamikaze name apparently was given to the first group asked to volunteer in
the Philippines by senior commanders who ordered the tactic. The moniker was
supposed to be something of an honorific for the original unit only, but
quickly it came to be applied to other units using the same suicide tactic.
Kamikaze known as 'special forces'
The kamikaze were widely known as "special forces" - the pilots did not call
themselves kamikaze - but the word became popularized and has stuck in the
Western imagination; it has come to mean anyone who acts recklessly or
suicidally. That was far from the case with the pilots, interviews with a
number of them in Japan showed. They survived because their missions were
aborted, they
couldn't find a suitable target, they themselves were shot down and forced to
ditch into the water, or they had to turn back because of bad weather or
mechanical failure.
"Not one person went because they thought they wanted to die," Toyotaro
Nakajima, a former special-forces pilot, said in an interview. He later ended
up living and working in the US for many years. "It was an order - help your
country, your country being the family that you loved, your brothers and
sisters, friends, your home town - to protect these things from the enemy," he
told Asia Times Online.
After the kamikaze sinking of the aircraft carrier Saint Lo on October 25,
1944, in Leyte Gulf off the coast of the Philippines proved that the tactic
could inflict severe damage, the Japanese navy expanded the special forces
during the Battle of Okinawa. According to the US Strategic Bombing Report on
the Pacific War, the Japanese flew 2,550 kamikaze missions from October 1944 to
the end of the Okinawa campaign in June 1945, the vast majority of the kamikaze
missions, though final and definitive figures were not collected by the US
after the Okinawa campaign.
They managed a hit rate of about one in five planes; that is, one in five
planes managed to hit an enemy ship, sinking some, damaging others. Others had
mechanical problems during flight, ran into enemy air cover en route to the
front, or were hit by anti-aircraft fire from the ships they were trying to
hit.
Other former kamikaze pilots agreed that most special-forces pilots were
thinking primarily about their families when they left on their one-way
missions.
No one shouted Banzai for the Emperor!
Shigemitsu Saito, now 78, a fighter pilot in campaigns including those in New
Guinea and Guadalcanal, said the schoolboy comic-book image of the
Emperor-worshipping kamikaze pilot bears little
relation to reality. "The Emperor never really came into it - that's just
something the newspapers made up. I doubt anyone actually went to his death
shouting 'Banzai for the Emperor!'" he laughed.
Though the initial units were directly asked to volunteer for such missions by
their superiors, later pilots were asked to fill in a form and state whether
they would be willing to go on such missions - most pilots said they would.
Then those who had expressed willingness later received a "special-forces
order" from central command, and then they had to go. These orders were often
posted on notice boards at air bases for all to see. Because pilots knew that
their chances of surviving the war were slim to begin with, the prevailing
sentiment at the time was that they should seize any chance that their deaths
would not be wasted - by keeping the enemy away from Japanese shores.
Hiromi Kawasaki, now 77, was a navy pilot trainee when he saw a recruitment
poster for a top-secret project pinned to the notice board at his base. The
stand-out attraction for the 18-year-old was
that volunteers would have the chance to go to the front after only two or
three months of training. Given that it could have taken up to a year to see
combat if he had stayed in the regular forces, Kawasaki took little heed of the
warning on the poster that the mission had "no guarantee of survival".
He was assigned to the manned-torpedo unit, a variation on the original
crash-dive aerial tactic. Kawasaki was trained to pilot a single-man torpedo
with a 1.55-ton explosive warhead into enemy ships, using little more than a
stopwatch and a periscope for navigation.
He said he had few qualms about volunteering, as the probability of death for
an ordinary Japanese navy pilot was already extremely high - Japanese soldiers
used to joke that joining the military not only got you a discount on your
movie tickets but also on your life span, he laughed. "From the outset, I never
really expected to return from the front," he told Asia Times Online.
But since Kawasaki was posted to coastal Shikoku in southern Japan to await the
US invasion that never came, he lived to tell the tale.
Kawasaki said that during the war, the manned-torpedo pilots all wanted to take
part in an attack and eagerly waited their turn on the attack roster. Missions
were assigned according to the order in which pilots had graduated from
training, with the first graduates assigned to the first missions. And so if
someone botched his mission and had to be reassigned to the next attack, it was
always very disappointing for the younger pilots waiting further down the line,
he recalled.
They didn't care for money, fame or life
"We thought we didn't need money, or fame, or our lives - that was the
mindset," Kawasaki said.
But once the war ended, he realized he would have to find a way to live.
Eventually, he ended up working in a flour mill and getting married.
"I've been able to lead an interesting life," he said, adding that if he had
the chance to go back in time, he probably wouldn't place himself in harm's way
so enthusiastically. "It seems strange that I was a soldier at 18 and now I'm
almost 80."
Some of the survivors escaped death when the war fortuitously ended before the
day of their scheduled sortie. Former special-forces pilot Tsukasa Abe,
interviewed in the Philippines, dodged what would have been his fate by just a
few hours - his scheduled mission was for the afternoon of August 15, 1945, but
at noon the Emperor of Japan broadcast to the nation that Japan must "endure
the unendurable" and accept defeat.
Of those pilots who remain, almost all watched close friends fly off to
sacrifice their lives in kamikaze attacks.
"It was very painful to see them off," remembered one special-forces pilot.
"They were going first and you were staying behind, so you felt indebted in a
way." And yet despite seeing his friends perish in this manner, this pilot, who
declined to give his name, was remarkably candid about how it felt to realize
that it would not be his fate to die in battle.
"It would be a lie to say that I didn't have at least some feeling that I was
glad I wasn't chosen," he said.
Although the use of the kamikaze tactic didn't change the final outcome of the
war, there is some evidence that those pilots who flew to their deaths hundreds
of kilometers away were indirectly able to protect their families from harm.
Because of the threat posed by the kamikaze attacks to Allied forces, more than
2,000 B-29 sorties that were to have attacked civilian and industrial targets
in mainland Japanese cities ended up being diverted to striking kamikaze
airfields in Kyushu.
Reliable estimates indicate that between 34 and 45 ships were sunk by kamikaze
attacks and hundreds more were damaged. Kamikaze pilots were also known to ram
enemy planes in midair. In addition, many sailors who witnessed kamikaze
attacks suffered psychological trauma due to the shocking nature of the suicide
tactic.
US sailors terrified of kamikaze
Bill Obitz, standing just a short distance from where a kamikaze plane hit the
USS Missouri on April 11, 1945, said sailors were scared of kamikaze because
"you knew when they came in that that you were either going to shoot them down
or they were going to dive into the ship".
While the bomb failed to explode in the attack he witnessed that day, Obitz
said the dedication evident as the pilot lined up his single-man plane on the
final run toward 45,000 tons of battleship firepower was fearsome. It was
awe-inspiring that "you knew that he wouldn't turn back", Obitz said.
Some have suggested that the Japanese kamikaze were an inspiration for the
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon three years ago, on
September 11, 2001, but the surviving pilots unanimously disavowed any
comparison to modern terrorists - their aim in World War II was only to hit
military targets. Whether the September 11 terrorists ever thought about the
Japanese kamikaze attacks will never be known.
"It's a major mistake to say that the September 11 attacks were kamikaze
attacks - the special forces were only ever used in a theater of war," said
Kawasaki, the former manned torpedo pilot who never got his chance to die. "We
never carried out any attacks [against civilians] like the ones on September
11," he said.
The former pilots also said it was a soldier's duty to obey orders and their
underlying motivation was different from that of today's suicide bombers. The
kamikaze tactic was a defense to keep the Allies at bay, more than an attack.
"Nobody was chasing after death or trying to commit suicide - we did it because
we had a duty to protect our country. To me, there's a major difference," said
former kamikaze pilot Nakajima.
Bennett Richardson is a Tokyo-based freelance journalist with a special
interest in Japanese defense policy, politics and modern history. Fumiko Hattori
is an independent researcher and translator specializing in the World War II
Pacific theater.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
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couldn't find a suitable target, they themselves were shot down and forced to
ditch into the water, or they had to turn back because of bad weather or
mechanical failure.
relation to reality. "The Emperor never really came into it - that's just
something the newspapers made up. I doubt anyone actually went to his death
shouting 'Banzai for the Emperor!'" he laughed.
that volunteers would have the chance to go to the front after only two or
three months of training. Given that it could have taken up to a year to see
combat if he had stayed in the regular forces, Kawasaki took little heed of the
warning on the poster that the mission had "no guarantee of survival".
