Kamikaze Pilots

At the end of World War II, as a last ditch effort the Japanese military instituted the tokkōtai (or kamikaze) operations, in which pilots were asked, as a one-way mission, to dive into American aircraft carriers. Their voices defy the prevalent stereotype of “crazy chauvinistic zealots”:

These words from Hayashi Ichizō, a graduate of the Imperial University of Kyoto who died on April 12, 1945, succinctly portray the death imposed on the young men who died as kamikaze pilots. In their opinion, they did not commit suicide, and no Japanese believed they did either.

Toward the end of World War II, when an American invasion of the Japanese homeland seemed imminent, Ōnishi Takijirō, a navy vice-admiral, invented the tokkōtai (Special Attack Force) operation, which included airplanes, gliders, and submarine torpedoes, none of which was equipped with any means of returning to base. ōnishi and those closest to him thought that the Japanese soul, which was believed to possess a unique strength to face death without hesitation, was the only means available for the Japanese to save their homeland, which was surrounded by American aircraft carriers whose sophisticated radar systems protected them from being destroyed by any other means. Of the approximately 4,000 tokkōtai pilots, about 3,000 were so-called teenage pilots, who were drawn from newly conscripted and enlisted soldiers and enrolled in a special pilot training program. Close to 1,000 were student soldiers, university students who the government graduated early in order to draft. Although exact figures are hard to find, the available data shows the majority of those who died in the tokkōtai operation were student soldiers who were quickly promoted to officers. Of the 632 army officers who perished, 71#x0025; (449 pilots) were student soldiers; and of the 769 navy officers who perished, 85#x0025; (655 pilots) were student soldiers.

Unfortunately, the teenage pilots left almost no written legacy, but the writings left behind by the student soldiers offer invaluable testimony to these young men's struggle to sustain their connections to the rest of humanity amid the wrenching conditions of war and to make meaning of a death they felt was decreed for them. These extraordinarily well-educated youth were reflective and cosmopolitan, able to read the classics as well as the philosophies [Page 624]and literature from Germany, France, Russia, and elsewhere, sometimes in the original language. They drew on their knowledge of philosophy and world history to try to understand the situation in which they inadvertently, but inescapably, were placed. Many of the student soldiers were political liberals or even Marxists or other radicals.

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