Kamikazi: Japan's Suicide Gods

Anyone who accepts certain death for a cause rouses strong emotions in the rest of us: curiosity, mixed with anger if they take innocent lives with them, pity if the sacrifice has been for a lost or, worse, a bad cause.

We imagine ourselves in the last moments of a suicide dive, and wonder about their motives. Fools? Dupes? Heroes? Killers? Half a century before the events of 11 September 2001, more than 5,000 young Japanese threw promising lives away in a vain attempt to destroy the American and British fleets that were throttling their country and preparing to invade it. The parallels between the World Trade Center and Pentagon attackers and the kamikaze pilots of the Second World War are tempting, and this book tries to draw them - with limited success, but some interesting new facts.

The two authors approach their subject from different viewpoints. Albert Axell is a veteran American journalist with much experience of Japan, and he makes a workman-like job of the basic history of the kamikazes - how the idea was born in the ultra-realistic mind of Vice-Admiral Takijiro Onishi, in charge of the defence of the Philippines as the Allied noose closed around Japan's faltering empire. Onishi reasoned that American aircraft carriers were high-value targets, worth losing a plane and pilot for, if a hit could be guaranteed by diving through the ship's anti-aircaft fire and crashing on a carrier's wooden deck.

The flier officially remembered as the first "Special Attack" pilot, Lieutenant Yukio Seki, 23, was not a volunteer for suicide. "Japan's future is bleak if it is forced to kill one of its best pilots - myself," he confided, perceptively as it turned out, to a war correspondent. Still, Seki obeyed orders. On 25 October 1944 his wing of nine kamikazes sank the American "baby" carrier St LÙ (the US Navy had more than 100). "Was it necessary to go to this extreme?" asked Emperor Hirohito, another cautious realist. "Still, they did a good job," he added diplomatically, as Japan's nominal commanderinchief.

As on 11 September, the first kamikaze kill did not succeed in cowing the Americans - rather the reverse - but it looked like a godto Japanese home-front propagandists. "We are far superior in our spiritual strength to American and British devils," said the head of Waseda University in Tokyo, eager, as the old so often are, to send the young to certain death. "Now we must demonstrate this spirit in an all-out effort." Young navy and army cadets, not yet really aware of the finality of death, flocked to volunteer as kamikaze pilots. Their last waving take-offs and farewell messages, checked for patriotic fervor by senior officers, flooded the Japanese media (Axell describes one such effort as "obligatory wartime twaddle").

Kamikaze pilots were not, as he explains, promised paradise in the next life, only being worshipped as "gods" in the Japanese sense, like everyone else who died for the Emperor - or, in the less high-flown English equivalent: "We shall remember them."

Altogether, around 5,200 young Japanese gave their lives in kamikaze attacks. Even Admiral Onishi had the courage - or, some might say, the decency - to kill himself by painful disembowelment the day Japan surrendered. No major American or British warships were sunk, although the invasion of Okinawa cost the lives of 5,000 American sailors, the heaviest loss in any US Navy campaign. Ironically, the suicidal Japanese defence of Okinawa by land and sea gave the Americans time, and some of the justification, for testing and dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagaski. Still, Japan's war was worthwhile, this book argues, as it ended European and American colonialism in Asia. Here we can detect the contribution of Kase, a wellknown Japanese Right-wing publisendcist. This may contain some historical truth. But the cause the kamikazes were defending was, in reality, that of the biggest, cruellest and most efficient of all the foreign empires in East Asia - that of imperial Japan.

Here the parallel with the perpetrators of 11 September breaks down. The kamikazes had no religious motive as we would understand it, but were the heroes, or victims, of a propaganda offensive which had a certain desperate military logic - a ship for a plane was a good exchange. Japan was not defeated because it ran out of suicide volunteers, but out of aircraft, even the crude one-way piloted bombs of the spring of 1945, as well as out of oil, food, ships, trains and everything else needed to continue the war.

The half-trained hijackers of 11 September, on the other hand, were part of no military plan, however far-fetched, to defeat the "great Satan", the United States. Rather, to judge by their self-obsessed last messages, their interest in this world ended with their deaths and the personal paradise yet to come.

Just the same, anyone who chooses certain death can't be accused of insincerity, which is, of course, the point they are trying to make. Suicide can be the reverse of the grown-up courage which means staying alive as long as we have a contribution, even by example, to make. The kamikazes were told they were setting Japan an even better example by dying young. I can see why they agreed, but I think they were wrong - maybe because I saw all too much useless death in my days as a war reporter. Nevertheless, I too think of that last desperate dive with horror and fascination.