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By Root 1180 0

enthusiasm is largely fallacious. Among the first wave of suicidalists in the autumn of 1944, there were many genuine volunteers. Thereafter, however, the supply of young fanatics dwindled: many subsequent recruits were driven to accept the role by moral pressure, and sometimes conscription. Their training was as harsh as that of all Japanese warriors, and attended by the same emphasis on corporal punishment. Kasuga Takeo, a mess orderly who served at Tsuchitura, a kamikaze base, testified to the melancholy and sometimes hysteria which attended the pilots’ last hours. Some smashed furniture or sat in mute contemplation, others danced in frenzy. Takeo spoke of a mood of ‘utter desperation’. Peer pressure, a dominant social force in Japan since time immemorial, achieved its apogee in the kamikaze programme.

A Japanese historian wrote later, with a lyricism incomprehensible to most Westerners, about the doomed fliers of this period: ‘Many of the new arrivals seemed at first not only to lack enthusiasm, but indeed to be disturbed by their predicament. With some this condition lasted only a few hours, with others for several days. It was a period of melancholy that passed with time and eventually gave way to a spiritual awakening. Then, like an attainment of wisdom, care vanished and tranquillity of spirit appeared as life came to terms with death, mortality with immortality.’ He cited the example of one Lt. Kuno, who arrived unhappy at his operational airfield, but before his last flight became positively jaunty, and insisted on stripping his plane of all non-essential equipment. The writer expressed regret, however, that ‘a few of these pilots, unduly influenced by a grateful and worshipping public, came to think of themselves as living gods and grew unbearably haughty’.

Most were merely distressed. One young trainee mused grimly as his country’s plight became plain: ‘Now the wholesale attack by the enemy with enormous material superiority begins. The last katastrophische stage described in All Quiet on the Western Front is soon to approach.’ Likewise a twenty-year-old bomber pilot, Norimitsu Takushima, wrote in his diary: ‘Today the Japanese people are not allowed freedom of speech and we cannot publicly express our criticism … The Japanese people do not even have access to enough information to know the facts … This is just one example of the routines and demagoguery that have become the moving forces of our society … We are going to meet our fate led by the cold will of the government. I shall not lose my passion and hope until the end … There is one ideal – freedom.’ On 9 April 1945, Takushima’s plane vanished on an operation.

Yet some such young men professed that they went willingly: Lt. Kanno Naoishi, regarded by his peers as one of Japan’s most colourful fighter pilots, had rammed a B-24 and escaped with his life, but did not expect to survive for much longer. Aircrew travelled between postings with a small bag of personal effects, chart pencils, underwear, bearing their names; his was jauntily inscribed ‘personal effects of the late Lt. Cmdr. Kanno Naoishi’, for he assumed his own death, and the consequent posthumous promotion granted to every flier who fell. In one of innumerable last letters left behind by kamikazes for their families, Hayashi Ichizo wrote in April 1945: ‘Mother, I am a man. All men born in Japan are destined to die fighting for the country. You have done a splendid job raising me to become an honourable man. I will do a splendid job sinking an enemy aircraft carrier. Do brag about me.’ Ichizo died off Okinawa on 12 April 1945, aged twenty-three. Nakao Takenonori wrote likewise to his parents on 28 April: ‘The other day I paid my visit to Kotohira Shrine and had a picture taken. I told them to send the finished photo to you. Just in case, I enclose the receipt … Please do not get discouraged, and fight to defeat America and Britain. Please say the same to Grandmother. I will leave behind my diary. Although I did not do much in my life, I am content that I fulfilled my wish to live a pure life,