‘Kamikaze Diaries’ by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney
When someone shows you the most personal side of your enemy and you see yourself, you truly begin to fathom what the horror of war really is. In "Kamikaze Diaries," Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney gives the West a rare glimpse into the hearts and minds of the tokkotai, the Japanese student soldiers who ended their 20-something lives as suicide bombers in World War II military operations.
We know them better as kamikaze pilots, the fanatical warriors of an Imperial Japan who live on forever as the black hats of World War II movies set in the Pacific theater. What Ohnuki-Tierney does in her book is tear down that caricature with translated excerpts of letters and diaries written by those who are long since ghosts. She wisely steps aside and lets the tokkotai speak for themselves about their fear, their reluctance to die, their doubt in Japan, their yearning for family, and their desperate desire to live beyond their doom.
The most powerful thing the book does is give these handful of faceless soldiers names: Sasaki Hachiro struggles to find what patriotism really is. Hayashi Tadao asks himself why he does not respect or love Japan. Matasunaga Shigeo tries to explain in poetry what he cannot voice to those around him. And in their words, they demonstrate a surprising erudition, referring thoughtfully to Western philosophers and novelists they studied before being conscripted into the Japanese military.
In a century defined by the war they fought, these stories have gone largely untold or unnoticed. But these are the stories of the real people caught up in an unstoppable war machine. They dealt with their powerlessness as best they could, staging riotous, almost angry parties the night before suicide missions, or writing to their faraway families expressing the desire to see them, just once more. And even in the face of certain death, some of them displayed a sense of irony and tragic humor that belongs in a Shakespeare play: "I will do a splendid job sinking an enemy aircraft carrier," Hayashi Ichizo wrote his family. "Do brag about me."
