ABSTRACT
Towards the end of the Second World War, almost 3,900 young men lost their lives in air suicide attacks as members of the “Special Attack Corps”, known as kamikaze outside Japan. Among them were at least 17 Koreans. This chapter looks at representations of the Korean kamikaze pilot in two films: Hotaru (Fireflies, 2001) and Ore wa kimi no tame ni shini ni iku (I will go to die for you, 2007). Though both films draw their inspiration from a real Korean kamikaze pilot Tak Kyung Hyun (aka Mitsuyama Fumihiro), this figure is put to different uses in each film. This chapter examines the treatment of this character in the two films against the backdrop of shifting representations of kamikaze in Japan, as well as the post-1990s rise of historical revisionism and new nationalism. It argues that while I Will Go depends on and reproduces the “national” framework, subsuming its Korean character into hegemonic images of kamikaze, Firefly acknowledges the ambivalent subjectivity of a Korean kamikaze and explores reconciliation outside such dominant national frameworks.
