ABSTRACT
Everybody has heard of the suicidal kamikaze fighters of Japan who played a key role in the final stages of the war in the Pacific in 1944-45. But not everyone has understood their reasons for doing what they did. A study of these raises the question: were they martyrs for their cause? If not, why not? Kamikaze is a word widely used in the West, meaning ʻdivine wind ʼ in Japanese. It originally referred to the typhoons of 1274 and 1281 CE which reputedly saved Japan from Mongol invasions. As such, it was adopted in 1944 to designate the project of a suicidal attack unit within the Japanese navy towards the end of the Second World War.1 By means of this new unit it was hoped to prevent an otherwise inevitable American invasion. The new, emergency tactic of suicidal attack from the air against the allied Pacific fleets ultimately failed to achieve its aim, even without the coup de grâce of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By late 1944 Japan was already in desperate straits, and shortages of all kinds of military equipment, including fuel, as well as numerous mechanical failures resulting from the haste and the material inadequacies with which the tactic was put in place, helped to make the kamikaze tactic futile in the long run. But in the immediate circumstances of the approaching end of the war, especially in the Philippines from October 1944 and, above all, Okinawa in 1945, it had its local successes, sinking ships and killing a large number of allied sailors. By the end of 1944, 500 kamikaze sorties had been flown, even though it was already clear that Japan was losing the war. By the end of the war it is estimated that 5000 kamikaze pilots had died. Not all of these used the specially constructed light aircraft designed for the purpose; sometimes the Japanese used ordinary fighters to ram American B29 bombers in the air. They also had suicidal midget submarines designed to sink ships in port.2 From the beginning, the kamikaze pilots were genuine volunteers. And even when conscription into the suicide squadrons was introduced, late in the war, their enthusiasm was undiminished. There was no shortage of men willing, indeed eager, to commit suicide for the cause. No doubt there were those who tried to avoid being recruited – for example, by reporting sick. But
the effect of peer pressure tended to have the opposite effect. And hatred of the Americans, especially after the carpet-bombing of Japanese cities and the viciousness of the Pacific Island campaigns, also had its effect. Some men would even sign up by writing their names in their own blood, to show how determined they were to take part. In one case, a married man with several daughters who wanted to volunteer found his family connections an obstacle. But the obstacle was removed when his wife and daughters collectively killed themselves in order to release him for his chosen mission.3 Even more appalling was the mass suicide of Japanese soldiers and civilians in Saipan in July 1944. After 3000 fit men had voluntarily charged into concentrated American machine-gun fire, and been mown down, a crowd of wounded then followed suit. After that, whole units of men were decapitated by their officers, who then committed harakiri. Finally, hundreds of civilians, including women and children, flung themselves off cliff-tops to avoid being captured.4 Events such as these raise the question of personal motivation. As one American witness of a kamikaze attack confessed, in a documentary broadcast on 14 July 2004 on UKTV History, it seems impossible for anyone to get personal satisfaction out of committing suicide; after all, once you are dead you canʼt gain anything for yourself. How, then, is it possible for large numbers of people to volunteer to do something from which they could gain absolutely nothing? This is the point at which the concept of martyrdom might begin to be relevant in accounting for what happened. Yet virtually nowhere, since the seventeenth-century massacres of Christians, do the Japanese themselves use the language of martyrdom to describe what their own fellow countrymen were doing. As for those in the West who are more used to talking about martyrs, virtually nobody has described the kamikaze in these terms either. Why not? The history of Japanese culture can explain a good deal. Suicide is not forbidden, let alone a sin, in the traditional Japanese tradition. On the contrary, it has been an honour, even a privilege, to commit harakiri, particularly to avoid humiliation, defeat or capture in battle. Japanese history is littered with stories, some legendary from the distant past, others well documented or even physically witnessed by disinterested visiting observers in modern times,5 of heroes who have stabbed themselves in the neck (to cut the carotid artery) or, more usually, disembowelled themselves, in order to avoid disgrace. Such suicides of failed heroes are widely felt to be the epitome of the true Japanese spirit. Among disgraces, defeat in battle, or imprisonment as its consequence, seem to be the most prominent reasons for self-killing. ʻDonʼt survive shamefully as a prisonerʼ, wrote General Hideki Tojo in his Instructions for the Military in the Second World War; ʻdie and thus escape ignominy.ʼ6 A similar resolution was expressed (though eventually not carried out) by Admiral Ugaki Mantome, commander-in-chief of the Fifth Air Force with special responsibility for the kamikaze pilots. He wrote in his diary of his resolution ʻwhen and how to die as a samurai, an admiral or a supreme commander. I renewed a resolution today of entrusting my body to the throne
and defending the empire until death takes me away.ʼ7 Where possible, ritual self-disembowelment has usually been followed by decapitation by a willing accomplice, partly to shorten the excruciating pain but also to make sure it ʻworksʼ. From the legendary Yorozu in 587 CE to groups of generals at the end of the Second World War, harakiri has been practised and praised as a virtuous act, especially for the defeated. Indeed, being defeated is part of the point. For the Japanese have cultivated the ʻnobility of failure ʼfor their tragic heroes, as Ivan Morrisʼs splendid book of that title illustrates. Most of their greatest men have failed to achieve great things. Whereas in the West heroism and its rewards, in terms of honours and memories, has been associated with great achievements, even in death (for example, Nelson), in Japan the most revered men have been those who have achieved nothing in worldly terms, but who have been famous for their other-worldly virtues, including their renunciation of life itself by means of suicide.8 How is this possible? A manʼs self-disembowelment is first the public exhibition, and then the extinction, of everything that makes him to be the person he is. For in Shinto and then Zen tradition, the lower abdomen is the seat of the will, the emotions, the virtues, the very personality of a man. So harakiri, or ʻbelly-slittingʼ, is not only a way of demonstrating courage and the manly conquest of pain (mere self-poisoning is a ʻ womanish ʼmeans of suicide), but of self-abnegation, the giving up of a manʼs whole existence and his raison dʼêtre, for some greater cause.9 By the twelfth century CE this greater cause had been accepted by the medieval hereditary warrior class, or samurai, as absolute loyalty to the emperor, seen as divine head of the nation and identified with Dai Nippon or ʻGreater Japanʼ. The Shinto insistence of cleanliness of body and mind, together with the impossibility of defining good and evil in any other terms, reinforced the Zen faith in a transcendental wisdom to be attained only by rigorous discipline, asceticism and indifference to physical needs. This combination led to a warrior ethic of instant action. ʻThe Zen adept is “right thinking”: without ratiocination, by intuition alone, he acts immediately, decisively and correctly in all circumstances.ʼ10 Fujio Hayashi, who helped with the selection of volunteers but never flew himself as a kamikaze, admits to studying Zen ideals: ʻIn Zen teaching there is no life or death. Even if one lives a bit longer or dies younger, when one thinks of oneʼs life against all the living things in the world, it is quite insignificant. If one can think like this it is no big deal.ʼ11 This is the ethic which underlies the readiness of the kamikaze fighter to volunteer for suicide, in the name not only of the nation and its honour, but also (especially in the case of young unmarried men who formed the majority of the volunteers accepted for the role) of the family and its honour too. For most of the volunteers were well-educated, well-adjusted, well-respected sons of respectable families – far removed from the caricatures often prevailing in the West of a caste of subhuman, bloodthirsty, thoroughly brainwashed barbarians. But the ethic just outlined also justified the emphasis on the tragic element in the kamikaze make-up. For it is essentially an other-worldly ethic, scornful
of success in financial, political or even ideological terms. Like the suicides of the long Japanese tradition, in which nothing succeeds like failure,12 the kamikaze pilots were not giving up already-successful careers or promises of a great future. They were giving up themselves and thus, too, the very idea of worldly ʻachievementʼ. Ironically, of course, their veneration tended to encourage others to take up this same cause. As OʼNeill points out, in the case of Field-Marshal Takamori Saigo, who disembowelled himself after defeat at the battle of Shiroyama (24 September 1877), he ʻ won a great victory for those virtues of which he had feared the loss and which he had sought to defendʼ.13 The very success of Vice-Admiral Onishi Takijiro, in creating the kamikaze units in 1944, was built on a widespread cult of venerating great heroes of failure in the past. No wonder the Americans at the time could not understand what was going on. Only in retrospect have Western thinkers been able to appreciate the Japanese cult of suicide for what it is. What were the virtues which the kamikaze pilots and their tradition epitomized? First, it was gratitude for everything that had made their lives possible. This gratitude was summed up in their love of the emperor, who was himself not a particularly notable ʻpersonality ʼ(perhaps this was part of the point). Nevertheless he represented, in his own person, the tradition and the moral riches of the nation. ʻIt is an honour to be able to give my life in defence of these beautiful and lofty things, ʼwrites Yamaguchi Teruo on the eve of his death.14 Above all, ʻthese beautiful and lofty things ʼincluded the pilotʼs own family. Sometimes a pilot even associated his parents with his own mission, as if they were physically with him in his final moments.15 A second virtue which is frequently cited by the kamikaze fighters themselves is ʻ sincerityʼ. This comes out in the lack of any hope for a successful outcome of the kamikaze tactic. One surviving final kamikaze pilotʼs letter reads: ʻIs it true that self-sacrifice is the only thing that gives meaning to death? To this question the warrior is obliged to reply “yes”, while knowing full well that his suicide mission has no meaning.ʼ16 But this is perhaps overdoing it, for while the mission may have no military meaning, it can lead to a spiritual rebirth. Indeed, military defeat may be the condition of this ʻvictoryʼ. But, of course, there is no question of a spiritual rebirth for the hero himself. He himself gains nothing, as the American sailor quoted earlier rightly points out. Indeed, ʻif by some strange chance, Japan should suddenly win this war, it would be a fatal misfortune for the future of the nation . . . [so] it will be better for our nation and people if they are tempered through real ordeals which will serve to strengthen [them]ʼ.17
