Nobody wanted to, but everybody said, ‘Yes, with all my heart.’ That was the surrounding atmosphere. Probably it’s unthinkable in the current days of peace. As a result, he told me, “everyone put down the answer which was opposite from what we were feeling. They feared that if they did not volunteer, their families would be ostracized and their parents told that their son was “a coward, not honorable, shameful.” And then, as fighter pilots, they would be sent to the most dangerous part of the front line where they would still die-but dishonored. On the contrary, Oonuki said, when he and his fighter pilot colleagues were first asked to volunteer for this “special attack mission” they thought the whole idea “ridiculous.” But, given the night to think about their decision, the men reconsidered. But the fact that he did survive meant that he was able to correct the central myth of the kamikaze-that these young pilots all went to their deaths willingly, enthused by the Samurai spirit. He told me that his survival had given him “a sense of a burden.” He knew he wasn’t supposed to be talking to me 60 years after the end of the war-that he should have, as my colleague had said, smashed his plane into the superstructure of an American warship. He was rescued by the Japanese navy and interrogated about the reasons for the failure of his mission. Back in April 1945 he had been forced to land his plane-stuffed with explosives-because of engine trouble while he was en route to attack the American fleet off Okinawa. That is how I came to meet Kenichiro Oonuki. All had been instructed to return to base if their planes developed a fault on the way to their targets. Unlikely as it may seem, a number of Japanese kamikaze pilots did survive the war. “How can you meet a kamikaze pilot? These guys all killed themselves in suicide attacks on Allied ships! They disintegrated into a million pieces 60 years ago!” A Kamikaze Who Lived to Tell the Tale CloseĪ few years ago, when I was making a BBC TV documentary series about the Japanese and World War II, I mentioned to a colleague that I was leaving for Tokyo in order to meet a kamikaze pilot.
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