When kamikaze pilots were gods; now remembered with sorrow

By KAYOKO SEKIGUCHI
December 8, 2024

Chino Kuwashiro, 95, stands at the site where she, as a student, sent off young kamikaze pilots on their suicide missions in 1945 in what is now Minami-Kyushu city in Kagoshima Prefecture. (Kayoko Sekiguchi)

MINAMI-KYUSHU, Kagoshima Prefecture--Chino Kuwashiro recalled how her legs trembled as she saw off young kamikaze pilots almost 80 years ago, waving a symbolic cherry blossom branch.

In spring 1945, it became a routine for her and other students at Chiran Women’s High School here to pray for the success of the suicide missions.

Chiran, now part of this city, hosted an Imperial Japanese Army base that pilots used.

Kuwashiro, then a teenager, revered them like gods.

She could hardly control her emotions when she thought about the fate that awaited them.

Despite her deep sense of personal tragedy, she did not falter in her belief that people sacrificing their lives was an indispensable means for Japan’s victory in the Pacific War.

“To win the war, I told myself to accept the suicide missions,” said Kuwashiro, now 95. “I did not want the United States to take over a beautiful Japan.”

Only six months after Japan’s December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Navy suffered a crushing defeat in the Battle of Midway in the Pacific.

Japan’s war situation from then on only grew worse.

By autumn 1943, the idea of a kamikaze squadron had been floated by a small circle in the military, according to a military history compiled by what is now the National Institute for Defense Studies, a research institute under the Defense Ministry.

At the time, it was a vague notion, nothing more.

But then Saipan, where Japan had a large base and a sizable Japanese population, fell in July 1944, and the mood in the military fast tilted toward extreme measures.

THE FIRST ASSAULT

On Oct. 25, 1944, the Imperial Japanese Navy mounted the first organized suicide assault, flying a unit of five planes to the Leyte Gulf to target U.S. warships. One ship was sunk. The five pilots all died.

The army followed suit immediately with its own kamikaze mission.

The institute’s archive shows that in October 1944, the Imperial Japanese Navy notified its forces fighting on the front that it would announce the results of each kamikaze mission.

The decision reflected the military’s belief that the outcome would “significantly affect the will to continue the war among the military and the general public” as Japan’s prospects looked increasingly bleak.

Kamikaze successes were often exaggerated to make the public think Japan was faring better than it was.

Newspapers carried detailed coverage of the unit members, not just their names and a photograph, but also their profiles and a list of family members.

In its Oct. 29, 1944, edition, The Asahi Shimbun splashed a large headline on the front page about the first assault by a Special Attack Unit.

The story stated that the kamikaze attack corps was formed with the military leadership’s “strong resolve to turn the tide of the war with ramming attacks designed to hit the targets without fail.”

The paper’s editorial page lauded the pilots, saying “we Japanese saw a chance of victory in their distinguished service and fighting spirit.”

The Asahi ran more than 300 stories on the suicide missions over the course of 10 months or so until Japan surrendered in August 1945.

The fallen kamikaze pilots were treated as “War Gods.”

Their wills were read out on the radio. Newsreels featured them, showing facial close-ups right before takeoff on their one-way trips.

Signs emblazoned with the words “War God” were erected outside the pilots’ homes and at the schools they attended to honor their valor and sacrifice.

In the closing days of the war, many bases located in Japan’s southern main island of Kyushu became sites to mount suicide missions.

Kuwashiro and other students at her school had been deployed to the Chiran base since the end of March 1945 to prepare meals for the troops and to clean their barracks.

School-age children and female students in Kyushu visited military bases to offer emotional support.

During the ferocious Battle of Okinawa, which raged from March to June in 1945, college students and other young pilots were selected for kamikaze missions.

The deployment of youngsters was a means to reserve skilled aviators for the fight to the finish on Japan’s main islands that was anticipated by Japanese leaders as well as the general population.

The kamikaze missions involved a total of 3,000 airplanes taking off from bases across Kyushu. An estimated 4,000 Japanese aviators lost their lives in the attacks.

Motoko Owada, who is 94 and lives in Mitaka on the outskirts of Tokyo, recalled that her mindset during the war was like that of a kamikaze pilot.

Owada said she had had no doubt that Japan would eventually prevail if its people worked unflinchingly for the good of the country and with an unwavering determination to sacrifice their lives if necessary.

In the summer of 1944, she was mobilized to work at an airplane factory, making aircraft parts by polishing duralumin sheets with sawdust and shaping them with a press machine.

“It would be a great honor if an airplane I helped to build were used for a kamikaze attack,” she recalled thinking.

Owada volunteered to work an overnight shift on a day off even though she was allowed only two days off a month.

She and her friends made cuts in their fingers to create a statement written in blood to assert their faith in Japan’s eventual victory and even sent that sentiment to kamikaze pilots waiting to go on their missions.

Owada was devastated when Emperor Hirohito went on the radio to announce Japan’s surrender on Aug. 15, 1945. She and her mother wept like there were no tomorrows.

Nearly 30 years after the end of war, she was reunited with her former classmates to compile a collection of essays reminiscing about their wartime experiences.

It was then that she was struck by the thought that if only they had built fewer airplanes, even if it was just one less, the number of young Japanese pilots lost in suicide missions would have been one fewer.

Masanori Tsujita, a researcher of modern history, refers to World War II as a “total war” in which nations fought with everything they had by deploying all resources available, not just manpower and firepower, but also political and economic systems, culture and civilians.

He noted that the military exploited new media--newsreels and radio--as a convenient tool to spread their narrative glorifying the fallen troops and to galvanize the civilian population into participating in the war effort.

Tsujita believes it is vital to look beyond the surface of events.

“For sure, the wills left by individual kamikaze pilots were touching,” he said. “But we should also ask why Japan had to send young people on suicide missions in the first place to have a better understanding of the historical background.”

Even today, he said, the media loves nothing better than to shed the spotlight on “heroes” and “moving stories” when traumatic events occur such as natural disasters.

“We should ask whether such stories are not trying to cover up underlying causes of and where the responsibility for the fiasco lie,” he said. “Taking a step back from emotional tales and trying to see deeper is particularly important since we are living in the age of growingly influential social media.”