Men who would die for the emperor

TOSHIO YOSHITAKE was ready to die on Dec. 12, 1944, in a kamikaze attack on U.S. Navy ships off the Philippines, but his plane developed engine trouble and he had to crash-land. He survived.

Hideo Suzuki was trained to drop from a mother plane in an Oka rocket-assisted bomb, but World War II ended before his turn came to immolate himself.

Likewise, Toshiharu Konada never got a chance to attack in a Kaiten manned torpedo. After Japan’s surrender, reluctant to take off his uniform and face the shame of living in a defeated country, he worked with the U.S. occupation forces to destroy the treacherously unreliable Kaitens, which had killed more Japanese than Americans.

Members of a dwindling, insular group -- the last of Japan’s suicide warriors -- these men and others confided their stories to M.G. Sheftall, a Japanese-speaking American professor of comparative cultures and creative writing at Shizuoka University in Japan who doubles as a military historian. Sheftall made these interviews the core of “Blossoms in the Wind,” a heavily footnoted, scholarly work about the kamikaze “death cult” that’s as lively to read as a popular novel.

The veterans hardly could have found a more respectful listener. They rewarded Sheftall’s tact and patience by describing their family backgrounds, how they were recruited and trained, what they felt waiting for that single, fatal mission, and how they view their wartime service now, in a pacifistic Japan that doesn’t want to hear about it.

Sheftall argues convincingly that they weren’t crazed fanatics or the product of feudal samurai traditions. They were ordinary, patriotic young men who responded logically to the reality of imminent defeat -- Japan’s surface naval forces vanishing, its cities being firebombed -- and to the dire propaganda they were force-fed: that the “honorable death” of all 100 million Japanese was preferable to the horrors of American occupation. “Although there was no Japanese historical precedent for organized ‘suicide’ tactics, per se,” Sheftall writes, “the idea seemed like something that warriors of old might have done, and it could be sold along those lines” by Japan’s militarist leaders.

Sheftall sharply criticizes the propagandists for promoting an unwinnable war and then whipping young men into a frenzy of self-sacrifice. He credits Emperor Hirohito with belatedly saving the country. If the emperor truly believed what the militarists were saying, Sheftall opines, he never would have surrendered, even after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But Sheftall doesn’t blame the kamikaze fighters -- many of them in their teens -- for believing what they were told. After the war, those who lived helped shoulder the burden of Japan’s economic recovery, raised families and grappled in silence and privacy with their grief and disillusionment, their shame as survivors and their envy of comrades who died believing in their cause.

Sheftall notes some of these men’s crotchets -- their campaigning, for instance, to purge school textbooks of any references to Japan’s war guilt. Perhaps carried away with empathy, he even agrees with them that the kamikazes had nothing in common with today’s Islamic suicide bombers. The difference, he says, “is as simple as the difference between love [of country] and hate [of the West].”

Sheftall is on firmer ground when he emphasizes that kamikaze attacks were a desperate expedient started late in the war, not something central to the Japanese psyche. These attacks killed and wounded more than 15,000 Americans at a cost of 6,310 Japanese; they made the invasion of Okinawa “the bloodiest episode in the entire history of the U.S. Navy,” but they didn’t begin until Japan was critically short of pilots, planes, aviation fuel and bases to fly from.

“Blossoms in the Wind” tells us about things we wouldn’t expect to encounter here: the sociology of the ‘pleasure quarters’ of prewar Tokyo, the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923.

Some of Sheftall’s more memorable interviews are with women. Shigeko Araki married her husband, Haruo, the night before he went off to die on a kamikaze mission. She followed three steps behind him to the train station, regretting to this day that both were too well-bred and reticent to speak of their feelings. Later she hid, pregnant and half starved, on the slopes of Mt. Fuji to avoid the expected wave of American marauders and gave birth to a sickly baby who soon died.

Old women meet regularly in Tokyo to relive the months when they were teenage nadeshiko in Chiran, a town on the southern island of Kyushu that became a major kamikaze base. The nadeshiko -- schoolgirls drafted for war work and nicknamed after a tough and lovely wildflower -- harvested potatoes, dug bunkers, dodged bombs, repaired runways and tended the barracks where kamikaze pilots stayed briefly before their missions.

Though ordered not to fraternize, the girls naturally grieved for each group of doomed boys who took off. Then they had to pull themselves together and welcome the next group, day after day.

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Michael Harris, author of the novel “The Chieu Hoi Saloon,” is a regular contributor to Book Review.