I wonder how much influence (I suspect a great deal) the occupation of any country has on the then current and subsequent generations. For the losing side, the “great sacrifices” made by their countrymen / women are probably spoken of in hushed tones so the occupiers don’t think a rebellion may be uprising and despite these “great sacrifices”, the country was still defeated.
Killing yourself is one thing - but looking forward to the deaths of all of your countrymen (i.e. “the shattering of one hundred million like a beautiful jewel”, a resist-to-the-last-civilian attitude which some influential Japanese leaders encouraged)…well yes, I find that fanatically evil.
As for “suicide missions” there was a Medal of Honor winning dive-bomber pilot who, during the battle of the Coral Sea, flew way lower than the safest minimum altitude in order to be sure of hitting the aircraft carrier Shokaku (damaging it severely enough to keep it out of the battle of Midway and possibly altering the course of the war). In doing so he ensured his own plane would be fatally damaged, costing his life and that of a crew member.
Not quite the same as being pumped up with virulent racist and nationalist sentiments and sent out to commit suicide in a completely futile gesture, as the kamikaze pilots were.
I was married to a Japanese woman, and lived with her parents for over a year. The parents were children during the war and then have lived through all the changes since.
I’ve written a rather long post concerning the difference in war guilt between Germany and Japan. I can find that, if anyone is really interested.
Typically Japanese are quite ignorant of anything having to do with WWII. In the 25 years I lived there, it just didn’t come up in any conversations outside those I initiated.
The general public was just really happy to have the war over. I never personally discussed it with people who were adults during the war. The father of a girlfriend had been a zero pilot during the war but escaped the fate of being assigned to the tokkotai (Special unit), the unit name for this group. I did about the war some with people who had been children during the conflict.
For America, WWII was the Good War and there is a lot of continuing interest. Not so for the losers.
Any mention of tokkotai, has been to cover the tragedy of the sacrifice they made and how young they were.
One show I watched on NHK, the public broadcaster) talked about how the final letters home were all about how much they missed their mothers and that they were resigned to their fates.
Japan has essentially been run by the LDP for almost all of the post war period, and part of their support comes from the strong nationalists (as well as the ultra nationalists). They obviously have no interest in hashing out any wrongs they committed.
I donno. Japan clearly did some really horrible, terrible and outright evil things. However, given that the general public had no ability to influence the leadership then I can see how it would be just easier to want to put it past it.
However, I’m losing patience with people who want to single Japanese out. Sure, they practiced torture on a scale a magnitude or two greater than the US did, but the US hasn’t dealt with it’s more recent history either. The current president apparently believes in torture and the CIA nominee won’t say if it’s immoral or not.
Yep. Being willing to gamble your life and throwing it away are two very-different things.
The first time we heard of a suicide-bomb terrorist attack, my grandfather told us how, during the battle of the Ebro (when he’d been a tank commander), the one thing tankers were most terrified of was seeing a red beret running back to the National lines. Such a beret had been carried inside the shirt of a nutso who’d crawled under a tank (the weakest point), deposited several grenades, put his beret on, pulled a ring and started running like hell.
“Those red berets gambled their lives in every crawl, but they also did their best to keep 'em attached to their skin! These morons are just fucking stupid nuts!”
The US was isolationsist with respect to Europe while happily protecting the interests of US corporations throughout Latin America. It is perfectly possible to be isolationist in some respects but not in others. Heck, the current leadership is isolationist in that it refuses to take the interests of any other countries into account, while at the same time expecting every other country to take American interests into account.
How is a pilot who flies a plane full of explosives into a battleship fundamentally different from a soldier who charges an enemy machine gun nest over open ground, knowing that he will die while taking out the nest? Most people find the soldier’s instance of self-sacrifice to be worthy of deep respect. Do you agree with that? If not, why? If so, then why would you feel differently about a kamikaze pilot?
Because infantry are not trained to kill themselves - they’re trained to take enemy machine nests *without *dying in the process. Sure, there’s a chance they’ll be killed, but then, there’s also a chance you’ll be killed crossing the street; the only thing different is the percentage. If a soldier decides to actually sacrifice himself - rather than just to risk his life - to save others, that means that something has gone horribly wrong and that there is literally no other option, and yes, in such a case, the soldier in question should be lauded for doing something that had to be done. It also means that someone else should be court martialed for allowing the situation to occur in the first place.
Besides, killing yourself is easy: it’s just a lazy way of getting out of the next mission. A real soldier, a professional, knows he has more battles to fight.
Two relevant quotes from one of my favorite military sci-fi authors:
“A soldier who wants to die just leaves you with another damn slot to fill.”
"Sometimes you simply have to charge straight uphill into a machine gun nest. Then it’s nice if you’ve got people along who think that’s a good idea.”
They did, and it was. Furthermore, the Bataan Death March and their treatment of the Chinese during that occupation pretty much show, to me at least, that they got everything they deserved. They were as brutal as they were aggressive and had a total disregard of human rights.
Why is this not applicable to kamikaze pilots? Were they not sacrificing themselves to save their fellow soldiers, just as you describe? If their self-sacrifice enabled them to sink an enemy battleship that couldn’t be approached by pilots with a stronger sense of self-preservation, weren’t they as laudable as a soldier absorbing bullets while tossing grenades at a machine gun nest?
No, it isn’t. I’m not saying that it would have been a good thing if Japan as a whole had chosen suicide rather than surrender, but it wouldn’t have been “evil”, any more than a Romeo and Juliet situation is “evil.”
I think there’s a cultural difference to be recognized between cases of planned and organized suicide attack as opposed to extremely risky acts in war which result in death. AFAIK as I know it’s rare for modern Western military men who somehow survived acts very likely to result in death then saying they had set out to kill themselves. Although it’s not impossible obviously because people of all cultures kill themselves including outside of war. And saying they didn’t think about it, sure. And where they died, we don’t know.
For example US a/c crashed into Japanese ships during WWII in at least two documented cases*. But we don’t know their intention (intentional or accidental? intentional once they knew they’d crash anyway?). With the Japanese special attack units it was 100% clear, premeditated and organized. Besides which ‘conventional’ IJN a/c where expected to crash into their targets if the a/c was going down anyway. A common notation in IJN WWII air unit records for a/c lost in all kinds of combat action was ‘self explosion’ (literally), suicide crash even though it seldom meant the a/c had actually succeeded, rather assuming the pilot would have tried.
That said I see logical confusion in too closely associating suicide tactics with the moral value of the suicide attacker’s national cause (let’s leave aside suicide attack in irregular conflict for now). It’s nonsensical to posit that WWII Allied fighting men’s cause was morally superior because they generally eschewed suicide tactics. It might be somewhat more valid to say that the excesses of Japanese hyper-nationalist militarism manifested itself in both war atrocities and widespread used of suicide tactics, but not a rock solid link IMO. South Koreans in the Korean War, albeit influenced by Japanese military ideas from the recent occupation, used outright suicide attacks by infantry against North Korean tanks in the early days of that war as the Japanese had against Allied tanks. That didn’t make them the bad guys and the North Koreans the good guys. The Koreans called those attacks ‘flesh bullet’, a coining of Chinese characters originating with the Japanese in the bloody fighting in the siege of Port Arthur in the 1904-5 war with Russia. It wasn’t as organized then (and of course not against tanks which didn’t yet exist) but a tendency to suicide attack by the Japanese doesn’t clarify the moral ambiguity of the Russo-Japanese War in favor of the Russians, and Japanese conduct during that war otherwise (as toward Russian prisoners) was generally in line with Western standards.
*the SBD of Ens Paul Halloran crashed on the cruiser Maya during the attacks on the final large Japanese convoy to Guadalcanal in Nov 1942, and the P-38 of Lt. John Grillet crashed on the cruiser Ashigara retreating from the Japanese bombardment of the US beachhead at Mindoro in Dec 1944, serious fires killed dozens of Japanese sailors in both cases (the idea that a US a/c crashed on one of the Japanese cruisers at Midway has been discounted).
If you’re not familiar with Senator Daniel Inouye, read his real life story about charging into a machine gun nest. Simply amazing!
It may be unfair to think of the pilots as suicidal or crazy, when in the main they seem to have been simply ordered to die, as soldiers often are. “Volunteering” doesn’t mean the same in the military as in normal life, and peer pressure is strong too. If the chain of command needed trained personnel to execute a function, they get those personnel. A mystical Warrior Code doesn’t need to be invoked or understood, other than the generic military one. So today’s Japanese would certainly seem to be justified in thinking of them as mainly just military personnel who got shitty orders but followed them.
People are definitely a product of their environment in large part, but voluntarily following through on what you were always taught is right or honorable is not the same as being ‘simply ordered’. The kamikaze were not ‘simply ordered’. What young Japanese of that time thought of as right and honorable was different than what their Western contemporaries thought and I don’t see a reason to try to plaster over that obvious difference by comparing apples and oranges (brave and extremely risky Western soldiery to organized Japanese suicide tactics).
You can find the system of that time as it interacted with Japanese culture, which led young men to feel that way, as a bad one for that reason besides other reasons. And I guess many people in Japan would say that was part of their general poor view of the militarists (all the ways they brought ruin to Japan and Japanese people, not as much for what Japan did to other countries, a difference which tends to stick in a lot of craws outside Japan). But the kamikaze were not the product of a ‘generic military code’ or we would have seen genuinely similar action on a similar scale in the West, which just isn’t the case. Brave soldiering and deliberate, organized suicide tactics are not the same thing.
Though again I wouldn’t draw a direct connection between that difference and right/wrong of the underlying cause. You could have deliberate suicide tactics in a just cause (defense of South Korea 1950 IMO would qualify), and you can obviously have no deliberate suicide tactics in an unjust cause (loads of wars through history).
In a military environment, being asked to volunteer is not much different from being ordered, despite all the patriotic claptrap it may be wrapped in. The first unit:
I wonder if you think of Nazi Germany as the same thing, sure they did some evil but in the greater scheme of things hasn’t everyone done evil?
I think his point is that they did evil things 70 years ago.
I read that during 9/11 2 American fighters took off to intercept the planes. Neither had time to load ordinance and one pilot told the other something like “I’ll go for the cockpit, you go for the tail” which means they were going to intentionally ram the airliners. Now granted a modern fighter has a pretty good ejection system so they might have survived but wasnt this in a way also sort of a kamikazee mission? If they had succeeded how would we look at them now?
Understand the kamikaze, pity them, perhaps, but don’t romanticize them. See them as part of the complete permeation of militarism in Japanese society. I highly recommend James Bradley’s Flyboys, an excellent and balanced view of Japan’s involvement in the war:
The kamikaze pilots, like all Japanese children who attended school after the earthquake of 1923 led to replacing teachers with military officers, attended schools in which every aspect of the curriculum was designed to inculcate “right thinking,” i.e., militarism and unquestioning obedience to authority. Arithmetic and science focused on military matters; PE included war games, and music classes focused on war songs.
[Bolding mine.]
It’s a cautionary tale of what we humans, not merely the Japanese, are capable of turning ourselves into.
I think many would point out that firebombing cities full of innocent civilians (>20,000 dead in Dresden, >100,000 dead in Tokyo, >70,000 in Hiroshima, etc) is no less “evil” than ordering soldiers to go on suicide missions.