Kamikaze music videos & Japanese pacifism

While cruising YouTube this morning, I came across a music video honoring Japan’s kamikaze pilots (or ‘Special attack forces’ as they are commonly called in Japan).  It splices together scenes from an anime called ‘The Cockpit: Kamikaze Stories’, which was released in 1993.  As I had never heard of it before, the scenes of glorified sacrifice depicted in music video were quite interesting to me.  [The music video can be seen here.]

Here’s a summary of part of ‘The Cockpit’, from movie review written by kamikaze expert Bill Gordon, who maintains the Kamikaze Images website:

The second episode, “Sonic Thunder Attack Team,” gives the story of a young pilot of an ohka, a “human bomb” launched from underneath a mother plane and powered by rocket engines. On August 5, 1945, this ohka pilot named Nogami survives by parachuting out of his plane when attacked by American fighters. Although ashamed to be saved since so many of his comrades perished, he gets another chance to make an attack on the next day. When the plane carrying his ohka gets attacked and catches fire, a Japanese plane makes a suicide crash into the American fighter ready to shoot down his mother plane and ohka. Nogami’s ohka gets launched, and he crashes it into an American aircraft carrier. The carrier captain receives news of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima just before his ship explodes.

Sounds interesting?  Well, you can watch it at YouTube.  The segment has been divided into several parts: [Video Part 1], [Video Part 2], and [Video Part 3]

The kamikaze pilots are a foggy subject for me.  My education in America and my exposure to countless World War 2 movies, documentaries, and books written and produced from the American perspective flooded me with information about how the kamikaze pilots were brainwashed into becoming fanatical suicide pilots for their god emperor.  I knew that there must be more to the issue than what the history channel can say in a short documentary aimed at patriotic American viewers.
After suicide bombings became a popular tactic of middle-eastern terrorists, the analogy of the kamikaze pilot has been used a lot in the western media (especially after the airplane attacks on 9/11).  Recently, historians have been picking apart the propaganda-clouded wartime image of the fanatical kamikaze pilot and have written that most pilots were forced into special attack units: most of them did not want to take part in suicide attacks.  Yet, in spite of this, most Americans still have the image of kamikaze pilot similar to the crazed dynamite vest-wearing jihadists who blow up buses.

There is a somewhat understandable fascination with the kamikaze pilots in Japan.  Many movies and manga have been made that feature kamikaze pilots, and zero-sen model airplanes can be purchased in almost any toy store or convience store.  Of course, Japan’s  nationalists like to cling to a romanitized vision of kamikaze pilots.  I’ve heard that Gov. Ishihara is even in the process of producing a film that honors the kamikaze pilots.

I’d love to see a poll over at What Japan Thinks about the Japanese people’s views on the pilots.  It’s not exactly a subject that most Japanese people would like to talk about, nor would many major magazines want to bother with a survey on the subject.  When I do hear opinions expressed, they are often something like this (quoted from a comment on the YouTube music video):

Japan today exists thanks to your honorable lives.

And, it is sworn never to sacrifice an honorable life like you.

I usually heard such statements without the contents of the second line thrown in, which made such a sentiment very hard to understand the first few times I heard it.  Were they claiming that the sacrifice of so many men after it was clear that Japan had no chance to win was a good thing?  It wasn’t until later that I realized that they might have meant that the sacrifice of the kamikaze pilots and so many others in that costly war had a major effect on making Japan a pacifist state.

A lot of people like to claim that militarism is on the rise again in Japan; that right-wing politicians are trying to rebuild Japan’s military as a force for imperialism in Asia.  While I agree that the Japanese government is becoming more defense-minded, as this survey shows, it will take a gargantuan leap to create the monster that so many journalists like to say is on the horizon.

So, what do you think?  Kamikaze pilots: creators of pacifism, or propaganda tool for the rebuilding of the new militarism of Japan?