Book Smart

They had been taken in, many of them, manipulated by the government they had sworn to uphold. And the price the Japanese tokko-tai pilots paid for their fealty was very dear.

Ohnuki-Tierney’s new book corrects this painful omission. It follows a line of inquiry that she began with the 2002 publication “Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History” (University of Chicago Press). In that volume, she argued that, far from being suicidal zealots, many tokko-tai/kamikaze felt that they had been forced into sacrificing themselves for their country. But many did not consider their fall the honor that the government made it out to be.

“I found the diaries left by highly intelligent young men who perished in a meaningless war so painful to read that without the sustained encouragement of my colleagues I would not have been able to complete the task,” Ohnuki-Tierney says.

When an American invasion of Japan began to seem inevitable toward the end of World War II, Japan commissioned a “special attack force” composed of planes, submarines, gliders and other conveyances, none equipped to return to base. In 1944, of around 4,000 tokko-tai pilots, about 3,000 were very young boys. About 1,000 of those had graduated early from universities to ensure their inclusion in the draft. It is the writings of this last category from which Ohnuki-Tierney drew for her book.

“These young men who were forced to fly to their deaths were graduates of top universities. Many were Marxists. Some were Christians. Almost all never embraced the military ideology. My quest was to understand the process, which brought them to the point of no return and reproduced the military-imperial ideology in action but not in thought,” she says.

For educated, well-read Japanese, communicating usually meant writing or reading as opposed to talking, Ohnuki-Tierney says.

“In a culture in which verbal communication is not well-developed, writing is the most serious mode of communication. Diary-keeping has been an important cultural practice in Japan since the eighth century, when the diary developed into a special literary genre. Some of those diaries have become world classics. The sheer quantity of writings left by these student soldiers is in part the result of this persistent cultural practice,” she says.

However, Ohnuki-Tierney adds that the diaries served a purpose beyond reflecting a key component of Japanese culture. They helped them understand, she says, and to come to terms with the shadow of death they faced.

“Their anguished voices remind us of colossal human tragedies, often unnecessary, that wars and other conflicts repeatedly inflict upon their own people and others,” she says.

Ohnuki-Tierney will discuss “Kamikaze Diaries” at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 9, at Borders West, 3750 University Ave. Her appearance is part of the International Institute’s World Beyond Our Borders series in partnership with Borders Booksellers.