JAPAN:New documentary shows kamikazes' pointless sacrifice exposed the moral bankruptcy of Japan's wartime leaders, writes David McNeillin Tokyo
Shigeyoshi Hamazono still sometimes cannot believe he is alive. Wounded in second World War dogfights with US aircraft, the pilot later got back into his plane and survived two aborted kamikaze missions.
When the war ended, he says he cried for days "for all the people who lost their lives, for our loss, and for my country".
Now in his 80s, Hamazono was once one of a legendary squad of Japanese pilots who damaged or destroyed 300 US warships by ramming them in aircraft loaded with 250kg bombs. Like today's jihad martyrs, the kamikazes were depicted as suicidal fanatics who burned with hatred for the US. But a new documentary shows a different story.
In Wings of Defeat, directed by Risa Morimoto, a Japanese-American, the dwindling group of ageing pilots who survived express sadness, regret and even anger at their leaders, who told them they were fighting madmen who would kill them all. "They thought they were fighting to end all wars, and they were lied to - as we are being lied to now in Iraq," Morimoto recently said.
Launched in 1944 as the US invasion neared and Japan ran desperately short of supplies, the kamikaze strategy cost the lives of about 5,000 Japanese men, many in their teens. For many, their pointless sacrifice exposed the moral bankruptcy of Japan's wartime leaders, but nationalists still revere them as "falling cherry blossom petals".
Like most of the men in the movie, Hamazono's survival was a fluke. He was forced to abandon his first mission after his cockpit filled with oil, and during the brutal Battle of Okinawa he crashed landed his aircraft when it ran out of fuel. "We didn't want to die," he said. "We wanted to live, but back then we weren't allowed to say such things."
Wings of Defeat arrives as a movement led by prime minister Shinzo Abe, is trying to rewrite the history of Japan's wartime past, and hot on the heels of a very different movie. In I Go To Die for You, written by Tokyo's right-wing governor, Shintaro Ishihara, the pilots are eulogised are self-sacrificing heroes.
"The worries, sufferings and misgivings of these young people are something we cannot find in today's society," Ishihara said after the movie was released this spring. "That is what makes this portrait of youth poignant and cruel, and yet so exceptionally beautiful."
Morimoto was persuaded to come to Japan from her native New York and interview survivors after learning that her beloved uncle was once a kamikaze pilot. Until then, she says all her images of the kamikaze were from US propaganda movies, and completely at odds with the "kindly, gracious man" she knew.
After years of silence, the former pilots relished the chance to explain their experiences. One even criticised wartime emperor Hirohito.
The movie's producer, Linda Hoaglund, told a Tokyo press conference that when they showed it to the US survivors of kamikaze attacks, some cried.
"For the first time they realised they were just high-school boys back then, shooting at other high-school boys. It took 60-plus years for them to realise that."