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Portrait of Shigeo Imamura as Naval Cadet
(November 1943)
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Books - Personal Narratives
Books written by former members of Japan's special attack
corps provide readers great insight into the soldiers' motivations, feelings,
and opinions. General books and film documentaries about Japan's kamikaze
attacks often try to speculate on how pilots felt before making attacks that
would lead to certain death, but personal narratives give much more insight
into the thinking of individual pilots and the men assigned with them to go on
missions of death. The authors of the five books examined in this section wrote
their stories several years after the actual experiences, so some specific
details may have been difficult to remember. Since they had many years to
reflect on their actions and experiences, there may have been a tendency to try
to justify, hide, or alter some incidents when preparing a written record.
However, the five personal narratives reviewed on this web site generally
appear to be sincere attempts to present accurately the authors' wartime
experiences.
The personal narratives include The Divine Wind, the
most influential book on kamikaze history both inside and outside Japan. In
1951, two Imperial Japanese Navy officers published in Japanese their firsthand
account of the Navy's kamikaze operations, and the U.S. Naval Institute
published an abridged English version in a journal article in 1953 and the full
translation in a book in 1958. The authors are Captain Rikihei Inoguchi, who
served as senior staff officer to the vice admiral who initiated Japan's
kamikaze attacks in October 1944, and Commander Tadashi Nakajima, who worked as
flight operations officer for the air group from which the first kamikaze
special attack corps was formed. Authors of most other books on Japan's kamikaze
history usually use The Divine Wind as one of their key sources.
I Attacked Pearl Harbor
is an English translation of the Japanese memoirs of Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki,
America's first POW in WWII when he was captured after his midget submarine got
stuck on a coral reef. The book covers not only his training and the
attack at Pearl Harbor but also his four years in POW camps and his return to
Japan after the war.
Kamikaze Submarine weaves together Yutaka Yokota's
exciting personal experiences with the complete history of the Navy's kaiten,
manned torpedoes launched from submarines. Yokota joined the kaiten program in
its early stages and went out on three unsuccessful missions to steer his
explosive kaiten into an enemy ship.
Requiem for Battleship Yamato gives Ensign Yoshida's
account of this great battleship's suicidal final mission and his unexpected
survival. Yoshida, an
assistant radar officer on Yamato, was rescued by an escort destroyer
after witnessing the famous battleship's sinking, which resulted in over three
thousand men dead.
Shig: The True
Story of an American Kamikaze by Shigeo Imamura is an excellent
autobiography written almost fifty year after the end of the war. The book does
not try to cover the entire history of the kamikaze special attack forces
but rather focuses on the personal experiences of the author in the
military and in the kamikaze corps. He starts his account with his childhood experiences, so readers can better understand
his actions and feelings when he became a young man in the Japanese Navy. This
book not only
relate personal incidents but also provides insights into the personalities and
feelings of others with whom he served in the military.
In I Was a
Kamikaze, author Ryuji Nagatsuka recounts his fears and inner struggles as
he faced impending death. This author's contemplation of death has a
philosophical tone, but at times he seems to be looking back on past events
rather than describing his feelings and opinions during the war.
Since its publication in 1957, Kamikaze by Yasuo Kuwahara and
Gordon T. Allred has been considered to be a personal narrative of Kuwahara's
experiences in the Japanese Army, including his serving as an escort pilot for
kamikaze squadrons and being assigned to a kamikaze mission. However, the article
Ten
Historical Discrepancies (October 2006) discusses significant inconsistencies between the book's
contents and historical facts. This article concludes that the Kuwahara most
likely never flew as an Army pilot, so this web site now classifies the book as
fiction rather a personal narrative.
Some of these personal narratives have had a significant influence
on how foreigners view kamikaze pilots. Since the publication of The Divine
Wind in the 1950s, it has exerted a very strong effect on subsequent
writings and documentaries. This book is an essential primary source for
understanding the motivations and feelings of the military leaders involved in
the formation of the first kamikaze corps in the Philippines in October 1944,
and the book's two authors also provide many personal observations and stories
about the young men who served as kamikaze pilots. I Attacked Pearl Harbor
by Kazuo Sakamaki sparked interest when published in the US in 1949, but it was
never reprinted so has had almost no influence in recent years. Kamikaze by Kuwahara
and Kamikaze Submarine by Yokota were published in 1957 and 1962,
respectively, and both of these paperback books reached a wide audience through
several reprints over many years. Although Requiem for Battleship Yamato
has become a minor classic of wartime literature in Japan since its publication
there in 1952, the English translation did not get published until 1985, and the
book's publication by an academic press probably means its distribution has been
much less than the paperbacks by Kuwahara and Yokota. I Was a Kamikaze by Nagatsuka was
first published in France in 1972, and the English translation came out the
following year, but it appears to not have had as much influence as the other
books. Shig: The True Story of an American Kamikaze came out in 2001,
three years after the author's death. This memoir by Shigeo Imamura has been
available only at a private web site through 2004 and appears to have had
limited distribution and influence.
Personal narratives written many years after the
actual events have some limitations when compared to contemporary writings by
kamikaze pilots during the war. However, personal narratives have a definite
advantage in regards to no restrictions being placed on their contents, whereas
letters and diaries written by pilots during the war were generally subjected
to military censorship. Discovery of secret letters or diaries criticizing the
war, military, or specific orders would have resulted in extreme punishment by
military leaders. The personal narratives in this section provide many details
of the harsh physical punishment inflicted on soldiers by their leaders. Also,
the freedom of a personal narrative allows the author to freely describe the
actions and words of their leaders. For example, The Divine Wind (1958,
180) includes the following quotation from Vice Admiral Takijiro Ohnishi, who
organized the first kamikaze unit, "We will tolerate no criticism of any
kind of the operations that are about to be undertaken. . . . Stern discipline
will be meted out to anyone who criticizes orders or neglects to carry them
out. In flagrant cases there will be no hesitancy about exacting the extreme
penalty." Such honest reporting of a superior's words would never have
been tolerated during the war.
Source Cited
Inoguchi, Rikihei, Tadashi Nakajima, with Roger Pineau.
1958. The Divine Wind: Japan's Kamikaze Force in World War II.
Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.
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