Here in the United States, kamikaze pilots are seen as evil or misguided at the least. They took the lives of many American soldiers during World War II. Our history books often fail to show how kamikaze pilots were as human as the Americans they killed. This is a collection of letters from kamikaze pilots written just before they flew their final missions. They show a concern for family and mundane, everyday things. These translations may be a little awkward at times.
Kamikaze Special Attack Group Fugoku Killed near Luzon Island on 13 November 1944 Native of Shizuoka Prefecture
Honorable Older Brother,
Once again, orders have come down for the attack from which we will never return. I feel not the slightest regret. Already I have grown intimate with death, the ultimate character-building passage that we human beings have to face. All that is left is to carry out the duties for which I’ve been trained and to fulfill the Imperial mandate. I am deeply ashamed that in the twenty-seven years of my life I have been such an unworthy son and younger brother.
I will have to leave everything up to you. It is with an untroubled heart that I fulfill the obligations for which I was born. I am merely carrying out my duties as a man.
The made-in-Manila bar of toilet soap you’ll find in my things was given to me by the chief of staff. Please take good care of Mother, and take care of yourself in the coming winter.
Yoshitaro
Captain Furukawa Takao to his wife Killed in the sea off Kagoshima on 21 April 1945 at age 25 Native of Saga Prefecture
Recently, in calmer moments, I find my thoughts returning continually to you and our soon-to-be-born child. Please take good care of your health.
When we first arrived at our base in Kyushu, there was a sudden change in plans, and we were all ordered into special attack units. I expected to depart at any moment. Every day, as I waited for my first, and last, attack, I reread the letter you wrote the day you made the jelly and gazed at the photos of you and Sister Etchan.
Surprisingly, my heart was perfectly at peace-as though another me were gazing upon the me that was so calm.
But orders, for better or for worse, changed again, and I was assigned to another squadron and given other duties. We made two sorties to Okinawa; the first was completed without incident, and I returned without doing anything especially heroic.
Mr. Hagiwara, who visited us the other day, asked about you. Try not to be upset, but he was shot down the day after he arrived.
Now, more than ever, the fleetingness of human life astonishes me, but I have become a much stronger person. You too must be strong. Wait for me. I will return without fail. Until you’ve safely given birth to our child, I have no intention of dying easily.
Captain Adachi Takuya to his parent Kamikaze Special Attack Group No. i Seikita Killed in the Okinawa area on 28 April 1945 at age 23 Native of Hyogo Prefecture
Honorable Mother and Father,
The difficulty of the journey you made to see me was clearly evident in your disheveled hair and in the hollows under your eyes-it made me want to bend my knees and worship before you. In the wrinkles on your brows was vivid testimony of the pains you took to raise me. Words could not express my feelings, and what little I did say was superficial in the extreme.
Yet, although acutely conscious of how little time we had, I saw in your eyes and in your gaze all you wanted to say but couldn’t.
When you took my hand and passed it over your chilblains, I experienced a sense of profound peacefulness unlike anything I have experienced since joining up -like being a baby again and longing for the warmth of a mother’s love. It is because I bask in the beauty of your deep devotion that I can martyr myself for you-for in death I will sleep in the world of your love. Washed down with my tears was the sushi you prepared with such loving care, for it was like putting your love to my lips. Though I ate but little, it was the most delicious meal of my life.
Honorable Mother, even if I was never able to fully accept the love you gave me, I received so much wisdom from you. And Father, your silent words are carved deeply into my heart. With this I will be able to fight together with you both. Even if I should die, it will be with a peaceful spirit.
I mean this with all my heart.
The war zone is where these beautiful emotions are put to the test. If death means a return to this world of love, there is no need for me to fear.There is nothing left to do but press on and fulfill my duty.
At 16oo hours our meeting was over. Watching you walk out the gate, I quietly waved goodbye.
Letter from Second Lieutenant Tomisawa.
I trust that everyone has been doing well recently.
I am dearly grateful that you went to all the trouble to come visit me the other day in such a busy time.
Since my injury is already healed, do not worry.
At last for me also the time of final service has arrived. I very deeply appreciate my special upbringing until now. I am one who lacked courage, but please do speak well of me.
In order to destroy our enemy, I will summon courage with all my might and will go to strike. We are the ones to deliver the country from the current crisis. Taking pride in this, I will surely do it. My comrades have already done it. Even right now my comrades, believing in those who will follow after them, are striking the enemy.
Shall I keep silent? Shall I try to be quiet about this?
Father, Mother, please do congratulate me.
Brother, sister, please take care of Father and Mother.
I surely will be protecting everybody from the immortal faraway skies in Nansei Shoto (Okinawa and other islands in archipelago that stretch south of Kyushu and toward Taiwan). Even though my body dies, I will certainly defend you.
Please give my kindest regards to the neighbors. I hope you will always keep in contact with Mr. Ebihara of Honjo. Since I have been busy, I have not been able to write a letter to him for a long time. Please give my greetings to Mr. Nishigaya also.
With this I give you my final farewell. Thank you for everything. Goodbye, goodbye.
Second Lieutenant Tomisawa
Lieutenant Kishi Fumikazu to his family Killed in the Philippines on 24 October 1944 at age 22.
Dear Mother and Father, Brother and Sister,
End of autumn. The backyard must be filled with the cries of insects, as it is every year around this time. My heart is full to bursting with memories of the many evenings we spent talking together. I suppose you are all somewhat concerned about how I’m doing.
During my visit home in May, Sister said to me, “Ever since you joined up, Mother has been setting meals before your photograph. She’s given up drinking tea, and every evening she visits the shrine to pray for you.” I was so moved that I was unable to thank her. Mother really wore herself out at the farewell party the night before I left to join my unit. She was so busy preparing for my departure that she didn’t sleep at all the night before.
And on my sun flag, she wrote HAPPILY WAITING FOR A RETURNING CHILD. Whenever I can, I gaze at those four noble characters for the nourishment they give my soul. The fighting has become extremely intense, and there is no guarantee of my safe return. The image of all those poor school kids and everyone else singing war songs and waving a sea of flags as they saw us off to the front is burned indelibly into my mind. I firmly believe in the benevolence of the Emperor and of our parents. Mother seems to be growing weaker by the day. Brother and Sister, you will have to give her the love that I cannot.
Please forgive my impiety; I pray for the continued good health of you all. The three photo albums I sent the other day are keepsakes for Brother and Sister. Please don’t worry about me. When you hear of my death, be happy for me, for I will have achieved my ambition.
Goodbye
References
Last Letters of Kamikaze Pilots.(2001) Manoa 13 (1). 120-123.
Naemura, Hichiro. 1993. Rikugun saigo no tokkou kichi: Bansei tokkoutaiin no isho to isatsu (Gordon, .B.trans.) Osaka: Toho Shuppan.
And you should be! He did what he believed he had to in order to protect his family.Does your family have any of his letters? If so, you should try to preserve them. As World War II fades from memory, such writings are critical to help us remember the people involved.
This reminds me of letters from Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s, “Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History,” (2002), and her follow-up, “Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers,” (2006), both from the University of Chicago Press. She’s a Research Professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Many of the letters are heartbreaking, simply apologies to families for leaving them. Most of these pilots were college students who were well-educated and intelligent enough to know that what they were doing was a waste. But the nationalist cultural impetus not to dishonor their families, much clothed in the traditional symbolisms and rhetoric, compelled an acceptance of death.
My father was born in 1937 in northern Japan, near the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War. By the age of twelve he’d become a committed pacifist, much motivated by having witnessed the result of the firebombing of Aomori. Consequently, I grew up with an insight into the Japanese anti-war, feminist, communist, anarchist, and Quaker-pacifist movements that existed in various degrees of conflict with official government policies, especially those of Imperial Japanese military-colonialism dating back to the time of the Russo-Japanese War. I not to long ago wrote something about the feminist/anarchist, Kaneko Fumiko, who was swept up in the purge after the Great Kanto Earthquake and who subsequently died in a Japanese prison in 1926.
I will have to give those books a read. Thank you! The Japanese anti-war movement isn’t discussed too often in books I’ve read. Usually, the pacifist sections are short before going back into description of suicide charges. As I’ve delved into bushido, I was pleased to find most samurai writers frowned upon needless suicide. Some even discussed how such a death was a dishonor because it violated filial piety and stole a lifetime of service from the warrior’s lord. Sadly, these aspects of what we would call bushido, as you know, were ignored. Did you father or any of the other pacifist dissenters use these writings to support some of the stances? Takuan Soho is one writer that jumps into my mind.
(Apologies for the long comment.) Several years back, partially in response to government moves to reinterpret or repeal Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, the poetry of Akiko Yosano regained some popularity. (The street protests in front of the National Diet were epic, and there was a Taiwanese-style near riot on the legislative floor when they tried to sign documents.) One poem by Yosano that became popular during the protests was, 君死にたもうこと勿れ (“Kimi Shinitamou koto nakare”), or “Brother, You must Not Die,” which was written to her younger brother and published in the popular poetry journal, “Myōjō”, during the height of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. Yosano spent most of her life skirting the edges of arrest for violations of lese-majesty, and was instrumental in the creation of the girls’ “Bunka Gakuin” (Cultural Academy) in 1922. The girls’ private university in Tokyo’s Shibuya district still exists today as the “Bunka Gakuen University.” Alas, these kinds of movements don’t fit the popular Japanese cultural narrative that seems more fixated on samurai and geisha, which also means that little has been translated into English.
The Japanese Christian “Friend” and author, Inazō Nitobe, wrote a modernized assessment of Bushido for foreigners. On death, he wrote that, “…it is true courage to live when it is right to live, and to die only when it is right to die.” He was implying that courage is not defined by a mere willingness to perish, and certainly not without purpose. The Japanese expression for this is, “inujini” (犬死に), a dog’s death — a term that conveys a tragic sense of waste.
Takuan Sōhō… Rinzai school… interesting. My father practiced eastern Japanese “Pure Land”. He was involved in the late 60s Tokyo University movement… which ended up leaving him discouraged. I think that Kaneko Fumiko, whom I mentioned above, had come to some of the same conclusions forty-five years earlier.
First, thank you for sharing this and the poem! You’re right on how this isn’t widely available in English. What I’ve read only touched on what you described. Details are rarely offered by English books. Of course, if you read any book about World War 1 or 2, you don’t see much about the American protests that went on nor the atrocities Americans soldiers did. Omission simplifies history.
The poem certainly would be a dangerous one for the time! Yet, the heartbreak needs to be felt. Too often history forgets its human element. Thanks again for sharing!
O my young brother, I cry for you Don’t you understand you must not die! You who were born the last of all Command a special store of parents’ love Would parents place a blade in children’s hands Teaching them to murder other men Teaching them to kill and then to die? Have you so learned and grown to twenty-four?
O my brother, you must not die! Could it be the Emperor His Grace Exposed not to jeopardy of war But urging men to spilling human blood And dying in the way of wild beasts, Calling such death the path to glory? If His Grace possessed of noble heart What must be the thoughts that linger there?
“Okinawa will never surrender. Life, honor, status, none of those cares will distract me. My only aim: to hit the target. Cherry trees blossom secluded in the mountains. Once in full bloom, petals gracefully disperse when they should. “
Navy Lieutenant Takamitsu Nishida (5th Tsukuba Corps S20 (1945).5.11) #Okinawa #Okinawa Prefecture #Kamikaze Corps #Farewell Note of Kamikaze Corps #Let’s meet at Yasukuni Shrine #Yasukuni Shrine
These letters are among the most powerful writings I have ever read. I admire their devotion to their families and their nation. Unlike some Westerners who, against their better judgement, freely spread dissent and show disdain for their own societies and predecessors, I do not fault American commanders for deciding to do what was done to end Japanese imperialism. The loss of life and property was horrific but ultimately it did enable the transformation of Japan into the peaceful and highly functional society it is today. Were it not for those bold decisions, more lives would almost certainly have been lost on both sides to bring about imperial Japan’s surrender. Japan is now the envy of the world; who knows what it would be like had America not intervened. That our two nations are close allies and strongly tied by trade and friendship bodes well for the decisions that were made.
These letters gave me pause when I first read them. Death poems also have the same effect: these are the final public thoughts of people just before they died.
“These letters are among the most powerful writings I have ever read. I admire their devotion to their families and their nation. Unlike some Westerners who, against their better judgement, freely spread dissent and show disdain for their own societies and predecessors.”
There was some serious opposition to the Japanese Army departments going as far as they did pre-WW2. They were all killed and otherwise suppressed though.
Arguably, the leadership, culture, and the people themselves deserve a whole lot of scorn for what they did during WW2. No idea why you think dissent and disdain shouldn’t be there for their society if they go through with metaphorically jumping into a bonfire they built themselves.
“Against their better judgement…” I’m not too sure about your judgement frankly, you picked a nation that essentially thought that taking on a first tier threat, when they’re stalemated and struggling with a mid-tier threat was a good idea, resulting in them unconditionally surrounding, their cities burnt, tens of millions of lives lost, countless maimed and permanently injured, and getting to be the only recipients of hostile nuclear devices. This is the result of doing exactly what you are praising got them, neverminded that they kill a lot of innocent people as well. Maybe the Japanese people who dissented and were disdainful of the culture the military adopted of “just trust the army people” were right. I struggle to find a worse example for the things you are supporting than this.
And what military interventions the western world took part in during the last 50-60 years did you think were good anyway? How does one look at Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, all the other little interventions here and there and think that public suspicion on the uses of force are not deserved?
John Toland, in his book “The Rising Sun” accounts of several instances where Japan and the US could’ve and almost-did avoid the war. It saddened me to think how pride among a handful of people ultimately led to such death and destruction. But that is the way of human civilization.
I agree that these letters are profoundly and deeply moving, so much so that I had tears in my eyes when reading the long one to his parents. I must strongly disagree with your statement regarding what I assume alludes to the bombings that brought about the immediate surrender of Imperial Japan. So much of the historical commentary regarding this ghastly part of US history, much of it monopolized zealously by hawkish professors and ahistorical statist reactionaries, is deeply propagandized. Fascist Imperial,J apan, whose horrendous ethnic cleansing and war crimes was among the worst purveyors of this kind of violence in modern history, had been defeated by the time Okinawa fell. Its navy, never having dominance against the Americans since Midway, were no longer an offensive threat, the US had complete air superiority and with the Soviet Union advancing rapidly through Manchuria and an increasing American blockade, Japan was utterly trapped, bereft of allies and had no possibility of breakout or imports. One third of the Japanese government was in favour of surrender, one third (the aggressive nationalist military cult which still exists in Japanese parliament today), and the final third, including Hirohito and his close advisors, wanted to sue for peace and end the war. Essentially, the Pacific War was over, at great cost to all parties involved. A mainland invasion was certainly being planned, but many in the US army thought it unnecessary, with the Red Army, then the world’s largest, tripling the blockading power. The firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what you refer to as ‘bold decisions’ intentionally slaughtered hundreds of thousands of non combatants, women, children, the elderly, workers, killed more from leukemia and thyroid cancer, utterly destroyed the concept of American righteousness and unleashed a specter, nuclear war, from which humanity will probably always live in fear. Eisenhower, Nimitz and LeMay, to name a few, opposed the bombings, but Truman saw an opportunity to make a show of power to the Soviets, punish the Japanese and stake a claim for American interests in the East, even going so far as bringing Nagasaki’s date three days closer to not give Japan time to surrender. Ironically, once the American occupation of Japan began after VJ day the US pardoned many heinous Japanese war criminals, casting doubt onto the bombings being a question of justice. The notion that the bombings ‘transformed ‘ Japan into what it is today is a strange one to me, I find it hard to believe any goodwill between the west and Japan was formed by the mass murder of it’s civilian inhabititants. Speaking subjectively, I don’t find the Western-Japanese relationship all that healthy in truth, from us distilling an ancient island culture into crass vapid exotic consumer media and cheap cars, and they having memory holed their own dark 20th century and suffering (far from functional) from the social decay from their embrace of neoliberal capitalism, which has seen the erosion of labor movements, the rise in Japanese exceptionalism and the phenomenon of such a highly stressed and profit driven middle class that it threatens the traditional family structures of Japanese culture. So to finish, I must say I think the bombings of Japan rank among the worst war crimes of the 20th century, and I, as an American, Westerner and humanist, am more than happy , proud even, with my best judgement, to freely spread dissent and show disdain against the crimes and cruelties enacted upon the citizens of Japan in the 1944-45. I most certainly fault any commander or society, my own included, that commits such acts, and I would hope that my Japanese equivalent would show the same contempt towards his predecessors in Manchuria and the Philippines. I truly believe that a citizen’s most sacred duty is to hold his or her own government to account, not from afar as a foreigner but from within as a sovereign son.
When you dive deep into history, you start to see just how complicated events and perspectives can become. And you see how uncertainty will always remain. Did the a-bombs convince the hold-out factions of Japan to stop fighting? Perhaps. Did the US need to drop them? Perhaps not for Japan’s surrender, but perhaps yes to stave off a bloodier conflict with the Soviet Union. Then again, perhaps not. Either way, the actions were done, and we need to consider the lessons and consequences of those actions so we can do better. It just shows that war is one of the most primitive of human behaviors, and one we really should leave behind.
In Palawan, there is a World War 2 Museum set up by the sons of a prisoner of ward in World War 2. His grandfather escaped the prison that the Japanese set up before the rest of his troupe were burned alive.
There were Japanese flags in the museum with Japanese characters all over and the museum curator said Japanese visitors to the museum translated them as letters of families of the young soldiers. It is sad, especially thinking that many of these soldier were just starting with their lives – late teens and early 20s
I’m glad the museum exists. World War II is quickly fading into history as the people who live through it die, and with them will also die the lessons the war taught.
“how kamikaze pilots were as human as the Americans they killed.”
Actually they were more human, they were giving their lives to try to stop Americans who were mass bombing Japanese cities and mass murdering Japanese civilians. This is why they were willing to do kamikaze and die.
Did the Japanese mass bomb and murder American civilians? No, they just attacked a US army base that was on occupied land the US took over from the Kingdom of Hawaii.
If you are unaware of the US bombings of Japanese cities, go look at Tokyo in 1945, nearly totally flat. The US indiscriminately napalm bombed 66 Japanese cities in WW2, causing mass civilian death (which was the purpose). Who are the real war criminals? Go look at what the British and Americans did in Dresden also.
I won’t defend the actions of the US during the war. It is still common to find people in the US who hold a grudge against the Japanese (though this is a shrinking population) for the deaths of their family members. I wanted to remind them of their shared humanity.
Japan itself isn’t as human as the Kamikaze Pilots. They tried to take over China, They actually did take over Korea, and they teamed with Hitler. Adding to that, the attack on Pearl Harbor, Bombers actually did kill many people. Sure, some people were killed by American Bombs during the attack on Pearl Harbor, but the Japanese brought it on.
My grandfather was a Kamikaze pilot. I am proud of him.
RICK TAKASHI IKESAKA
Hamilton, ON, Canada
And you should be! He did what he believed he had to in order to protect his family.Does your family have any of his letters? If so, you should try to preserve them. As World War II fades from memory, such writings are critical to help us remember the people involved.
This reminds me of letters from Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s, “Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History,” (2002), and her follow-up, “Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers,” (2006), both from the University of Chicago Press. She’s a Research Professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Many of the letters are heartbreaking, simply apologies to families for leaving them. Most of these pilots were college students who were well-educated and intelligent enough to know that what they were doing was a waste. But the nationalist cultural impetus not to dishonor their families, much clothed in the traditional symbolisms and rhetoric, compelled an acceptance of death.
My father was born in 1937 in northern Japan, near the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War. By the age of twelve he’d become a committed pacifist, much motivated by having witnessed the result of the firebombing of Aomori. Consequently, I grew up with an insight into the Japanese anti-war, feminist, communist, anarchist, and Quaker-pacifist movements that existed in various degrees of conflict with official government policies, especially those of Imperial Japanese military-colonialism dating back to the time of the Russo-Japanese War. I not to long ago wrote something about the feminist/anarchist, Kaneko Fumiko, who was swept up in the purge after the Great Kanto Earthquake and who subsequently died in a Japanese prison in 1926.
I will have to give those books a read. Thank you! The Japanese anti-war movement isn’t discussed too often in books I’ve read. Usually, the pacifist sections are short before going back into description of suicide charges. As I’ve delved into bushido, I was pleased to find most samurai writers frowned upon needless suicide. Some even discussed how such a death was a dishonor because it violated filial piety and stole a lifetime of service from the warrior’s lord. Sadly, these aspects of what we would call bushido, as you know, were ignored. Did you father or any of the other pacifist dissenters use these writings to support some of the stances? Takuan Soho is one writer that jumps into my mind.
(Apologies for the long comment.)
Several years back, partially in response to government moves to reinterpret or repeal Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, the poetry of Akiko Yosano regained some popularity. (The street protests in front of the National Diet were epic, and there was a Taiwanese-style near riot on the legislative floor when they tried to sign documents.) One poem by Yosano that became popular during the protests was, 君死にたもうこと勿れ (“Kimi Shinitamou koto nakare”), or “Brother, You must Not Die,” which was written to her younger brother and published in the popular poetry journal, “Myōjō”, during the height of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. Yosano spent most of her life skirting the edges of arrest for violations of lese-majesty, and was instrumental in the creation of the girls’ “Bunka Gakuin” (Cultural Academy) in 1922. The girls’ private university in Tokyo’s Shibuya district still exists today as the “Bunka Gakuen University.” Alas, these kinds of movements don’t fit the popular Japanese cultural narrative that seems more fixated on samurai and geisha, which also means that little has been translated into English.
The Japanese Christian “Friend” and author, Inazō Nitobe, wrote a modernized assessment of Bushido for foreigners. On death, he wrote that, “…it is true courage to live when it is right to live, and to die only when it is right to die.” He was implying that courage is not defined by a mere willingness to perish, and certainly not without purpose. The Japanese expression for this is, “inujini” (犬死に), a dog’s death — a term that conveys a tragic sense of waste.
Takuan Sōhō… Rinzai school… interesting. My father practiced eastern Japanese “Pure Land”. He was involved in the late 60s Tokyo University movement… which ended up leaving him discouraged. I think that Kaneko Fumiko, whom I mentioned above, had come to some of the same conclusions forty-five years earlier.
First, thank you for sharing this and the poem! You’re right on how this isn’t widely available in English. What I’ve read only touched on what you described. Details are rarely offered by English books. Of course, if you read any book about World War 1 or 2, you don’t see much about the American protests that went on nor the atrocities Americans soldiers did. Omission simplifies history.
The poem certainly would be a dangerous one for the time! Yet, the heartbreak needs to be felt. Too often history forgets its human element. Thanks again for sharing!
A translation of the poem that I mentioned:
O My Brother, You Must Not Die
by Akiko Yosano
O my young brother, I cry for you
Don’t you understand you must not die!
You who were born the last of all
Command a special store of parents’ love
Would parents place a blade in children’s hands
Teaching them to murder other men
Teaching them to kill and then to die?
Have you so learned and grown to twenty-four?
O my brother, you must not die!
Could it be the Emperor His Grace
Exposed not to jeopardy of war
But urging men to spilling human blood
And dying in the way of wild beasts,
Calling such death the path to glory?
If His Grace possessed of noble heart
What must be the thoughts that linger there?
“Okinawa will never surrender.
Life, honor, status, none of those cares will distract me. My only aim: to hit the target. Cherry trees blossom secluded in the mountains. Once in full bloom, petals gracefully disperse when they should. “
Navy Lieutenant Takamitsu Nishida (5th Tsukuba Corps S20 (1945).5.11)
#Okinawa #Okinawa Prefecture #Kamikaze Corps #Farewell Note of Kamikaze Corps #Let’s meet at Yasukuni Shrine #Yasukuni Shrine
沖縄は断じて敵にゆずらず。
生命もいらず、名誉も地位もいらず、ただ必中あるのみ。深山のさくらのごとく、人知れず咲き、散るべき時に潔く散る。何の雑念も含まず。
―海軍中尉 西田高光(第五筑波隊 S20.5.11)
#沖縄 #沖縄県 #特攻隊 #特攻隊員の遺書 #靖国で会おう ＃靖国神社
“HONNI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE”
Thank you for sharing!
These letters are among the most powerful writings I have ever read. I admire their devotion to their families and their nation. Unlike some Westerners who, against their better judgement, freely spread dissent and show disdain for their own societies and predecessors, I do not fault American commanders for deciding to do what was done to end Japanese imperialism. The loss of life and property was horrific but ultimately it did enable the transformation of Japan into the peaceful and highly functional society it is today. Were it not for those bold decisions, more lives would almost certainly have been lost on both sides to bring about imperial Japan’s surrender. Japan is now the envy of the world; who knows what it would be like had America not intervened. That our two nations are close allies and strongly tied by trade and friendship bodes well for the decisions that were made.
These letters gave me pause when I first read them. Death poems also have the same effect: these are the final public thoughts of people just before they died.
“These letters are among the most powerful writings I have ever read. I admire their devotion to their families and their nation. Unlike some Westerners who, against their better judgement, freely spread dissent and show disdain for their own societies and predecessors.”
There was some serious opposition to the Japanese Army departments going as far as they did pre-WW2. They were all killed and otherwise suppressed though.
Arguably, the leadership, culture, and the people themselves deserve a whole lot of scorn for what they did during WW2. No idea why you think dissent and disdain shouldn’t be there for their society if they go through with metaphorically jumping into a bonfire they built themselves.
“Against their better judgement…” I’m not too sure about your judgement frankly, you picked a nation that essentially thought that taking on a first tier threat, when they’re stalemated and struggling with a mid-tier threat was a good idea, resulting in them unconditionally surrounding, their cities burnt, tens of millions of lives lost, countless maimed and permanently injured, and getting to be the only recipients of hostile nuclear devices. This is the result of doing exactly what you are praising got them, neverminded that they kill a lot of innocent people as well. Maybe the Japanese people who dissented and were disdainful of the culture the military adopted of “just trust the army people” were right. I struggle to find a worse example for the things you are supporting than this.
And what military interventions the western world took part in during the last 50-60 years did you think were good anyway? How does one look at Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, all the other little interventions here and there and think that public suspicion on the uses of force are not deserved?
John Toland, in his book “The Rising Sun” accounts of several instances where Japan and the US could’ve and almost-did avoid the war. It saddened me to think how pride among a handful of people ultimately led to such death and destruction. But that is the way of human civilization.
I agree that these letters are profoundly and deeply moving, so much so that I had tears in my eyes when reading the long one to his parents. I must strongly disagree with your statement regarding what I assume alludes to the bombings that brought about the immediate surrender of Imperial Japan. So much of the historical commentary regarding this ghastly part of US history, much of it monopolized zealously by hawkish professors and ahistorical statist reactionaries, is deeply propagandized. Fascist Imperial,J apan, whose horrendous ethnic cleansing and war crimes was among the worst purveyors of this kind of violence in modern history, had been defeated by the time Okinawa fell. Its navy, never having dominance against the Americans since Midway, were no longer an offensive threat, the US had complete air superiority and with the Soviet Union advancing rapidly through Manchuria and an increasing American blockade, Japan was utterly trapped, bereft of allies and had no possibility of breakout or imports. One third of the Japanese government was in favour of surrender, one third (the aggressive nationalist military cult which still exists in Japanese parliament today), and the final third, including Hirohito and his close advisors, wanted to sue for peace and end the war. Essentially, the Pacific War was over, at great cost to all parties involved. A mainland invasion was certainly being planned, but many in the US army thought it unnecessary, with the Red Army, then the world’s largest, tripling the blockading power. The firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what you refer to as ‘bold decisions’ intentionally slaughtered hundreds of thousands of non combatants, women, children, the elderly, workers, killed more from leukemia and thyroid cancer, utterly destroyed the concept of American righteousness and unleashed a specter, nuclear war, from which humanity will probably always live in fear. Eisenhower, Nimitz and LeMay, to name a few, opposed the bombings, but Truman saw an opportunity to make a show of power to the Soviets, punish the Japanese and stake a claim for American interests in the East, even going so far as bringing Nagasaki’s date three days closer to not give Japan time to surrender. Ironically, once the American occupation of Japan began after VJ day the US pardoned many heinous Japanese war criminals, casting doubt onto the bombings being a question of justice. The notion that the bombings ‘transformed ‘ Japan into what it is today is a strange one to me, I find it hard to believe any goodwill between the west and Japan was formed by the mass murder of it’s civilian inhabititants. Speaking subjectively, I don’t find the Western-Japanese relationship all that healthy in truth, from us distilling an ancient island culture into crass vapid exotic consumer media and cheap cars, and they having memory holed their own dark 20th century and suffering (far from functional) from the social decay from their embrace of neoliberal capitalism, which has seen the erosion of labor movements, the rise in Japanese exceptionalism and the phenomenon of such a highly stressed and profit driven middle class that it threatens the traditional family structures of Japanese culture. So to finish, I must say I think the bombings of Japan rank among the worst war crimes of the 20th century, and I, as an American, Westerner and humanist, am more than happy , proud even, with my best judgement, to freely spread dissent and show disdain against the crimes and cruelties enacted upon the citizens of Japan in the 1944-45. I most certainly fault any commander or society, my own included, that commits such acts, and I would hope that my Japanese equivalent would show the same contempt towards his predecessors in Manchuria and the Philippines. I truly believe that a citizen’s most sacred duty is to hold his or her own government to account, not from afar as a foreigner but from within as a sovereign son.
When you dive deep into history, you start to see just how complicated events and perspectives can become. And you see how uncertainty will always remain. Did the a-bombs convince the hold-out factions of Japan to stop fighting? Perhaps. Did the US need to drop them? Perhaps not for Japan’s surrender, but perhaps yes to stave off a bloodier conflict with the Soviet Union. Then again, perhaps not. Either way, the actions were done, and we need to consider the lessons and consequences of those actions so we can do better. It just shows that war is one of the most primitive of human behaviors, and one we really should leave behind.
In Palawan, there is a World War 2 Museum set up by the sons of a prisoner of ward in World War 2. His grandfather escaped the prison that the Japanese set up before the rest of his troupe were burned alive.
There were Japanese flags in the museum with Japanese characters all over and the museum curator said Japanese visitors to the museum translated them as letters of families of the young soldiers. It is sad, especially thinking that many of these soldier were just starting with their lives – late teens and early 20s
I’m glad the museum exists. World War II is quickly fading into history as the people who live through it die, and with them will also die the lessons the war taught.
“how kamikaze pilots were as human as the Americans they killed.”
Actually they were more human, they were giving their lives to try to stop Americans who were mass bombing Japanese cities and mass murdering Japanese civilians. This is why they were willing to do kamikaze and die.
Did the Japanese mass bomb and murder American civilians? No, they just attacked a US army base that was on occupied land the US took over from the Kingdom of Hawaii.
If you are unaware of the US bombings of Japanese cities, go look at Tokyo in 1945, nearly totally flat. The US indiscriminately napalm bombed 66 Japanese cities in WW2, causing mass civilian death (which was the purpose).
Who are the real war criminals?
Go look at what the British and Americans did in Dresden also.
I won’t defend the actions of the US during the war. It is still common to find people in the US who hold a grudge against the Japanese (though this is a shrinking population) for the deaths of their family members. I wanted to remind them of their shared humanity.
Japan itself isn’t as human as the Kamikaze Pilots. They tried to take over China, They actually did take over Korea, and they teamed with Hitler. Adding to that, the attack on Pearl Harbor, Bombers actually did kill many people. Sure, some people were killed by American Bombs during the attack on Pearl Harbor, but the Japanese brought it on.
WWII provides an example of how nationalism ends with suffering on all sides.
The Philippines was an American territory.
The Philippines has no animosity with Japan in terms of WW2 anymore, but your comment justifying the war will definitely rub people the wrong way.
It was war, so people died. Both sides suffered. Justifying each others action take for granted the suffering of the others.
You are an idiot. Both sides were full of monsters, and trying to justify one being better than the other is outrageous.
Furukawa, above mentioned, died shot by B29. Six years later,vhis plane was found offshore of small island. I went to the island with my mother.
Thank you for providing more details. I had hoped the letters would provide the human story behind what books often show as dry history.
They do, thank you.