Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers

This history presents diaries and correspondence left by members of the tokkotai, or kamikaze pilots, and other Japanese student soldiers who perished during World War II. Outside of Japan, these kamikaze pilots were considered unbridled fanatics and chauvinists who willingly sacrificed their lives for the emperor. But the writings explored here by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney clearly speak otherwise. A significant number of the kamikaze were university students who were drafted and forced to volunteer for this desperate military operation. Such young men were the intellectual elite of modern Japan: steeped in the classics and major works of philosophy, they took Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" as their motto. And in their diaries and correspondence, as Ohnuki-Tierney shows, these student soldiers wrote long and often heartbreaking soliloquies in which they poured out their anguish and fear, expressed profound ambivalence toward the war, and articulated thoughtful opposition to their nation's imperialism.
A salutary correction to the many caricatures of the kamikaze, this work will be essential to anyone interested in the history of Japan, World War II, or the tragedy of war itself.

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney is the William F. Vilas Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.