They’ve Outlived the Stigma tells the tale of an unusual class of old Japanese men — kamikaze survivors:
These are the dusky days of old age that kamikaze pilots like Shigeyoshi Hamazono were not supposed to see.Three times during the final months of World War II, Japanese officers sent Hamazono off to die, ordering him to crash-dive a single-engine plane stuffed with bombs into an American warship.
Bad weather aborted the first mission, an oil leak the second. On his final attempt in April 1945, he encountered three American pilots over the sea off Okinawa. In the ensuing dogfight, Hamazono was burned and took shrapnel in his shoulder, but his plane limped home.
You could call him the luckiest man in Japan, though Hamazono didn’t see it that way at the time.
After the war, such survivors lived on as pariahs, symbols of Japan’s folly, but the stigma’s started to drop away. Now they’re insulted to be compared to modern suicide bombers. They argue that there’s a huge difference:
- They were ready to die out of love for their country, they say; suicide bombers are driven by hatred and revenge.
- The Shinto religion offers no reward of life after death. Islamic suicide bombers are promised a place in an afterlife.
- They were volunteers, motivated solely by patriotism. Suicide bombers often are recruited by militia leaders who offer money to their families.
I’m not convinced — especially about their volunteerism:
Hamazono says that although pilots were asked to “volunteer,” they really had no choice. Of 100 or so in his naval squadron who were asked to volunteer, all but three agreed, he recalls, spreading out photographs of himself that show a handsome young man in pilot’s gear. “The other three got beaten up.”