Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

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  [1] Official Website of the USS St Lo (formerly Midway) CVE63/VC65 http://www.stlomidway6365.org/

  [2] McKenna, Francis J., “Report of action against Japanese enemy, October 25, 1944”, (posted on www.stlomidway6365.org). During the Battle of the Philippine Sea, a Japanese pilot, Naval Aviator Sakio Komatsu, pulled off an unusual “torpedo interception” of his own after discovering a wake speeding toward his ship, the carrier Taiho, shortly after take-off. In Komatsu’s case, however, instead of strafing the torpedo with machine gun fire, he opted to crash his plane into it, exploding both the offending item of American ordnance and himself in the process. The reader is free – and encouraged – to contemplate the different cultural values at work behind his and Lt. Waldrop’s acts of selfless heroism.

  [3] U.S. ships in combat areas were always on General Quarters at dawn and dusk, the most likely times for enemy air attack because of the favorable cloaking characteristics of low-light conditions at these times of day. See Lott (1964).

  [4] E.H. Crawforth, personal correspondence

  [5] www.stlomidway6365.org

  [6] E.H. Crawforth, personal communication

  [7] Contrary to common Western belief, there are no actual physical remains – cremated or not – interred at Yasukuni. The shrine is in function a memorial and an institutionalized political statement, not a cemetery.

  [8] A common Japanese term for “foreigner” often interpreted as pejorative by receiver
s of the moniker.

  [9]Taylor (1954) p.254

  [10] See Oide (1984) for detailed descriptions of Ōnishi’s human frailties regarding personal recreation.

  [11] See Peattie (2001) for details of Ōnishi’s role in the development of Japanese naval air power.

  [12] This was a national identity concept institutionalized in Meiji Era political dogma and proselytized to subsequent generations of Japanese until the end of World War II through Ministry of Education policies. Although the phrase can be found in eighteenth century Japanese kokugaku nationalistic poetry, its modern permutation was influenced in form and function by nineteenth century German Romanticism, encapsulating a theory that innate archetypal qualities in the character of the Japanese afforded the race unique spiritual attributes beyond those of other walks of life. It was easily extrapolated in a “manifest destiny” vein for the legitimization of expansionist policies in Asia.

  [13] See Jukes (2002) for an excellent analysis of this battle.

  [14] The Army formed its own tokkō air unit independently of the Navy (but no doubt motivated by a sense of competition with same as rumors began flying) when the Banda Unit, flying twin-engined Ki-48 bombers rigged with 800kg bombs, was formed at the Hokota Flight Training Center in Ibaragi Prefecture on October 20. See Warner (1982), p.115n.

  [15] See Tillman (1979) and Hammel (1992) for American perspective accounts of the “Turkey Shoot.”

  [16] Buruma and Margalit (2004) give a cogent and very post-9/11 relevant explanation of this mindset.

  [17] See Agawa (1979), p.229 for a candid look at Ōnishi’s true take on the prewar strategic picture. Interestingly enough, he was initiallyopposed to the Pearl Harbor raid, correctly assessing the galvanizing effect it would have on American public opinion regarding the war effort.

  [18] Dower (1986), Lafeber (1997).

  [19] Warner (1982), Maga (2002), Mikano (1998).

  [20] Morimoto (1992) p.23

  [21] Morison (1958), p.106

  [22] Morison (1958) gives the figure of 322,265 tons for the month of October 1944. (Leyte, p.405)

  [23] Inoguchi (1958), p.5

  [24] Inoguchi’s older brother Toshihira was commander of the superbattleship Musashi, at this point steaming toward the Philippines from Lingga Roads with Kurita’s main force. He would go down with his ship five days later in the Sibuyan Sea in the opening phase of the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

  [25] Formally speaking, this was Operation Sho #1; four potential Sho “decisive surface battle” scenarios had been planned months earlier in the wake of the fall of Saipan, dealing with contingencies for Allied invasion moves against the Philippines, Taiwan, the Ryūkyūs (Okinawa, etc.) or the Home Islands (Kyūshū, Honshū, etc.) themselves, respectively. In striking at the Philippines, the Americans put Sho #1 into motion. Halsey’s massive air raids with Task Force 38 against Taiwan a week earlier had very nearly caused the Combined Fleet to be fully committed to a Sho #2 deployment in Taiwan, but this was averted at the last moment when Halsey’s force left the area to move on to bigger and better things, a development that gave the Japanese the mistaken impression that they had just successfully turned back a massive American invasion force. This error gave rise to widespread – and extremely short-lived – celebrations throughout the Empire, including bases in the Philippines. In fact, Ōnishi had arrived at 1AF HQ in Manila just as the heady bubble was being burst by reports of a gargantuan American armada spotted at the mouth of Leyte Gulf.

  [26] Morimoto (1992), p.25

  [27] Crossed signals (and impatient personalities) had caused Yamamoto to miss his scheduled meeting with Ōnishi. At this moment, he was nursing a sprained ankle in a hospital in the suburbs of Manila after crash-landing his liaison plane (a borrowed A6M5 Zero) in a rice paddy. Cause of the crash was engine failure, most likely attributable to “Marianas Gas”.

  [28] En route to the Philippines for Operation Sho, Atago had the misfortune of crossing the path of the USS Darter, an American submarine patrolling the Palawan Passage with its partner the USS Dace. After making the command decision not to go down with his ship, Admiral Kurita had to endure the ignominy of having to swim to be rescued by one of his own picket destroyers. The admiral’s flag moved to Yamato, where it remained for the rest of the Battle of Leyte Gulf.See “USS Darter” http://www.csp.navy.mil/ww2boats/darter.htm

  [29] At this point, Fukudome was still not convinced of the wisdom of tokkō tactics. Ōnishi would eventually win him around by the morning of the 26th, but this was too late to change Japanese fortunes at Leyte Gulf.

  [30] The last surviving carrier from the Pearl Harbor raid; her sister Shokaku was sunk by the U.S. submarine Cavalla at the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The other four Pearl Harbor veterans – Akagi, Kaga, Soryū and Hiryū – had all been sunk within hours of each other at Midway on June 4, 1942. See “First Patrol” http://www.cavalla.org/firstpat.html

  [31] The Seventh Fleet shore bombardment battle line consisted of six World War One-era battleships, California, Tennessee, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Mississippi, all but the last of which were severely damaged in the Pearl Harbor raid, subsequently repaired/refitted and returned to duty. California and West Virginia were actually sunk at their moorings in the raid, salvaged and, along with Tennessee, so extensively refitted as to almost qualify as completely new ships. The new Mark 8 gunnery radar fitted to the latter three vessels was to play an enormous role in the night engagement in Surigao Strait six days later.

  [32] See Turnbull (1996) and Friday (2004) for authoritative treatises on samurai tactical thought and Japanese fusilology.

  [33] Kofukuda (1985) outlines the technical and philosophical evolution of Japanese fighter aircraft from early designs through the superlative Zero and finally late war types.

  [34] Even though probably concocted on the spot, the phrase Ōnishi actually used, tosotsu no gedō, has the Zen-like ring of a time-honored Buddhist parable. It is untranslatable into an English phrase as concise, eloquent and devastatingly direct as the original Japanese.

  [35] See Hoyt (1983), pp10-12. See also Masuya (2000), pp.280-281.

  [36] See Bix (2000), p.187.

  [37] Compulsory education from the Meiji Era until the end of World War II consisted of a six-year primary school program. Six-year middle school programs offered the equivalent of a modern era high school education for white-collar job hopefuls and/or college prospects.

  [38] See Reischauer (1970), Beasley (1990) and Buruma (2003) for a societal scale analysis of this process. Ravina (2004) studies its effect on legendary samurai Takamori Saigō, on whose life the film The Last Samurai was loosely based. See also Shinozawa (1999) for a contemporary Japanese celebration of this “nation-building” populist social engineering.

  [39] This translation of the Senjinkun or Japanese Servicemen’s Code of Conduct is from Warner (pp.5-6).

  [40] This quote is in reference to the official philosophy of Hakkō ichiu (“eight corners of the earth in harmony under one roof” a metaphor for global control under Imperial rule) proselytized in Japanese propaganda since the 1930s to legitimize the nation’s expansionist policies. It was one of the founding principles of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. See Edwards (2003) for an explanation of this expansionist propaganda imagery, and the ancient mythology used to legitimize it.

  [41] Kaneko (2001), pp.47-48

  [42] The compound noun Shinpū is written with the Chinese kanji characters for “god” and “wind.” Many readers will note that the word kamikaze employs these exact ideograms. Shinpū uses an on-yomi reading/pronunciation for ideograms intended to simulate their reading in the original Chinese, while “kamikaze” is a kun-yomi reading/pronunciation in which Chinese characters are used for ideographic meaning only and applied to Japanese words – kami (god) and kaze (wind) – which have existed in the Japanese language since before the adoption of kanji in the Seventh Century A.D. The respective roles of on-yomi vocabulary items (usually compo
und nouns, verbs and adjectives of two to four kanji characters each, often accompanied by particles in the Japanese kana phonetic syllabary) and kun-yomi words (basic grammatical structure and simple nouns, verbs and adjectives) in the evolution of the modern Japanese language can be likened to the interplay of sophisticated Latin vocabulary and ancient Anglo-Saxon tribal tongues in the formation of modern English. On-yomi readings tend to imply erudition and sophistication on the part of the user, while kun-yomi readings imbue meaning with a homey, comfortable nuance harkening back to a rustic, idealized Japanese “good old days” era. To give a user-friendly example for the Western reader, imagine deciding to open a restaurant themed on the delicious bread you bake on the premises; whether you name your new establishment La Boulangerie or Granny’s Bread Oven might be the determining factor in whether you have either BMWs with Ivy League bumper stickers or pick-up trucks with shotgun racks in your parking lot on opening day. In using the characters for “god” and “wind” in the naming of the first tokkō unit, Ōnishi obviously wanted to evoke imagery of the fabled Mongol rousting “kamikaze” or “kami-no-kaze” of lore, but at the same time, give it a professional sharpness with the use of the on-yomi reading for the kanji. The actual use of the word “kamikaze” to refer to tokkō tactics and units was most likely either an Allied translator’s or a Western journalist’s mistaken reading of Shinpū. This misreading has stayed in the English vernacular ever since – and has subsequently entered the Japanese vernacular.