On April 12, 1945, Lieutenant Shinichi Uchida faced a terrifying mission -- crash his plane into a US warship. But the young kamikaze's final letter to his grandparents was full of bravado.
"Now I'll go and get rid of those devils," the 18-year-old wrote shortly before his final flight, vowing to "bring back the neck" of President Franklin Roosevelt. He never returned.
For many, such words are redolent of the militarism that drove Japan to ruin in World War II. But for an increasingly bold cadre of conservatives, Uchida's words symbolize something else: just the kind of guts and commitment that Japanese youth need today.
PHOTO: AP
Long a synonym for the waste of war, the suicidal flyers are now being glorified in a film written by Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, a well-known nationalist and co-author of the 1989 book The Japan That Can Say No. And a museum about the kamikazes in the southern town of Chiran, near the airstrip where Uchida and others took off, gets more than 500,000 visitors a year.
"The worries, sufferings, and misgivings of these young people ... are something we cannot find in today's society," Ishihara said when his movie, I Go to Die For You, opened this spring.
"That is what makes this portrait of youth poignant and cruel, and yet so exceptionally beautiful," he said.
No one is publicly calling for young Japanese to kill themselves for the nation these days. But the renewed hero-worship of the kamikazes coincides with a general trend in Japanese society toward seeing the country's war effort as noble, and mourning the fading of the ethic of self-sacrifice amid today's wealth.
The government has stepped up efforts to expunge accounts of Japanese atrocities from history books and reinstate patriotic instruction in the public schools. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, like his popular predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, is pushing to revise the pacifist Constitution.
The estimated 4,000 kamikaze -- or "divine wind" -- pilots were named after a legendary typhoon that foiled the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan's invasion of Japan in 1281. Chiran museum officials say as many as 90 percent failed to reach the US warships they were meant to attack.
Despite the pilots' reputation abroad as suicidal fanatics, Japanese hearts have always had a soft spot for the kamikazes. Long celebrated in movies, books and comic books, the pilots are seen as innocent young men forced by a desperate military into sacrificing their lives to protect their country.
Ishihara's film plays these tragic-hero sentiments to the hilt, with a strong dose of patriotism: Strapping young pilots proudly sing war songs and down cups of sake before taking off, while townspeople kneel in tearful gratitude as they fly overhead. Girls paint Rising Sun flags with their own blood.
The film is set in Chiran, about 1,000km southwest of Tokyo. From here 402 pilots took off, among them Uchida, whose fate remains unknown.
Today's kamikaze-boosters deny they are pro-war, and indeed, the Ishihara film does not shy away from the futility of the suicide missions. But the nationalist sentiment is clear.
While insisting to reporters that the movie's message is anti-war, director Taku Shinjo said Japan launched the war in Asia in self-defense, and that the decision to send young men on suicide missions was the only option left as the conflict neared its end.
"When you get to the roots of the Japanese soul, I think they are embodied in the kamikaze pilots," he said.
While the Japanese have not fired a shot in wartime since 1945, critics see peril in the new trend.
"It's extremely dangerous to glorify the kamikaze pilots as tragic heroes. The people who glorify them want to connect the prewar period with the present and future Japan," said Atsushi Shirai, a historian who has written about the pilots.
"These views also block critical analysis of the tragedy of the war, what it signified and why it was carried out," he added.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.