Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze - Hardcover

Sheftall, M.G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0451214870 ISBN 13: 9780451214874

Publisher: NAL Hardcover, 2005

Synopsis

Drawing on firsthand, intimate interviews with the few remaining survivors of Japan's kamikaze corps, a thought-provoking study offers a revealing glimpse into the lives, attitudes, beliefs, and mindsets of former kamikaze pilots who never completed their suicidal missions.

About this title

About the Author

M.G. Sheftall is a native New Yorker who studied creative writing with Frank McCourt at Stuyvesant High School and attended West Point. Now an associate professor in the Faculty of Informatics at Shizuoka University in Japan, he teaches U.S./Japanese comparative culture and creative writing. He is also a translator and journalist specializing in aviation and military history. He has lived in Japan since 1987, and currently resides in Hamamatsu City with his wife and two sons.

Reviews

An independent scholar, long a resident of Japan, has produced a superior addition to the literature on Japan's tokko, or suicide, warriors. Suicidal missions—in the air (both conventional aircraft and the ineffective Ohka guided bomb) and at sea (the even less effective Kaiten manned torpedo)—had been under development during much of WWII, but the large-scale operations were launched in defense of the Philippines in October 1944. Thanks to unparalleled access to the surviving tokko personnel and a gift for characterization worthy of a first-rank novelist, the author gives us an extraordinary range of humanity, including Toshio Yoshitake, who flew obsolete attack planes all over the Philippines; Tokuro Takei, who became a suicide pilot while a teenager; and Iwao Fukagawa, holding his father's hand in farewell—as well as tokko founding father Adm. Onishi Takijirou. The author's description of the right-wing Japanese politics surrounding this part of WWII history and the resentment of many Japanese at comparisons of 9/11 to the tokko missions may raise eyebrows, but the book is remarkably evenhanded as to the vexed question of war guilt, and enormously rewarding if read carefully. (July)
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Independent scholar Sheftall, American by birth and education but a longtime resident in Japan, adds a well-written study of the Japanese suicide warriors to the World War II literature. In the autumn of 1944, Japan was running out of soldiers, supplies, and occupied territory and was facing the conquest of Japan itself. In a last effort to discourage attack and invasion, the high command sent out the kamikaze. These suicide warriors were to be human incarnations of the Divine Wind that legendarily had saved the home islands from invasion in centuries past. Sheftall's outstanding account of this policy's design, training, and execution includes interviews with the families of dead pilots and, harder to reach, pilots who survived the missions. Since 9/11, interest in the mindset of suicide pilots has increased exponentially. Sheftall and those he interviewed want it known that the Japanese kamikaze were the product of a particular time, place, and culture, and that erroneous analogies to contemporary terrorists will only confuse anyone seeking to understand either type of suicidal flier. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: NAL Hardcover
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0451214870
• ISBN 13: 9780451214874
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496