In Fukuoka Prefecture, at the northern end of the most southerly of Japan’s four big islands, Kyushu, you can learn a lot about kamikaze. Like many island nations, Japan’s historical self-identity was deeply tied up in having never been conquered or invaded. (British people are like this too, so much so that they simply deny the facts about William of Orange.) The mythic moment came when the great Mongol emperor Kublai Khan mounted two attempted invasions of Japan, landing in Fukuoka. Thousands of warships and tens of thousands of Mongol invaders arrived in 1274 to face off a defending army of Japanese samurai, whereupon a great typhoon struck, dashing the ships in Hakata Bay and wiping out any hope of Mongol victory. Not one to give up easily on a military conquest, Kublai Khan tried again in 1281, only for another storm to strike and do the same thing again. The Japanese quite understandably attributed these events to the divine intervention of the gods, specifically the brothers Raijin and Fujin, deities of the storm and the wind. These “divine winds,” or kamikaze, became part of the self-identity myth of the nation. That’s why, in 1905, following the Russo-Japanese War, and with Russia and America only seeming to be causing more trouble in the Pacific in the coming century, Japan named the class of torpedo boats it commissioned the Kamikaze class. It did so again for a group of destroyers finished in 1922, ships that would see action in World War II.
Then there are the suicide strike pilots. While some Japanese pilots at Pearl Harbor appear to have crashed deliberately into American vessels, these were not really kamikazes as such. They did not take off with the intent of crashing in a suicide strike, but only did so when they had no other (murderous) choice, such as when they were already crashing and could not return to their ship anyway.
Later, there was the “Divine Winds Special Attack Unit” program in the Imperial Japanese Navy. These were the kamikazes as we generally think of them, ones who were trained differently and deployed just in the last two years of the war in, as the Japanese government then saw it, the defense of Japan and the emperor in the tradition of 1274 and 1281. Currently, Japanese opinion is that the extreme sacrifice and the extreme offensive violence the kamikaze took up represents the profoundly regrettable tragedy of their country’s wartime choices more broadly. Their willingness to die only prolonged the violence. Or that is the sense you would get from going to Fukuoka and seeing the two museums at Tachiarai Airfield, which Japan Today says was “once the largest military airfield of East Asia. Things turned dark, though, when Japan entered World War II. Tachiarai Air Base became a central transfer point for deadly kamikaze attacks.” Destroyed by American bombers in 1945, it now hosts the Chikuzen Tachiarai Peace Memorial Museum and the Tachiarai Retro Station Museum.
So, the kamikaze pilots were a real thing, they were a bad thing, and they are something about which Japanese public and official opinion acknowledges its (complicated and often prevaricating) sense of regret. In Japanese politics, how and whether to apologize for World War II and make sure nothing like it ever happens again is the defining political issue, except perhaps for stagflation. Now, though, according to the Nikkei, “Asian American journalists are advising news organizations not to use the word ‘kamikaze’ when describing the self-detonating drones recently deployed in Ukraine, citing the potential harm to a demographic already hit by hate crimes.” It always annoys me when sentences are written in such a way as though all Asian American journalists, and not some group of possibly six people with weird niche activist opinions, think this nonsense. The claim, apparently, is that Russia’s use of Iran-provided unmanned aerial vehicles that fly into their targets is morally different from the Special Attack Unit program because the Japanese aircraft had someone in them and because “the Japanese kamikaze missions hit military targets.”
The more objectionable part here, beyond presuming to speak for all Asian American journalists, is this weird and unjustified belief that usages such as this “cause harm.” Just referencing the historical fact of kamikaze strikes, a fact that is loudly and publicly memorialized all over Japan, causes hate crimes? That’s a hypothesis we should perhaps test before we start banning words.
