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.