Flying in the face of reason
Japan’s attempt to glorify its kamikaze pilots of World War II is a brazen violation of universal human values
One tragedy of World War II was Japan’s fascist fanatics driving young pilots into suicidal attacks on US warships. These kamikaze attacks have become synonymous with crazy, reckless behavior.
But for today’s Japanese nationalists, the kamikaze pilots, officially named Special Attack Forces of the Imperial Japanese Navy, embody Japan’s samurai warrior spirit of devotion and revenge and therefore should be idolized. Pilot documents are exhibited at the Yasukuni Museum in Tokyo and more are displayed at the Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots in Kagoshima Prefecture, Kyushu.
The Minami-Kyushu municipal government, which manages the museum, submitted an application on Feb 4 for 333 items, including pilots’ wills, letters and diaries, to be included on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register under “Letters from Chiran”. The aim is to have those items honored worldwide and remembered side by side with the Diaries of Anne Frank and other documentary heritage inscribed to the Memory of the World Register and related to the victims of the Holocaust.
Curator of the Chiran museum Satoshi Yamaki says the pilots’ “letters are symbolic of Japan’s commitment to peace”, while Mayor Kanpei Shimoide claims the special attack pilots were “victims of the national war policy”.
In fact, the curator and mayor know well that the letters and documents are real in handwriting but hardly in thinking. Due to the Imperial Army codes of behavior and peer pressure, those young pilots who did their “noble duty to die”, a duty shunned by the experienced naval officers, could never express their agony, doubts and concerns in words as it would threaten the lives of their immediate families and other relatives. Akihisa Torihama, grandson of Tore Torihama, a woman who cooked many pilots’ last meals in her restaurant in Chiran, told Mark Litke from ABC News that the pilots confided in her “all the things they could not say in their heavily censored letters home”.
The kamikaze pilots may have been victims of the war, but once they took off, they were committed to turning others into victims. Their writings should not be part of the Memory of the World.
The attempt to honor the kamikaze pilots is an outright attack on international justice and an insult to the dignity of life. UNESCO’s Memory of the World program aims to preserve and promote documentary heritage that has “world significance and outstanding universal value”. The register can never be a platform to glorify the nightmare of the kamikaze attacks and other manifestations of fascism. Unless the Tokyo Trials are invalidated, as claimed by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and the post-war United
UNESCO’s Memory of the World program aims to preserve and promote documentary heritage that has “world significance and outstanding universal value”. The register can never be a platform to glorify the nightmare of the kamikaze attacks and other manifestations of fascism.
Nations system is overthrown, these pilots should be remembered as nothing more than the executers of the desperate schemes of war criminals.
Those who seek to honor the kamikaze pilots have twisted the purpose of their acts and are trying to uphold them in the name of peace (a reminder of Abe’s logic of paying homage to war criminals and claiming he is praying for peace). If they truly want to display their desire for peace, the mayor and curator should collect the documentary heritage of the women forced into sexual slavery and those Chinese and Koreans used as forced labor and the surviving relatives of those massacred in Nanjing in 1937.
They should know their endeavor to eulogize the suicide bombers is doomed to failure, yet still they went ahead, largely because they have gained confidence from the rise of nationalism and militarism in today’s Japan.
The fact that their action received little objection in Japan highlights a disturbing trend: The fetish for war extremism has spread from Tokyo officials to local intellectuals after campaigns fanned by right-wing winds, and the kamikaze attacks are no longer viewed as acts of madness by the Japanese military. Abe said he was moved by a kamikaze movie, and his followers no longer feel their fathers’ need to bury the traces of Japan’s militarism.
This trend has been cultivated by Abe, who stubbornly seeks to shake free of the US-designed post-war Constitution and constantly pressurizes the media, builds up threats from neighboring countries, and manipulates the teaching of history in schools.
Such tricks in the name of proactive pacifism can hardly fool US diplomats and strategists, but the US administration’s selfish desire to prolong their country’s global dominance has led to its constant appeasement of the increasingly defiant, weapon-thirsty and nuclear-minded Japanese right-wing leaders.
The US’ refusal to curb the folly of its ally has only emboldened the right-wingers in Japan, and a group of them are now calling for the US president to apologize for the nuclear attacks against Japan, forgetting all about the fascist insanity that triggered the use of these extreme weapons. They even seek to install US nuclear missiles in Japan, as they attribute Japan’s defeat in World War II to the use of these weapons alone. Although the US at present can still ensure Japan toes the line, the abrupt shifting to the right of Japanese leaders indicate they aspire to break free from the “Constitutional shackles” and become “normal” so as not to let the “white colonialists” exploit the country any further.
And in this lies the real danger to universal values.