Kamikaze bid infuriates China
They express love for wives, children and, above all, for mothers. They are written on cigarette packets, on headbands, some of them in blood. Hours after they were written, their authors died in an inferno of flames and steel. They are the last letters of Japan’s kamikaze pilots and, 70 years later, they are at the centre of a bitter controversy.
Chiran, a small town in southern Japan, is pushing for United Nations heritage status for its collection of kamikaze documents, including letters, diaries and other mementos. The move has drawn a furious reaction from China, which regards it as an attempt to glorify one of the most notorious episodes in the history of warfare.
About 4000 Japanese pilots flew to their deaths in deliberate suicide missions in the last year of World War II, 439 of them from the airfield at Chiran. The town has a museum devoted to the subject, including a collection of the final letters that the pilots, many of them teenagers, wrote.
‘‘I regret that I cannot take care of you,’’ Lieutenant-Colonel Yoshio Itsui wrote to his fourmonth-old son.
‘‘I will keep an eye on you from heaven. Be dutiful to your mother, work hard, and please grow up to be excellent as a Japanese man and a son of the Emperor.’’
Second Lieutenant Fujio Wakamatsu, 19, sent his mother a simple cloth doll.
‘‘I go smiling as I perform my first and last act of filial piety,’’ he told her.
‘‘Please think of this doll as me, Fujio.’’
The first attempt to register the documents last year was unsuccessful, and was angrily criticised by China as ‘‘an effort to beautify Japan’s history of militaristic aggression’’.
It responded with an application to list documents describing murder and rape by Japanese soldiers on the same UN index, called the Memory of the World Register, which exists to recognise and preserve important historical documents.
Kampei Shimoide, the mayor of Minami-Kyushu, which includes Chiran, insisted this week that the purpose of seeking Unesco registration was to draw attention to the horrors of war, not to celebrate it.
‘‘Our project is in no way whatsoever being undertaken in an attempt to glorify, romanticise, or otherwise rationalise the historical legacy of the kamikaze,’’ he said.
‘‘It is being undertaken so that this record of the tragedy of war will be secured and passed on to future generations, so that humankind never repeats such a tragedy.’’
Applications for listing on the register are made by UN member states and adjudicated by a committee, in the same way that physical monuments are recognised as world heritage sites.
Documents are included for their historical value, not their moral content, according to Unesco, and the list includes the Gutenberg Bible, the Book of Kells and Magna Carta.