Memory: Chiran, Yasukuni and the Word “Kamikaze”

The Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots (Chiran Tokkō Heiwa Kaikan) in Minamikyūshū, Kagoshima Prefecture, on the site of the wartime Army airfield. It holds photographs, letters and belongings of the 1,036 Army airmen who died in special attacks in the Okinawa campaign. Photo: STA3816, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Kamikaze · Chapter 9 of 9

Memory

In Japan the special attack dead are remembered in museums, shrines and films, and argued over still: as victims of the state, as pure-hearted patriots, or as young men who deserve to be understood rather than either. In the United States they are remembered through the ships they struck and the sailors who survived them.

1945 – todayChiran · Kanoya · Yasukuni · Mabalacat · Patriots Point · Pearl Harbor~22 min read

For about a generation after 1945 the special attacks were not much talked about in Japan, at least not in public. The occupation’s censorship, the collapse of the wartime ideology that had sent the young men to their deaths, and the shame and grief of families and survivors all pushed the subject to the edges. When it came back, it came back through the dead men’s own words: letters, diaries and last notes, published first by the families of student soldiers and then, from the 1970s, collected and displayed in museums at the old airfields. Those museums, the shrine in Tokyo where the dead are enshrined, the films made about them and the arguments over all of these are the subject of this chapter.

The American memory runs on a different track. For American sailors the kamikazes were the enemy that came out of the sky and killed their shipmates; the word became, in English, shorthand for reckless self-destruction. But the ships they struck are still afloat at several American museums, and in recent years those museums have become places where the two memories meet.

After the Surrender: Silence and Stigma

Under the American occupation (1945–52), the Press Code of September 1945 and the censorship that enforced it until 1949 restricted the publication of militarist material, and few publishers would have touched celebratory accounts of the special attacks in any case. The surviving special-attack airmen, men who had trained to die and then not died, returned to a country that wanted to forget the war. Some were treated with suspicion or contempt, as symbols of the militarism that had ruined Japan; many simply said nothing. Survivors interviewed for the 2007 documentary Wings of Defeat described decades of silence; one of them, the former gunner Nakajima Kazuo, said simply: “I wanted to live; I didn’t want to die.”

The first great publication of last writings was not about the special attacks as such. Kike wadatsumi no koe (Listen to the Voices from the Sea), published in 1949 and filmed in 1950, collected the letters and diaries of student soldiers who had died in the war, some of them special-attack pilots. It presented them as young intellectuals sacrificed by a militarist state, and it set the tone for the postwar left’s memory of the war: the dead as victims. The other line of memory, which presented the special attacks as the purest expression of loyalty and self-sacrifice, appeared in 1951 with Inoguchi Rikihei and Nakajima Tadashi’s insider history, published in English in 1958 as The Divine Wind. Both traditions continue.

Diary · student soldier, 1945

“To be honest, I cannot say that the wish to die for the emperor is genuine, coming from my heart.”

— Hayashi Ichizō, Navy special-attack pilot, killed in 1945; as translated in Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze Diaries (2006)

The Letters Come Back

The recovery of the pilots’ own words is the central fact of the postwar memory. Families had kept letters, photographs and last notes. From the 1960s and 1970s these began to be collected by former comrades, memorial associations and local governments at the old bases, and published in anthologies. Bill Gordon’s 2020 study of 392 writers found in them a range of attitudes: commitment to the mission, gratitude, filial devotion, worry for family, and a minority who expressed doubt or dissatisfaction (Chapter 3). Most were written under military supervision and in a language of duty that the writers knew their officers and families expected; what they meant by it is one of the hardest questions in this history.

The best-known letters are those of student soldiers, who wrote more and better than the teenage professional pilots who made up most of the dead. Uehara Ryōji, a Keiō University economics student who flew from Chiran with the 56th Shinbu Squadron on 11 May 1945, left notes that read today as a judgment on the regime he died for.

Last writing · Chiran, May 1945

“I think liberty’s victory is evident.”

— 2nd Lt. Uehara Ryōji, 56th Shinbu Squadron, killed 11 May 1945, aged 22; trans. Bill Gordon (kamikazeimages.net)

The Chiran Peace Museum

Chiran, a small town in the hills of the Satsuma Peninsula in southern Kyushu, had an Army airfield from 1941, a branch of the Tachiarai Army Flying School. In the spring of 1945 it became the main Army base for special attacks on the fleet off Okinawa, and more Army special-attack pilots flew their last sorties from Chiran than from any other base: 439 of the 1,036 commemorated at the museum, including those who staged through Kikaijima and Tokunoshima.

The museum began in 1975 as the Chiran Tokkō Ihinkan, a hall for the dead men’s relics; an enlarged building was completed in 1986, according to Bill Gordon’s description of the museum (some Japanese sources give 1987), and it took its present name, the Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots (知覧特攻平和会館, Chiran Tokkō Heiwa Kaikan). The town of Chiran was merged into the new city of Minamikyūshū in December 2007, which now runs it. Its core is a hall of portraits, one for each of the 1,036 dead, and cases of letters, diaries and personal belongings; Gordon counted about 4,500 photographs, letters and other items, and touch-screen panels with 123 writings. The museum also displays aircraft, among them a Ki-84 Hayate, the only survivor of its type, a Ki-61 Hien and a Zero raised from the sea, and the grounds include a replica of the half-buried triangular barracks in which the pilots spent their last nights.

The museum describes its purpose, in its English brochure, as being “built to commemorate the pilots and expose the tragic loss of their lives.” It draws very large numbers of visitors, many of them school groups; Gordon reports about 400,000 a year in the mid-1980s under its director Itatsu Tadamasa, himself a surviving Army special-attack pilot. It has also been criticized from several directions. Gordon notes that it presents only the Army dead, although more than 60 percent of the special-attack dead were Navy airmen, and that a line in its audio guide about “liberation and prosperity for Asian countries” is controversial. Critics in Japan and abroad have said that its emotional focus on the young men’s sacrifice leaves aside the question of who sent them and why; its defenders reply that it is a memorial to the dead, not a history of the war.

The visit is designed to be emotional, and for most visitors it is. The portraits hang in long rows, each with a name; many of the faces are those of teenagers. A short film shown in the museum draws on Torihama Tome’s memories. Outside, a walking course of about a kilometre and a half leads to the surviving traces of the airfield, among them a bunker, an ammunition store, a water tower and the earth revetments that sheltered aircraft, and to a statue of Kannon, the bodhisattva of mercy, put up after the war in memory of the dead. Gordon reports more than two thousand visitors a day.

Torihama Tome and the Hotaru-kan

Much of what is remembered about Chiran’s pilots was remembered by one woman. Torihama Tome (1902–1992) ran the Tomiya Shokudō, a restaurant in the town that the Army designated as an eating place for its airmen. The pilots called her “mother”; she fed them and kept their confidences, and after the war tended their memory and told their stories to anyone who would listen. She became known as the “mother of the tokkō”. In 1977 she received the Order of Merit (sixth class). Her stories include that of Miyagawa Saburō, who told her he would come back as a firefly, and of the Korean-born pilot Mitsuyama Fumihiro, who sang a song of his homeland on his last night: a reminder that colonial subjects from Korea and Taiwan were among the dead.

In 2001 her family opened the Hotaru-kan (Firefly Museum) in the former restaurant building; it is run by her grandson, Torihama Akihisa. The same year the film Hotaru, directed by Furuhata Yasuo and starring Takakura Ken, drew on her stories, as did Ore wa kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku (For Those We Love, 2007), written by the nationalist politician and novelist Ishihara Shintarō. Her grandson has described the purpose of the museum in words that most of the Chiran institutions would accept.

Testimony · Hotaru-kan, Chiran

“We must communicate to the next generation so that a war where blameless young men must die will never occur again.”

— Torihama Akihisa, director of the Hotaru-kan and grandson of Torihama Tome; as quoted by Bill Gordon, kamikazeimages.net

The Letters and UNESCO

In February 2014 the city of Minamikyūshū announced that it would apply to have about 333 of the Chiran letters, diaries and last writings inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World register, as a record of the tragedy of war and an appeal for peace. The bid became an international controversy. Chinese government spokespeople and state media protested that it would glorify Japanese militarism, and criticism also came from South Korea; supporters argued that the letters were the testimony of young men and belonged to the world. The nomination was not put forward by Japan’s national selection process, and the city’s renewed attempt in 2015 drew renewed protest. The letters have not been inscribed. The episode showed how far the memory of the special attacks, which in Chiran is local and personal, is read abroad as a statement about Japan’s attitude to the war as a whole.

Kanoya and the Navy Bases

The Navy’s dead are remembered at the old naval air bases, above all Kanoya, the headquarters of Ugaki’s Fifth Air Fleet, from which 829 Navy airmen flew their last sorties, more than from any other base. The base is still in use by the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, whose Kanoya Air Base Museum covers the history of naval aviation, the special attacks among it. A memorial tower in Kozuka Park in the town commemorates the base’s special-attack dead; another stands at the former Kushira base, from which 334 flew. Smaller museums and memorials mark the other sites: the Bansei Tokkō Peace Museum near the Army field at Bansei, the Tachiarai Peace Museum in Fukuoka Prefecture, the Kaiten Memorial Museum on Ōtsushima in Yamaguchi Prefecture, where the human torpedoes were trained, and the former Naval Academy’s museum at Etajima.

Yasukuni and the Yūshūkan

All of the special-attack dead, Army and Navy, are enshrined as kami at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, together with the other war dead of Japan’s wars since the 1860s. Since 1978 the shrine has also enshrined fourteen men convicted or accused as Class A war criminals by the Tokyo tribunal, and visits by Japanese prime ministers have been a recurring source of protest from China and South Korea. For many families of the special-attack dead, the shrine is simply the place where their son or brother is remembered; some pilots wrote of it as the place where they would meet again. One letter displayed in the Yūshūkan, by Miyauchi Sakae, tells his family that “since I will be waiting for you at Yasukuni Shrine, please come to see me.”

The shrine’s museum, the Yūshūkan, was rebuilt and enlarged in 2002 with English captions. Its exhibits include an Ohka, a Kaiten and a restored Zero; a section is devoted to the special attacks, with more than thirty of their writings and walls of small portraits of the war dead, and there is a memorial to the Fukuryū divers. Bill Gordon judges that the museum “presents a slanted view of Japan’s military history”; its critics say it presents the war as a struggle for Japan’s survival and Asia’s liberation and the special attacks as its noblest expression. For visitors from the countries Japan occupied, and for many Japanese, the Yūshūkan is the clearest example of what critics mean when they say that commemoration of the special attacks can become glorification.

Mabalacat and Bamban

The special attacks began in the Philippines, and the Philippines has its own memorials. At Mabalacat, now within the Clark Freeport Zone in Pampanga, a marker was set up in 1974 at the East Airfield, from which Seki Yukio’s unit flew; it was buried by ash from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991. The site has since been restored as the Kamikaze East Airfield Peace Memorial, with a statue of a pilot unveiled on 25 October 2004, the sixtieth anniversary, and a monument at the West Airfield. The local historian Daniel Dizon promoted commemoration there from the 1960s. In nearby Bamban, where the 1st and 2nd Air Fleets had their tunnel headquarters, the Bamban Historical Society under Rhonie Dela Cruz erected a memorial to Ōnishi in 2001. These are memorials on the soil of a country that suffered terribly under Japanese occupation; they exist because local people chose to preserve the history of the place.

Films, Books and Debates

The special attacks have been one of the most persistent subjects of Japanese popular culture, and the films and books about them have been battlegrounds. On one side is a tradition, strongest on the political right, that presents the pilots as pure-hearted young men who gave their lives for their families and their country, and the attacks themselves as tragic but noble. Ishihara Shintarō’s For Those We Love (2007) belongs to it, and so, in the view of its critics, does the most successful of all, The Eternal Zero (Eien no Zero), a novel by Hyakuta Naoki (2006) filmed by Yamazaki Takashi in 2013, about a young man investigating his grandfather, a Zero pilot who died in a special attack. The film became one of the ten highest-grossing films ever released in Japan. Miyazaki Hayao, whose own film about the Zero’s designer, The Wind Rises, appeared the same year, was reported by Film Comment to have called it “a pack of lies.”

On the other side is the postwar tradition of Kike wadatsumi no koe, which presents the pilots as victims of a state that used them; and between the two, a body of scholarship that tries to understand the men themselves. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms (2002) and Kamikaze Diaries (2006) studied the student soldiers’ diaries and showed how the state turned symbols that the young men loved, the cherry blossom above all, into an aesthetic of death. M. G. Sheftall’s Blossoms in the Wind (2005) built on interviews with survivors and families. Hatsuho Naito’s Thunder Gods (1989) recorded the testimony of men of the Ohka unit. The documentary Wings of Defeat (2007, directed by Risa Morimoto) let survivors speak for themselves, many for the first time. Some well-known books are not what they seem: the American publisher’s “memoir” Kamikaze (1957) by Kuwahara Yasuo and Gordon T. Allred, Gordon concludes, should be considered fiction rather than personal narrative.

Within Japan the central argument has been about consent. Postwar insider accounts such as Inoguchi’s presented eager volunteers; later research, by Ohnuki-Tierney, Kōdachi Naoki and others, documented the pressure applied, names put on lists without being asked, and the reported practice of asking “those who do not volunteer, step forward” (Chapter 3). Both kinds of evidence exist, and the honest answer is that the men’s situations varied. The argument matters because of what it implies: if they were volunteers, they can be honoured as heroes; if they were conscripts, they must be mourned as victims; and if they were, as most probably were, young men doing what they believed was expected of them in a system that left little room to refuse, they deserve to be understood.

There is also a question of whose memory survives. The best-known writings are those of university students drafted in 1943 and after, who were articulate, often well read in Western literature and philosophy, and wrote at length. They were a minority of the dead. Yuki Tanaka, using Japanese records, counts 1,732 petty officers against 782 officers among the Navy’s special-attack dead, and 685 former students; in the Army, 708 non-commissioned officers against 621 officers. Most of those who died were young professional airmen who had entered the preparatory flight programmes as teenagers (Chapter 3). They left shorter letters, often in the formal language they had been taught, and they are easier to forget. The museums at Chiran and Kanoya, which hang every portrait the same size, are in this respect fairer than the anthologies.

The Word “Kamikaze”

The characters 神風 mean “divine wind”, the name given to the storms that wrecked the Mongol invasion fleets off Kyushu in 1274 and 1281 (Chapter 1). The Navy chose them for its first special attack units in October 1944, read in the Sino-Japanese way as “shinpū”. American intelligence translators and war correspondents read the same characters as “kamikaze”, and by 1945 the word was in American newspapers; U.S. sailors, for their part, used it alongside their own slang, including “Baka” (“fool”) for the Ohka. After the war the reading “kamikaze” came back into Japanese, partly through English.

In English the word has since become generic: a “kamikaze” driver, a kamikaze political strategy, a cocktail. That usage is now so common that most English speakers no longer think of its origin. In Japanese, by contrast, the more common word for the wartime units is tokkō, and it too is used colloquially. This collection uses both, and treats both as historical terms. The young men they describe were real people with names, and the purpose of a history like this one is to remember that.

The Weapons in Museums

The special-attack weapons themselves became museum pieces almost at once. American forces captured Ohka rocket bombs on Okinawa in April 1945, and more in Japan after the surrender, and shipped examples home for study; a Model 22 is displayed at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia, on show there since December 2003, and an Ohka trainer is at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. A Kaiten human torpedo stands at the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum at Pearl Harbor, and another, recovered by the U.S. Navy, is on permanent loan to the Yūshūkan in Tokyo. In Japan the tunnels and slipways where Kaiten and Shin’yō boats were hidden to meet the expected invasion survive at several coastal sites. Seen in a museum hall, the weapons are small, crude and strangely quiet; the Ohka in particular, a wooden-winged rocket with a cockpit and a warhead, explains more about the desperation of 1945 than any statistic.

American Memorials: The Ships

For American readers the most direct way to meet this history is aboard the ships that survived it. Several are preserved as museums, and for readers in North Carolina the nearest is one of the most famous. USS Laffey (DD-724), the destroyer that survived 22 attacks in about 80 minutes on Radar Picket Station No. 1 on 16 April 1945 (Chapter 6), is a museum ship at Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, across the harbour from Charleston, a drive of a few hours from the Lake Norman area. She was designated a National Historic Landmark on 14 January 1986. Her commanding officer’s memoir, written with Joseph Morschauser and published in 1980, gave her the name she is known by: The Ship That Would Not Die.

1945Today

Other ships tell other parts of the story. USS Kidd (DD-661), hit by a kamikaze on 11 April 1945 with 38 killed and 55 wounded, has been a museum ship at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, since 1983, restored to her 1945 appearance; she displays the names of the dead and wreckage of the aircraft that struck her. USS Cassin Young (DD-793), hit on 12 April and again on 30 July 1945, is preserved at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston. USS Intrepid in New York, struck by kamikazes more than once, and USS Lexington at Corpus Christi, Texas, mark where they were hit. LCS(L) 102, one of the last of the gunboats that fought on the picket line, survives at Vallejo, California. At Wilmington, the museum of the Battleship North Carolina (BB-55) records the kamikaze attacks she fought off with the fast carriers off Okinawa. Not every memorial is a museum: the wreck of USS Mannert L. Abele, sunk by an Ohka on 12 April 1945 and found in 2022, was described by NHHC’s director Samuel J. Cox as the “final resting place for 84 American Sailors who made the ultimate sacrifice.”

Missouri’s Dent: Where the Memories Meet

The most remarkable of these places is the battleship Missouri at Pearl Harbor. On 11 April 1945, off Okinawa, a Zero struck her; the pilot, probably a nineteen-year-old petty officer of the 5th Kenmu unit from Kanoya, Ishino Setsuo, was killed, and his body was recovered from the deck. The next morning Capt. William M. Callaghan ordered that he be buried at sea with military honours, a decision the Battleship Missouri Memorial calls “remarkable and controversial”; the ship’s chaplain, Cmdr. Roland Faulk, conducted the service. The dent left by the aircraft can still be seen in the rail.

In 2015, according to the memorial, the Missouri opened an exhibit on the special attacks, developed with the Chiran Peace Museum, its sister institution in Japan, with original letters, artifacts and photographs. On 13 April 2025, for the eightieth anniversary, a ceremony was held on the fantail where the burial had taken place. The mayor of Minamikyūshū, Nuruki Hiroyuki, attended; the keynote speaker was the captain’s grandson, Carey Callaghan; a young pilot’s farewell letter was read aloud; and guests tossed flowers into the water over the rail, just above the dent. It is hard to imagine a clearer sign of how far the memories have moved since 1945.

Okinawa: Every Name

Okinawa, where most of the special attacks were aimed, has its own way of remembering. The Cornerstone of Peace at Mabuni, opened in 1995 on the fiftieth anniversary of the battle, lists the names of everyone known to have died in it, of every nationality: Okinawan civilians, Japanese soldiers and sailors, Americans, British, Koreans and Taiwanese. It includes the names of American sailors killed off the island, many of them by the special attacks. The decision to list every name, enemy and friend alike, is a deliberate answer to the habit of remembering only one’s own.

Survivors and Reconciliation

The men who survived on both sides have mostly died now; the youngest Japanese special-attack airmen of 1945 would be nearly a hundred, and so would the youngest American sailors. In their last decades many of them spoke publicly for the first time. Japanese survivors such as Nakajima Kazuo and Ena Takehiko, in Wings of Defeat, and Hamazono Shigeyoshi and Hasegawa Kaoru in other interviews, described their training, their fear, their survival and the long silence afterward. Itatsu Tadamasa, a surviving Army special-attack pilot, directed the Chiran museum in the 1980s. American veterans’ associations of Laffey, Bunker Hill and the picket ships kept their own records and reunions, and American authors such as Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, whose Danger’s Hour (2008) tells the story of Bunker Hill alongside that of Ogawa Kiyoshi, the pilot who struck her, have tried to tell both sides at once.

Meetings between former enemies happened, and the Missouri ceremonies are the most public of them. This collection does not repeat stories of personal reconciliation that cannot be verified. What can be said is that in 1945 neither side would have believed that the Japanese special-attack pilots’ letters would one day be read aloud on an American battleship, in the presence of the mayor of the town from which so many of them flew, at a ceremony whose keynote speaker was the grandson of the American captain who had insisted on burying one of them with honour.

A Close

Between October 1944 and August 1945 several thousand young Japanese men flew or sailed to their deaths in the special attacks, and they killed several thousand young American, Australian and British sailors who were trying to stay alive. Both groups were, for the most part, ordinary young men caught in a war they had not made. The Japanese dead were sent by commanders who by 1945 had little hope of winning the war; the American dead were killed in the last months of a war that their country had already won.

The museums at Chiran and Kanoya, the shrine in Tokyo, the ships at Patriots Point, Baton Rouge and Pearl Harbor, and the names on the stones at Mabuni remember them in different ways and for different purposes. A history can do one thing that a memorial cannot: put them side by side, with the evidence for what happened and the honest disagreements about what it meant. That has been the purpose of this collection. The men themselves are owed the rest: their names, their words, and the effort to understand them.