Posted on 09/30/2004 7:16:16 AM PDT by billorites
CHIRAN, Japan — These are the dusky days of old age that kamikaze pilots like Shigeyoshi Hamazono were not supposed to see.
Three times during the final months of World War II, Japanese officers sent Hamazono off to die, ordering him to crash-dive a single-engine plane stuffed with bombs into an American warship.
Bad weather aborted the first mission, an oil leak the second. On his final attempt in April 1945, he encountered three American pilots over the sea off Okinawa. In the ensuing dogfight, Hamazono was burned and took shrapnel in his shoulder, but his plane limped home.
You could call him the luckiest man in Japan, though Hamazono didn't see it that way at the time.
"I was, of course, ready to die," says Hamazono, who instead has aged into a bent but dignified 81-year-old. Fate allowed him to see his hair turn wispy and gray. And fate made him part of one of history's strangest and most exclusive brotherhoods: "kamikaze survivors."
Most were still waiting for orders to fly when Japan surrendered to the Allies in September 1945. A few others were spared because they did not reach their intended targets — a failure Hamazono found intolerable at the time. He was on standby to fly a fourth mission when Japan capitulated. Denied the opportunity to redeem his honor, he felt disgraced.
"I wished I had died," he says.
In the postwar years, a traumatized nation treated the kamikaze survivors like pariahs. But in the last decade, their reputation has recovered. Publishers clamor for memoirs. Scholars pick over their backgrounds in search of an explanation for their willingness to die for a lost cause. Japanese nationalists buff and shine their memory like medals.
"Kamikaze" has ceased to be a slur in Japan.
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(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
About WW2 Japan's attachment 731 (biological warfare experments)
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:sNwtVES7akEJ:scarab.msu.montana.edu/historybug/insects_as_bioweapons.htm+%22Detachment+731%22&hl=en
I have always felt the measure of a man is more about what is written in his heart and soul, than on a peice of paper. Give me the Bushido-directed warrior anytime.
Forgive my temporary thickness, but how is Chivalry a piece of paper as opposed to Bushido?
I concur...Fanaticism is the evil behind barbarism.
But forgive me, Sarge, my Libertarian streak is showing.
And was not the Chivalric Ideal passed from Knight to Squire, as well? And didn't the Knight have his confessor and his feudal lord, from whom came penance and duty?
And I thought "Memoirs of a Kamikaze Pilot" was the world's second thinnest book, next to "French War Heros of World War II".
To show how loyal our press was back then, the Mainstream Media was aware of the balloon bombs during WWII and NEVER reported it because the military had requested that the media keep it quiet. If the "Japs" (that's what they were called back then) knew that these bombs were actually hitting their targets they would have sent more. But since there were no reports of them landing in the US, they gave up on the idea.
Back then the press actually wanted the US to win in their wars. These days the Press appears to be rooting for the enemy.
Does anyone actually think that CBS/NBC/ABC/NYTimes/LATimes would honor such a request from the military today?
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