Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze/Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers

Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze. By M. G. Sheftall. New York: New American Library, 2005. ISBN 0-451-21852-3. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 430. $15.00.

Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers. By Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. ISBN 0-22661950-8. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 227. $25.00.

Correcting historical misperceptions can be a difficult business for historians. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, many commentators compared alQa'ida's attack on the World Trade Center to Japan's kamikaze attacks of 1944-1945. Superficially these human missile tactics were similar: the terrorists traded pilots for buildings; the Japanese pilots for ships. Assigned to the Special Attack Corps, the kamikazes represented Japan's last realistic hope of reversing an increasingly desperate war situation. To many, these attackers are remembered as unbridled fanatics who willingly sacrificed their lives for the Emperor. Two recent books, however, provide a human face to the Japanese kamikaze pilots and debunk the mythology tying them to twenty-first-century terrorism.

M. G. Sheftall's Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze is an expansive work of oral histories. The author draws on two main groups for his narrative: kamikaze pilots who...