Volume 49, Number 18 · November 21, 2002
Suicide for the Empire
By Ian Buruma
Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalists: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History
by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney
University of Chicago Press, 376 pp., $20 (paper)
Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912
by Donald Keene
Columbia University Press, 922 pp., $39.50
Imagine what it must have been like to be squeezed into a human torpedo loaded with three thousand pounds of TNT, or into the cockpit of a flying bomb, and crash into a ship at six hundred mph, if one is lucky, or suffocate slowly inside a tight steel coffin if the target has been missed. As a military tactic adopted by the Japanese at the end of 1944, suicide bombing did considerable damage to the US Navy. Ships were sunk; many Americans lost their lives. And the attacks left a terrible mess. A witness recalls:
Review, 4346 words
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