The Kamikaze and Suicide Bombers

[Xodiac]

This is a really neat but long article from reuters about Japanese Kamikaze. It's a good read, if you have time.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...livedthestigma

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. If the Japanese still can't agree on whether the pilots were victims or heroes, brainwashed conscripts or volunteers, they are at least prepared to honor their spirit of sacrifice.


Only the modern menace of the suicide bomber has emerged to spoil this sentiment.

The survivors bitterly resent the world's appropriation of the term "kamikaze" — meaning "divine wind" and originally coined to describe the unexpected typhoons that saved 13th century Japan from invading Mongol ships — as shorthand for suicide bombers of every stripe.

There are the "Al Qaeda kamikazes" who flew passenger planes into office towers, "Palestinian kamikazes" who blow up pizza parlors filled with teenagers in Jerusalem, and "female Chechen kamikazes" willing to detonate explosive girdles in the middle of school gymnasiums crammed with children.

Japan's originals are insulted to be mentioned in the same breath.

"When I hear the comparison, I feel so sorry for my friends who died, because our mission was totally different from suicide bombers," Hamazono says as he strolls through the Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots in Chiran, a former air base on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu.


The kamikazes attacked military targets. In contrast, "the main purpose of a suicide bomber is to kill as many innocent civilians as they can," Hamazono says. That, he says, "is just murder."


The same distinction is made by other survivors of the Tokkotai, or Special Attack Force, conventionally known as the kamikaze. Its survivors tick off the reasons their goal-line stand against an American invasion was different from the blind lashing-out of suicide bombers today:


• They were ready to die out of love for their country, they say; suicide bombers are driven by hatred and revenge.



• The Shinto religion offers no reward of life after death. Islamic suicide bombers are promised a place in an afterlife.

• They were volunteers, motivated solely by patriotism. Suicide bombers often are recruited by militia leaders who offer money to their families.

Yet the arguments can't prevent those who use suicide tactics today from claiming Japanese kamikazes as an inspiration.

Naoto Amaki, Japan's former ambassador to Lebanon, recalled delivering a polite lecture to Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Shiite Islamist militia Hezbollah, in 2001. Amaki said he told Nasrallah that Japan's experience was a lesson in the ultimate futility of violence.

Not so, replied the sheik.

"He told me: 'We learned how to do suicide missions from the kamikazes,' " Amaki recalled. "Nasrallah said the Shiites all commend the Japanese samurai spirit."

Amaki says the analogy is faulty. "We Japanese are not a religious people; we just obey instructions. But the Arab world is looking for support wherever they can get it, so they seek out every excuse to legitimize their actions."

And kamikaze survivors resent it.

"We did what we did for military purposes," says Takeo Tagata, 88, a kamikaze instructor who was ordered to fly a mission the day before Japan surrendered. "No matter what supreme ideas they talk about, suicide bombers are just killing innocent civilians, people who don't have anything to do with their war."

Nor does Tagata have any doubt that Japan was justified in using "crash-dive" tactics in the final months of the war.

"It was worth it," he says, sitting almost at attention in the Tokyo office of a nationalist cultural organization. "It's not a question of whether Japan could win or not — if you're in a war, you have to come up with some kind of strategy. If the pilots really thought it was so bad, they would have rioted. But they stayed. They were proud of their mission."

Not all the pilots were eager to die for the emperor, counters Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney of the University of Wisconsin, an anthropologist

[Krash]

The Kamikaze may indeed of had more honor, however they were just as desperate and misguided as the suicide bombers we see today.

[Val]

Kamikaze died for their country... Do suicide bombers even care about their homeland?

[Guido]

Valid point.


My concern is that these people are attacking civilian installations in an undeclared war.

The Japanese Kamikaze Pilots were part of declared war, attacking military targets, and the casualties were mostly military personnel. These modern day suicide bombers attack cafes, restaurants, and other public facilities to instill terror in a civilian population.


I am by NO MEANS implying that military lives are of lesser value.... However, military personnel are aware that their lives are more at risk.

[USAcommitteeX]

Kamikaze died for their country... Do suicide bombers even care about their homeland?

Of course they do, they are taught that its an honorable way to die they are promised eternal happiness 72 virgins, the highest level of salvation for themselves and family members. Like Christianity and Judaism suicide in Islam is forbidden but self-martyrdom is that the same? Some say yes and some say no.

[Val]

It still disgusts me to no end that someone would pervert the word "honor" to justify actions harming the innocent. I'd love to line those fuckers up, have them dig a big trench, and mow them down with a .50 cal MG mounted on the back of a truck.. Only problem with that, is it makes me no better than them.. Fuckers

Only problem I have with above said statement is the fact that they're dying for their religion, not necessarily their homeland

[USAcommitteeX]

It still disgusts me to no end that someone would pervert the word "honor" to justify actions harming the innocent.

One thing that disgusts me is seeing Palestinian children some barely 1 year old wearing mock explosives belts and older children holding real assault weapons with live ammo, and we are starting to see alot of that in Najaf and other Iraqi towns. While visiting Israel I wasn't allowed in Gaza but I did visit Hebron in the West Bank and all over the walls and homes are pictures of Palestinian martyrs and if you ask Palestinian children 9 out of 10 would say they want to become a sucide bomber, their goal in life is death. I suppose you can say that they are a product of the times.

[Xodiac]

Yeah, I think that's part of the big difference. The Kamikaze were fighting for something tangible and had a huge amount of self discipline in order to live and die by their principals. The Islamic fundamentalist terrorists are basically mindless lost lunatics, brainwashed by the organized lunacy of their religion. These people aren't willing to die to live by their principals, they've been brainwashed into believing that their on a jihad and will go to a happy afterlife for killing innocents.

[KING SIZE]

as diluted as suicide bombers are.. especially fundamentalist ones, they do have one quality that we lack. the desire to put something greater than themselves ahead of their own shallow lives and ambitions.

[Xodiac]

Originally Posted by silent grooves

as diluted as suicide bombers are.. especially fundamentalist ones, they do have one quality that we lack. the desire to put something greater than themselves ahead of their own shallow lives and ambitions.

Even that's arguable, because they don't believe they're REALLY dying, they believe they're about to go be in a better, happier place.