topics: |  japan | history | world-war2

Extracts

Falling cherry blossoms.
The remaining cherry blossoms
Will soon be
Falling cherry blossoms.
	- Haiku quoted by one of the officers in conversation

--
The 15 Thunder Gods and the mother plane crews took clippings from
their fingernails and hair and placed them in unpainted wooden boxes
for delivery to their parents so they could hold funeral services for
them.  They took off their old clothes and burned them, putting on new
uniforms.  They then sat down and carefully wrote out their death
statements.
			...
Flight Petty Officer 1st Class Ataru Shimamura, Ohka Squadron 17th
Term, Category B, Graduate Naval Training Course, Age 20:

	I shall fall, smiling and singing songs.  Please visit and worship
	at Yasukuni Shrine this spring.  There I shall be a cherry blossom
	smiling, with many other colleagues.  I died smiling, so
	please smile.  Please do not cry.  Make my death meaningful.



Kamikaze Pilot Statue,  Yasukuni shrine museum Yushukan, Tokyo

I'll meet you are Yasukuni Jinja (shrine)

	Excerpt from the book Kamikaze: Japan's suicide gods, by
	Albert Axell and Hideaki Kase (2002).

When men were inducted into Japan's armed forces they knew that if they fell
on the battlefield they would instantly become kami, or ‘gods’, and join
the guardian spirits of the nation at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo.  In
Shinto, everyone becomes kami after death.

It was common among members of the Kamikaze corps, as well as all servicemen
going into battle, to say farewell with the catch-phrase: ‘I'll meet you at
Yasukuni Shrine!’  This Shinto shrine, built in 1868, was from the beginning
known as the ‘guardian shrine of Japan’ and impressed everyone with its great
bronze torii, or sacred gateway, the broad, paved approach to the shrine that
is lined with cherry trees, rows of stone lanterns and statues of national
heroes.  Increasingly, the people's attitude to Yasukuni became a yardstick
of patriotism.

In 1882, Prince Hirobumi Ito, an outstanding political leader of the
Meiji epoch, visited Germany and met Otto von Bismarck, the statesman
who elevated Germany into a political and military powerhouse in the
heart of Europe. 

	Bismarck was very impressed with the Shinto creed, and suggested that
	it could be effectively turned into a national military cult; that it
	should be taught in every Japanese school. Ito, who gratefully
	accepted Bismarck's advice, is regarded as the statesman who laid the
	foundations for the later Japanese Empire.

After some years had passed and Japan had adapted to a number of European
institutions, a German expert said that ‘from an innocent animal in its
lonely paradise, [Japan] became a tiger amongst tigers’.

Register for fallen soldiers

What makes Yasukuni unique for the Japanese is that virtually all of Japan's
fallen soldiers and sailors have been registered at Yasukuni, a fact that
conveys apotheosis.

Because this deification cum glorification extends also to
controversial figures like wartime leader General Hideki Tojo, the
shrine has been a target of criticism by liberal and leftist
politicians and intellectuals. Tojo was indicted as a war criminal by
the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and hanged in
December 1948. There were protests when he was among those deified at
Yasukuni. Nevertheless, the number of annual visitors to the shrine has
increased rapidly and, in the new millennium, has already surpassed 10
million.This growing number, says the official brochure, ‘demonstrates
how highly the Deities worshipped here are revered by the people of
Japan’.

when a group of senior Japanese military leaders and politicians were put on
trial in 1947–48, accused of war crimes, the main thrust of their defence was
that they had acted to turn the tide of Western colonialism in East Asia; and
this, say many experts, is not an argument easily dismissed.  America,
Britain, and other European powers had for many decades looked upon the East
as fair game for their territorial acquisitions.  In any case, there are some
revisionist scholars who see the Tokyo trials as having been hastily prepared
and poorly conducted, even regarding the trial itself as illegal under
international law.

Tokkotai (kamikaze) exhibits at Yasukuni shrine museum Yushukan

[The Yasukuni shrine remains controversial in Japan as the center for
right-wing neo-militarism.   The shrine houses a museum which includes
may of the last letters incorporated in this book.]

Yasukuni Jinja website: http://www.yasukuni.or.jp/english/

particularly moving are the last letters written by the tokkotai:
http://www.yasukuni.or.jp/english/will/index.php

from kamikazeimages.net:

This bronze statue of a kamikaze pilot stands to the left of the main
entrance to the Yushukan, founded in 1882 as the museum at Yasukuni Jinja
(Shrine). The inscription at the base of the statue reads "tokkou yuushi no
zou" (statue of special attack hero).

Many kamikaze pilots told their comrades they would meet at Yasukuni Jinja,
the place of enshrinement for spirits of Japan's war dead.

The Yushukan has several exhibits dedicated to special attack corps members,
not only those who made suicide attacks with planes but also other types of
weapons such as ohka (manned rocket-powered glider), shinyo (explosive
motorboat), and kaiten (manned torpedo).

Commemoration plaque 2005

In 2005, the Tokkotai (Special Attack Corps) Commemoration Peace Memorial
Association placed a plaque to the left of the kamikaze pilot statue that has
stood for many years in front of the Yushukan. Following is an English
translation of the plaque:

	Praise for Special Attack Heroes

	In the last stage of the Greater East Asia War when the war situation
	increasingly worsened, a total of 5,843 men in the Army and Navy gave
	their lives by bravely plunging into enemy warships and making other
	types of attacks. These men who became the cornerstone of today's
	prosperity included:

	* 1,344 men of the Army Air Corps headed by Major Nishio
	* 88 men of the Giretsu Airborne Unit headed by Major Okuyama
	* 9 men of the Tank Corps headed by Warrant Officer Funaba
	* 266 men of the Offshore Advance Force headed by Major Okabe
	* 2,514 men of the Naval Air Corps headed by Lieutenant Seki
	* 436 men of the Special Submarine Force headed by Lieutenant Iwasa
	* 104 men of the Kaiten Corps headed by Lieutenant Kamibeppu
	* 1,082 men of the Shinyo Corps headed by Lieutenant Ishikawa

	These totally pure and noble spirits who gave their lives for our
	country should each be honored and remembered by our nation, and
	their stories should forever be passed on to future generations.

	June 28, 2005

	Tokkotai Commemoration Peace Memorial Association

from Kamikaze (wiki)

	 		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze

In Japanese, the formal term used for units carrying out suicide attacks
during 1944–1945 is tokubetsu kōgeki tai (特別攻撃隊), which literally
means "special attack unit". This is usually abbreviated to tokkōtai (特攻
隊). More specifically, air suicide attack units from the Imperial
Japanese Navy were officially called shinpū tokubetsu kōgeki tai (神風特別
攻撃隊, "divine wind special attack units"). Shinpū is the on-reading
(on'yomi or Chinese-derived pronunciation) of the same characters that
form the word kamikaze in Japanese. During World War II, the
pronunciation kamikaze was used in Japan only informally in relation to
suicide attacks, but after the war this usage gained acceptance worldwide
and was re-imported into Japan. As a result, the special attack units are
sometimes known in Japan as kamikaze tokubetsu kōgeki tai.

Bill Gordon on Yasukuni museum:

		http://wgordon.web.wesleyan.edu/kamikaze/museums/yushukan/

Yasukuni Jinja's museum presents a slanted view of Japan's military history,
with highlights of heroic moments but no mention of negative incidents such
as foreign comfort women and Unit 731 in Manchuria. The museum gives the
nationalist perspective of Japan's war history and tries to portray a
military history of which Japanese people should be proud. A theater has
continuous showings of a 50-minute film entitled "We Shall Not Forget," which
gives the Japanese nationalist perspective that Japan was not at fault in the
Nanking massacre in 1937 and that Japanese leaders were wrongly convicted at
the Tokyo war crimes trials. The museum has an exhibit that portrays Japan as
the key to the liberation of other Asian countries from the U.S. and European
powers (Yasukuni Jinja 2003, 84).

[the very helpful lady at the information desk told me (sep 2012) that 40% of
the exhibits have English translations.]

The web site contains many statements that reflect Yasukuni Jinja's mission
to preach its nationalistic view of Japanese military history, such as the
following quote from the home page, "Japan's dream of building a Great East
Asia was necessitated by history and it was sought after by the countries of
Asia" (Yasukuni Jinja 2004).

Paul Murphy: Yasukuni Museum Tugs At Heartstrings

	IHT / Asahi Shimbun 2002 aug http://rense.com/general28/tudg.htm

A room inside the newly reopened Yushukan museum at Tokyo's controversial
Yasukuni Shrine might more appropriately be called the crying room. Here,
people come to read messages to loved ones from fallen soldiers.

Reading one display, which tells the story of Saitama mother Fukuko Fujii, a
middle-aged woman dabs her tears with a handkerchief. In 1943, Fujii threw
herself and her two children into the Arakawa river, to free her husband of
the worry of caring for his family and enable him to fulfill his dream of
becoming a kamikaze pilot.

The woman, and what presumably was her youngest baby, a ball of cuteness, are
pictured in a display photograph. "She was so brave," said the sobbing
woman's husband. "The story fills my heart and fills my eyes."

Teaching context is what the Yushukan museum is all about. "Young people
learn that we fought against the Americans, but they learn only one side:
that Japan was bad," said Yasuhira Noda, the head of the museum and Shinto
priest at Yasukuni Shrine. Reopened in July after a 4 billion yen makeover,
the museum now has twice as much space to explain the nationalist side of the
war story. Gone are the dull displays of the old museum. Kept are artillery,
the bric-a-brac of war and Emperor Showa's military uniform. Introduced are a
reconstructed Mitsubishi Zero 52 fighter plane and video footage of World War
II combat. Visiting war veterans sometimes gather and sing along with the war
songs in the footage.

What those people learn by visiting will contrast sharply with their
history books at home.

Japan of the 1930s and 1940s is portrayed as an Asian liberator, provoked
into war by European and U.S. colonizers who connived to choke the rising
but resource-poor industrial power by cutting off raw material
supplies. "Chinese terrorism" is blamed for arousing Japan from its
contented perch in Manchuria and forcing it south in 1937.

Japan's march into the southern city of Nanking in December 1937, which most
war historians agree resulted in a huge massacre of civilians, is described
as follows: Gen. Iwane Matsui "warned Chinese troops to surrender, but
Commander-in-Chief Tang Shengzhi ignored the warning. Instead he ordered his
men to fight to the death and then abandoned them. The Chinese were soundly
defeated, suffering heavy casualties. Inside the city, residents were once
again able to live their lives in peace."

The Bataan death march and Unit 731 are not mentioned.  Yasuhira Noda, the
head of the museum and Shinto priest: "Here we are not exhibiting the history
of crime, but how war is fought between countries as a matter of justice,"
and adds that on the same logic the museum makes little mention of the
dropping of the atom bomb in 1945.

"Westerners looked down on us as 'yellow monkeys.' Europe and America wanted
to enslave Asia and that is why Japan fought. This tells the real story,"
said Keiichiro Kitajima a 63-year-old salaried worker.

"I was taught that Japan was bad, but the soldiers fought for Japan and
 protected Japan," says Miho Tanaka, a 47-year-old homemaker, "Japan was
 defeated in war but we flourished thanks to all of these soldiers."

Above all others, the operators of the Yushukan museum aim to propagate that
sentiment: that Japan fought nobly in a war from which today's Japanese have
benefited. Outside the main exhibition hall, a couple of dozen people, young
and old, sit around watching a video that drives home the same
message. Interspersing World War II "banzai" battle charges and grisly
images of soldiers' corpses washed up on beaches along with scenes from
modern Japan the voiceover asks and answers, "What was it for? It was for
Japan ... it was for our families."