FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“These painful and deeply moving letters and diary entries are a necessary correction to common misperceptions about Japan's suicide pilots. Kamikaze Diaries is not just for specialists, but for anyone interested in human affairs.”
Ian Buruma

 

“The kamikaze used all their learning and reading to try to make sense of an impossible situation, and through their writings we get to see them as remarkable human beings, profoundly alive in spirit as they faced physical destruction. Theirs is a moving testament that speaks to us beyond boundaries of nation or race, and it will continue to speak as long as humans engage in meaningless wars.”
Robert Bellah

KAMIKAZE DIARIES

Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney

The story of the kamizake or tokkōtai is among the most tragic and misunderstood in the history of World War II. Commonly remembered as suicide pilots who volunteered to die for their country, a significantly large number of these student soldiers were in fact kind and gentle souls who were forced into their desperate mission. Among the intellectual elite of Japan, they could speak and write in four different languages, they were steeped in the classics of world literature and classical philosophy, they listened keenly to Beethoven and Mozart, and they even wrote their own poetry.

Fortunately, the kamizake also wrote diaries, and six of them are collected here in this heartbreaking but much needed corrective to their many caricatures. As Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney shows, these young men composed long and often heartbreaking soliloquies in which they poured out their anguish and fear, expressed profound ambivalence toward the war, and articulated thoughtful opposition to their nation's imperialism. Kamikaze Diaries therefore clearly and eloquently subverts the idea that these men were suicide bombers in the harrowing mold of al Qaeda or the Hamas.

Beginning with a poignant introduction to the kamikaze phenomenon and interspersed with further historical commentary throughout, this moving work will be essential to anyone interested in the history of World War II or the tragedy of war itself.

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney is the William F. Vilas Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of numerous books, including Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalism: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History.

 

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney is available for interviews. For more information please contact Mark Heineke
at (773) 702-3714
mah@press.uchicago.edu