• During wartime, soldiers from all sides wrote letters to home. In the case of Kamikaze pilots, however, the letter was an integral part of the mission. Before his mission, the Kamikaze pilot’s final act was to write a letter to his parents, wife or family. After his mission, the family members were supposed to read the heavily censored letters. These writings captured the final thoughts of a pilot before he made his attack. Many letters and poems survived to this day, but only a handful have been translated into English. One such letter was written by Ensign Kiyoshi Ogawa, the pilot of the second plane that took out the USS Bunker Hill, ultimately decommissioning the ship and wiping out over 300 crew members. The letter isn’t quite what you’d expect from someone embarking on such a mission. Ogawa expressed gratitude to his parents and the honor he feels for being a member of the special attack corps, writing,

 “Beyond those boundless white clouds, I will make my attack with a calm feeling. Not even thoughts of life and death will come to my mind. A person dies once. It will be an honorable day to live for an eternal cause. Father and mother, please be glad for me.” The Ensign signed off with the wish of good health to his mother, telling both parents he’d be watching over them at the Yasukuni shrine, ending the letter with the phrase, “I will go smiling, both on the day of my sortie and forever.”

•  To this day it’s difficult to determine if these letters represent a pilot’s true feelings, or if soldiers wrote them in a way that demonstrated the pilot’s courage to their families. Other pilots wrote similar letters, but there was never a guarantee that the military would pass them along to the pilots’ families. Several books of these final writings were compiled, translated, and saved for posterity so that future generations can learn about the lives of these doomed men from a dark time in Japanese history.

• Serving in the Japanese army could be cruel at times, especially since corporal punishment was baked into the framework of the armed forces. Beatings and violence were common among the ranks. Anything from a missing button to failure to snap the attention could ignite a superior officer’s wrath. A soldier might receive a beating for standing on a newspaper photo of the emperor. While many Japanese soldiers were drafted into military service with some level of patriotism in their hearts, the beatings and regular punishments left indelible scars on the soldiers that would last a lifetime. And if that weren’t bad enough, corporal punishment permeated the entire armed forces. Anyone above your rank might beat you for any reason. Their superiors would treat them the same way.  And it went all the way up the ladder to Japan’s Prime minister, Hideki Tojo. One Kamikaze pilot named Irokawa Daikichi was drafted into military service but never conducted a kamikaze mission. When he later became a historian, he wrote a harrowing account of the brutality he suffered while enlisted. One terrible incident occurred after his superiors accused his company of eating with the local farmers to ease their hunger. He wrote “Each of us was called into the officer’s room. When my turn came, as soon as I entered the room, I was hit so hard that I could no longer see and fell to the floor. The minute I got up, I was hit again by a club so that I would confess. A friend of mine was thrown his head first to the floor, lost consciousness, and was sent to a hospital. He never returned. All this savagery was orchestrated by the age corp commander, named Tsutsui. During his training, he was no longer recognizable. One day in 1945, a fellow ensign hit him in the face repeatedly until his teeth badly cut the inside of his mouth. On another day his unit was forced to sit on a frozen concrete floor and beaten with clubs.”

• When the special Attack Force first formed in 1944, no military academy-trained officers volunteered to join. So instead, the deadly Kamikaze missions were left entirely up to the new recruits and junior personnel to take on the unpleasant role. Japan’s kamikaze force consisted of approximately 4000 kamikaze pilots. At least 3000 of them were boy pilots that had recently been conscripted into the Japanese Army. Around a thousand of them were student soldiers whom the government decided to graduate early to make them eligible for the draft. These men were exponentially well-educated, spending most of their time at university reading and writing. As a result, most accounts of the reality of serving in the special attack force come from these student scholars. They probably didn’t think about the enemy much at all, especially since most of them never saw actual combat.         

• According to writer Yuki Tanaka, of the Hiroshima Peace Institute, their diaries and letters don’t often discuss their enemies. Instead, they offer a profoundly philosophical approach to describe their lives and experiences. There is no hatred of the enemy within their pages. Instead, they capture their struggle to understand their imminent deaths and come to terms with their fate. And in the end, they often pondered how to spend the remaining time in a meaningful way and to justify the suicidal act they were required to make on behalf of their country.         

• It may seem strange but taking off on a kamikaze mission wasn’t always a death sentence. Mechanical failure or engine problems required pilots to divert their flight and return to base. A lot of Japanese air crafts were old, outdated, and beginning to fail. As the war raged on, more pilots had to divert their missions due to these problems. Kamikaze pilot Takahito Ena survived a few planned missions as a direct result of this policy. He was supposed to be part of a crew of three flying a bomber during operation Kikusui, but luck was on Ena’s side. On his first mission, he couldn’t get his plane off ground. His second mission didn’t fare much better. Engine trouble forced an emergency landing. On the third time out, engine trouble forced a crash landing into the sea. Ena, his co-pilot, and the communications officer swam to nearby Hiroshima island, where they stayed for almost three months until a Japanese submarine picked them up. Ena was relieved he survived and felt optimistic about his future. After the war, the new US-written constitution’s Article 9 restricted Japan’s military to a defensive role. 70 years later, he reflected on his experience, telling the Guardian, “for 70 years, we have been protected by a peace-oriented constitution. I am very grateful that we haven’t gone to war at that time. The Japanese people should be happy about that.” His sentiment isn’t unique among surviving kamikaze pilots, but it’s strange to think that more kamikaze missions might have been successful. If it weren’t for their poorly maintained planes.         

• While many young Japanese men were drafted into serving, firstborn sons weren’t allowed to become kamikaze pilots. In 1944, firstborn sons got the opportunity to stay alive to carry on the family name. Everyone else was expected to sacrifice themselves for the service of the emperor. Second sons bore the brunt of the kamikaze service. Okinawa Native Paul Saneaki Nakamura volunteered for the special attack force training on a glider due to plane shortages. Nakamura was never called upon to conduct a mission of his own and he survived the war. But he was far too poor to return to his home in Okinawa right away. When he finally made it black, he discovered all the first sons who’d remained behind during the war met their demise in the battle of Okinawa. After his horrifying discovery, Nakamura became an Anglican priest and spread Christianity throughout the land.