http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere...1720082,00.html

'We were ready to die for Japan'

Justin McCurry hears the extraordinary story of a kamikaze pilot whose aircraft's failure meant his survival

Tuesday February 28, 2006


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Shigeyoshi Hamazono, 81, today (left); and (right) Mr Hamzono as a Japanese kamikaze pilot in the second world war. Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert


For what, or whom, did Japan's 2.5 million war dead sacrifice their lives?According to Taro Aso, the Japanese foreign minister, they did so for the emperor. Mr Aso, an arch conservative, longs for the day when Japan's symbolic head - not its political leaders - pays his respects at Yasukuni, a controversial Shinto shrine in Tokyo where Japan's war dead (including 14 class A war criminals) are honoured.

In truth, Mr Aso and other modern-day nationalists have no more idea than the rest of us about what went through the minds of the men and women who died in battle during Japan's wars of the 19th and 20th centuries.




For a truly authoritative explanation, free of polemic, they should spend an hour in the company of Shigeyoshi Hamazono.In the black and white photograph he showed me when we met near his home in Kyushu, in south-west Japan, Mr Hamazono looks every inch the dashing young pilot.

Now, more than 60 years later, he is slow on his feet - but his posture betrays his military past, and his scarred face breaks into a smile when he recalls dogfights with US fighter planes in the final months of the Pacific war.

That photograph, kept in near-pristine condition, should have been the last-ever image of Mr Hamazono.

When it was taken, he was 21 and preparing for what was supposed to be his valedictory contribution to the Japanese war effort as a member of the elite Tokkotai Special Attack Squadron - the kamikaze.

He volunteered as a navy pilot soon after the Japanese bombed Peal Harbour in December 1941, and by late 1944 was in the Philippines preparing for a suicidal attack on a British cruiser.

But for the first time in his flying career, his beloved Zero fighter let him down. When the aircraft developed engine trouble, Mr Hamazono was forced to return to another base in Taiwan, where sympathetic engineers deliberately dawdled over their repairs, putting off the day when the young pilot would have to leave with his engine containing only enough fuel for a one-way journey.

By the time he returned to Japan, doubts were surfacing about the value of the men of the Tokkotai: the 2,000 kamikaze aircraft dispatched in the final phase of the war had managed to sink only 34 ships. Even so, Mr Hamazono's superiors again sent him out to die.

"They came out of the clouds from above and I saw them too late," he said of the US fighters that confronted, and then outgunned, his squadron in a 35-minute dogfight that left him with a badly damaged aircraft and cuts and burns to his face and hands.

"At the end of the dogfight, I could see them coming at me again from a long way off. I was certain that I would be killed in a matter of seconds. But as they got closer they banked and flew off. I still can't work out why they did that."

As dusk descended, Mr Hamazono limped back to the Japanese mainland until he could see the lights of Chiran, a kamikaze base on Kyushu. "I was burned all over and only had five of my teeth left," he said. His mission had failed.

With only weeks of the war remaining, he stayed on to train younger pilots who - unlike their emotionally exhausted teacher - were still eager to die as heroes.

Now aged 81, Mr Hamazono said his only regret is that so many of his comrades died. "I live my life now for them, for my wife and for my 11 grandchildren," he added.

He has little time for the notion that the young men who flew into enemy warships did so happily in a selfless display of loyalty for the emperor.

"We said what we supposed to say about the emperor, but we didn't feel it in our hearts," he said. "We were ready to die, but for our families and for Japan. We thought people who talked seriously about wanting to die for the emperor were misguided.

"It was more like a mother who drops everything when her child needs her. That's how the kamikaze felt about their country."

Last August, the 60th anniversary of the end of the war sparked renewed interest in the kamikaze. A film adaptation of the successful antiwar stage production The Winds of God is set for release, and Shintaro Ishihara, Tokyo's nationalist governor, is believed to be working on a script for a film about the lives of young kamikaze pilots in Chiran.

Mr Hamazono enjoys celebrity status at the town's peace museum, which houses an impressive collection of aircraft, uniforms, photographs, letters and other artefacts that bestow on the kamikaze the status of demigods.

As we talked, he paused in front of the remains of a Zero fighter that went down off Chiran in May 1945 and was recovered from the seabed in 1980. "It's a lovely plane," he said. "It gave you that extra bit of confidence."

He sees his old uniform and goggles on display - and he is a young pilot again, preparing for another mission.

"When I see my uniform, I feel like getting back into that plane," he said. "But I also think that the time for pilots like me has passed. Now it's just a case of dropping bombs on civilians from a great height. That's awful."

The kamikaze have inevitably been compared with the al-Qaida terrorists who flew planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre on Spetember 11 2001.

Mr Hamazono, though, bristled at the suggestion that he and his fellow Tokkotai pilots were the forerunners of modern-day suicide bombers.

"We were completely different," he said. "We did what we did for our comrades ... the terrorists kill themselves for purely selfish reasons. I don't get angry when I hear them described as the modern-day kamikaze, but it troubles me that religion, not love, inspired them to do these things."

Today's suicide bombers may invoke the name of their god before they self-destruct, but what of the kamikaze?

Mr Hamazono is certain that, had he been able to see his mission through to its conclusion, his final words would have had little to do with Japan's wartime state Shintoism or its spiritual figurehead.

"Mother ... that's the only word. You have only seconds left," he said. "The idea that we laughed in the face of death is a myth."