Calling soldiers under-educated is nothing more than arrogance.

There was a *draft*. Unless you think everyone who wasn't 4F was dumb, you have no reason to make that statement other than a contempt for those in uniform.

What, boot camp kills brain cells?

Get a life.

@1, i meant the whole population, not just soldiers. to make that clear, i changed the wording.

Yes, Charles. I'm sure it went like this:

General 1: "The Emperor says we need to repress and control the population to prevent the proletariat from anthropomorphizing into a bourgeois."

General 2: "Why, that would lead to the disruption of traditional ethnic roles and stereotypes! It must be stopped, as surely as the sun symbolizes the classic male/female dichotomy!"

General 1: "Indeed, hegemonic influences counter-negotiate. But how do we implement this repression and control?"

General 2: "I know! We will force the under-educated youth of our military to crash planes into enemy ships! They will represent the hopes of the population, and the enemy ships will represent the harsh realities of post-neoliberalism!"

General 1: "Brilliant! And by only giving them enough fuel to get there, but not to come back, we will be crafting a commentary on the irreversability of aging and wisdom. The planes will represent life experience, and the fuel will represent the lifeforce of the racial archetypes."

General 3: "Also, it will sink some enemy ships, which might be useful in a war like this. What luck! What a great fringe benefit to the main goal of repressing and controlling the population!"

Is that how you imagine this going down, Mudede?

Charles, no war is just, but WW2 is probably the most 'just' of wars the world has ever known, if you weren't an Axis member. These people mobilized to murder and conquer, and were beaten back.

"Those in power on both sides of the war benefited from the image of the zealous, hyper-patriotic Japanese pilot: one side for the purposes of demonization; the other for deification. Both, however, had the same aim: the repression and control of the population."

Seriously, are you Slogging while high? How did stopping Nazi Germany from taking Europe and continuing in the extermination of millions of jews, Italy from taking Northern Africa, or Imperial Japan from taking Asia have anything to do with the US or West "repressing or controlling" the population? Seriously, what the hell does that even mean? I dare you to explain this more clearly. I know you will not, but I dare you.

Get a grip, #1. You seem to be responding to a different post than the one the rest of us see. Mudede never says they were dumb or under-educated. Trolling to shoot down hipsters, are we?

Charles this is not the first time I've heard this take on the kamikaze, and weirdly enough, it's not too different from what others have written about American soldiers in the Pacific war. Gore Vidal's writings on his youth in particular come to mind.

I have seen several documentaries over the years that made it clear the pilots were not the zealous patriots of the "myth". That's never been a secret.

Perhaps not all Kamikaze pilots were young zealots eager for death but the fact remains that in most land battles in the Pacific theater US and Allied forces never captured more than a handful of Japanese soldiers. If preferring death at the enemy’s hands or your own over surrender isn't zealotry I am not sure what is.

Seems like you're making a thinly veiled analogy to Al Qaeda...and it works somewhat. In the sense that none of 'us' would imagine himself as human bomb, yet we subscribe readily to one of the two ideologically driven explanations of why others might take these actions.

You're leaving out the whole story of Japanese culture--its militarism, fascism, crushing conformation, and xenophobia. While individual kamakazi may have not been so enthusiastic, their entire society would have put enormous pressure on them to "do their duty".

From a military perspective, one aircraft and one pilot in exchange for a troop ship or aircraft carrier is an excellent trade.

#7: Actually, that is another myth about the war in the Pacific, that Japanese soldiers never surrendered. U.S. veterans of the war openly talked about how lots of Japanese soldiers surrendered, but they were usually summarily executed by Americans. This was not just because the war was so intense that GIs had their blood up and kept shooting even though the Japanese guys had started waving a white flag. It was policy from upper ranks to discourage taking of prisoners, for whatever reason.

Two books for anyone interested in this stuff: Wartime by Paul Fussel and War Without Mercy by John Dower.

Even if Nazis and the Japanese imperialists were evil, it is amazing the number of lies about WWII that are accepted as common wisdom. Enthusiastic kamikazes and never-surrendering Japanese troops are merely two.

@4 Painting the Japanese as zealots who would never stop fighting made it easier to sell the nuking of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki only 3 days later, allowing us to cow the Japanese into submission while at the same time scaring the shit out of the Soviets by showing them just what we were capable of. I can imagine a foreign enemy coming and nuking one of their cities right after they nuked another one having a repressing and controlling effect on their population.

I have never actually heard that. Even from a young age, talk about Kamikaze pilots was focused on the fact that they were very young pilots who were taught to fly planes, but not land them. I have never heard them painted as zealots... but victims.

You're obviously assuming that I give a shit. Sorry.

@3

You're missing the point that certain actions, policies, forces, have functions outside of the intentions of those putting them into action. Whether or not the generals talked like that, and of course they didn't, just emphasizes the point that they do it but they don't know it.

"War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it..."

-General Sherman, right before he burned Atlanta

That is one of my favorite quotes. After a year in Afghanistan, I believe that it is more true than anything else I've ever read about war.

No, wars have to do with gaining resources and have almost nothing to do with oppressing the opposition. Marxism is responsible for gulags, collectivist slave farms and killing dissenters. Capitalist societies like America and Japan have very little in common with that.

Romanticization of samurai culture + historical significance of the term + losing ground in the Pacific = one last ditch effort to swing things in their favor.

@16 Your ignorance of American history is understandable, but still sad. Labor's battle for decent pay and safe working conditions against Robber Barons that would stop at nothing to quell dissent is more than a little exactly like those things.

18, how so? Of course the worker is used, but in a capitalist society the worker is worth more than in that of any other society.

@19 The case has been made numerous times by much more informed parties than I that 3 days was simply not the appropriate amount of time to wait for a response from the first country ever to be offensively nuked, before making the irrevocable choice to destroy yet another city of civilians.

@20 A worker is worth more in a capitalist society than in a socialist one? If the socialist society isn't just a facade for fascism and totalitarianism (which I believe to be an attainable thing), than it puts the worth of the worker above that of the millionaire industrialist who in a corporatocracy like ours is free to balance the scales of worth anyway he can afford to.

@21, would more time really have made a difference? The destruction of Hiroshima was only new in method, not in scope. More civilians were killed the same year via the conventional firebombing of Tokyo. Japanese military leaders didn't surrender to save civilians--they had plans to arm them with bamboo spears to fight the coming invasion--the emperor surrendered because the atom bomb would leave Japan not just conquered but a smoldering lifeless ruin.

@10,

More proof that the victors write history, considering how much hay had been made of torture and enslavement of Allied POWs by the Japanese.

@23 Would more time really have made a difference? I don't know, I think so, but of course I can’t be sure. But I don't think expediency for the sake of expediency would have been better than waiting a week or two and possibly only having to teach our kids we just nuked one city.