Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers Book

I heard about this book on NPR -- first an interview with the author, and then an interview with Clint Eastwood who read the book while he was working on his Letters from Iwo Jima/Flags of our Fathers films.

The book is very scholarly, and not very emotionally engaging. The book summarizes what's in the letters of the young pilots, but it's not a direct translation. It's more of a critical synthesis of what the young men wrote. There were poignant passages, but these were very few. I expected the author to be an editor, who would write the foreward and then let the boys speak in their own words, but this is unfortunately not how the book was organized. The author spends a lot of time on the rigorous schooling these exceptional young men endured, but the tone of the book remains somewhat aloof and academic.

Given that this is the first English translation of any of these diaries, I'm glad to have been able to read the scraps of the diary the author quotes. And the book humanizes those who I used to assume were brainwashed kamikaze idiots.

The truth is, the tokkotai pilots were far far from brainwashed and were the intellectual elite of their generation. Their integrity, innocence and sense of duty could not prevail over a maniacal regime who systematically manipulated them into believing that it was shameful for them not to die. These men so desperately wanted their lives and early deaths to mean something, and the government refused them even that.