Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: An athropologist's turgid but useful study of the society that ordered young men to die for it

This excellent book is a difficult read, because the subject is a tough one, and also because Ohnuki-Tierney uses the worst kind of academic trash-talk in which to approach it. (Hegemony, polysemic, imbrication, and méconnaissance are among the stones to break the unwary reader's teeth.) As the title suggests, the kamikaze are only partly the subject: OT is mostly interested in how they came to be, a quest that takes her through history, culture, and literature.

But several chapters focus on five particular kamikaze pilots who left a particularly rich trove of diary entries and letters to friends and family, and these are what make the book worthwhile for a non-academic reader. These chapters are indeed fascinating reading. OT argues that the kamikaze were the intellectual cream of Japanese youth (which wasn't entirely true: by her own figures, only a third of the 3,000-odd kamikaze pilots were "student soldiers" drafted from the universities), and from that thesis she goes on to argue that the writings she cites are typical.

I'm not convinced. OT is also innocent on historical matters. Several times she tells how the two-man subs at Pearl Harbor "rammed the American ships," when not one of them appears to have made contact, and only one is known for sure to have gotten through the submarine nets. And she tells how the student soldiers were "tortured" by their superiors, because of their erudition, but such beatings were routine in the Japanese military, and were handed out even more vigorously to enlisted men, prisoners of war, and captive populations. Nevertheless, well worth reading by anyone with an interest in the kamikaze phenomenon.