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KAGOSHIMA, Japan—One Saturday afternoon in October, families, schoolkids, and the elderly milled about the Chiran Peace Museum, near Kagoshima in southwest Japan. In this country, many things branded “peace” are likely to be about war. Chiran is no exception: It is a museum dedicated to kamikaze pilots.
Momoka Takashima wanted to come with her parents to Chiran, a former army airfield, after her school trip to the cinema last year to see Till We Meet Again on the Lily Hill, a film about an unhappy young woman from the present day who goes back in time and falls in love with a kamikaze pilot. I had approached the Takashima family—Momoka; her father, Kazuyoshi; and mother, Chizuko—because they were clearly so absorbed by the museum’s walls of young male faces. The exhibit’s glass cases hold the original last wills and letters home of these pilots, often beautifully written in careful calligraphy. At 15, Momoka is only a year younger than the youngest kamikaze pilot to die.
KAGOSHIMA, Japan—One Saturday afternoon in October, families, schoolkids, and the elderly milled about the Chiran Peace Museum, near Kagoshima in southwest Japan. In this country, many things branded “peace” are likely to be about war. Chiran is no exception: It is a museum dedicated to kamikaze pilots.
Momoka Takashima wanted to come with her parents to Chiran, a former army airfield, after her school trip to the cinema last year to see Till We Meet Again on the Lily Hill, a film about an unhappy young woman from the present day who goes back in time and falls in love with a kamikaze pilot. I had approached the Takashima family—Momoka; her father, Kazuyoshi; and mother, Chizuko—because they were clearly so absorbed by the museum’s walls of young male faces. The exhibit’s glass cases hold the original last wills and letters home of these pilots, often beautifully written in careful calligraphy. At 15, Momoka is only a year younger than the youngest kamikaze pilot to die.
Three people look at photos of Japanese kamikaze pilots in a museum display in Chiran on June 6, 2007. David Guttenfelder/AP
Some 338,000 people passed through Chiran’s doors between April 2023 and March 2024, up from 290,000 the year before. The current 12-month span is expected to be even higher. Two hours’ drive away, Kanoya Air Base Museum, used by the Japanese navy to send planes off to crash into Allied warships, sees 60,000 visitors a year. Chiran is an attractive facility: Outside, there are sculptures and statuary, a shrine, winding paths. The road to the museum is lined with cherry trees, the blossoms of which are one symbol of the kamikazes (fireflies are the other).
Books and films are credited with sparking a wave of “tokko tourism”—tokko being shorthand for tokkōtai, itself an abbreviation of tokubetsu kōgeki tai (special attack corps), the more precise Japanese term for kamikazes.
The film Godzilla Minus One, written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, was an international hit in 2023 and picked up an Oscar earlier this year. It’s about a failed kamikaze pilot seeking redemption. Over the last 25 years in Japan, kamikazes have become an entertainment staple; 2013’s The Eternal Zero was one of the highest-grossing Japanese films of all time and was based on Naoki Hyakuta’s novel that sold millions of copies. There was For Those We Love (2007) and The Firefly (2001). In 2005 and 2019, there were big-budget, high-grossing live-action feature films about the famous Japanese battleship Yamato, sunk on an Okinawa suicide mission of her own. Perhaps 4,000 pilots died out of more than 2 million Japanese war deaths overall. What accounts for the kamikazes’ outsized—and enduring—place in the public consciousness about the war?
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A man wearing a suit sits at a wooden table and goes through a large ledger with Japanese characters on it. -
Yoshiomi Yanai shows his last will and testament, which he made amid his time as a kamikaze pilot, during an interview at Tsukuba Naval Air Group Base in Kasama, Japan, on April 29, 2015. Eugene Hoshiko
/AP
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A finger points to a black-and-white photo of a pilot atop another out-of-focus photo. They sit atop papers with Japanese characters on them. - Hisashi Tezuka shows pictures of himself as a kamikaze pilot during an interview at his home in Yokohama, Japan, on April 23, 2015. Eugene Hoshiko/AP
In the academic discipline of tourism research, the kamikazes are the most powerful example of the evolving concept of “contents tourism.” Contents tourism is specific to Japan and defined as fans physically traveling to the places where popular culture stories take place to explore their emotional bond. A number of academic papers in the discipline have focused on kamikazes.
People come here for the humans, the interior and private lives of the individual pilots, not the geopolitics of the war. At the museum at Kanoya, 74-year old Seishi Takayama read aloud to his wife the last letters of kamikaze pilots. He was overcome, stopping frequently to sigh deeply and shake his head. “They were so young, 18 or 19,” he told me.
Japan’s massive and justly famous creative arts industries—film, novels, music, manga, anime—provide an entry point to learn about and explore the war in a country where nearly eight decades after it ended much of the facts and record remain contentious, untaught or unsaid.
There is not even agreement on what to call the period of 1931-45. Conservatives feel they have apologized enough for Japanese aggression and atrocities, even too much, while those on the left feel it has not been enough. In Japan, certain events are periodically relitigated in the public square and in school textbooks—issues like the scale, intent and official involvement in everything from comfort women to the Nanjing massacre. Pearl Harbor, meanwhile, is a historical footnote. Stroll into a well-stocked bookstore like Ogaki, a Kyoto institution since 1942, and you will not find the sizeable military history section common in most Western shops. At most you might find two small shelves, dominated by translations and mostly about the Holocaust and Nazis.
Germany is widely seen to have taken greater responsibility for its wartime past than Japan, and made more genuine efforts to atone for it, without equivocation. “Comparisons of postwar German and Japanese apology, reparations and attitudes concerning the past are common among journalists as well as scholars. Japan comes out unfavorably in such comparisons,” Jane Yamazaki wrote in 2015. In his monumental Judgment at Tokyo, Gary J. Bass wrote that conservatives like the late Shinzo Abe repeatedly implied the Tokyo war crimes trials were a sham and their verdicts on even the most serious group of the accused, termed “Class A,” were unfair: “I think that the very act of calling such people criminals is strange.” You’d be hard-pressed to find a German utter the same about Nuremberg.
The lack of an agreed upon narrative should not suggest there are not strong views. In Japan it is risky business to comment on the war. Reactions from the left or right are swift, and can come through public statements, online harassment, or other means. Activist, author, and filmmaker Tamaki Matsuoka has hidden the testimonies she has collected on the Nanjing massacre to protect them from being stolen or destroyed. Conversely, when a museum about the battleship Yamato was being planned in 2005, groups like Peace Link Hiroshima-Kure-Iwakuni protested vociferously.
Kamikaze pilots salute at Chiran Air Base in Kagoshima, Japan, in April 1945. Yasuo Tomishige/The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images
The Japanese government shows little interest in its wartime history, and as a result, kamikaze memorials are typically built and operated by municipal governments instead. Museum officials at Chiran and elsewhere obtained the letters, wills, and mementoes directly from the families of kamikaze pilots, the central government playing no role.
A few days before I went to Chiran, I visited Etajima on the Seto Inland Sea. It’s the current Maritime Self-Defense Force Candidate School, and the former and famous IJN academy. The academy’s museum includes a large room given over to the kamikaze pilots, the majority of whom were from the navy. My guide, a young officer, stood next to me, looking at the faces in rows along a wall. “Victims. All victims,” he said, shaking his head.
By the time kamikazes were first deployed in late 1944, Japan was in a last-ditch defensive effort to protect the homeland itself. Kamikazes don’t carry the whiff of the campaigns of aggression in China, Philippines, or Southeast Asia.
Philip Seaton is a professor at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies who, along with Takayoshi Yamamura, is credited with popularizing the contents tourism concept. As he wrote in the Journal of War & Culture Studies, the sites can be controversial, and “remain a cause of consternation for those who believe militaristic nationalism is being nurtured and war’s serious lessons are being forgotten.”
The pilots are portrayed as if they were part of a particularly severe religious order. In paintings and photographs, they are often shown from the perspective of those on the ground, the planes taxiing and taking off towards the heavens, never to be seen again. Bodies are never recovered, they simply disappear. Other artwork depicts the pilots’ souls ascending to heaven, or their bodies turned into cherry blossoms or fireflies.
The USS Bunker Hill is hit by two Japanese kamikaze aircraft off Kyushu, Japan, on May 11, 1945.Reuters
Chiran is on a high plateau, a short drive from the city of Kagoshima through a winding, ascending, mostly single-lane road. The approach runs parallel to a runway that is now cultivated fields. It is destination tourism, a pilgrimage—you have to make an effort to get here. There are at least six museums and memorials to the kamikazes all over out-of-the-way Kyushu, selected because it is the main island closest to Okinawa, where an amphibious invasion was underway, and from which the invasion of Japan’s main islands was expected to come.
Yet now the war refuses to go away. Within the last few months, Hiroshima survivors group Nihon Hidankyo won the Nobel Peace Prize; the last airman from Pearl Harbor died; a 10-year old boy was stabbed to death in China on the Mukden anniversary. Less newsworthy, on October 2, 2024, a bomb spontaneously exploded on a taxiway of the current Miyazaki Airport. The civilian airport was at built as an IJN base and later was used for kamikaze flights. The ordnance, believed to be American and dropped to stop the suicide flights, left a crater 7 meters across and the airport was shut down for several hours.
The former kamikaze naval airfield at Kanoya is now a Japan Self-Defense Forces base and, with rising tensions in the region, is being used by U.S. forces too, including for tanker aircraft and drones. Beijing is interested too in the kamikazes, but for a different reason. As Toshi Yoshihara at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and an expert on China’s navy has written, Beijing is quite intrigued by what it sees as Japan’s successful use of kamikaze attacks against the U.S. fleet in 1944-45, including the high casualty rate in hulls, and the inability of carrier- or land-based American aircraft to take out all the Kyushu airfields from which kamikazes were launching. Investing heavily in its coastal-based anti-access and aerial denial capabilities, it seems China has now taken a page from the Japanese book.