Hisao Horiyama first learned how he was due to die from a simple slip of white paper. On it were written three options: to volunteer willingly, to simply volunteer, or to say no.
But as a 21-year-old airman caught in the thick of Japan’s faltering war with the Allies, he knew there was only one choice. Without hesitation, he agreed to fly his plane into the side of a U.S. warship.
With that one act of destruction, he would end his life and the lives of many others, in the name of his Emperor and as a member of the kamikaze: an elite, and supposedly invincible, group of young men whose sacrifice would deliver victory to Japan.
Horiyama was a young soldier in an artillery unit of the Japanese Imperial Army when he was drafted into the air force.
It was late 1944, and the tide of war was turning against Japan. In the newly formed kamikaze, Tokyo’s military leaders envisioned a dedicated unit of ideologically conditioned warriors willing to die a glorious death for their empire.
As a devoted subject of the Emperor, Horiyama longed for his moment of glory. “We didn’t think too much [about dying],” Horiyama said. “We were trained to suppress our emotions. Even if we were to die, we knew it was for a worthy cause. Dying was the ultimate fulfilment of our duty, and we were commanded not to return. We knew that if we returned alive that our superiors would be angry.”
Japan was still flying suicide missions up to the moment, on August 15 1945, when Emperor Hirohito announced to a shattered people traumatised by nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Japan was surrendering.
“I felt bad that I hadn’t been able to sacrifice myself for my country. My comrades who had died would be remembered in infinite glory, but I had missed my chance to die in the same way. I felt like I had let everyone down.” That was Hisao Horiyama’s story.
But not every would-be kamikaze was as fervent in their belief in death for the motherland. When Takehiko Ena learned he had been chosen to fly a suicide mission he greeted the news in a way he still finds confusing. “I felt the blood drain from my face,” he told The Guardian . “The other pilots and I congratulated each other when the order came through that we were going to attack. It sounds strange now, as there was nothing to celebrate.” Ena, 92, was part of a squadron of pilots in Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost main island, in April 1945, when the kamikaze were at their most active.
He was to pilot a crew of three aboard a plane with an 800kg bomb strapped to its undercarriage. The aircraft would have fuel only for a one-way flight. They were part of Operation Kikusui, an ambitious suicide-bombing mission against the Allied ships bombarding Japanese forces in the Battle of Okinawa, one of the bloodiest battles in the Pacific theatre.
By the latter stages of the war, Japan was relying on ageing planes that had been stripped and adapted for suicide missions It was their dismal mechanical record that was to be Ena’s salvation. On April 28, 1945, he steered his aircraft along the runway at Kushira airfield in Kagoshima prefecture, but failed to get airborne. His second mission too ended in failure.
On May 11, he was steeling himself for a third attempt. Early into what should have been his final flight, engine trouble forced Ena’s plane into the sea. Ena and his two companions survived and swam to nearby Kuroshima island, where they stayed for two-and-a-half months before being picked up by a Japanese submarine. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015
