Check out the THE JAPAN TIMES for a gripping account of the War experiences of Masamichi Shida, a man who was accepted into the Japanese Naval Academy at the age of 15 back in 1942, and eventually was slated for a one-way ride as a kamikaze pilot.
In March 1945, Shida himself graduated from the academy, and a week before being commissioned he and fellow pilots were handed a questionnaire asking: “Do you strongly desire to become a kamikaze? Or only moderately? Or not at all?”
Today, Shida takes great pains to explain what was going through his head when he chose certain annihilation. For starters, he’d worked hard up to that point and didn’t want to back out now. And he was about to become an officer in a navy that placed honor before all else. He and most of his fellow pilots answered: “Strongly.”
One comrade was rumored to have demurred and quietly left the unit in shame as the others looked on with a mixture of pity and contempt. The young man — this elite soldier — had disgraced himself. But before long, Shida would find himself envying his “courage” to resist the call.
My father entered Navy when he was just 14 or 15 in 1945. He was a fighter plane trainee. Before he went to the war front, the war ended. He got back to school. I once heard him speak to other persons that he might have been kamikaze pilot if the war would go on for another a year.
My mother’s eldest brother died in the battle in China, elder brother was under detention by Soviet in Siberia for years and came back to Japan being infected with tuberculosis. My mother worked in the weapons factory when she was 12. All my parents’ or grand-parents’ generations went through that mess.