大象传媒

Mariko Oi meets two of the very last surviving men to have been trained to fly their airplanes straight into enemy ships, ensuring certain death. Ninety-one-year-old Keiichi Kuwahara says 鈥淚 kept looking back, thinking that it was the last time I would see the land. And as I was doing so, the sun came out and made the horizon shine light pink. And I thought that I have to go in order to defend this beautiful land. That was what I told myself.鈥�

She talks to her own grandfather, Kenkichi Matsuo, who is 95. He was once one of the engineers making the bombs that were fitted to the planes of kamikaze pilots during the war. Through their stories she tries to understand how a whole nation apparently embraced a culture of nationalist extremism, encompassing suicide for the sake of the homeland.

(Photo: A Japanese kamikaze pilot tying on the honorary ribbons that were always worn when on a suicide mission. Credit: Keystone/Getty Images)