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Cady Goldfield wrote:
Peter's remarks regarding bentatsu and tekken seisai bring to mind an interesting book I read some time back, "Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers" (Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, 2006, University of Chicago Press). There is a lot of anecdotal material in her book that attests to the treatments Peter cites (definitely, there was no love involved here), and it provides some interesting insights into the authoritarian Japanese government during WII, the symbolic position and role of the emperor, and the harsh treatment of and expectations of ultimate sacrifice that young men were expected to make not for their homeland and people, but for their emperor.
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Cady,
The book you mentioned is a sequel to an earlier book by Emiko Ohnuki Tierney, which contains much of the argument. The title is
Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History, published in 2002. These two books have led to another book, much more 'journalistic' than Ohnuki-Tierney, but none the worse for that. The title is
Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze, by M G Sheftall, published in 2005.