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Kamikaze: Japan's Suicide Gods
 
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Kamikaze: Japan's Suicide Gods (Hardcover)

by Albert Axell (Author)
3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 296 pages
  • Publisher: Longman (19 Jul 2002)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 058277232X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0582772328
  • Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 16.3 x 2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 658,511 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review

'the book's depiction of the Kamikaze themselves - using quotations from their diaries and letters - is both initimate and fascinating, not to say tragic' Saul David, The Sunday Telegraph

'This account of the kamikazes is powerfully gripping...Their dedication is a mystery to the western mind, but all too close to the behaviour of the al-Qaeda flyers on 11 September." J G Ballard, The New Statesman

'What motivated Japanese pilots to fly planes on suicide missions against Allied ships during World War II? This book gives part of the answer'. Daily Mail

'A fascinating study' Bolton Evening News



Sunday Telegraph
"Intimate and fascinating."

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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars reportage not an essay, 11 Aug 2002
By Lenny Lendon (New York) - See all my reviews
The book by Axell and Kase is well documented and skilfully written. It is a kind of encyclopaedia about the kamikazes, where facts and not opinions can be found. From this point of view, it is reportage more than an essay. You will be deluded if you look at it to know the historical opinion of the authors. However, a huge mass of data has been collected. Even some details can be found which are completely new in the literature. More than once, the authors draw on Japanese sources. Will this book become a standard work on the topic? It will, provided that it is meant as reportage with its own good points and flaws.
Some parts are superfluous, or they don't add anything to the comprehension of the phenomenon. If you talk about Russian, German, American, and British kamikazes you lose sight of the particularity of the Japanese. In Italy, too, there were unities of suicide attack but the Japanese ones have been organized according to a strategy referring to a peculiar tradition. The comparison with Al-Qaeda's warriors is misleading as well. Japanese kamikazes were not terrorist at all. Axel and Kase think that both Islamic and Japanese kamikazes commit suicide because they believe in rebirth. In fact, Japanese kamikazes didn't adhere to a precise ideology, and a great deal of them was atheist. Shintoist or Buddhist kamikazes only believe in a virtual and not concrete kind of rebirth. Islamic paradise is not the Buddhist Pure Land. The Japanese Walhalla is a state of mind and not a real land. The authors don't understand such philosophical implications.
There are some interesting sections in the book. The several excerpts of the Suicide Manual are very instructive from the psychological point of view. Thus, the book is worth reading even only on such basis. On the other hand, the authors don't comment upon it. Furthermore, the Index has been compiled in a hurry: some lemmas, e. g. Nagasaki, are not in order.
The principal quality of Kamikaze. Japan's Suicide Gods consists in suggesting that, unfortunately, contemporary Japan seems to put kamikazes on the fore again. This revival could be very dangerous politically. The fathers of the kamikazes, characters such as both the vice admirals Onishi and Ugaki, have been celebrated in recent years. Other books on the topic fail to take into account these events...I put Ivan Morris' "The Nobility of Failure" before this book. I recommend this reading to they who whish to intend kamikaze ideology more deeply.
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4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Prose? no. Precise? Hardly. But a wealth of facinating info, 14 Sep 2002
A friend of mine bought me this to help with some work I was doing, and it proved a facinating font of triva not only about the kamakazi (which was not the name the Japanese called them although this was hardly mentioned in the book) but the Japanese psyche during WWII as well. What it didn't prove to be was a good read.

A part of this was written by a Japanese national and it would be interesting to know which parts for, while it provides wonderful insite, it also provides terrible sentence structure and woeful bias.

The book is definately Japanese orientated and while the parts about the Kamakazi seems to be correct to this layman, basic things about WWII seem to contreverted by just about everyone else out there. Desipte the US greed for shipping, there were such insidents as the 'Rape of Nanking' and Hulls ultimatium was "get out of China" rather than, "Give us our oil lines back." Ah well. I suppose it's nice to see someone going the opposite way and America bashing for once... damn you Michal Criton.

The worst hing however, as mentioned, is the prose. Clunky? Uh-huh, but also completely contrived, a fact which rests on the publishers shoulders if no one elses. The book's claim to be an insite into the Sept 11 attacks is completely erronious, as purported on the second page by the auther who states that the kamakazi "were not terrorists" and then goes on to spell out in 20 pages why we should compare the two. A lame hope for higher sales there!

I thank my friend for buying this for me, and I thank the authors for providing the most compeling triva about Japans role in the second world war outside of spector's "the eagle agianst the sun" I just don't thank them for the irritatingly clunky translations.... at least I hope some of that was a translation. Even the tag line... "the very thought of death is unbearable for any person of sound mind. But these youths were sound of mind...." Is a tautology and also goes against everything the book later says.

Ah well. Can't have keats and Herodotus in the same book... come to think of it, can't even have Herodotus these days...

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