How is state nationalism developed? Why do individuals sacrifice themselves for their country? How are young and intelligent men brought to fight in wars orchestrated by a totalitarian regime? These are questions that anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney asked herself upon beginning this important and enlightening book.
One of her goals in writing it was to challenge the common perception of the so-called kamikaze pilots. She felt, she says, a moral obligation to present them in a more nuanced way to non-Japanese readers, because they are known outside Japan only as ultranationalistic zealots.
Perhaps the foremost anthropological observer of Japan's power structure, she earlier dissected a major myth in "Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through Time." In "The Monkey as Mirror: Symbolic Transformations in Japanese History and Ritual," she investigated forces of repression in Japanese history. In "Illness and Culture in Contemporary Japan," she offered one of the most trenchant and critical diagnoses of this country.