War flourishes through caricature and some of these wartime creations live on long after their political usefulness is over. One such is the grinning, suicidal kamikaze pilot, fanatically eager to die, devoted wholeheartedly if mindlessly to the emperor.
As the author of this startling and necessary new book states: "A major strategy of the state from the beginning of the Meiji period was to transfer the notion of love, loyalty and indebtedness from parents to the emperor." He was represented as some kind of national father because the people of Japan could thus be constituted as one family.
Through such fictions, the Japanese state managed to inculcate the idea that all Japanese, but particularly soldiers-to-be, must sacrifice their lives for their family -- the country. In German military tradition, the state told soldiers to kill, but in Japan soldiers were told to die. And they were punished if they did not.