Two U.S.-based scholars have recently published the first full-scale English version of a longtime Japanese seller, featuring letters written by Japanese student soldiers during World War II.
In the book titled "Listen to the Voices From the Sea" ("Kike Wadatsumi no Koe"), translator Midori Yamanouchi said she hopes "to give human faces to those young students," who she says were regarded as mindless "robot" soldiers in the United States.
Yamanouchi, a 72-year-old professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, translated the book with Joseph Quinn, who is a professor in the university's English department.
The first edition of the original book was published in 1949 by Wadatsumi Society, a Tokyo-based group of family members of the soldiers.
Ryoji Uehara was one of about 130,000 students who joined the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy in 1943 after the government began drafting college and university students into military service.
The 22-year-old kamikaze pilot died after he flew his aircraft carrying a large amount of gunpowder into a U.S. vessel in Kadena Bay off Okinawa Prefecture on May 11, 1945.
In his letter written the day before the suicide attack, he said, "When I am in a plane, perhaps I am nothing more than just a piece of the machine, but as soon as I am on the ground again I find that I am a complete human being after all, complete with human emotions."
He also said it was inevitable that "an authoritarian and totalitarian nation, however much it may flourish temporarily, will eventually be defeated."
"What more needs to be said about fascist Italy? Nazi Germany, too, has already been defeated, and we see that all the authoritarian nations are now falling down one by one."