On 28th July 2021, Global Asia Research Center, Waseda University, hosted a workshop entitled “The Invention of the Kamikaze: Coercion and Resistance in the Japanese Military” presented by Associate Professor of History Nick Kapur from Rutgers University-Camden, New Jersey.

The workshop started with an overview of previous literature on Kamikaze and the introduction of Vice-Admiral Takajiro Onishi as the “father of Kamikaze.” The historical records of earlier scholarships on the recruitment or the planning for Kamikaze — the special attacks began as early as mid-1943 for the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines.

Professor Kapur stressed the knowledge gap of the previous studies that the narrative of the invention and recruitment of the Kamikaze special attack group had been focusing on the reasons pilots and soldiers agreed to join the special attack. By listing the example of Lt. Seki Yukio as the “first Kamikaze,” Professor Kapur challenged the widely-known perception that instead of sacrificing for the state, the decisions of joining the Kamikaze special attack lean more toward personal-level. For instance, three personal memoirs and letters of the Kamikaze senior-level officers demonstrated the resistance of using the Kamikaze as the strategy to win the war, like that of Okajima Kiyokuma, Minobe Tadashi, Yoshida Atsushi, Yasuda Kakeo, Teraoka Kinpei, and Vice Admiral himself, Onishi. The resistance against military senior-level officers indicated that employing the special attack tactic during wartime was irrational and idiosyncratic.

After a fruitful discussion, the research highlights the shifting of perspectives of how historians narrated the Kamikaze and the errors within the stereotypical structure of the Japanese military practice. Professor Kapur also added that it was essential to broaden the scope of the subject of observation from elites and middle class who were recruited for Kamikaze to those of the lower class, for that could uncover new shreds of evidence and reasonings point to how Kamikaze was invented and was deemed as damnation by scholars.