CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV: Astonishing reason 4,000 Japanese kamikaze pilots were picked to die during the Second World War
How much do you want to die for your country? Please tick the applicable box: 'Strongly desire', 'Desire', or 'Negative', and hand your application form to the admin officer.
Astonishing almost beyond belief, this was the question posed to Japanese air force pilots during World War II, as revealed in Kamikaze: An Untold History.
Slightly less surprising, since armies are the same the world over, their answers were largely ignored as officials selected the fliers who would attempt to crash their planes into Allied aircraft carriers and other ships.
Instead, kamikaze pilots were chosen according to their exam results. Those with the highest marks were excused suicide duties, since their intellect made them too valuable.
The ones with the lowest scores were also not picked, because they had not earned the right to sacrifice themselves. But nearly 4,000 Japanese men, average age 21 and four months, did fly kamikaze missions between October 1944 and August 1945.
This grimly fascinating documentary tried to explain the mentality, not only of the pilots who flew to certain death, but of the nation that encouraged them to do it.
As Japanese newsreels showed the pilots sharing a solemn ceremonial drink — lemonade, since they had sworn off alcohol — and radio announcers read out the young men's wills, a cult of kamikaze gripped the country.
Their self-immolation became a symbol of what was expected from every citizen, and the slogan '100 million kamikaze' was a national catchphrase. The pilots were known as 'war gods' and 'mighty eagles'.
'Your divine battle will be known for eternity,' declared the newsreader on one piece of archive footage. Workers wore white bandanas in their honour.
It seems incomprehensible, until we realise that many of the young men didn't want to die at all. They simply felt they had no choice.
One man who wasn't picked said he saw a comrade receive his orders to 'volunteer' with horror: 'My parents didn't send me to university to die,' the doomed man howled.
Another survivor, Hijikata Toshio, bravely marked his questionnaire 'negative'.
He was engaged to be married, and his ambition was to be a maths teacher, he said. 'Taking a bullet from an enemy is one thing but blowing myself up didn't seem right.'
Most of the veterans, filmed over several years, were in their 90s. One, an American sailor named Seth Irving who described waves of kamikaze planes divebombing his fleet, was 103.
By the end of the war, so many Japanese aircraft had been destroyed that the pilots were sent out in trainer biplanes with explosives strapped to their fuselage. Slow and cumbersome, they were easily shot down.
Survival had become a matter of chance. One pilot, Arai Toshio, played rock-paper-scissors with a fellow flier, for the right to die in their last remaining plane.
He lost . . . and lived to be 99.
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