Front and Back Covers. Volume 20, Number 2. April 2004

Abstract

Front and Back Covers. Volume 20, Number 2. April 2004Front coverThe front cover illustrates Emiko Ohnuki‐Tierney's article on Special Attack Force (kamikaze) pilots (see pp. 15‐21). Kazuyo Umezawa, a Navy ensign, is shown on 28 April 1945, at the age of 18, about to embark on his 'no‐return' mission from Kokubun Base, southern Kyushu, to meet his death as a tokkotai pilot. He was one of 3000 so‐called 'boy pilots' (shonen hikohei) who, without finishing their higher education, were drafted towards the end of the war. State propaganda aestheticized their fatal missions, using the symbol of the cherry blossom to the extent that some pilots themselves fastened branches of cherry blossoms on their uniforms and headgear before taking off. When he was drafted, Kazuyo's mother pleaded with the Office of the Draft that her three other sons had already been drafted, that she had been raising her children single‐handedly since her husband's death from cancer at 42, and that her life would become even more difficult without Kazuyo. They replied that she was not the only one who suffered and that she should endure until Japan's victory. She persisted until an officer from the Draft Office threatened that she would be labelled a 'non‐national subject' (hikokumin), at which point she gave up (Umezawa Shozo, 1996, personal communication). Despite his mother's strenuous opposition, Kazuyo wanted to help her financially as well as fulfilling his obligation of loyalty to her (ko), and he therefore volunteered as a Navy practice pilot. Financial incentives for recruits included the offer of higher payments for more dangerous positions and promotion of tokkotai pilots by two ranks upon death, which sharply increased the payment (onkyu) to survivors.Shozo Umezawa explained how a few days before his brother's final flight Kazuyo had returned home cursing the Navy for killing young men. His facial expression reveals unspeakable sadness ‐ a far cry from the radiant smile often portrayed in the propaganda photos of the tokkotai pilots.Back coverSupranationalism, nationalism and 'indigeneity'The back cover shows souvenirs displayed in a typical Brussels Euro‐tourist shop. It illustrates the interview in this issue with Cris Shore and Marc Abélès on the European Union and its imminent enlargement (pp 10‐14). The EU is a putative supranational project aimed at an indeterminate future, but lacking the ritual or cultural legitimacy that the European nation‐states enjoy through their individual histories. Enlargement means that the EU will have to transcend its founding narrative, centred on avoiding war through a tight Franco‐German embrace, to find a new grand narrative. Since the EU project is very much about engineering a future, its study poses a particular challenge to anthropologists.If 'supranationalism' epitomizes an ideology of integration under assumptions of ethical and evolutionary superiority over parochial national bodies, in another take, Nancy Lindisfarne forefronts processes of globalization that are forming new transnational alliances, when she reviews the World Social Forum since 2000.Justin Kenrick and Jerome Lewis argue against equating extreme nationalism with 'indigeneity' or 'indigenous' ‐ but still envision these terms as no less culturally constructed than ideas such as 'the state' (or 'the EU'). 'Indigenous' points to lived realities best understood as including us all, not least the way transnational corporations make use of modern state power, or even academic arguments about who is 'indigenous' or not.No more powerful symbol of an integrated world exists than the attack on the World Trade Center. Emiko Ohnuki‐Tierney prepares the ground for a bold analysis of the mythical narrative in the US media that too easily conflates Al‐Qaeda civilian airline hijackers attacking Western urban targets with 'kamikaze' pilots attacking Pearl Harbor. In this issue, she examines the diaries of a number of young pilots at the end of World War II, and their thoughts, which reveal that they were cosmopolitan in their thinking, but forced to replicate in action the nationalist and militarist ideology that state propaganda aestheticized through the symbolism of the cherry blossom.