Kamikaze Pilots Research Articles

The Blossom and the Firefly by Sherri L. Smith

Reviewed by: The Blossom and the Firefly by Sherri L. Smith Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Smith, Sherri L. The Blossom and the Firefly. Putnam, 2020 [320p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-5247-3790-0 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-5247-3791-7 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 6-10 Fifteen-year-old Hana is a Nadeshiko girl in 1945 Japan, tasked with caring for the kamikaze pilots at the nearby airbase, doing their laundry, cleaning the barracks, and eventually waving goodbye as the Tokkō American fleet inching toward Okinawa in World War II. Taro is one of those pilots, and over the few days he is at the base, he and Hana bond over a shared love of music, despite knowing that their relationship has a clear end date. The day comes, and Taro flies off, but to his great shame, he survives the crash and returns home in dishonor, while Hana struggles with grief over his presumed death. Smith plays with timelines here to effectively maximize tension and emotion: readers watch Taro grow up from a baby to a teenaged soldier, but, in alternating chapters, they meet Hana at fifteen, already traumatized by a war that has taken her father, her school, and her sense of safety. Their short time together easily lends the story the sighs and swoons of a doomed romance, but their relationship is not so much star-crossed as it is a genuine depiction of two terrified kids finding a respite, however brief, from the hopelessness of war. Details of the Japanese involvement in the war, its preceding battles with China, and the culture's devotion to their emperor and his honor are carefully woven in, and Smith provides a glossary and bibliography. The final scene is a hopeful, tearful climax, and fans of Berry's Lovely War (BCCB 2/19) will find this happy ending especially satisfying. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Japanese and the War: Expectation, Perception, and the Shaping of Memory by Michael Lucken

Reviewed by: The Japanese and the War: Expectation, Perception, and the Shaping of Memory by Michael Lucken Beatrice Trefalt (bio) The Japanese and the War: Expectation, Perception, and the Shaping of Memory. By Michael Lucken; translated by Karen Grimwade. Columbia University Press, New York, 2017. xxii, 351 pages. $65.00, cloth; $64.99, E-book. Michael Lucken's book, made available from the French by Karen Grimwade's skillful translation, addresses the place of World War II in Japanese history and memory, and provides an important addition to the Anglophone scholarship on wartime and postwar Japan. Lucken provides a fascinating account of the war in Japan as it was imagined and experienced on the home front, and as it has been remembered since, thus complementing and extending in crucial ways the current scholarship on Japanese history and memory on the war. Lucken implicitly aims to complicate the simplistic dichotomies which underpin and undermine much of the commentary on the war in Japan: victims versus aggressors, conflict versus peace, conservatives or nationalists versus progressives and pacifists, or state versus population. As Lucken demonstrates, the many spaces in which the war was imagined, was experienced, and has been remembered in Japan defy easy categorization: at the level of each community and even individual, there are overlapping and, at times, contradictory stances, timelines, and emotions. In a world where the words "Japan" and "war" joined together become entwined in a host of acrimonious debates about denial of atrocities, failure to atone, or cynical refusal to acknowledge the suffering of victims,1 Lucken's careful and sober analysis is a must-read. An important aspect of Lucken's approach is his transwar focus. His discussion of the evolution of memories of the war in Japan is anchored in a careful analysis of the many meanings the war had at the time of its prosecution. [End Page 159] The artificial separation of Japan's history into a "bad" prewar and a "good" postwar has been criticized for a long time, not least since the death of the Showa emperor in 1989 reminded everyone that some of the continuities between pre- and postwar Japan were obvious.2 Though the artificiality of this separation is widely recognized and upheld, nevertheless it is rare for the two periods to be tackled together, and most work on war and memory in Japan usually finds a starting point with the defeat. Lucken, however, argues convincingly that it is important to rethink time frames, and that it would be more useful to consider separately the period between 1937 and 1943, when invasions were successful and eventual victory still appeared possible; the period between 1944 and 1952, when defeat was presaged through bombing and turned into reality and occupation; and the period after 1952, when Japan returned to sovereignty (pp. viii–ix). Admittedly these slices of time are also artificial (and obfuscate the many changes that occurred within each), but they are certainly more useful than the 1945 divide. These time frames allow Lucken to separate carefully and analyze, as these were discussed during the war, aspects of wartime mobilization, of the commemoration of fallen soldiers, of the impact of bombing, or the deployment of kamikaze pilots, to name just a few topics, as opposed to what these and other elements became after the war in the debates about history and the conflicting memories of individuals and groups. This approach injects our understanding of the wartime period with an appreciation of its cultural and symbolic elements, undermines a tendency to homogenize both period and experiences of that period, and provides crucial elements to understand the diversity and fluidity of postoccupation attitudes to the war. Lucken brings to his entire analysis an attention to literature, art, and architecture as well as to the religious elements that shape the funeral rites and the commemoration of fallen soldiers, a crucial element of any nation's management of a wartime past. There is little attention paid in this book to the functioning of government, to the reach of bureaucracy, or to hierarchies of authority in either the wartime or the postwar period. Lucken does not ignore government and bureaucratic structures but rather suggests that they do...

Strength in numbers: A survival strategy that helps explain social bonding and commitment.

We seek strength in numbers as a survival strategy, so it seems unlikely that social bonds would make us want to intentionally die. However, our deep desire to be protected may explain our attraction to exaggerated notions of intentional self-sacrifice - even though research on suicide terrorists, kamikaze pilots, and cult members suggests they were not actually dying for their group.

Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 by Samuel Hideo Yamashita

Reviewed by: Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 by Samuel Hideo Yamashita Simon Partner (bio) Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945. By Samuel Hideo Yamashita. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2015. xii, 238 pages. $29.95, cloth; $29.95, E-book. Samuel Hideo Yamashita’s Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 offers many insights into the wartime experiences of Japanese housewives and children, city dwellers and farmers, civilians and servicemen. Yamashita draws on his long experience with wartime diaries and letters: he has collected 160 diaries, translated (according to his website) 65 of them, and included several in a fine anthology, Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005). Many more are featured in this book. However, the reader who is looking for a comprehensive account of daily life in wartime Japan—if we understand daily life as the everyday experiences of a broad cross-section of the population—will be disappointed. The book contains three interesting chapters on the broader picture of daily life in wartime Japan (these chapters—1, 2, and 7—would have made more sense grouped together in my opinion). However, the remaining five chapters focus on two special groups—450,000 evacuee children sent with their teachers into the provinces, and a small group of kamikaze pilots—and one special day: August 15, 1945. These are fascinating topics which certainly involved “ordinary” people (if such a category actually exists—one of the strengths of this book is its vivid portrayal of unique personalities). But they [End Page 189] by no means represent the range of daily life experiences of Japan’s 70 million people during the eight years from the “China Incident” to Japan’s surrender, or even during the five years explicitly covered by the book. There is by now a considerable body of work in English (and much more in Japanese) on civilian Japanese experiences of World War II. Yama shita has drawn liberally on some of the classic works in English (e.g., Thomas Havens’s Valley of Darkness and John Dower’s essay “Sensational Rumors, Seditious Graffiti, and the Nightmares of the Thought Police”1), though without actively engaging with (or even mentioning) these influential works in his text. But he could also have drawn on an extensive historiography that encompasses some of the complexity of wartime experience in a modern society. These include works on art and music; boys’ and girls’ education; men’s and women’s labor; consumption and saving; clothing; rural life; women and childrearing; military conscription; and government propaganda and censorship; not to mention the experiences of almost three million Japanese civilians living in Japan’s formal and informal empire.2 That said, the three topics covered by Yamashita’s chapters on daily life—neighborhood mobilization, food security, and modes of resistance—are all interesting, albeit limited by his heavy reliance on diaries and his limited use of other available primary and secondary sources. The basic outlines of the stories of mass mobilization, neighborhood associations, food rationing, and food scarcity are well documented, and Yamashita does little more than summarize existing research. But his diaries offer vivid illustration of what these conditions meant in practice for urban Japanese [End Page 190] families. For most, their enthusiastic embrace of the war effort bumped up against the harsh realities of burdensome obligations, stress and exhaustion, shortage and hunger, fear for their own and loved ones’ safety, and, eventually, the prospect of invasion and defeat. The diaries also illustrate the diversity of responses to the war situation, from the protected comfort of a wealthy journalist, to the wholehearted efforts of middle-class housewives, to outright defeatism. Indeed, the chapter on popular resistance is to me the most interesting in the whole book, revealing as it does the determination of many people to preserve a private space in their lives separate from their country’s “total war,” even as they collaborated outwardly with the war effort. It is fascinating to me that the same diary genre that for some was a coercive space in which they felt obliged to represent themselves as aspiring “splendid citizens” was...

The Structure of Feeling – Emotion Culture and National Self-Sacrifice in World Politics

Why do individuals sacrifice themselves to defend a nation-state? This article emphasises the link between emotion and culture by investigating the affective reproduction of culture in world politics. Building on the tradition of Émile Durkheim, it introduces the concept of emotion culture to IR. Emotion cultures are understood as the culture-specific complex of emotion vocabularies, feeling rules, and beliefs about emotions and their appropriate expression that facilitates the cultural construction of political communities, such as the nation-state. It is argued that emotions provide a socio-psychological mechanism by which culture moves individuals to defend a nation-state, especially in times of war. By emotionally investing in the cultural structure of a nation-state, the individual aligns him/herself with a powerful cultural script, which then dominates over other available scripts. The argument is empirically illustrated by the case of the so-called Japanese kamikaze pilots.

Memories of the Tokko: An Analysis of the Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots

ABSTRACTThe present article examines the Chiran Tokko Heiwa Kaikan [Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots] located in Chiran, Japan, a popular kamikaze pilot memorial site to study the memories of kamikaze pilots the museum promotes. By examining the museum, I discuss militaristic ideas promoted by the museum that are coupled with ambiguous pacifist discourse, presumably for pragmatic reasons. Through my analysis, I also attempt to illustrate the importance of considering geographical location such as a town, city, or prefecture where political and economical considerations play important roles in the establishment and maintenance of commemorative sites.

Contigo en la distancia by Carla Guelfenbein

about identity and belonging, Peruvian novelist Isaac Goldemberg explores the many artistic possibilities of detective fiction in his fourth novel, Remember the Scorpion. In Peruvian letters, detective fiction has a limited tradition, as compared to that of other countries such as Argentina and Mexico; nevertheless, Goldemberg’s novel overcomes such shortcomings to offer a narrative filled with suspense, melodrama, and social criticism. In May 1970, while dealing with the aftermath of one of the biggest earthquakes in Peru’s history and as the population is enthralled by the national team’s participation in a soccer World Cup, Captain Simon Weiss is charged with investigating two gruesome crimes in Lima. In the first case, a Japanese immigrant is found crucified and beheaded in a pool hall, while in the other an elderly Jewish man is found hanged in his room in a downtown hostal. In both cases, the destruction left behind by World Word II in Europe and immigrant survival in South America haunt the lives of each victim’s past. Such is also the case of Captain Weiss, a Jewish Peruvian detective who was adopted by Jewish immigrants as a boy after spending time in a German concentration camp. In fact, it is Weiss’s sense of justice that led him to a career in Peru’s police force, where he has now reached the rank of a captain and is a respected detective. Weiss at first comes across as an intelligent , courageous individual with an impeccable sense of duty to his institution. While unraveling the many intricate secrets behind these two homicides (not the least of which is the recurring image of a scorpion), Weiss must come to terms with his childhood scars and other ghosts from the past. As the narrative progresses, the reader learns of Weiss’s many human frailties—including his love for Margarita, a mestizo prostitute fifteen years his elder, his addiction to cocaine and opium, and his sentimental temperament. In many ways, such is also the case of his sidekick, Katón Kanashiro, a young lieutenant who accompanies Weiss in his fact-finding mission. Kanashiro, the son of a Japanese immigrant, is in love with Sonia Galindo, a mestizo television journalist whose reporting pretends to keep the public informed of the truth behind the two homicides . However, when the real culprits are discovered, truth (and any possible sense of justice) also becomes a questionable concept . Instead, what emerges from the narrative is a critical portrait of modern Peru as a multicultural but fragmented society where ethnic prejudices are part of the daily social dynamic and corruption permeates the highest spheres of government. As in other works by Goldemberg, Remember the Scorpion is a novel in which national identity is confronted with personal , cultural loyalties. In the end, Weiss’s fate is the consequence of having to face his many ethical conundrums, including a questionable sense of belonging to Peruvian mainstream culture and an elusive sense of justice. Goldemberg’s excellent, fast-paced novel, well translated by Jonathan Tittler, is a reminder of this author’s great talent as a storyteller, someone whose many works deserve more critical attention. César Ferreira University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Carla Guelfenbein. Contigo en la distancia. Miami. Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial. 2015. 250 pages. Chilean writer Carla Guelfenbein’s Contigo en la distancia is the 2015 winner of the prestigious Alfaguara Novel Prize. The novel takes its title from a popular bolero written in 1946 by Cuban singer-songwriter César Portillo de la Luz, a song that has been interpreted over the years by many international artists. Like Guelfenbein’s previous four novels, this work revolves around the intimate lives of a limited number Naoki Hyakuta The Eternal Zero Trans. Chris Brynne & Paul Rubin Vertical On the surface, Naoki Hyakuta’s novel presents an intriguing mystery as two modern-day siblings try to uncover the character and circumstances of the death of their grandfather, who died as a kamikaze pilot. The expansive narrative, however, does not shy away from polemic questions and concerns of the motivations of kamikaze pilots or the reluctance of present-day Japan to face the past. The novel brings humanity to the often faceless...

Coping With Imminent Death: Thematic Content Analysis on Narratives by Japanese Soldiers in World War II.

Coping affects somatic and psychological outcomes. This article explores narratives in a book, Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers, which report on the ways of coping used by each kamikaze participant before and during military service. The purpose of this study is to observe the possibility of a trend in coping strategies and consider how these trends inform us about other populations facing imminent death. This study analyzed data and extracted meaning from the narratives in the book (thematic content analysis). Within the thematic content analysis, the Ways of Coping scale was used, which describes the coping strategies people use when facing problems. The most frequently used coping strategies before they entered the military were "Accept Responsibility," "Endurance/Obedience/Effort," and "Self-Control," while once in the military, they were "Accept Responsibility" and "Endurance/Obedience/Effort." All the coping strategies used by kamikaze pilots appeared to focus on the passive self, which may be the type of coping in other populations facing death.

Discourse on the Kamikaze Special Attack Corps and the Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots -The Miseducation on the War and Peace in Japan-

Discourse on the Kamikaze Special Attack Corps and the Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots -The Miseducation on the War and Peace in Japan-

The Suicide Forest: A Marxist Analysis of the High Suicide Rate in Japan

Suicide in Japan is a significant issue. The samurai warrior who commits hari-kari (hara-kiri) and the kamikaze pilot have long been icons of self-immolation. But even today the suicide rate in Japan is roughly 60 percent above the global average, and sociologists have long puzzled over the enigma. What about Japanese society has made it so prone to this phenomenon? Many have referenced forms of Japanese religious and cultural beliefs, but this article seeks to register a more profound explanation through an account of the trajectory and peculiarities of Japanese historical development. The author uses Trotsky's theory of uneven and combined development to better elucidate this trajectory before combining this analysis with some of the concepts deployed by the classical sociologist Émile Durkheim in his seminal work on the subject.

Suicidal Behavior in Immigrant Populations

Culture is a dynamic and complex phenomenon that can affect how vulnerable or resilient people are responding to psychiatric disease, trauma and other factors that can precipitate suicidal behavior. Some cultures glorify suicide (i.e. historically the notorious Japanese Kamikaze pilots and more recently the radicalized suicide bombers with their own interpretations of religious scripture and ideologies); others prohibit it (i.e. certain religious groups such as Islam and Catholicism). Immigrants, particularly refugees, have long been treated as a stigmatized and socially excluded people from their destination culture. This and other issues such as poverty, acculturation stress and unemployment that immigrants may encounter can have profound effects on their mental health so much so that they may resort to tragically ending their lives with their own hands. The ‘idioms of distress’ that immigrants use may not necessarily match diagnostic criteria and although culture is being homogenized by globalization, there are no universal models of psychotherapy or pharmacotherapy for the treatment of mental illness that may be heralded by suicidal behavior. To summarize succinctly: one size does not fit all. Mental healthcare providers need to receive training in cultural competency in order to effectively assess and treat an immigrant who may present in a crisis. The focus of this presentation is suicidal behavior in migrant groups. We will discuss and analyse the social and cultural factors that influence suicidal behavior in this population. We will also identify the barriers to treatment and early intervention, prevention and management strategies targeted at this specific group.

The Change, Oblivion and Commemoration of Korean Kamikaze Pilot in South Korea and Japan

The Change, Oblivion and Commemoration of Korean Kamikaze Pilot in South Korea and Japan

Music and Dance in the Japanese Military “Comfort Women” System: A Case Study in the Performing Arts, War, and Sexual Violence

Two Women's Stories Yi Yongsu was born in the southeastern Korean city of Daegu in 1928 during the second decade of Japanese colonial rule in Korea, which lasted from 1910 to 1945. (1) Her family was quite poor and was unable to afford her schooling; she worked in factory from very young age. But she was keen to study, and so she attended evening classes. She had always loved to sing and received some formal training in music. In 1944, at the age of fifteen, she was taken from Daegu by Japanese businessman and placed on boat to Taiwan. On the boat she was raped repeatedly by soldiers and others. After that she was taken to Hsinchu, about sixty kilometers southwest of Taipei, where she was placed in sex camp, imprisoned, and forced to have sex with soldiers. She had been made sexual slave of the Japanese military. The camp was near an air force airport that served as base for kamikaze pilots, and as the war turned desperate for the Japanese, the number of suicide missions increased dramatically. One of these pilots came to visit Yi Yongsu several times and fell in love with her. One day, he told her that he was leaving on suicide mission and wouldn't be coming back. gave me his photo and the toiletries he had been using. He had come to me twice before and said he had got venereal disease from me. He said he would take the disease to his grave as my present to him. Then he taught me song. (2) In 2004 she sang this song for me at her home in Daegu: I take off with courage, leaving Taiwan behind, Riding and rising above waves of gold and silver clouds. There is no one to see me off, And this little one is the only one who cries for me. I take off with courage, leaving Hsinchu behind, Riding and rising above waves of gold and silver clouds. There is no one to see me off, And the only one who cries for me is (3) Through the song Yi Yongsu learned where she was--she hadn't known before. The song was Hikokinori no uta (Song of the pilot), Japanese military song (gunka) associated with kamikaze pilots. He had changed the words, adding his own place of departure and putting in the Japanese nickname he had given her, Toshiko. After the war, Yi Yongsu returned to the newly partitioned Korean peninsula and began her long life as an outsider in postwar South Korea. She was reluctant to marry, and she was mainlined into the burgeoning South Korean domestic drinking house industry, where she had to pour drinks, sing, and socialize with male customers. Later she ran shop, worked in markets, and sold insurance. She never bore children, although she married an elderly man at the age of sixty, feeling a little sad that I would die without ever having had the opportunity to wear white veil. (4) In 1992 she came forward and began her life as an activist, seeking justice for herself and other women who suffered as she had during the war. (5) Mun Okju was born in 1924, also in Daegu, to family of four children. Her father died when she was eight, and her family was desperately poor. She did housework, worked in slipper factory, and took some classes at gwonbeou, private school and agency for traditional female entertainers (variously called gisaeng, giiiyeo, or other names). As teenager, before completing her courtesan training, she was already being called to sing at drinking parties. (6) In 1940 Mun Okju was abducted by Japanese military personnel, sent to Manchuria, and forced to provide sexual services for between twenty and thirty soldiers day. She lost her virginity this way. She escaped her enslavement in Manchuria and returned to Korea but was conscripted back into sexual slavery and spent the remainder of the war shuttled around Southeast Asia in sexual bondage to the Japanese military. An accomplished singer, she was often called to sing at officers' banquets and farewell parties, often alongside Japanese geishas. …

War and Peace: War Memories and Museums in Japan

AbstractHow is war remembered in public places in Japan? The high profile ‘peace’ museums of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Yushukan, the museum that is attached to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, have dominated both the English and Japanese language literature about sites of remembrance since the 1990s. The thrust of much of the literature emphasises the divide between Japan's recognition of its place as a victim of atomic bombing in war, and its recognition or denial of its aggression in East and Southeast Asia. In the 21st century, other less well‐known public institutions in Japan (Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots, Shokeikan Museum for Wounded Soldiers, Showakan, Okinawa Prefectural Peace Park and Memorial Museum, and Himeyuri Memorial and Museum) have produced different perspectives of Japan's wartime history. By briefly examining these lesser‐known museums, we demonstrate how the concept of ‘peace’ has been recast in various ways to provide legitimating contexts in which to rehabilitate Japanese people's experiences during the war. This research suggests that beyond the binary of ‘victim‐victimiser’ analyses of Japanese war memory there is room for research in this field that recognises and engages the complexity of how Japan's controversial wartime past is presented in the Japanese public domain.

The Colonial and Transnational Production of Suicide Squad at the Watchtower and Love and the Vow

This article places two Japan-Korea collaboration films produced during the Pacific War— Suicide Squad at the Watchtower ( Bōrō no kesshitai , 1943) and Love and the Vow ( Ai to chikai , 1945)—within the broader colonial and transnational context of filmmaking. Specifically, it focuses on the relationship of these films to the careers of their co-directors, Imai Tadashi (1912-1991) and Ch'oe In-gyu (1911-1950?). At the same time, the article shows how cinematic and cultural conventions such as the bildungsroman and the "Victorian empire film," which are more commonly associated with cultural production in the modern West, can, with appropriate adjustments, be fruitfully used to understand the power and entertainment value of these films. Suicide Squad at the Watchtower portrays a joint Japanese-Korean police squad controlling the border between Manchuria and Korea and its service to the Japanese empire; Love and the Vow is a story about a Korean orphan boy who, after interviewing the family of a kamikaze pilot, is inspired to become an imperial soldier himself. These two films were joint projects between Tōhō Film in Japan, where Imai was employed, and the Korean Motion Picture Production Corporation, the only film production company in colonial Korea (and the company into which all Korean film production companies had been absorbed during the war).

Nippon‘s nostalgic national narrative: Ishihara Shintarō‘s kamikaze film Ore

This paper explores the context and features of the national narrative as presented in Ishihara Shintarˉ’s 2007 film Ore wa, kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku (‘I go to die for you’) about kamikaze pilots in World War II. Paul Virilio has argued that all battlefields are film sets. Most American war films, whether they take place in the Pacific, Normandy, Vietnam, or Iraq, bear out this statement. Clint Eastwood’s 2006 films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima follow the same pattern. Ishihara’s Ore, in contrast, comprises a set of stories intertwined around a woman, Torihama Tome, a mother figure for four young kamikaze pilots, and it takes place mainly in the private family space of her parlor. Ore replaces a masculine narrative of war, one that relies on written reports, with a feminine, oral history, one that hinges on relations to a maternal figure. In terms of genre, the film is a foundling: designed by Ishihara as a response to Eastwood’s films, Ore is in fact a television film, emulating numerous 1960s television serials on memories of war targeted at housewives. Using Yoshimi Shunya’s idea of television consumption to a “national timetable” in postwar Japan, this paper argues that rather than being purely nationalistic, Ore is largely autobiographical and nostalgic, and it feminizes the viewer. Ironically, this may also explain its surrender to Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima at the Japanese box offices.

A Study of the Memory of 'Korean Kamikaze Pilot' in Contemporary Korean and Japanese Society

A Study of the Memory of 'Korean Kamikaze Pilot' in Contemporary Korean and Japanese Society

An Evolutionary Account of Suicide Attacks: The Kamikaze Case

Explanations for suicide attacks abound. Yet the literature remains conceptually fragmented, with different authors focusing on different attitudes, incentive structures, values, psychological processes, strategic imperatives, and cultural, historical, and personal circumstances. Curiously, however, there have been few efforts to cast suicide bombing within the extensive evolutionary literature on human altruism—in which it clearly belongs. Neither have there been more than occasional efforts to mobilize the distinction between “proximate” and “ultimate” explanations, with most proposed explanations being proximate. Here we draw on content analyses from materials written by Japanese Kamikaze pilots to propose an evolvable cognitive algorithm—by hypothesis, species typical—that (1) specifies environmental circumstances under which such “heroic” behavior is likely; (2) is consistent at the proximate level with the Japanese data; and (3) that is not inconsistent with many of the diverse proximate attitudes, values, and psychological mechanisms that dominate discussions of contemporary suicide campaigns. The evolutionary perspective is not an alternative to most of the proximate explanations offered in discussions of contemporary cases but is, rather, a paradigm around which diverse proximate explanations can be organized.

SH14 SURGERY DURING WORLD WAR II IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA – THE WAR ON BOUGAINVILLE

Rabaul fell to the Japanese in January 1942. This resulted in a communications failure and a controversial, self‐ evacuation of 15 Bougainville residents aboard the MV Bilua. The evacuees included the medical officer AV Price. The only other doctor, the German‐born, Dr Bruno Kroening, remained on the island, though he had not practiced since WWI.The Japanese did not occupy Bougainville (unopposed) until July 1942 whereupon they established a significant military base at Kieta housing the 17th Division of the 8th Army Corps under Lt Gen Haruyoshi Hyakutake. The 8th Fleet HQ set up at Buin in 1943. Admiral Yamamoto and his Chief of Staff, Admiral Ugaki, were shot down in April 1943 during a visit to boost the morale of the troops. Ugaki was rescued, his severed artery tied, and he lived on to become the last kamikaze pilot of WWII.On November 1st 1943 the US Marines landed at Cape Torokina and established a beachhead. They held on despite a number of Japanese counter attacks. The 21st Evacuation Hospital (Okalahoma University) managed US casualties. A prospective study of wounds was conducted during February to April 1944 and its major findings will be summarised.From November 1944 Australian Divisions relieved the Americans and continued the recapture of the island. During this campaign Brigadier Alec Dawkins (FRACS 1935) was DDMS in Bougainville. At the Australian General Hospital, the surgical division was commanded by Lt‐Col J O Smith.

Ne'er cast a clout 'til May be out

This old saying is usually applied to the coming of summer. Many assume it means don't throw away your winter clothes until the month of May is over. Old wives' tales suggest it refers to the appearance of the new hawthorn blossom (or 'May' flower) the appearance of which is the true mark of the beginning of summer. This year has seen butterflies out early and plants recovering from April frost and snow. I was delighted to receive an invitation to fish on the River Test but soon realised that in April this would prove a challenge. And so it proved to be. This was no 'duffer's fortnight,' when the mayfly (Ephemeroptera) turn trout in the river into kamikaze pilots attacking every fly on the water, whether real or imitation, until they are sated or dispatched.