ACTUAL DAMAGE?: the kamikaze campaign was extremely damaging for the Allies in terms of both material and human cost; some 15,000 sailors killed or wounded, over two hundred ships damaged and about thirty sunk. Psychological effect was equally impressive (or horrific, if you prefer) — during the peak of kamikaze activity as part of the battle for Okinawa, the U.S. Navy saw higher rates of personnel incapacitation due to what was then referred to as “combat fatigue” (what we’d call traumatic stress disorder today, or what military doctors during World War One called “shell shock”) than in any American command in any service branch and in any other conflict. The JSB types, I’d imagine, verily salivate just thinking about possessing such havoc-wreaking potential. God help us all if they ever get it…

OSAMA AS TACTICAL PRAGMATIST vs KAMIKAZE AS IDEALISM: Prup, here I’m tempted to say that I’d read the situation as being neatly opposite; I think kamikaze came about as a desperate (but entirely pragmatic, if in a particularly paradigm-shattering way) solution to a fairly hopeless military picture to which a legitimating/valorizing ideology was hastily applied (and backdated to putative samurai ethics, although as I note in my article, systematic socialization for self-sacrifice in military contexts beyond the “norm” for other imperialistic/industrialized societies at the time had been going on in Japan for at least a generation or so by the time the first kamikaze flew). In other words, all the mysticism and self-Orientalizing imagery was afterthought to the more pressing needs of planting bombs on the elevators of American carrier decks with better accuracy than the Imperial Navy had been enjoying to date. Of course, once a certain psychological snowball effect accelerated between high command, the Japanese mass media, rank and file morale and public sentiment, the whole kamikaze thing, as history shows, took on a nightmarish life of its own, so to speak (and this was the point where psychological effect of kamikaze upon: 1) Allies, in a deterrent sense; and 2) home population, for “spiritual mobilization”, perhaps became more important than military goals of sinking ships).

For JSB, on the other hand, it has always been my impression that the effect of the “willingness to die” gesture on targets (civilian and/or military) has been a primary operational concern — with the capacity of suicide tactics for the sowing of maximum “ontological horror”, if you will, being the major attraction of this type of tactic. In a 9/11 context, the whole martyrdom mojo/buzz (and subsequent recruiting potential for same) the Jihadist cause has since enjoyed would have been lost if Osama had had something like cruise missiles (or remote control override to send the airliners into the buildings). Same number of “enemy dead”, but immeasurably less ideological/propagandistic bang for the buck.

Furthermore, the PURPOSE of the kamikaze was to demonstrate the willingness to ‘die rather than surrender’ of the Japanese soldier, and by extension, the Japanese citizenry. It was in fact the death that was important, and not the damage caused, which, I understand, perhaps incorrectly, was relatively minor. But for the JSB, the purpose is to cause maximum damage. The use of a suicider, I would argue, is merely incidental, that if the people sending out the JSB could create the same damage with the same or lesser expense and without the use of a suicider, they would gladly do so. (I treat, sadly, the loss of a particular life, that of the suicider, as a relatively minimal cost.) Has Osama been able to come up with a plan in which he could have taken control of the plane from the ground and flown it into the towers, is it likely that he would have abandoned it to choose instead the use of the hijackers?

Culturally exceptionalist “feel-good” value from a populist perspective is also clearly at work in this depiction.

That said, I must admit to referring, in print, to Japan’s surviving war veterans as “Japan’s last samurai”, but this was intended to be in the dignified but melancholy context of a proud, romantic and doomed breed vanishing forever, whereas the Chiran qualification of “modern” samurai is clearly libidinally juiced (i.e. iconography of vigorous, beautiful young men brimming with potent yamato damashii, as opposed to old men in their twilight years, pining about the old days “when-men-were-men”), implying the possibility of current or future revitalization (or re-mobilization, if you prefer) of this “spirit”. The difference is significant, I think.

?!?!?!?!?!?!!!????

Anyways…

I will be attending Tanaka’s talk tomorrow, and hopefully I will have time to post something about it here on Frog in a Well afterwards.