This book is interesting on two different levels. On one: it provides a great deal of information concerning World War II (WWII) as fought in the Pacific and as seen from the perspective of Japan's military leaders; I.e., what they were thinking, how they saw the war progressing, what their plans were, and how they tried to implement those plans. The primary thrust of the book, however, is to broadly explore the history of Japan's Kamikaze, with emphasis on WWII.
I suspect that most readers, coming new to this subject, will know very little about the Japanese Kamikaze and what little they do know will likely be based on film footage shot by U.S. Navy photographers during Kamikaze attacks toward the end of WWII. From this footage, one might conclude that these attacks were largely ineffective, and, when viewed from a Western perspective, that these suicide pilots were crazy or had been forced into such action. As this book makes clear, however, although done partly out of national desperation, these attacks were effective to some degree and the pilots were volunteers who knew exactly what they were doing.
As a case in point, consider the woman whose husband's application to become a Kamikaze pilot had been turned down several times because he had a wife and three children. To free him to become a Kamikaze, she killed her three children and committed suicide. Crazy? Perhaps, but that was the Japanese mind-set at the time.
The thing which interested me most about this book, however, was that it examined the history of the Kamikaze in Japan and then explored the Kamikaze in its larger sense. In doing so, it explained how the well known Kamikaze attacks came about and delved into lesser known Kamikaze. For example: I had never considered that the Banzai attacks carried out by Japanese soldiers on various islands in the Pacific were actually Kamikaze attacks, nor did I know that the two-man mini-subs which attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, were essentially Kamikaze, nor that Japanese fighter planes which rammed U.S. bombers during WWII were considered Kamikaze, nor that the Japanese built and deployed a fleet of torpedoes manned and guided by Kamikaze volunteers, nor that the small balloons launched from Japan and carried to the United States, 7000 miles away by the "Divine Wind" were by definition "Kamikaze," "Kami" (Japanese pantheon of Gods) "Nishi Kaze" ((West Wind).
I have only one complaint about this book. The author uses way too many repetitive and italicized Japanese words, which makes for difficult reading by a Westerner. But, if you're interested, that's the price you'll have to pay. So, if you are interested in learning a bit more about WWII history, especially from the Japanese perspective, and would like to learn about Japan's extended Kamikaze force, you should enjoy reading this book. In doing so, you'll likely find that the Kamikaze was much more than you thought it was.
