Kamikaze and Samurai

Chiran is a small town in Southern Kyushu. It is far from the usual tourist routes for foreign visitors, but features two interesting sites: The WWII Kamikaze museum and a samurai village.

Chiran had been one of the major airbases for the "special airforce attack groups", better known as "kamikaze". These young soldiers were trained as pilots and their mission was to crash into the US ships in the South Pacific, each one was certain to loose his life. The museum tells the story of the soldiers, how they lived in Chiran and how they were trained for their mission. While kamikaze pilots are often portrayed as these crazy, evil Japanese in the West, you see that it's just a story like elsewhere - young people being seduced by an idea and manipulated until they are ready to sacrifice everything. Seems to be a neverending and universal story, sadly enough.

The museum showed the pictures and goodbye letters of many of the over 1000 kamikaze pilots, some of them translated into English. The pilots were all very young, the youngest only 17, most in their early 20s. It's hard to imagine that the young boys on the picture would sacrifice their lives for an idea. Many stated in their letter that they were dying for the Japanese emperor. After this place where more recent Japanese history was shown, I visited the samurai villages at the other end of the town. There is a small village of nicely reconstructed samurai houses. Even better than the houses I liked the lovely Japanese garden and the carp ponds. Such simple beauty that invites for meditation.