Kamikaze Attacks

Kamikaze Attacks are presented in You Only Live Twice as both a wartime tactic and an enduring ideal of self-sacrifice. Through Tiger Tanaka’s recollection, they acquire a double meaning: they are a costly military campaign that consumed young lives, and a form of combat whose concentrated violence Tanaka still regards as heroic. His account gives the idea its appeal without resolving the tension between its beauty to him and its human price.

Origins and Meaning

Tiger explains the name through the older story of a divine wind that saved Japan from invasion by Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century by destroying his fleet. In his wartime understanding, the term joined national survival to a sacred-sounding force: the pilots’ deaths could be imagined as another defense of the homeland. The historical allusion does not make the attacks impersonal. Tanaka presents them as a deliberate choice by individual pilots to die while striking the enemy at enormous cost.

The strategy became compelling to Tanaka when he was serving on intelligence work in Berlin and Rome during World War II. Far from air raids and the front, he listened to reports from home of American forces advancing island by island and airstrip by airstrip. He says that the wine turned sour and the women he slept with seemed cold; news of Japan’s danger displaced the comforts of his life abroad. Nearly forty and convinced that he had lived fully, he decided he could take the place of a younger man. His decision emerges from a specific wartime crisis, not from youthful enlistment or a mission he had already been ordered to carry out.

Tanaka’s Decision and the Attack

Tanaka says he forced the Kempeitai to accept his resignation, returned to Japan, and more or less bribed his way into a kamikaze training squadron. The difficulty of entering it mattered to his account: he recalls that young people across the nation seemed eager to serve the Emperor in this way. His story therefore sets his own late entry beside a much larger current of youthful willingness, even as he presents his age as a reason he could be spared in another role.

As aircraft ran short, the squadron used the baku, a small craft made mostly of wood and carrying a thousand pounds of explosive in its nose. It had no engine of its own; a fighter-bomber released it from beneath its belly, and the pilot steered with a single joystick. Tanaka describes a precise method of attack. Escorted by fighter planes, a pilot was to aim at a large ship, ideally an aircraft carrier bringing planes toward the islands, and dive for the flight deck and its lift machinery. Those were the carrier’s vulnerable heart, he explains, whereas the bridge and waterline were heavily armored. The method’s logic is chillingly practical: the attacker’s own plane and life become the means of reaching the target’s exposed machinery.

The Spectacle and Its Cost

The attack is also recalled as a public spectacle of departure. Tanaka remembers young men in white shifts and white headscarves associated with the samurai running toward their planes with joy. The mother planes roared as they took off at dawn or sunset toward distant targets located through spies or intercepted radio messages. The scene’s ceremonial clothing and the pilots’ apparent eagerness make the flight seem, in Tanaka’s image, like a passage toward their ancestors. He says none returned or was captured. The visual grace of the departure thus ends in an absolute absence: the men who seem to embrace their fate do not come back into the story.

James Bond asks what the attacks achieved and whether the losses were worth it. Tanaka acknowledges that they frightened the American and British fleets and that Japan lost thousands of its best young men. He answers the moral challenge by defending the attacks as one of the most glorious pages in Japan’s history, then offers a numerical measure of their effectiveness: the unit claimed 276 naval craft sunk or damaged, while the actual number, he says, was 322. The excess of actual damage over the claim complicates any simple dismissal of the operation as futile, but it does not answer Bond’s question about the price. Tanaka places military effectiveness and mass death side by side without making them cancel each other out.

A Mission Never Flown

Japan’s surrender came before Tanaka was sent on a mission. Bond calls him lucky; Tanaka answers that one of his most cherished dreams is still to dive from the sun through antiaircraft fire, strike a carrier’s flight deck, and kill its crew while destroying a costly warship. The imagined attack remains vivid after the chance to perform it has passed. In that persistence, the account distinguishes historical participation from personal identification: Tanaka did not make the flight, but he continues to inhabit its imagined moment of impact.

Tanaka also recounts Admiral Ohnishi’s suicide after the surrender. He describes the admiral’s seppuku and refusal of the coup de grace, presenting the death as an apology to the Emperor. The episode extends the logic of self-sacrifice beyond the pilots and gives the account a grim aftermath: surrender ends the military campaign, but not the code through which its participants interpret death. In the novel, Tanaka’s testimony makes Kamikaze Attacks more than a tactical detail from his past. It reveals how a strategy can remain an ideal in the mind of a survivor, even when he recognizes the lives it consumed and never had to die in its execution.