KAMIKAZE, UNLOCKING THE TRUTH

During the Pacific War, special units of the Japanese Army organized suicide missions in an attempt to halt the US Navy’s advance toward Japan. In total, no fewer than 4,000 pilots would plunge their planes into American ships at the cost of their lives.

Since the 1930s, militarist culture had permeated Japanese society and its soldiers. On this fertile ground, a subtle form of conditioning enabled the psychological subjugation of many young men during the Second World War. The kamikaze mission quickly became central to Japan’s counteroffensive. It would last ten months, up to the very last day of the war.

Blending previously unseen archives, letters, poems, and wills written by pilots just before their ultimate mission, as well as the written accounts of those who survived, this documentary evokes the sacrifice of these kamikaze pilots in the name of a war lost from the start and tells the story from within of this little-known, large-scale operation.