Brit Broadcasting Conservatism

Here's an interesting one from the LAT -

Three times during the final months of World War II, Japanese officers sent Hamazono off to die, ordering him to crash-dive a single-engine plane stuffed with bombs into an American warship.

Bad weather aborted the first mission, an oil leak the second. On his final attempt in April 1945, he encountered three American pilots over the sea off Okinawa. In the ensuing dogfight, Hamazono was burned and took shrapnel in his shoulder, but his plane limped home.

You could call him the luckiest man in Japan, though Hamazono didn't see it that way at the time.

"I was, of course, ready to die," says Hamazono, who instead has aged into a bent but dignified 81-year-old. Fate allowed him to see his hair turn wispy and gray. And fate made him part of one of history's strangest and most exclusive brotherhoods: "kamikaze survivors."

Most were still waiting for orders to fly when Japan surrendered to the Allies in September 1945. A few others were spared because they did not reach their intended targets — a failure Hamazono found intolerable at the time. He was on standby to fly a fourth mission when Japan capitulated. Denied the opportunity to redeem his honor, he felt disgraced.

"I wished I had died," he says.

In the postwar years, a traumatized nation treated the kamikaze survivors like pariahs. But in the last decade, their reputation has recovered. Publishers clamor for memoirs. Scholars pick over their backgrounds in search of an explanation for their willingness to die for a lost cause. Japanese nationalists buff and shine their memory like medals.

"Kamikaze" has ceased to be a slur in Japan. If the Japanese still can't agree on whether the pilots were victims or heroes, brainwashed conscripts or volunteers, they are at least prepared to honor their spirit of sacrifice.

Only the modern menace of the suicide bomber has emerged to spoil this sentiment.

Apparently, the exclusive group of kamikaze survivors resent being compared to suicide bombers -

The kamikazes attacked military targets. In contrast, "the main purpose of a suicide bomber is to kill as many innocent civilians as they can," Hamazono says. That, he says, "is just murder."

Read the whole thing. It raises interesting questions in that seemingly grey area in the laws of war. Despite the evil and fanatical nature of the Japanese regime during the war, I think these people have a point when they reject the comparison to Islamist suicide bombers. The sacrifice of life for your country is something we can at least vaguely identify with, when it is done against military targets. Counterforce attacks which lead to the death of the attackers are a staple of our heroic stories. The means of doing it makes little sense to us, but at least it is based on concepts we can understand: sacrifice, bravery, patriotism. Absolutely none of these things animate the minds of the cold-blooded child-killers of Hizbollah who pioneered the suicide-bombing technique.