PALESTINIAN TERRORISTS AND JAPANESE KAMIKAZES: Are there comparisons? Japanese Kamikazes are making a comeback in Japan--as role models for Japanese youth:

Long a synonym for the waste of war, the suicidal flyers are now being glorified in a film written by Tokyo's governor, Shintaro Ishihara, a well-known nationalist and co-author of the 1989 book "The Japan that Can Say No." And a museum about the kamikazes in the southern town of Chiran, near the airstrip where Uchida and others took off, gets more than 500,000 visitors a year.

One difference between the kamikazes and the Palestinian terrorists of course is that kamikazes are a memory--and even an inspiration for Japanese youth--but apparently not an actual goal.

...No one is publicly calling for young Japanese to kill themselves for the nation these days. But the renewed hero-worship of the kamikazes coincides with a general trend in Japanese society toward seeing the country's war effort as noble, and mourning the fading of the ethic of self-sacrifice amid today's wealth.

Then again, there are certain similarities between today's Palestinian terrorists and the kamikazes. There have been indications for a while that not all suicide bombers are driven by ideology. The same is true of the kamikazes of WWII:

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, a University of Wisconsin anthropologist and author of "Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers," said that the pilots' private writings and other evidence show that rather than stoic warriors, many of them were tortured souls, browbeaten and abused into flying to their deaths.

Of course, while today's Japanese have only memories of WWII and are therefore able to glorify the kamikazes, there is a very different memory of WWII that Japan to this day tries not to glorify, but to forget--or deny: the memory of Nanking. In Denying History, Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman write:

Nanking was only one of many atrocities committed by the Japanese between 1931 and 1945, in what Iris Chang has called "the forgotten holocaust of World War II," the subtitle of her disturbing book The Rape of Nanking...As in the Nazi mass murder of the Jews, totals of the numbers killed vary, ranging from 1,578,000 to 6,325,000, with a mid-range moderate estimate of 3,949,000 people exterminated as a direct result of Japanese crimes against humanity (i.e. noncombatants). When total Chinese deaths are calibrated to include Japanese military actions through looting, starvation, bombing, medical experimentation, and battle deaths, historians estimate that the figure may be as high as 19 million...the Nazis did not hold a monopoly on human cruelty. There seems nothing the Nazis did to Jews that would have shocked their Japanese counterparts. (p.232)

The difference between the Japanese and the Palestinian leadership is that while the former denies the murders of civilians, that latter remains at a level where the murder of civilians is glorified--and why not. Japan knows that to admit such atrocities is to bring world judgment to bear: perhaps even more than merely metaphorically. On the other hand, Fatah and Hamas have long realized that they have a free hand. They have the world's implicit assent, if not their financial assistance.

Personally, I think it is instructive to compare the Arabs and the Japanese directly--as Raphael Patai does in his book The Arab Mind. At one point in his book, Patai writes about old Arab poems:

Compared to the value of honor[,] that of a human life was minor--an attitude exemplified by numerous stories, both old and new, telling of how the hero fulfills a pledge, which is a matter of honor, or protects or restores his honor, even though it requires that he sacrifice the life of his own son or of one or more of his subordinates. As a widely read Arab friend of mine once remarked in a critical vein, both the Japanese and the Arabs are ready to kill in order to regain their lost honor; but the Japanese will kill himself, while the Arab will kill somebody else. [Emphasis added; p.224]

And that is the point.

Technorati Tag: Japan and Kamikazes and Palestinians and Terrorists and Raphael Patai.