Kamikaze: How Japan Talked 4,000 Boys Into Dying

0:00 Four thousand pilots, one order 0:42 The wrong answer 1:20 The blade's other job 3:34 A prop in a courtroom 7:26 Swords banned, idea kept 9:22 The general's funeral 11:08 Japan starts losing 15:02 The clue explained The admiral who planned it killed himself the old way the day Japan surrendered, and it took him most of a day to die. If you've ever wondered why young men would agree to crash their own planes into ships, this is the strange two-hundred-year path that idea actually took. It starts with an old short sword that samurai used only to avoid capture, centuries before any of this. Peace turns that sword into a courtroom ceremony, a new government turns the ceremony into a legend, and a losing war finally sends that legend into the cockpit. Topics covered: kamikaze pilots explained, why kamikaze pilots volunteered, history of seppuku, samurai suicide ritual, bushido history explained, Hagakure book, Nitobe Bushido Soul of Japan, Meiji Restoration and the samurai, Japanese military propaganda WWII, forty-seven ronin, Battle of the Philippine Sea, kamikaze special attack units. Stay for the end: the man who ordered the first kamikaze mission made a very different choice himself, once the war was over. #Kamikaze #History #WWII Sources Ohnuki-Tierney, "Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers" (University of Chicago Press, 2006) Inoguchi and Nakajima, "The Divine Wind: Japan's Kamikaze Force in World War II" (1958) A.B. Mitford, "Tales of Old Japan" - eyewitness account of a seppuku ceremony (1871) Yamamoto Tsunetomo, "Hagakure" (dictated c. 1709-1716) Nitobe Inazo, "Bushido: The Soul of Japan" (1900) Oleg Benesch, "Inventing the Way of the Samurai" (Oxford University Press, 2014) "Listen to the Voices from the Sea" ("Kike Wadatsumi no Koe"), collected letters and diaries of student soldiers (1949) Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors (1882); Imperial Rescript on Education (1890); Senjinkun field code (1941) National WWII Museum and U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, articles on the kamikaze campaign and the Battle of the Philippine Sea New episodes every Tuesday, Friday and Sunday. This video was researched, written, and narrated with AI assistance, based on the published historical sources listed above.