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Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze | 
 enlarge | Author: M.g. Sheftall
Publisher: NAL Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $2.31
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Avg. Customer Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 804676
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 496
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.7
ISBN: 0451214870
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5426
EAN: 9780451214874
ASIN: 0451214870
Publication Date: July 5, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In the last days of World War II, the Japanese unleashed a new breed of warrior. They were the kamikaze-idealistic young men believing there could be no greater glory than to sacrifice their lives in suicide attacks to defend their homeland. But what of those men who took the sacred oath to die in battle-and lived? Soon after the 9/11 attacks, ethnographer M.G. Sheftall was given unprecedentedly intimate access to the cloistered community of Japan's last remaining kamikaze corps survivors. The result is a poignant and unforgettable glimpse into the lives and mindsets of former kamikaze pilots who never completed their final missions.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 Propaganda and not worth your time or money. June 3, 2008
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
In writing what is, in essence, an oral history of the kamikaze suicide killers, after interviewing kamikaze who were unsuccessful in killing themselves, it might be understandable that this author would grow an unhealthy sympathy for these men. And it is understandable that these men might try to draw a distinction between their loathsome compatriots, who were suicide killers in 1941 and the suicide killers of 9/11/2001, as a psychological defense mechanism if for no other reason.
However, it was absolutely disgusting for the author to libel the heroes of 9/11 by saying that the kamikaze suicide killers were more like the firemen who rushed into the Twin Towers than they were like Mohammad Atta and his ilk. It was at that point that I realized that this was not merely a misguided and sympathetic portrayal of these kamikazes, but full-bore propaganda and an apologia for the kamikaze's dastardly doings.
Do yourself the favor, save your money and skip this one.
 Full Creative Telling Of Kamikaze Spirit and History October 18, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I was given this book as a gift. Boy was I lucky. While being interested in Japan, and a "war buff", this book just shook me. The detail that is gone into is just amazing. The author really did his homework when he researched this book. The depth of detail, and thread of every idea is fulfilled. Besides the incredible rich detail, the writing is just so good. If you enjoy beautiful creative writing, this book is great, just for that.
Also reall gems of knowledge come about, than just the Kamakize history and people. Like how resentment had built up by many educated Japanese to Western culture. Many had bad experiences when they went overseas to America or Europe. Also many "human" details emerge about Japanese society during the war years. Such detail in the book, brings this out.
The area I find wanting, is how the issue of key Japanese military officials are treated in the book. Many are veterans of obviously brutal tactics they employed in places like China. Maybe some insight on how such bright and strong men, could be so cruel to other human beings. It wonders how they justified this to themselves.
Last, you just earn the respect of the author. M. B. Sheftall did a tremondous amount of work, to write such a wonderfull book. At the bottom of almost every page is small references clariying many issues or giving background. This is not overdone, or lacking. It is just right.
 Fine history, compelling story, insightful cultural observations April 13, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
There are several things one can gather about Sheftall by reading "Blossoms in the Wind". Foremost is that he can write a good story. In this case, the usual skills must be supplemented by patience and the keen ear of an excellent listener. He is one who can actively elicit long forgotten or painfully repressed memories from the haze of time and the maze of survivor's guilt, crushed expectations of victory, humiliation of defeat, and suspicion of one who is both from the enemy camp, so to speak, and young. It implies Keeganesk respect, genuine and deep, for the profession of arms and the special esteem reserved for those who sacrifice for what they consider a worthy cause. But in the end it requires an ability to write well and this Sheftall can do.
Sheftall has skill in description. An example, minor to the main thesis but which provides setting and tone is his easy use of the vocabulary of architectural historical styles, aesthetics, and ornamental and functional details. Images of the people he writes about are brought to the mind's eye in a few words with perhaps special solicitude on behalf of the female form - the caressing recreation of the semi-salacious angels in "Chinkon no Mitsugi" being a pointed example. His descriptors give character and life to the people and events narrated in the book yet serve also to remind the reader that this text is documentation. He is fastidious about the machines of war, worrying over evolutionary development in aircraft or model changes in watercraft. Yet these delineations do not burden the reader but rather clarify or move the action of the story. These salutes to accuracy are reassuring in an historian and no doubt his recordings and photographs will serve as important primary sources on this topic well into the future.
Like de Tocqueville, whose broader vistas into American culture stemmed from his study of US prisons, Sheftall provides insights behind what is often the inscrutable face of Japanese culture beyond the title's subject. The men and women who live to tell the "kamikaze" tale seem to me a character study of rugged individualism not typically thought of as a Japanese virtue. These survivors, after the war, take risks, establish businesses and in general seem to behave in a manner beyond what might have been indicated by their caste. To the extent that this is true, might the phenomenon be explained as the self-liberation claimed by those who have embraced the inevitability of death only to be given, by grace or chance, an indefinite reprieve? May it represent the need to achieve for those comrades whose crowded hour was their final hour? Perhaps it is a cultural idiosyncrasy credit given to those whose loyalty and commitment to the emperor and collective are proved beyond doubt. Whatever the case, there is a certain irony at work in that the "tokko" program's systematic reduction of individual qualities that could hinder total dedication to the mission would create in the survivors the moral fortitude to find their own way. Contrast them with growing number of "hikikomori", marginalized young men who, like Japan itself often enough, choose voluntary isolation in the confusion of stifling cultural expectations and fear of the new.
Sheftall provides a carefully evolving narrative that sustains a reader's belief in what is nearly unbelievable. His challenge is to explain these young warriors' embrace of death and the lingering reverence for their sacrifice in an age where such fanaticism is mostly associated with terrorism. He does this, sometimes touchingly, sometimes with humor, through incisive observation, careful reconstruction of the mood and perceptions in Japan at the time, and a humane sympathy for the very real people who tell their stories.
Outstanding! February 15, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Really an outstanding book from a rather unique point of view. This book would make an excellent addition to a high school reading list - in both the US and in Japan.
A finely balanced work that demystifies the 'Kamikaze'. February 10, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
M. G. Sheftall has produced a very finely balanced account of the Japanese suicide attack programs of World War II. This is a major feat, as the Tokko ('special attack') program is a field so larded with biased and poorly-researched work that a serious historical approach must require doubting or discounting a great deal of what has already been written.
Sheftall has done what any responsible historian should when dealing with such a recent set of events: he went and talked directly to those involved. Unlike accounts of the same events from the Allied side, however, this was something he could only achieve by first learning to speak Japanese, behaving correctly in the presence of very sensitive people and leaving his own agenda at the interview room door. Sheftall happily has a strong grasp of effective techniques for this work, and the result is a very good read presented in a style that mixes skilfully-wrought historical accounts with gentle first-person reportage somewhat reminiscent of Bill Bryson. Sheftall visits and describes the shrines and societies that today perpetuate the bonds forged among the wartime Tokko personnel - both the successful and the survivors - and manages neither to sneer nor fawn; he meets and travels with men who in their youth accepted self-willed extinction in defence of their homeland without once judging them or sensationalising their accounts, and he leaves at least this reader with such a clear picture of the Tokko program as to make one wonder why so much mystery and myth surrounded it for so long.
As Sheftall points out near the end of the book, twentieth-century history is simply not taught in Japanese schools. Japan nowadays is gradually shedding its MacArthurian post-war sackcloth, however, and in view of the actions and pronouncements of its neighbors it is understandably keen to reassert itself in the region before the balance of power tilts too far towards some very unwholesome regimes. A steady supply of dispassionate, balanced accounts of Japan's recent history will help reassure the world that it is not unaware of its dark past, but the shortage of serious native scholarship in such matters still means that these will have to come in large part from foreigners. With this great book, Sheftall steps up to join John Dower, Herbert Bix and the many others who are quietly helping Japan get its historical house in order.
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