Wings of Defeat

I wrote this review in 2008, after previewing this documentary before its screening at the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival. I held back the full-length review for the film’s planned theatrical release. I feel now that I’ve held it back long enough, so I’m posting it now. Unfortunately, Wings of Defeat isn’t available in any form.

Historical Documentary

• Directed by Risa Morimoto and Linda Hoaglund

What makes a man (and it’s pretty much always a man) give up his life for his country? Not just risk his life, going into a battle from which he may not return, but go there with absolute certainty to his death. It takes a combination of patriotism, peer pressure, camaraderie, and a fascist government in complete control of the schools and media.

That’s what we learn in Risa Morimoto and Linda Hoaglund’s documentary about the Kamikaze pilots of World War II.

The issue is personal for Morimoto, a Japanese-American who grew up in New York. One of her uncles was a Kamikaze pilot. He survived the war (which ended before he was called to die), but he died before Morimoto could ask him about his experiences and try to reconcile her American stereotype of wild-eyed suicide bombers with her easy-going uncle.

So she went to Japan and interviewed other surviving Kamikaze pilots (yes, that sounds like an oxymoron; how these men survived is part of their tales). In addition, she interviews historians, visits museums and shrines, and tells us plenty about brave pilots whose government treated like tissue paper.

The suicide bomber idea came out of late-war desperation. By the fall of 1944, everyone high enough or smart enough to not believe government propaganda knew that defeat was only a matter of time. The Japanese were running out of both essential resources and the factories to turn those resources into weapons. It was easier to build planes that didn’t need to come home. In fact, some Kamikaze planes had bamboo gas tanks.

One of the experts interviewed suggests that the general in charge of the operation conceived of suicide bombers in hopes that inherent horror of the idea would force the Emperor to seek peace. Instead, some 4,000 pilots died in a strategy that sunk only 40 American ships. After the war, the surviving Kamikaze–who had been celebrated as living gods while awaiting their deaths–preferred not to talk about their now-embarrassing past.

Wings of Defeat avoids the visual banality of so many talking-head documentaries. Morimoto and Hoaglund keep the film lively with battle footage, propaganda (including English translations of actual newspaper headlines), and simple animation that resembles low-budget manga.