Risa Morimoto was born and raised in New York, the daughter of Japanese artists who moved to America to pursue their artistic ambitions. Linda Hoaglund was born and raised in rural Japan, the daughter of liberal American missionaries. Risa learned about World War II in American schools and always dreaded December 7th as the day her classmates would blame her for the Japanese “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor. Linda learned about WWII in Japanese schools, dreading any mention of Hiroshima, when all her classmates would stare accusingly at her. Despite her Japanese heritage, Risa never questioned that Kamikaze pilots were fanatics who happily crashed their planes into American ships. Linda, despite her American citizenship, grew up believing the Kamikazes were innocent victims who had willingly sacrificed their lives to a war, in which hundreds of thousands of Japanese had been firebombed by American planes.

Learning about her uncle’s secret past, Risa was inspired to film interviews with former Kamikaze pilots. Profoundly shaken by what they shared with her, she decided to make a film about them. Instead of meeting suicidal maniacs, she encountered gentle, sometimes resentful, always thoughtful men in their 80s, willing to share every detail of their fears, their ambivalence, their patriotism and their survivors’ guilt. When Risa asked Linda to join her, she instantly agreed, knowing this was a rare opportunity to re-examine the Kamikaze legacy and with it, the international record of WWII.

Risa and Linda joined forces to learn everything about the Kamikaze experience from both sides of that war. Risa worked her way through hundreds of hours of footage and numerous photographs at the National Archives in Washington. She also learned of a survivors’ reunion of the U.S.S. Drexler, a destroyer instantly sunk by Kamikaze, late in the war. The Drexler survivors, now in their 80s, like the former Kamikaze, provided a nuanced counterpoint to the Kamikaze stories. Linda and Risa combed Japanese archival sources to discover a trove of propaganda footage and candid images of doomed teenage pilots and the military commanders who ordered their deaths, some shown in this film for the first time.

This is a historic opportunity to examine the real history of the Kamikaze, reviled in the West as precursors of suicide bombers, while still hallowed by many Japanese as selfless martyrs. The real stories of the survivors reveal something very different. The filmmakers hope that their unique collaboration will result in an unusual opportunity to revisit the history of World War II from a bicultural perspective, mourning all those who died in the war and the sacrifices demanded of them by militarists who refused to admit obvious defeat.