The Foreign Service Journal, September 2004

samurai warrior’s coolness and courage, and bowed deeply to the emperor before leaving. For the memorial photograph, the pilots displayed large nametags and posed with their samurai swords. For some, their final departure from earth was worth writing home about, as exemplified in 23-year-old Isao Matsuo’s letter to his parents: “Please congratulate me. I have been given a splendid opportunity to die. This is my last day. The destiny of our homeland hinges on the deci- sive battle in the seas to the south where I shall fall like a blossom from a radiant cherry tree. May death be as sud- den and clean as the shattering of crystal.” In postwar accounts of its operations in the Philippines, the Imperial Japanese Navy counted a total of 447 missions by kamikaze aircraft before Japan sur- rendered on Aug. 10, 1945. Interestingly, the success rate was only 45 percent. In other words, only 201 pilots crashed into their intended targets. What happened to the rest? Fifteen percent failed when the planes were shot down away from their targets by anti-aircraft fire and by fighter-interceptors, or they crashed due to bad weather or mechanical failure. A sig- nificant proportion — 40 percent — returned to base to “die another day” in keeping with bushido, the “way of the warrior” in Japan’s feudal past. On the day of surrender, Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki managed to crash-dive into a U.S. warship off Okinawa for the last kamikaze mission of the war. For his part, the founder of the kamikaze, Vice Admiral Onishi, upheld the bushido tradition to the end. Instead of surrendering to the Allies, he committed seppuku — ritual suicide by ripping open the abdomen with a knife. An Eerie Connection Sept. 11, 2001, revived grim memories of the kamikazes. An unexpected and well-coordinated terror- ist attack unfolded when two hijacked Boeing 767 pas- senger aircraft crashed separately into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Later a third hijacked aircraft, a Boeing 757, hit the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Did the 9/11 terrorists draw inspiration from the kamikazes? The following facts point to an eerie connection between the two groups. Al-Qaida probably considered adopting kamikaze bat- tle tactics as early as the spring of 1999, when Osama bin Laden sent Mohammed Atta to the Philippines for pilot training at Clark Field. There he took flying lessons on an “ultra-light” plane, possibly a Max-Air Drifter or CGS Hawk, at a popular flying school where one could progress to solo flights within 10 hours. One can even fly (cautiously) over the familiar “Twin Peaks” of the area — Mt. Arayat in the northeast and Mt. Pinatubo in the southwest. Atta’s lessons thus included a dress rehearsal of his suicide crash into the World Trade Center. In addition to the practical advantages of that facility, Clark Field was also the perfect place for an aspiring sui- cide pilot like Atta to soak up kamikaze lore. Today a nearby sugar cane field marks the location of an airfield occupied by the Japanese during World War II. A Shinto torii (gateway) leads the visitor toward a historical mark- er established by Japanese war veterans. This local tourist attraction commemorates the exact location of the “Kamikaze First Airfield” and honors the likes of “Founder Admiral Onishi” and “The World’s First Official Human Bomb.” While staying in a hearby hotel, Atta may well have visited this site, which lists numerous U.S. Navy ships hit by Onishi’s pilots. There are a number of parallels between the two groups of suicide bombers. Both the 9/11 terrorists and the kamikazes were suicide bombers piloting an aircraft. The sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, planned by Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi, killed 2,388 Americans; the sui- cide attack on the World Trade Center in Manhattan, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. (and the crash of a fourth hijacked plane in Pennsylvania short of its target), steered by Mohammed Atta some 60 years later, resulted in about 2,800 dead. The two men taught Americans the grim lesson that the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans no longer protected them from foreign aggression. Fanaticism While the kamikaze pilots took off in Zero fighters laden with 550-pound bombs, the 9/11 terrorists flew with the intention of using the Boeing aircraft’s full load of jet fuel as bombs. Both sets of combatants went after specific targets identified by their commanders. The kamikazes homed in on the aircraft carriers and cruisers of the U.S. armada in the Western Pacific, which they believed were bent on invading the Japanese homeland. Similarly, the 9/11 terrorists fought a jihad against “Jews and Crusaders that gather on our lands,” their two sworn enemies. And the U.S. is a target-rich environment for jihadis. One in eight New Yorkers is Jewish, mainly in white-collar occupations, rendering the World Trade F O C U S 56 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 4