Kamikaze pilots say war horrors lost on young

TOKYO: Kamikaze pilot Yutaka Kanbe should have died nearly seven decades ago.It was only Tokyo’s surrender on August 15, 1945, that saved him from the fate of thousands whose suicide missions came to define Japan’s unrelenting pursuit of victory in the closing stages of World War II.

But as the 91-year-old faces his own mortality again, he worries that a rightward political shift under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and a recent film glorifying Kamikaze missions, are proof that the horrors of war have been lost on gene–rations of younger Japanese.