Wings of Defeat - Tokko

July 16, 2007 on 10:22 pm | In Media | | Email This Post

I saw the Japanese trailer for the kamikaze survivor documentary movie I mentioned a while back, Wings of Defeat. The Japanese title is 特攻 (TOKKO) which literally translates to “special attack”, but in Japan, when speaking about “TOKKO” in the context of WWII, most people will imagine the Kamikaze pilots.

TOKKO official Japanese movie website

Wings of Defeat official English site

I have a scanner now, so I scanned the filer that I picked up at the movie theater recently.

For those who can read Japanese, I’ve linked a larger readable image of the front, and back, of the TOKKO (Wings of Defeat) filer. The back of the flier has tons of text, worth a read if you’re interested.

By the way, the Japanese on the front of the flier translates roughly as… “I wanted to live.” “I didn’t want to die.”

This movie looks really interesting… I’m going to have to drag myself down to the theater and pay the 1700ish yen or so to see it! It starts July 21 in Japan.

By the way, a friend brought to my attention a book that is out of print, but available on Amazon called I was a Kamikaze. I have never read it, but it looks interesting. Surviving suicide missions… That’s heavy. Apparently the author, Nagatsuka was a French literature major at Tokyo university, so he originally wrote this book in French, and later it was translated into English.

Even better, John W. Dower is in this movie. Dower wrote the amazing Japanese post-war history book, Embracing Defeat. This book is as fat as a textbook, but is so interesting it reads like a novel. Highly recommended!

- Harvey

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4 Comments »

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  1. Gravatar

    Interesting stuff. That any of these guys made it out at all is almost miraculous. Even if they survived the crash without life-threatening injuries and avoided getting shot by the Americans, how would they get home? It’s not like someone was coming to pick them up.

    Comment by Michael — July 18, 2007 #

  2. Gravatar

    Clarification, they didn’t actually crash, and survive. I thought that as well. If you read the profiles of the interviewees on the website, you’ll see that they were people who like, got stuck in dogfights so had to drop their bombs and couldn’t do the deed… Or had signed up and trained to be kamikaze, but were never called to go to battle.

    http://www.edgewoodpictures.com/wingsofdefeat/storytellers.html

    Comment by harvey — July 18, 2007 #

  3. Gravatar

    I hadn’t thought much of that movie when I saw flyers, but reading this it does look interesting. Embracing Defeat is indeed an excellent book and that the author is involved speaks volumes. (Forgive the pun.)

    I would also recommend the old Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen) comic book series for this topic. I’m not at all a manga type but I found these manga to illustrate a lot of aspects of war and postwar life, and there was a section detailing kamikaze troops.

    Comment by Quinlan — July 19, 2007 #

  4. Gravatar

    Ah, I should have read the details. I’ll check out that website and give the flier a proper look when I have more time.

    Comment by Michael — July 20, 2007 #

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