It was October 19, 1944. The commander of Japan’s First Air Fleet, Takajiro Onishi, raised a novel idea during a meeting at Mabalacat Airfield: “organize suicide attack units composed of A6M Zero fighters armed with 250-kilogram bombs, with each plane to crash-dive into an enemy carrier.”[1] Thereafter and until the end of the Second World War, an estimated 3,800 Japanese pilots forfeited their lives “for the emperor”.[2]

The aforementioned conference was the origin of the famous “Kamikaze” tactic. Appraisals of it are typically accompanied with clichéd labels such as “suicidal”, “desperate” and “inhuman”. Such labelling of the Kamikazes shrewdly seeks refuge in its political correctness and appears morally impregnatable, for it concurs with contemporary mainstream standards: the value of individual human life takes priority over external duties. The public in an era when (outside of small, professionalized militaries) citizens of industrialized countries are almost wholly unfamiliar with war commonly refuse, where not actually despising, the act of purchasing the lives of the nation’s enemies at the cost of one’s own. Such condemnation of the Kamikazes also appears especially merited in view of how their desperate gambles archived no reversal of the Pacific War’s trajectory. In fact, according to a survey by Win/Gallup, only 11% of Japanese nationals today are willing to fight for their country, far fewer than those in the US (44%) or the UK (27%),[3] where modern representative democracy emerged and concepts of fundamental human rights first found political expression.

However, does such an approach enrich our understanding of the Kamikazes? Will future historians carry out the same condemnation? How will they judge our moral standards? This essay considers the issue of judging the past by today’s standards, through the example of the Kamikaze; it will then propose solution, prospecting what the future brings.

The Oxford Dictionary defines the verb judge as “to form an opinion about somebody/something, based on the information you have”.[4] The noun “standard” is defined as “a level of quality, especially one that people think is acceptable”[5]. A comprehensive appraisal of an historical event involves understanding both the causes (motives) and effects (significance) of it. That is, opinions should be formed not only on whether the outcome of the event is desirable, but also on why and how the event itself occurred: that we may know how we can promote or prevent similar events from reoccurring, rather than merely deciding whether we want them to reoccur. Therefore, reliable standards should take into consideration two elements: reason, by which we derive the cause and judge the acceptability of motives; and experience, through which we understand the effect and determine the acceptability of outcomes.

Judging the Kamikaze by today’s standards is far from impartial. Hindsight vastly amplifies the role of the experiential element which overshadows that of reason. It is easy to fall into the assumption that Onishi and his pilots were reckless and feckless because experience tells us that Japan eventually lost anyhow. This was not empirical knowledge to the Japanese airman, who had to use other means by which to judge the appropriateness of Kamikaze tactics. Therefore, it is advisable to first attempt to examine the reasoning behind the Kamikazes’ seemingly inhuman actions. In fact, through one of Admiral Nimitz’s comments on the Kamikaze tactic we discover the very evidence that with Kamikaze tactics, Onishi was adopting a highly rational tactic based upon unpredictability – the blind spot of experience and moral standards:

The war with Japan had been enacted in the game rooms at the War College by so many people…nothing that happened during the war was a surprise—absolutely nothing except the kamikaze tactics toward the end of the war. We had not visualized these.[6]

In other words, in judging the Kamikaze by our own knowledge and current standards, we fall into the exact same trap set for the Americans nearly eighty years ago. We do indeed, fail to escape it as we witness the resurgence of suicide attacks decades later in the Middle Eastern region.[7] From the Shiite militants blowing up the US Marine Barracks in Lebanon in 1983 to “9/11” to the suicidal London Bombings in 2005, we have been hit with astonishment, panic and moral incomprehension every single time, one after another. Even though terrorists are punished harshly (or when living outside of Western countries are often sanctioned through drones and satellites), there are no clearly effective methods for stifling the continuous germination of such activities.

So much for expounding the defects of judging the past solely by today’s standards, how are we to resolve them? The answer lies in whether and how future standards and judgments will differ from those of today. Along the path of exploring these questions, two principles in regards of standards should be observed: first, standards exist in the minds of individuals, and are therefore subjective and conditional; second, it is inevitable that empirical information takes up a greater portion of standards when we judge the past, for the results of events are known and irreversible. These principles pose both a challenge that future judgments must face, and an opportunity of which future judgments may take advantage.

The challenge is possible radicalization. Through the progression of time, these two principles may form a positive feedback loop: our previous, subjective judgments actively induce and filter our perception of certain experience. That is, we choose to listen to and look at the “truth” we like to listen to or to look at. With this possibly true but more importantly incomplete experience, we form more subjective standards, and hence make even more subjective judgments. The more information we may expose ourselves to, the more radical we become in recent times. We already witness the occurrence of such a loop in today’s phenomena such as “Cancel Culture”, increasing opposition between “conservatives” and the “liberals”, racial tension, military nationalism, etc. Since the amount of experience can only increase in the future, whether relevant or irrelevant to the event itself, it is reasonable to be apprehensive that future historians, due to their own beliefs and standards and experiences, will have completely such diametrically opposing views on our era that they never reach a consensus on characterizing us.

Yet this challenge can be tackled. While accumulation of experience based on a partial preset induces radicalization, an openminded collective cross-reference to experiences of varying subjects may very well reconcile the partiality of each and approach the comprehensiveness of the standards as a whole. For example, the formation of our mainstream opinion today on evaluating the suicide attacks assumes that the observers are themselves victims or at least potential victims. Our perspectives and judgments would be much more well-rounded if we were to remove ourselves from the moral high ground. By doing so, we can place ourselves into the position of the Japanese pilots, who were raised to persist in loyalty to their country, and due to the information imbalance, believed during the last seconds of their lives that what they did was for their families and friends, instead of paying the price for their rulers[8]; we can also put ourselves into the shoes of the both the Shiite and Sunni youths, witnessing the MI6 and the CIA overthrowing Iran’s first democratic government in 1953[9], the American government’s instigating the 8-year-long Iran-Iraq War in backing the Iraqis[10] and later suppressing them during the Gulf Wars[11], and all sorts of wanton acts committed by the First World. From such analysis, we may take into consideration reinforcing public inspection on military agencies, or raising our awareness on the importance of the openness and diversity of information, instead of making futile blame and persecuting our seeming enemies.

The future depends on the potency of historical revisionism[12] and dialectical thinking. The advancement of technology, especially in artificial intelligence, information integration and data analysis, presents us with an opportunity to better act upon it. At present, although the Internet has allowed individual remarks to be received by those sympathetic to it across the world, censorship from authorities and mainstream media biases still hover over the ability of society as a whole to think critically. However, we can still estimate the effects of the impending era of AI and Big Data. With much superior processing ability and higher speeds in calculating and collecting information, new machines and software, if used as assistants by future historians, may much more quickly discover flaws or gaps in our historical understanding. For example, in the time a human needs to picture the image of the A6M Zero fighters diving into the US vessels, computers may have already conceived a statistical comprehension of the entire war situation by extracting all existing reports from both US and Japanese military databases, and may even have analyzed the psychological states of the Japanese airmen through their recorded conversations. Most importantly, the highly developed reasoning capability may allow them to discern and eliminate flaws, however nuanced, when approaching to a conclusion, while a human may often neglect or misinterpret them due to their assumptions. AI and Big Data offer quick and convenient supplement to these gaps. An article on the recent 200-year historical events recorded by Wikipedia indicates that the recorded interconnections of the events across different geological areas increase drastically as it approaches the present.[13] In particular, the “connectivity density of this global encyclopedic network explodes exponentially” with Wikipedia coming into existence. The article attributes the capturing of nuances which used to be washed out by time to the “open editing model and centralized nature” by which everyone from anywhere around the world can contribute their views while the “independent nature” of the events is preserved. The article even predicts optimistically that AI will further fill the blanks. Instead of deconstructing our existing judgments, technology will help amend and complete them.

Our current standards are thus demonstrably incomplete, and the path in front of us remains challenging and full of pitfalls. However, above I have suggested ways around it. Before anticipating any materialistic means of evolution, it is feasible and necessary that we adjust and prepare our minds. This includes accepting the partiality of our current judgments, welcoming opposing voices, and developing dialectical thinking to embrace the continuous emergence of unprecedented standards and new judgments. Once we embark on the right course, future technology will be a powerful boost, bringing us a novel comprehension of history – the open source and impartially centralized collection of information will allow us to not only define, but also to retrace, to derive and to apply. By then, when we stop looking for the “justest” standard but begin seeking ever “juster” standards, the value of judging will exceed beyond arriving at a mere conclusion. We judge not to reach a pre-defined destination. We judge to advance ever forward.

[1] Inoguchi Rikihei, Nakajima Tadashi, and Roger Pineau, The Divine Wind, Annapolis, 1958.
[2] Steve Zaloga, Kamikaze: Japanese Special Attack Weapons 1944–45, New Vanguard Osprey Publishing, 2011.
[3] “How Japan's youth see the kamikaze pilots of WW2”, BBC, 2017, bbc.com/news/world-asia-39351262.
[4] “judge”, Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, 8th edition, accessed June 18 2021.
[5] “standard”, Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, 8th edition, accessed June 18 2021.
[6] John Hartley, Planning for the kamikazes: toward a theory and practice of repeated operational games. Naval War College Review, vol. 70, no. 2, Spring 2017, p. 29+, Accessed 18 June 2021.
[7] Riaz Hassan, What Motivates the Suicide Bombers?, YaleGlobal, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, 2009.
[8] Nicholas Voge, Manoa, University of Hawai’i Press, Volume 13, Number 1, 2001, pp. 120-123.
[9] Stephen Kinzer, John Wiley, David S. Robarge, "All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror", Central Intelligence Agency, 12 April 2007.
[10] Shane Harris, Matthew M. Aid, "Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran", Foreign Policy, 26 August 2013, foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/.
[11] "George Bush (Sr) Library – Margaret Thatcher Foundation", margaretthatcher.org/archive/us-bush.
[12] Barbara Krasner, “Historical Revisionism”, Current Controversies, New York: Greenhaven Publishing LLC, p. 15.
[13] Kalev Leetaru, “Could AI Help Us Better Understand History?”, Forbes, April, 2019, forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/04/16/could-ai-help-us-better-understand-history/?sh=55466048132a.