Contested memories of the Kamikaze and the self-representations of Tokkō-tai youth in their missives home

The word Kamikaze has haunted the image of Japan abroad and at home, producing tales, legends, and internet memes, embedding itself in today's youth culture. The contested memories of the Kamikaze ascribe them various identities and their associated characterization continues to evolve, but mostly in the absence of their own self-identity. This cross-disciplinary study explores the Kamikaze's self-representation in their own words and aims to trace the sources of the contested memories in the sociopolitical conditioning that was present at the time the discourse was produced. In the course of this empirical study a central theme emerges: the struggle for self-identity anchored in ‘home and family’ associated with frequent reference to ‘being and thinking’. A diversity of beliefs and backgrounds of the Tokkō-tai youth is uncovered. The findings of the quantitative data analysis are then subjected to detailed critical discourse analysis to explore, through multifaceted contextualization, the socio-cognitive link among Kamikazes’ self-images, education and training in contrast to their younger peers. Shifts in the social context, agency and norms have shaped, through conceptual association and assimilation, peers' interpretation of the Kamikaze's (self-) representation over time, eventually giving rise to the sources of ongoing memory debate concerning the identity and images associated with the Kamikaze.