Ah Tokubetsu kogekitai

Kamikaze

あゝ特別攻撃隊

Release Date: February, 10th, 1960

Running Time: 95 min

Genre: Feature

Color: Color

Screening Format: -,HDCAM SR

Screen Size: Cinema Scope (1:2.35)

Sound Processing: -

[ Directed by ]

INOUE Yoshio

[ Cast ]

[ Staff ]

── Screenplay
OHMORI Seitaro ── Music
WATABNABE Toru ── Cinematography

[ Production Company ]

DAIEI

[ Distributor (Japan) ]

DAIEI

[ Story ]

By 1944 the tide of war had turned against Japan and Akira Nozawa, lieutenant, junior grade, is a student-soldier.
On one of his rare days of leave from the Yokosuka Air Base, Akira visits his Alma Mater to read in the school library. He asks the librarian, a pretty young girl named Reiko Yamanaka, for a book called "Only A Year and A Half," the story of a man who prepared himself to meet death bravely.
The two young people, strangers until a short time before, feel irresistibly drawn toward each other, but the war is like a spectre between them, and the thought of death is never far from their minds.
At the Navy Air Base, Akira shares a room with three other student-soldiers. They are all torn by doubts about the war they are fighting, and do not possess the stoic calm of the career soldiers about dying for their country.
Unless something is done, defeat seems inevitable, and the Navy Staff decides that resort must be made to drastic measures, namely, Kamikaze attacks, or one life for one battleship.
Akira and his friends are transferred suddenly to a base in lbaraki Prefecture and there they are told that they will be assigned to the Kamikaze (Suicide) Corps.
Akira is given leave and he hastens, under heavy bombing, to the factory where Reiko works. They are reunited briefly, but a bomb drops, and the only thing left of her is the towel with which Akira had bound her wounded leg a few minutes before.
Face to face with death, the student-soldiers realize for the first time in their lives that war is an abnormal state of affairs, and that even cowards in normal life rise to the occasion and are able to die bravely for their motherland.

【Quoted from Unijapan Film Quarterly 1960 3.2】