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Spot Reviews
1.This book does justice to the Kamikaze pilots, August 24, 2005
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　By Jun Isobe (Los Angeles, CA, USA)

Let us never forget the human struggles that history has taught us in the Pacific War: From the attack on Pearl Harbor to the aftermath of the atomic bomb. M.G. Sheftall takes a bold step to record the personal stories and views of the pilots of the infamous tokko program more popularly known as kamikaze to the West. This is a topic that is much taboo as it is revered in Japan. It's a topic that only a non-Japanese can research, for it would be academic suicide for any Japanese to partake. Sheftall does a great job of giving a non-biased story, and explains in painstaking detail to the Western reader what went through the hearts of the men and women in the tokko program. Several passages brought tears to my eyes. Japanese poetry and Haiku, personal letters, actual newpaper translations and such are scattered throughout the book. There are also about 15 pages worth of black and white pictures. Sheftall doesn't justify the tokko program, but he convinces you that any soldier willing to fight for their country has the same fire burning in their hearts. He asks the question at the end: Does the fighting spirit that made Japan a World power still exist in the modern Japanese?


2.Definitive work on a little-known subject, January 12, 2006
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　By David H. Lippman Kiwiwriter (Newark, NJ United States)

M.G. Sheftall has used his intimate knowledge of the Japanese language, culture, and people to craft a superb history of the Kamikaze corps, linking the young men of this group with the Japan of today. He has researched the subject matter and people well. It is an outstanding work and a timely one: the motivations, behavior, and attitudes of suicide bombers have never been more important.

I would also like to add that while the research is immense -- Professor Sheftall waded through vast tracts of Japanese records and interviewed family members and surviving pilots -- the writing style is entertaining and gripping at the same time. It makes good reading not only as history, but as writing -- vaulting from blazing ships on the high seas one moment to the quiet solemnity of the Yasukuni Shrine the next.

I was mildly surprised that this book was not nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in its category.

Customer Reviews
1.Fine history, compelling story, insightful cultural observations, April 13, 2007
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　By EB (Maryland, United States)

There are several things one can gather about Sheftall by reading Blossoms in the Wind. Foremost is that he can write a good story. In this case, the usual skills must be supplemented by patience and the keen ear of an excellent listener. He is one who can actively elicit long forgotten or painfully repressed memories from the haze of time and the maze of survivor's guilt, crushed expectations of victory, humiliation of defeat, and suspicion of one who is both from the enemy camp, so to speak, and young. It implies Keeganesk respect, genuine and deep, for the profession of arms and the special esteem reserved for those who sacrifice for what they consider a worthy cause. But in the end it requires an ability to write well and this Sheftall can do.

Sheftall has skill in description. An example, minor to the main thesis but which provides setting and tone is his easy use of the vocabulary of architectural historical styles, aesthetics, and ornamental and functional details. Images of the people he writes about are brought to the mind's eye in a few words with perhaps special solicitude on behalf of the female form - the caressing recreation of the semi-salacious angels in Chinkon no Mitsugi being a pointed example. His descriptors give charter and life to the people and events narrated in the book yet serve also to remind the reader that this text is documentation. He is fastidious about the machines of war, worrying over evolutionary development in aircraft or model changes in watercraft. Yet these delineations do not burden the reader but rather clarify or move the action of the story. These salutes to accuracy are reassuring in an historian and no doubt his recordings and photographs will serve as important primary sources on this topic well into the future.

Like de Tocqueville, whose broader vistas into American culture stemmed from his study of US prisons, Sheftall provides insights behind what is often the inscrutable face of Japanese culture beyond the title's subject. The men and women who live to tell the kamikaze tale seem to me a character study of rugged individualism not typically thought of as a Japanese virtue. These survivors, after the war, take risks, establish businesses and in general seem to behave in a manner beyond what might have been indicated by their caste. To the extent that this is true, might the phenomenon be explained as the self-liberation claimed by those who have embraced the inevitability of death only to be given, by grace or chance, an indefinite reprieve? May it represent the need to achieve for those comrades whose crowded hour was their final hour? Perhaps it is a cultural idiosyncrasy credit given to those whose loyalty and commitment to the emperor and collective are proved beyond doubt. Whatever the case, there is a certain irony at work in that the tokko program's systematic reduction of individual qualities that could hinder total dedication to the mission would create in the survivors the moral fortitude to find their own way. Contrast them with growing number of hikikomori, marginalized young men who, like Japan itself often enough, choose voluntary isolation in the confusion of stifling cultural expectations and fear of the new.

Sheftall provides a carefully evolving narrative that sustains a reader's belief in what is nearly unbelievable. His challenge is to explain these young warriors' embrace of death and the lingering reverence for their sacrifice in an age where such fanaticism is mostly associated with terrorism. He does this, sometimes touchingly, sometimes with humor, through incisive observation, careful reconstruction of the mood and perceptions in Japan at the time, and a humane sympathy for the very real people who tell their stories.


2. A finely balanced work that demystifies the 'Kamikaze'., February 10, 2007
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　By Paul R. Callomon (Cherry Hill, NJ United States)

M. G. Sheftall has produced a very finely balanced account of the Japanese suicide attack programs of World War II. This is a major feat, as the Tokko ('special attack') program is a field so larded with biased and poorly-researched work that a serious historical approach must require doubting or discounting a great deal of what has already been written.

Sheftall has done what any responsible historian should when dealing with such a recent set of events: he went and talked directly to those involved. Unlike accounts of the same events from the Allied side, however, this was something he could only achieve by first learning to speak Japanese, behaving correctly in the presence of very sensitive people and leaving his own agenda at the interview room door. Sheftall happily has a strong grasp of effective techniques for this work, and the result is a very good read presented in a style that mixes skilfully-wrought historical accounts with gentle first-person reportage somewhat reminiscent of Bill Bryson. Sheftall visits and describes the shrines and societies that today perpetuate the bonds forged among the wartime Tokko personnel - both the successful and the survivors - and manages neither to sneer nor fawn; he meets and travels with men who in their youth accepted self-willed extinction in defence of their homeland without once judging them or sensationalising their accounts, and he leaves at least this reader with such a clear picture of the Tokko program as to make one wonder why so much mystery and myth surrounded it for so long.

As Sheftall points out near the end of the book, twentieth-century history is simply not taught in Japanese schools. Japan nowadays is gradually shedding its MacArthurian post-war sackcloth, however, and in view of the actions and pronouncements of its neighbors it is understandably keen to reassert itself in the region before the balance of power tilts too far towards some very unwholesome regimes. A steady supply of dispassionate, balanced accounts of Japan's recent history will help reassure the world that it is not unaware of its dark past, but the shortage of serious native scholarship in such matters still means that these will have to come in large part from foreigners. With this great book, Sheftall steps up to join John Dower, Herbert Bix and the many others who are quietly helping Japan get its historical house in order.