Kamikaze survivors express regret and anger in new film

Trying to imagine Toshio Yoshitake as a wild-eyed 21-year-old hunched over the cockpit of a flying bomb is not easy. Yet this kindly pensioner with the easy laugh was once one of a legendary squad of Japanese pilots who terrorised the United States Navy fleet in the Pacific as it inched its way toward invasion of the Japanese mainland.

Long before 11 September 2001 and today's suicide bomber came the kamikaze, or tokkotai (special attack) pilots as they were known in Japan. Like the jihad martyrs of the Middle East, the Second World War kamikazes were depicted as desperate, fanatical men who burnt with hatred for the US and were ready to die for their god, the emperor. But a new documentary shows a different story.

In Wings of Defeat, directed by Risa Morimoto, a Japanese-American, the dwindling group of ageing pilots who survived express sadness, regret and even anger at their leaders, who told them they were fighting madmen who would kill them all. "They thought they were fighting to end all wars, and they were lied to - as we are being lied to now in Iraq," Morimoto recently told The Japan Times.

Launched as the US began its attack on the Philippines in 1944, the kamikaze wave damaged or destroyed 300 US warships by flying bomb-laden planes straight at them though a blizzard of anti-aircraft fire. About 5,000 Japanese men, barely out of their teens and with no chance of turning the tide against the US juggernaut, lost their lives

Yoshitake's survival was a fluke. On the way to attack US ships in the Philippines his plane was shot down and he was badly injured. He says he still has nightmares. "In my dreams I'm trapped in my burning plane on Mactan, trying to escape. But my legs won't move."

Masaaki Kobayashi, another former pilot in the film, says all the pilots "thought we were fighting and giving our lives for our families and our comrades".

Wings of Defeat arrives at a time when a movement led by Shinzo Abe, Japan's Prime Minister, is trying to rewrite Japan's wartime history, and hot on the heels of a very different film. In I Go to Die for You, written by Tokyo's right-wing governor, Shintaro Ishihara, the pilots are eulogised are self-sacrificing heroes. Nationalists often glorify the kamikaze as "falling cherry blossom petals".

Kazuo Watanabe, who helped compile a book of the secret writings of young Japanese soldiers, says, the imagery along with the relentless barrage of wartime propaganda, helped force the men to strangle their emotions and "accept the irrational as rational".

Morimoto was persuaded to return to Japan from her native New York to interview survivors after learning that her uncle was once a tokkotai pilot. Until then, she says, all her images of the kamikaze were from US propaganda movies, which were completely at odds with the "kindly, gracious man" she knew. After years of silence, the former pilots relished the chance to explain their experiences. One even criticised Emperor Hirohito.

The film's producer, Linda Hoaglund, said that when the film was shown to the American survivors of kamikaze attacks, some cried. "For the first time they realised they were just high-school boys ... shooting at other high-school boys."