Woman Remembers Seeing Off Suicide Pilots Near End of WWII

By Hitoshi Kawabata / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

1:00 JST, May 5, 2025

KAGOSHIMA — A memorial service was held Saturday in the Chiran district of Minami-Kyushu, Kagoshima Prefecture, for pilots who had died in suicide missions. Japanese pilots on these missions attempted to crash their planes into U.S. warships in the closing months of the Pacific War.

Former students of a local girls’ school who sent off the pilots with small branches of yaezakura cherry trees in their hands have attended past ceremonies. This year, which marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, only one was able to come.

“We must put an end to war in our generation,” said Tomi Miyake, 95, from Kitakyushu.

“I put my hands together and offer a prayer for the pilots and also for the sake of my classmates who could not come to the ceremony today,” Miyake said. She walked to the altar to offer a flower while trying to recall memories from 80 years ago.

The memorial service took place at the Tokko Heiwa Kannon-do hall on the site of the former Imperial Japanese Army’s Chiran airbase, from which the pilots took off for their mission. Some 700 people attended the ceremony, including 220 family members of 80 suicide pilots. They offered condolences for the around 1,000 suicide pilots and others who died in the war.

The ceremony first took place in 1955, and former students at the Chiran Girls’ High School who had worked at the airbase and taken care of the pilots by cleaning their barracks and doing laundry for them have attended the ceremony since then. Miyake was one of the students.

After the war, the former students were called the “Nadeshiko unit” after the flower used as their school emblem. As they got older, their attendance levels at the ceremony gradually decreased. Last year, only two attended.

This year, Miyake was the only one of them who attended the ceremony, as the other attendee had been hospitalized.

“We washed handkerchiefs and socks in a nearby stream for pilots waiting for their mission. We used to tell each other jokes at the nearby rice paddies in our spare time,” she said, recalling those days.

However, the pilots were set to make their attack only a few days later, so “I wasn’t able to remember their names and faces,” she said in a sad tone.

“The special attack missions are not a beautiful story but a reckless one. Now that there are fewer and fewer people who experienced the war, I worry war could come again,” she said.