Thus the Kamikaze Blew / Kakute Kamikaze wa fuku (1944)

Kakute Kamikaze wa fuku is perhaps the ultimate Japanese wartime propaganda movie, certainly the most substantial to survive the war itself. Made at about the same time as the Kamikaze pilot program began, it reminded Japanese how the gods had saved Japan from a previous invasion by a far superior power, the second armada of Kubla Khan in 1281.

As befits such a major subject, it has an enormous cast, so large it is hard to believe it was made in 1944 when resources were beginning to get tight on the home front. It is, however, much shorter than you would expect such a spectacle film to be, perhaps reflecting the limits on film length established in 1944. The screenwriter (uncredited) and director (Santaro Marune) even manage some battle scenes of Mongol hordes charging off of boats on outlying islands and a commando raid led by the Kono Lord (Tsumasaburo Bando) that gives us some shipboard fighting suitable for a pirate movie. All branches of the military contributed to or oversaw its production. Though it was primarily filmed at Daiei, the special effects were done at Toho, which long before Godzilla, was famed for its special effects team, so effective in The War at Sea that MacArthur thought the Pearl Harbor sequence was a documentary.

Unfortunately, for a movie you need a plot, hard to come by when it is the wind that actually wins the battle (which is why we see lots of movies about Elizabeth I speaking bravely but almost none about the Spanish Armada itself, which was also destroyed by the winds, not by the brave defenders). So there is a lot of confusing stuff about clan rivalry and a special kind of hat worn by the samurai of the Kono clan. There are even hints of a romance, but the battle overtakes that plotline and the beautiful young actress involved disappears from the story and the credits.

Of course, our primary interest from this date is in the relation to the kamikaze, or shinpu, program that was beginning to be used at the time the movie was made. The exact release date of the movie is not on IMDB, so we can’t say how far into the kamikaze program it occurred. However, the depiction of the death of all the residents on the two small islands where the Mongols successfully landed may well be a direct reference to the battle on Saipan in July 1944, where almost all the Japanese soldiers died and several thousand civilians committed suicide rather than be captured by the Americans. After Kono’s dramatic commando raid, a competing samurai lord launches his own suicide mission, in which his tiny Japanese boat rams a large Mongol ship and sets it afire, a direct mirror of the kamikaze tactic of flying directly into a ship .

There is a great deal of “we are all in this together” speechmaking, and scenes of the peasants and artisans bringing food and weapons to the samurai. Oddly, before the insertion of the scenes of dead peasants, there is no attempt to brutalize the depiction of the Mongol. They are to be fought because they are invaders, not lower orders of mankind, and they are dangerous because they are richer and more powerful and have much greater resources. The parallel with the expected invading force from the Americans can hardly be avoided.

Unfortunately, the upload to YouTube is of quite low resolution, which means that most of Toho’s special effects in the windstorm are too dark or too fuzzy to actually see. There are also the usual problems with the subtitles from Maya Grohn’s site, which are quite literal and often seem as if they were put together with an English-Japanese dictionary, leaving out all pronouns and connectors and missing any idiomatic fluency. At one point we get a subtitle that belongs with the classics of Hong Kong movies, in which it is reported that the Japanese are on the beach, bravely “glaring at the enemy ships,” which would certainly have frightened off someone like Kubla Khan.

Oddly, though we see large crowds addressed by the famous priest of legend, we do not see him reciting the Lotus Sutra at the enemy, which was often credited as the true instigator of the “divine wind,” as the kamikaze is usually translated. Perhaps the military did not want to suggest that the military forces actually needed religious help.

At any rate, the movie is fascinating primarily because it has survived, even in a fuzzy upload from ancient VHS. It is one of the very few all-out propaganda movies of the era to survive in any form,¹ and what we can see indicates that it was also in its original form quite a spectacular, all-out movie production as well.

¹ Anderson and Ritchie do not mention the movie in their extensive summary of movies in the war years (The Japanese Film (Princeton, 1982), pp. 126-58), nor does Jasper Sharp (Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema (Lanham, UK), p. 281-2) in his briefer summary, and despite the extensive detailed discussion of cartooning, John W. Dower, War Without Mercy (NY, 1986)  hardly touches on movies at all.