Surviving former kamikaze pilots reject moves to glorify their mission

Kamikaze pilot Yutaka Kanbe should have died nearly seven decades ago.

It was only Tokyo's surrender on August 15, 1945, that saved him from the fate of thousands whose suicide missions came to define Japan's unrelenting defiance in the closing stages of the second world war.

But as the 91-year-old faces his own mortality again, he worries that a rightward shift under Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and a recent film glorifying kamikaze missions, are proof that the horrors of war are lost on younger Japanese generations.

"It was crazy - I cannot support the idea of glorifying our mission," the former navy pilot said of young men ordered to crash their planes into allied ships.

"Japan could go to war again if our leaders are all like Abe. I'm going to die soon, but I worry about Japan's future."

Kamikaze pilots - the term means "divine wind" - were heroes in wartime Japan, where their deadly sacrifice in the name of Emperor Hirohito and the nation was celebrated.