Reddit reviews Kamikaze: A Japanese Pilot's Own Spectacular Story of the Famous Suicide Squadrons

> and at Okinawa a bunch of people just committed suicide because...well, Japanese honor and shit.

It's a little bit more complicated than that. Contemporary Japanese propaganda of the US Marine Corps said that to enter the Marine Corps you had to kill your parents. This was meant to dehumanize marines as heartless beasts that were okay to kill, but once marine units moved in on villages it was a very widespread fear that you and your family would be raped to death. So people chose to kill themselves and their kids rather than have them suffer.

There was an extent to which honor in Japanese culture played into it (better to kill yourself than to be captured, and likewise better to kill yourself than to be raped to death) but from what I've read (can't remember any books' exact names but one was entitled "Kamikaze!" by a kamikaze pilot who didn't get to go on his mission before the war ended, published c. ~1955) the infamous suicide cliffs on Okinawa were out of fear, not out of honor.

Edit: uhhh I think this was one of the books

I read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Kamikaze-Japanese-Spectacular-Suicide-Squadrons/dp/0976154757 as a kid in middle school. Many years later I recall it pretty well. It is really a good read for anyone with any interest in the Kamikaze.

The author underwent Air Force training and aerial combat, then later joined the Kamikaze but the war ended before he flew his mission.

Yeah, I heard that you specifically had to make grandmother stew to be a Marine. What happens when you don't have one?
Source

By 1944/45 both Germany and Japan were recruiting teenager to fill up their depleted ranks.

http://www.amazon.com/Kamikaze-Japanese-Spectacular-Suicide-Squadrons/dp/0976154757

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze#Cultural_background
Look at that photo, disgusting that governments talked their children into doing shit like that.