The grandiose Museum of Naval History, erected in 1936 at the Etajima naval base in Hiroshima Bay, devoutly records the heroic death wishes of young Kamikaze warriors from the Imperial Navy who flung themselves into enemy ships.

“Notes left behind by the young pilots of Kamikaze Special Attack often bring tears to those who read them,” reads a brochure from the naval base, now part of Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force.

“With my own blood, I will serve the Emperor,” reads one young man’s farewell letter to his parents. “To die for my country, I will go forth and attack, filled with belief.”

While the sacrifice of some 4000 Kamikaze or Tokkotai boys and young men in air craft and naval craft during the Pacific War was very real, the world has gradually learned - especially over the last decade or so with the release of books on the topic - that this youthful sacrifice was not always voluntary, eager or willing.

Yet at Etajima, with its magnificent old English-designed buildings set among beautiful gardens, today’s modern navy, through its museum, regrettably perpetuates the nationalistic Kamikaze myth. As do other museums all over Japan. While heroism abounded among the Kamikaze youth, it is now clear that a sizeable number were forced into their untimely suicides against their will.

The SBS documentary Wings of Defeat helps balance the picture.

“After a final toast to at the command post, I will encounter my final hours, my doom looms, wretched and unjust,” wrote one young Kamikaze pilot, Takehiko Ena, quoted in Wings of Defeat. “I will plunge headlong into a fiery hell, an abyss of carnage.”

Fortunately for him, the engine on his Kamikaze plane failed, and he plunged into the sea to swim to an isolated island, where he spent the next 92 days. “In that place, my warrior spirit simply withered.”

In 2007, I was in Etajima researching my book 1942. Reading the farewell letters of the soon-to-be immortalised young warriors, I was surprised to find two large framed photographs and words venerating Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi, the ‘father of the Kamikazes’. Onishi had been an outspoken little thug at Etajima and had been found guilty of ‘conduct unbecoming’ for striking a geisha.

It was he who came up with the desperate idea of training pilots to crash planes into enemy ships. His plan was explained in the Nippon Times of March 18, 1945: “Youth must lead way for overcoming crisis,” he said. “It is necessary to kill as many of the enemy’s forces as possible … and to show him through his flesh and blood, how horrible a thing is war.”

Onishi said that “with an airplane you can sink a ship carrying hundreds, thousands of men. This is worth dying for.” He thought dropping bombs onto ships was too inaccurate. Better results could be achieved by pilots crashing bomb-laden aircraft into them.

Kazuo Nakajima, a pilot cadet when recruited, survived his Kamikaze mission when his plane crashed due to engine failure. “Mostly they died in vain. And then in the end, what did they die for?” he asks in the documentary. “They [the Navy] treated people’s lives like waste paper … because of that Emperor, we pilots were tormented and all these men had to die … why couldn’t he have ordered the war to end sooner?”

And why also does Japan’s modern day navy honour such war-mongering, imperialistic thugs like Onishi?