Book Review: The Last Zero Fighter by Dan King

Topic & Content

Published in 2012, The Last Zero Fighter is a collection of firsthand accounts of Japanese aviators during World War II. Each account chronicles the subject’s upbringing, reasons for joining the Imperial Japanese Navy, training to be an aviator, and experiences during the Pacific War. Each chapter focuses on a different aviator and is organized as follows:

• Japanese Naval Aviation 101 (Paths to becoming an aviator in the IJN, air crew roles, and air group organization.)
• Ch. 1 Kaname Harada (Soren graduate, Zero pilot)
• Ch. 2 Isamu Miyazaki (Yokaren graduate, Zero pilot)
• Ch. 3 Haruo Yoshino (Yokaren graduate, Kate observer/navigator)
• Ch. 4 Toshimitsu Imaizumi (Soren graduate, Zero pilot, assigned to Kamikaze unit)
• Ch. 5 Tomokazu Kasai (Yokaren graduate, Zero & Shinden pilot, assigned to Kamikaze unit)
• Epilogue

One interesting thing the book and interviews highlight is the differences in training programs Japan used for its aviators. Unlike Western nations, which preferred officers (four-year university graduates) for their pilot training programs, the majority of Japanese aviators were originally civilian teenagers who graduated from the Kaigun Yoka Renshusei (Yokaren for short) program. This program recruited civilian males, aged 15 to 20, directly into the Navy as enlisted men for a couple of years of training and schooling, and then sent them directly into flight training. Some of them would eventually be promoted up to the officer ranks. The rationale was that teenagers possessed better hand-eye coordination for flight training. Another program known as the Kaigun Hiko Soju Renshusei (Soren for short) drew from the Navy’s enlisted personnel who passed the exam and prerequisites to attend flight school. Of course, Imperial Japanese Naval Academy and university graduates who became officers could also attend flight training and become pilots or aviators.

Thesis

The author states that his intention with this book is to share the thoughts and motivations of the Japanese pilot with the English speaker.

Author’s Background

Dan King visited Japan several times during his high school years in the 1980s and then earned a Bachelor’s degree in Japanese at California State University, Los Angeles. He then moved to Aichi Prefecture and worked for Toyota Motor Corporation from 1986 to 1996. During this time, he passed the highest level of Japanese language proficiency test administered by the Japanese Ministry of Education. It was also during this time that he began interviewing Japanese WWII veterans about their experiences. At the time of the book’s publication, he had met over 250 Japanese Army and Navy WWII veterans and interviewed 97 of them about their experiences.

Dan King’s other books in his series on Japanese veterans include A Tomb Called Iwo Jima: Firsthand Accounts from Japanese Survivors, Blossoms from the Sky: Firsthand Accounts from Kamikaze Pilots Who Volunteered to Fly the Ohka Baka Bomb, and The Iron Graves of Saipan: Firsthand Accounts of the Japanese 9th Tank Regiment from Manchuria to the Mariana Islands.

In addition to his interviews, King has also worked as a historical and technical consultant on various films and documentaries about Japan or the Pacific War, such as John Woo’s Windtalkers (2002), Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai (2003), Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006), and the HBO miniseries The Pacific (2010).

Critical Observations

Positives

The book is organized fairly well. Each chapter covers the subjects’ experiences chronologically through the war. Since all of these men survived the war, each chapter concludes with their final thoughts on the war, looking back on it some 70 years later. Given their advanced age, these men look back on the war with sorrow and wisdom, noting the cruelty of war.

Additionally, the subjects are arranged chronologically, with the early chapters detailing the prewar period (including experiences in the Second Sino-Japanese War in China), and the later chapters showing men recruited in the middle of the Pacific War who underwent far less rigorous training. For example, Tomokazu Kasai received no dogfighting or aerial gunnery training before being sent to an active unit following advanced flight training. He literally had to learn on the job. What becomes apparent is that all of these men were lucky to survive the war.

Negatives

The title of the book is something of a misnomer. It would seem to imply that this is a biography of the last Zero fighter pilot and his aircraft or the last dogfight in the Pacific War, but it’s not; it’s a metaphorical title. On the other hand, not many of these men are still alive, so the interviews that King conducted could literally be from the last Zero fighter pilots.

While each chapter is substantial, there are only five interviews in the book. Given that it’s been over 80 years since the end of WWII, the number of living veterans is dwindling every day. In fact, at the time of the book’s publication in 2012, only Kaname Harada and Tomokazu Kasai were still alive. Harada passed away in 2016, and Kasai passed away in 2021. With this in mind, the subject matter is a victim of time, and the paucity of veterans for King to interview is understandable. Eventually, we will all pass into nothingness, so it’s left to historians to document these experiences before that happens.

As with any book dealing with personal accounts, this one has the same limitations as any oral history. It suffers from offering the reader a very narrow perspective of the events and is limited by the inherent biases in personal recollections, given the chosen interviewees. That is to say, the five subjects the author interviewed may or may not be representative of the average experience of a Japanese aviator.

The majority of these men were Yokaren graduates and fighter pilots. Haruo Yoshino was the only person who wasn’t a fighter pilot, and thus seems like the odd man out. Additionally, none of these men commanded any units. While some of them rose through the ranks to become officers, the majority of their experience was as enlisted men. Essentially, all of the narratives are from the enlisted man’s perspective. Consequently, the view they have of the war is very narrow and solely “from the cockpit,” so to speak.

Evaluation (Does the content support the thesis?)

Overall, the book does exactly what the thesis claims. It documents the lives and war experiences of the five men who were interviewed. The book is well organized and moves chronologically through their experiences and the war. Thankfully, it’s not trying to be some epic narrative of the war, but presents the reader with the personal recollections of these aviators.