Please join the FCCJ and the Yale Club of Japan in this special preview of the documentary "Wings of Defeat" followed by a Q&A session with Director/Producer Risa Morimoto and Linda Hoaglund (Yale College '79), Producer/Writer.

The world premiere for Wings of Defeat took place at the HotDocs festival on April 24th. The film will be released in Japan by CineQuanon with the title "Tokko" in July.

THE PROJECT
Wings of Defeat is a feature-length documentary exploring the human experience of surviving kamikaze pilots. When director, Risa Morimoto, learned that her Japanese uncle had trained as a kamikaze pilot in his youth but carried that secret to his grave, she retraced his footsteps asking surviving pilots about their provocative experiences.

THE STORY
Internationally, Kamikaze pilots remain a potent metaphor for fanaticism. In Japan, they are largely revered for their selfless sacrifice. Yet few outside Japan know that hundreds of kamikaze pilots survived the war. By the spring of 1945, when all Japanese planes were reassigned to kamikaze (Tokkotai) attacks, Japan could no longer defend its airspace and its naval fleet was demolished. Old airplanes and inadequate training resulted in many failed engines, leaving scores of pilots stranded. When Japan surrendered, hundreds of kamikaze trainees were awaiting sortie orders that never arrived.

Through rare interviews with surviving kamikaze pilots, we learn that the military demanded pilots volunteer to give up their lives. Retracing their journeys from teenagers to doomed pilots, a complex history of brutal training and ambivalent sacrifice is revealed. As U.S. firebombs incinerated its major cities and the country ran out of weapons and fuel, Japan's military government refused to accept the reality that it could no longer fight. Instead they sent thousands of pilots off to targets nearly impossible to reach. Sixty years later, survivors in their eighties tell us about their training, their mindsets, their experiences in a kamikaze cockpit and what it meant to survive when thousands of their fellow pilots had died. Their stories insist we set aside our preconceptions to relive their all too human experiences with them. Ultimately, they help us question what responsibilities a government at war has to its soldiers and to its people.

THE STORYTELLERS
Wings of Defeat features interviews with four trained kamikaze pilots, including three who took off to attack the U.S. fleet off the coast of Okinawa in the spring of 1945: Navigator pilot Ena, Pilot Hamazono, Gunner Nakajima, and Pilot Ueshima.

Exclusive interviews with surviving veterans of the USS Drexler, a destroyer sunk by two kamikaze pilots, illustrate the enduring trauma of the suicide attacks.

Two Japanese kamikaze authorities and John W. Dower, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, American historian of modern Japan, and Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, author of Kamikaze Diaries and Cherry Blossoms, Kamikaze and Nationalism contextualize these individual narratives into a portrait of youthful determination exploited by a desperate military.

VISUAL STORYTELLING
In order to recreate the most dramatic moments of these pilots’ lives, Wings of Defeat has commissioned original animation, inspired by late 19th century modernist woodblock prints. Unique graphics, inspired by WWII maps, have been created to trace the course of the Pacific War. Never-before-seen Japanese war-time propaganda newsreels and magazine covers recreate deteriorating conditions on the Japanese mainland, while dramatic archival footage reveals what the kamikaze pilots experienced after taking off. 

PRODUCERS
Risa Morimoto (producer/director) produced the feature film, The LaMastas in 1998. Since then she has produced, written and directed for film and television.  Risa produces the award-winning program Cinema AZN, a half-hour show on Asian film. President of Edgewood Pictures Inc., a motion picture production company, Risa graduated with a Masters in film and education from New York University in 1999.  Risa also serves as Executive Director of Asian CineVision, a non-profit media arts organization. A second-generation Japanese American, Risa studied at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.

Linda Hoaglund (producer/writer) is the film advisor for the Japan Society in New York. Born and raised in Japan, the daughter of American missionary parents, she attended Japanese public schools. A graduate of Yale College ('79), after working as a bilingual news producer for Japanese television, she joined an independent American film production company as a producer. She has subtitled 150 Japanese films. She represents Japanese directors and artists and serves as an international liaison for producers. In 2004, she received a commendation from the Foreign Minister of Japan for her work promoting Japanese film abroad .

The trailer and more information for Wings of Defeat  are available at http://www.wingsofdefeat.com