Kamikaze: Japan's suicide gods Albert Axell and Hideaki Kase Longman, 274pp, £19.99 ISBN 058277232X

The World Trade Center has gone, but the shadows of the twin towers seem to lengthen, pointing to the coming war in Iraq, and beyond that to Saudi Arabia and even, who knows, to an unco-operative European state. On the one side lies a fanaticism unrestrained by reason, and on the other a religiose and self-important America, determined to remake the world in its own image, a comic-book culture driven by ruthless technologies.

If the future is a marriage between Microsoft and the Disney Corporation, what can the rest of us do about it? Reading this strangely moving account of the kamikaze pilots, one dimly senses that the fightback may have already begun, launched more than 60 years ago when Japanese carrier planes bombed Pearl Harbor. The wartime newsreels that show waves of suicide pilots ("hashi-crashies" and "screwy-siders", to the American servicemen I met soon after) diving into aircraft carriers near Okinawa uncannily evoke the images of al-Qaeda terrorists flying their hijacked Boeings into the World Trade Center. There are the same horrific fireballs, and the same mystery of how human beings - so intelligent, gifted and far-sighted - could lock themselves into such insane confrontations.

Anyone, civilian or combatant, who saw Japanese soldiers in action during the Second World War, knew that life and death existed for them in a very different realm. The horrendous atrocities carried out by the Japanese armies were sanctioned by an officer corps inured to violence and death by centuries of civil strife, and who almost welcomed the prospect of death - their own or their captives' - as a means of testing their own integrity and will.

As a teenage boy roaming around the abandoned airfields near Shanghai in the weeks after the war's end, I met countless armed Japanese soldiers waiting for the arrival of the American and Chinese forces. They knew what was in store for them, but sat stoically on their ammunition boxes. Sharing my water bottle with them, I realised that in a sense, they were already dead.

In many ways the entire Japanese nation had resigned itself to death once the war turned against them at the Battle of Midway. As Axell and Kase make clear, the kamikaze attacks that began in 1944 were not a bizarre aberration of the samurai spirit, but were latent in the Japanese character and its attitudes to self, family and country, a patriotism as strong as the feelings we have for our young children.

Anguished Americans re- sponding to 11 September described the attacks as cowardly and the product of envy, a huge misjudgement, I suspect. The al-Qaeda terrorists despise, not envy America, and no coward could fly an aircraft into the side of a skyscraper or carrier.

At the same time, far more than bravery propelled the wartime suicide pilots. The thousands of young Japanese who joined the Special Attack units never thought that they were throwing away their lives. They knew that the war was lost, and believed that they were defending their families and homeland in the only way left to them. Conventional tactics were no longer an option for the novice pilots who made up most of the Japanese air force. Far from seeking heroic death, the kamikaze pilots saw the suicide attacks as their only means of delaying the American advance.

The first official suicide pilot was Lieutenant Yukio Seki, who crashed his Zero fighter into the US carrier St Lo at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The St Lo sank within hours, blown apart by its own exploding torpedoes. During the next three months, more than a thousand suicide pilots lost their lives attacking the American fleet near the Philippines.

A further 2,000 kamikaze pilots died in the bitter struggle for Okinawa in the spring of 1945, most of them shot down into the sea by resolute gunners. More than 30 US warships were sunk or damaged, and fears that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would lead to millions of casualties may well have persuaded President Truman to drop the atomic bombs and shock Japan into sudden surrender.

This account of the kamikazes is powerfully gripping, its authenticity vouched for by the testimony of former suicide pilots who finished their training but were never sent on missions. It is also draining and unsettling to read, a collective suicide note written by thousands of young men who had scarcely entered adult life. There is a good case to be made for the proposition that no one should fight in a war, or put on a uniform, until the age of 40.

On the evidence of the letters and poems that they wrote on the eve of their last flights, the kamikaze pilots were extraordinarily calm. Many had been university students with degrees, curiously, in the humanities and law rather than science and engineering. Most were described as "blissful" during their last hours, a peace of mind that lies beyond both despair and psychopathology.

Their dedication is a mystery to the western mind, but all too close to the behaviour of the al-Qaeda flyers on 11 September. At a certain intensity, the will to suicide becomes a deranged affirmation of life. One has to assume that there will be other suicide attacks on the US mainland, and that the American response will be ever more decisive, and, sadly, ever more provocative.

J G Ballard's most recent novel is Super-Cannes (Flamingo)

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