M.G. Sheftall, Professor of Modern Japanese History at Shizuoka University and author of Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (Penguin 2005), was in Honolulu, Hawaii, aboard the battleship USS Missouri (site of the Japanese surrender in World War II) speaking at the dedication of a temporary exhibition of the Tokkō Kamikaze suicide pilots on April 10 and 11, 2015.

On April 11, 2015, a special exhibition on Kamikaze pilots opened on the Battleship Missouri Memorial, which is berthed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Kamikaze plane attack on the battleship during the Battle of Okinawa. The Missouri survived an April 11, 1945 kamikaze attack, which set fire to the starboard deck, and became the site of Japan's surrender on September 2 of the same year. Hitherto, no exhibition relating to the kamikaze has ever been held outside Japan, so it is of interest that this exhibition came to be held in the U.S., above all at the shrine to the American war in the Pacific, and how it has been received by American veterans and civilians. According to the Battleship Missouri Memorial's home page, the exhibition “offers a rare glimpse into the lives and final days of these young kamikaze pilots or Japanese tokkō tai (special attack forces) … Exhibit artifacts include farewell letters and poems (translated into English) from the pilots to family members and loved ones, personal photographs and information, historical images, and uniform items. The exhibit will be on display through November 11, Veterans Day.”

US censorship of public discussion of the bombings during the Allied Occupation of Japan ensured that the Japanese public knew little about the human consequences of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When hibakusha poets seek a public audience for their poetry, their experiences make them potentially powerful public intellectuals. As Noam Chomsky has observed, the most effective public intellectuals are dissidents who act from the margins. Tōge Sankichi and Kurihara Sadako became activists and their poetry offers a powerful and rousing response to the atomic bombing and lobbies for nuclear disarmament. The simplicity and accessibility of these poems is essential to the public dissemination of their message and Kurihara's and Tōge's identification as public intellectuals. This article examines the ways in which hibakusha poets can be recognised as public intellectuals when they seek public audiences for their work. Discussion hinges on a number of considerations centred on public intellectualism, trauma and the uses of language.

The two great poets of Iwate, Ishikawa Takuboku and Miyazawa Kenji, were born 50 kilometers and 10 years apart (1886 and 1896) and went to the same middle school in Morioka. They both died young of tuberculosis: Takuboku at 26 in 1912 and Kenji at 37 in 1933.