Long before September 11th and suicide bombing in the Middle East, Japanese pilots were prepared to fly their bomb-laden planes straight into enemy targets. Two surviving kamikaze talk to David McNeill in Tokyo about what drove them towards what seemed to be certain death.

'I was concentrating on the success of my mission, nothing else, so I felt no fear. It was just a job that had to be done to defend'

Trying to imagine Iwao Fukagawa as a wild-eyed 21-year-old hunched over the cockpit of a flying bomb is no easy task. Yet this diminutive former salesman with the kindly pensioner's face and easy laugh was once one of a legendary squad of Japanese pilots who terrorised the US navy fleet in the Pacific as it inched its way toward invasion of the Japanese mainland.

Long before September 11th and the emergence of the Arab suicide bomber came the kamikaze. Like the jihad martyrs of the Middle East, the kamikaze were desperate, fanatical men who burned with hatred for the US and were more than ready to die for their god, the emperor.

Launched as the US began its attack on the Philippines in 1944, the kamikaze wave damaged or destroyed 300 US warships by flying bomb-laden planes straight at them though a blizzard of anti-aircraft fire. The strategy cost the lives of about 5,000 Japanese men barely out of their teens - just one more tragic episode in a war without limits or mercy, and one that had no chance of turning the tide against the US juggernaut.

Fukagawa might then be expected to nurse some bitterness against his former leaders. Far from it. Despite being just 48 hours from self-immolation against the hull of a ship in Okinawa when the Emperor announced Japan's surrender in August 1945, he says he was proud and happy to serve his country. And he claims to have felt no relief or happiness when it ended.

"I was sad and ashamed," he says, "because we had lost despite all our efforts. And because I was still alive. It's hard to describe the sense of failure I felt. I had volunteered so I was ready to give my life."

It's a struggle to understand what many would consider an absurd sense of duty and loyalty to one of history's least noble causes, but it helps to learn that he went through years of narrow ideological education before going to military school aged just 15. By the time many children in Ireland are having their first pint, the young farmer's son was already a fully trained warrior ready to die for the emperor.

"When I was growing up everyone wanted to be a soldier," he says. "We admired them, and I was doubly honoured by being chosen as a Tokkotai (special attack unit). My family were happy for me. And the skills needed to become a kamikaze pilot were not easy. You had to have honesty, purity of spirit and courage."

Did he ever have any doubts about what he was going to do? "No. During the war, emperor and nation were the same for us. To give your life was a given. I never thought about it."

His comrade Toshio Yoshitake, who came even closer to death when flying what he thought would be his last mission in late 1944, also denies ever having any doubts. On the way to attack US ships in the Philippines his plane was shot down and he crash landed, badly injured, on Mactan island. All his friends died in the attack.

HOW did he feel as he flew toward what he thought was certain death? "I was concentrating on the success of my mission, nothing else, so I felt no fear." Did he have any second thoughts? "No, none at all. It was just a job that had to be done to defend my country." He says the hardest thing for him was when he arrived back home after the war to see how quickly people had changed. "There were Japanese girls walking around arm in arm with US soldiers. It was hard to take at first."

Elsewhere it might be called the stiff-upper lip, the soldierly mask of duty and honour that prevents the display of more human emotions like fear and doubt. The façade slips just once during our interviews in a veterans' centre in central Tokyo. As we leaf through a book profiling the dead kamikaze, page after page of men with boys faces in stiff military poses, frozen in time, Fukagawa's voice cracks and his eyes fill with tears.

Doesn't he blame anyone for this reckless waste of life? The voice is strong again. "It was war, we were fighting for our country. Who would I blame?" he says.

Although he and Yoshitake accept that wartime emperor Hirohito was a "symbol" and not the God as they were led to believe, both still "respect" Hirohito and his son Akihito, who sits on the Imperial throne today. Moreover, they resent that Japan's postwar peace and prosperity came at the cost of weakening the emperor system and writing their story out of history.

In nationalist mythology, the kamikaze were glorified as "falling cherry blossom petals", a classic and recurring fascist metaphor that beautified what was an unnatural and unnecessary death. As Kazuo Watanabe, who helped compile a book of the secret writings of young Japanese soldiers says, the imagery along with the relentless barrage of wartime propaganda, helped force the young men to strangle their emotions, to "accept the irrational as rational".

One of these men, Ryoji Uehara, who, at the age of 22, ploughed his plane into the US fleet in Katena Bay, Okinawa, wrote in his diary: "A pilot in our special aerial attack force is . . . nothing more than a piece of the machine which holds the plane's controls - endowed with no personal qualities, no emotions, certainly with no rationality - simply just an iron filament tucked inside a magnet itself designed to be sucked into an enemy aircraft carrier. The whole business would, within any context of rational behavior, appear to be unthinkable."

YET, all these men put aside their doubts once they sat in the cockpit of their flying bombs because they were ordered to. How far, I wonder, would they have gone. Would they, for instance, have attacked the Pentagon or civilian targets like the suicide bombers of September 11th? Fukagawa becomes very angry.

"That's a stupid question!" he says. "We were fighting for our country in a war. Who are they fighting for?"

But change the cause and so many things sound similar, I say. The method for one, the blind obedience to a higher power, the kamikaze codes of honour and duty. Don't the jihad soldiers also believe they are fighting to defend Saudi Arabia and Palestine from US influence?

"They're completely different. We were soldiers. They are just terrorists," he says, before cutting off any further discussion.

Yoshitake, the quieter of the two, the one who came closest to death and who is, at 80, presumably close again, admits he still sometimes has nightmares. "In my dreams I'm trapped in my burning plane on Mactan, trying to escape. But my legs won't move." Has he ever told his children or grandchildren what happened to him? "No, they're not interested."

As we look down again at the book of dead pilots, he says in a small voice: "It was a stupid, cruel war." Then, looking up to see if I have heard, he gives an embarrassed smile.