To be a kamikaze was seen as a great honour in the Japanese culture and if you didn't fulfil this you were seen as weak, pride is important to their culture.
Garland liked to write about people and their lives and enjoyed listening to other peoples stories.
Form and Structure
The first stanza is a backstory before she recounts the story, the line break is used to start the daughters thoughts. The poem is so complex to reflect how complex the situation is, between the generations.
Kamikaze
Written by Beatrice Garland where a daughter is talking to her children about their grandad/her father.
Ideas
Japanese suicide pilots who loaded their planes with explosives and crashed them into American ships. A fighter plane used for suicide missions by Japanese pilots in World War II.
Like a huge flag waved first one way then the other in a figure of eight'
(The daughter here is talking about the fish): Fish were seen as symbols of life, the simile is used to represents life and also the patriotic sacrifice he will make. The figure of eight symbolises infinity, he is imagining his imortal death and his internal death. Also the figure of eight returns on itself to show that he is going to do the same, in his daughters eyes this is the moment it changed.
And sometimes, she said, he must have wondered which had been the better way to die.'
The phrase 'he must have wondered' suggests that the daughter never spoke to her father about the decision to return. The idea that he ''must have wondered which had been the better way to die' suggests to the reader that he died emotionally and as a person in the family and he was permanently ostracised.
