Here's a photo of the factory worker's headband being worn by flight crew, and on the other hand a variant Kamikaze headband for a factory worker with even a Kikusui emblem. Collectors would have wanted these two characters to swap their headbands back then before getting photographed. In the end, solid provenance is the only way to be sure of the context in which they were once worn.
Last edited by Nick Komiya; 11-19-2015 at 01:08 PM.
As this thread is pinned, I might as well use it to showcase a fake you'll find already in circulation in the collector's world.
Back in the 80s there was a US dealer calling themselves "House of Swords and Militaria", who issued thick catalogs. The headband below was one of their regular catalog items at $45 a piece. It was done like the fake Tojo flags made by the CBs. They took the Saburo Endo headband and copied it by hand. These were hand done, so there are some minor differences from the catalog photo, but you can see that it was written by the same person. These will show age and staining, but don't get excited when you see one at a garage sale.
Their catalog read as follows.
"JAPANESE KAMIKAZI HEAD BAND. 100% authentic of linen with full hand lettered inscription, chop mark, rising sun meat ball design. Recovered from a local veteran. One of the most famous of all Japanese headbands......$45.00 "
From a vet, of course, where else? Photos borrowed from zachb's post at WAF
Accurate repros with Endo's name along the bottom are now available in Japan and sell for $5. Great news for Halloween Cosplayers.
Watching wartime newsreels gives us some additional background on why the Kamikaze headbands for girls came about.
The headbands were issued to students and women conscripted into military production labor by two programs launched in August of 1944. The women's labor conscription program required women between the age of 14 to 40 to work at munitions factories or in food production. Students had been involved in military production ever since 1938 on a part time basis, but from August 1944, it became a full-time responsibility, so that 81.9% of junior high school kids were in factories by 1945.
When these programs kicked in in August 1944, these workers were only wearing plain white tenugui as headbands, as shown in these newsreels of 31 August 1944 and 12 October 1944.
And in end of October 1944, soon after the second newsreel above, the first wave of navy Kamikaze attacks began, making big news.
At that time Endo, who had been Chief of the Aircraft Production Bureau since the previous year must have gotten the idea of adding Kamikaze as a message of national resolve to all the plain white tenugui he had seen the women wearing. Thus by end of 1944, he had the Kamikaze headbands mass produced and they were issued to the girls and students, probably in December 1944, making their news reel debut on 4th January 1945.
Here's another example of a tenugui/headband worn by women in their homefront collaboration campaigns. This example was printed and distributed to members of the National Defense Women's League in 1938 and expressed solidarity of the women in the national effort in the face of the China Incident. Bottom photo shows this actual headband worn during their rice cake making drive.
By the way, the accurate repro I showed in post 14 can be bought from Nakata for 380 Yen. See here
I wasn't really interested in these before as I assumed anything worn by an actual Kamikaze would be near impossible to find considering the nature of their occupation. But after reading this I want one of those printed headbands for my Japanese home front collection.
Yes, they are valid collectible wartime memorabilia, so long as they are not misrepresented in significance and price. It is similar to the China Incident Commemorative Medal, another home front item that used to be misrepresented as the Chinese collaborator's medal with a fraudulently inflated sense of rarity.
Last edited by Nick Komiya; 09-18-2019 at 11:10 AM.
With the picture in post #11 and this photo, it seems that there must have been some reason pilots were wearing them. Maybe they are from sweethearts back home?
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