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Julian Ryall

Japan’s wartime kamikaze pilots remain among the most recognisable symbols of the Pacific war: young men flying aircraft into Allied ships on missions from which they were not expected to return.
Far less well-remembered are the fukuryu – suicide frogmen trained in the closing months of World War II to walk into the sea with mines on bamboo poles, then wait beneath the waves for an Allied invasion fleet.
Kanade Hamamoto was one of many Japanese people who had never heard of them, despite spending years on the same stretch of coast where they once trained.
The 25-year-old photographer knew Inamuragasaki, on the Shonan coast south of Tokyo, only as a scenic seaside spot until a friend mentioned that the remains of a military base could still be seen near the cape, in tunnels cut into the cliff face.
“My friend’s comments kept nagging away at me after I got home, so I did an online search and came across the term ‘Fukuryu Special Attack Unit’ for the first time,” Hamamoto told This Week in Asia.

She has since turned that discovery into “ー・・”, a bilingual photo book published in 2025 that won the 50th Kimura Ihei Photography Award, one of Japan’s most prestigious honours for emerging photographers.
The title, rendered in English as “Arrived at the seabed”, refers to the Morse code-style signal – one long tug and two short ones – that the divers would use to tell colleagues on shore they had reached the bottom.
Once underwater, the fukuryu could communicate only through such coded tugs on a rope. Their bodies were sealed inside heavy diving suits, with weighted shoes and helmets fastened shut with four screws.

As those screws were tightened, surviving members of Japan’s wartime fukuryu units later described a piercing, high-pitched sound right next to their ears.
In his memoirs, former fukuryu Takaichiro Monna wrote that it felt “as if I were being placed in a coffin while I was still alive”.
Other survivors of the little-known unit, which was tasked with the last-ditch defence of the Japanese homeland in the closing stages of the second world war, reported that even years afterwards, they could still hear the whistling sound.
Few of the estimated 1,200 men who completed fukuryu training before Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, are likely to still be alive, but Hamamoto has helped return their story to public memory.

A different kind of kamikaze
The first organised kamikaze attack came during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, off the Philippines, in October 1944, when Lieutenant Yukio Seki crashed his Zero fighter into the US Navy escort carrier St. Lo, causing an explosion that sank the vessel in minutes.
Kamikaze air attacks on Allied shipping grew more frequent over the following months, alongside one-way missions by kaiten crewed torpedoes and shinyo motorboats laden with explosives.
The tide of the war could not be turned, however, and the fukuryu – meaning “crouching dragon” – were conceived as virtually the last line of defence against an Allied invasion of Japan.
The plan was simple: when an invasion fleet was sighted offshore, the fukuryu would wade out from the beaches, wait for a warship or landing craft to pass overhead, then strike it with a mine fixed to a five-metre-long (16.4 foot) bamboo pole.
The 15kg (33lb) explosive would be devastating to the enemy vessel – and to the frogman holding it.
In some places, underwater structures were installed a short way off the beach to store extra mines and offer the divers some shelter.

The 71st Arashi unit, based at Yokosuka, was tasked with defending the beaches of Sagami Bay with about 1,000 men. Additional units were stationed at Kure in central Japan and Sasebo in Kyushu.
Although the divers were never called upon to face an invasion fleet, since Japan surrendered first, their training was far from safe and at least some of the men died in accidents.
It is not clear how many were killed during training, however, because many records were destroyed after the surrender.
Surviving accounts describe isolated incidents, including one evening when bioluminescence at sea was mistaken for an approaching invasion fleet and the men were ordered into the water.
“When I read reports that said many of the bodies could not be recovered and many people were still missing, I began to wonder if they might still be there, somewhere beneath the sea where I had spent time since I was a teenager,” Hamamoto said.
“I felt their presence not as something that belonged to the past, but as something that exists in the present. I felt it not as something that concerned someone else, but as something that concerned me personally.”
While researching her book, Hamamoto concluded that the fukuryu were relatively unknown today for a number of reasons: firstly because the war ended before they saw combat, secondly because the unit’s records were destroyed and thirdly because the area where they trained was long off limits to civilians.

Garren Mulloy, a professor of international relations at Daito Bunka University and a specialist in military affairs, pointed to yet other reasons that the fukuryu frogmen’s stories had been largely overlooked for so long.
“When the first kamikaze aircraft started hitting warships in the Pacific in 1944, it was caught on film and shocked everyone who saw it,” he said. “There was also attention on how the kamikaze were first thought up, then the technology was developed and deployed, but with the fukuryu, it was just diving suits and a pole with a mine on the end.”
Sending young men to their certain deaths armed only with a mine illustrated the desperation of Japan’s military in the waning days of the conflict, Mulloy said.
Other last-gasp defences were planned too, including soldiers being ordered to crouch in beach foxholes and wait for enemy tanks to pass overhead before detonating a mine beneath them.
“I imagine that even in those extreme circumstances – with reckless training regimens and makeshift diving suits, as well as the grim necessity of carrying out a suicide mission – the waves and winds off Yokosuka must have been just as calm as they are today,” Hamamoto said.
“In that beautiful sea, human beings were attempting to kill their fellow human beings and, in the process, were losing their own lives.”
Preserving the memory of the fukuryu was essential to ensure that history did not repeat itself, she said. “I simply cannot bring myself to view this as a distant event that has nothing to do with me.”


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A photograph obtained by Japanese broadcaster CBC Television shows a diving suit used by the “fukuryu” suicide diver units in WWII. Photo: YouTube/NextTVCBC

The remains of a military base where “fukuryu” were trained can be seen in the cliffs along the coast of Inamuragasaki, on the Shonan coast south of Tokyo. Photo: Kanade Hamamoto

The remains of a military base where “fukuryu” were trained, in the cliffs along the coast of Inamuragasaki. About 1,200 men had completed “fukuryu” training by the time Japan surrendered in 1945. Photo: Kanade Hamamoto

Kanade Hamamoto won an award for her photo book on the “fukuryu”, Japan’s wartime suicide frogmen. Photo: Hinano Kimoto

The remains of a military base for “fukuryu” training in the cliffs along the coast of Inamuragasaki. Once underwater, the “fukuryu” could communicate only through coded tugs on a rope. Photo: Kanade Hamamoto

A Japanese kamikaze fighter is shown swooping down on a US warship in the three-day Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. Photo: AP

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Sealed in diving suits with mines attached to poles, Japan’s ‘fukuryu’ frogmen waited beneath the waves for an invasion that never came


Sealed in diving suits with mines attached to poles, Japan’s ‘fukuryu’ frogmen waited beneath the waves for an invasion that never came.


History

Legacy of war in Asia

Daito Bunka University

Crouching dragons: the suicide divers Japan never sent to war

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Sealed in diving suits with mines attached to poles, Japan’s ‘fukuryu’ frogmen waited beneath the waves for an invasion that never came

Sealed in diving suits with mines attached to poles, Japan’s ‘fukuryu’ frogmen waited beneath the waves for an invasion that never came