WWII kamikaze base seeks UNESCO recognition

(13 May 2015) RESTRICTION SUMMARY: AP CLIENTS ONLY
SHOTLIST
AP TELEVISION - AP CLIENTS ONLY
Tokyo, Japan - 13 May 2015
1. Close of Minamikyushu Mayor Kampei Shimoide
2. News conference on Minamikyushu City's application for inclusion on UNESCO's "Memory of the World" Registry
3. Cutaway of screen and media attending news conference
4. SOUNDBITE (Japanese) Kampei Shimoide, Mayor of Minamikyushu:
"Our objective is not an attempt to glorify, romanticise or rationalise the historical legacy of the 'Tokko' (or Kamikaze pilots). We are submitting the application in the hopes that this record of the tragedy of war will be fairly passed on to future generations so that humankind never repeats this tragedy again."
5. Reporter asking a question
6. SOUNDBITE (Japanese) Mutsuo Kuwashiro, Curator of the Chiran Peace Museum and advisor to the city government:
"Seventy years have passed since the war has ended and the current generation has not experienced the war. While the memories of World War II are wearing thin with time, the conservation of the recorded documents of such people's stories are necessary so that the next generation will not follow in their footsteps of such horror of war."
7. Various of slides shown during news conference of conserved documents written by the Kamikaze fighters during the war
8. SOUNDBITE (Japanese) Mutsuo Kuwashiro, Curator of the Chiran Peace Museum and advisor to the city government:
"The letters written and left by the Tokko pilots document the atrocities of a total war in modern history. We believe that these are very important and rare documents of testaments that must be shared with the rest of the world."
9. Wide of news conference and slide showing girls waving flowers at the Kamikaze pilots taking off for their mission
10. Close pan of slide showing girls who took care of the Kamikaze pilots at Chiran base waving at the pilots taking off for their mission
11. SOUNDBITE (English) M.G. Sheftall, Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural History and Communications at Shizuoka University:
"We regard that era, and I regard that era, as a collective failure on the part of the human race, as a period of temporary madness that gripped our entire species, or at least those of us who are in the primary war-making industrial powers at the time. It was an era where the pace of advances and the development of lethal weapons technology outstripped the ability of our collective sanity and common sense to keep up with this so called 'progress' with the whole catastrophic system almost taking on a mind of its own, fuelled by national propaganda machines of superb efficiency that stoked our mutual hatred, trapped all of us in our own patriotic rhetoric and caused us to both inflict and suffer unimaginable levels of bloodshed."
12. Cutaway of news conference
13. SOUNDBITE (English) M.G. Sheftall, Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural History and Communications at Shizuoka University:
"People generally don't like their world views tampered with. And our project and the approach our project is taking is going to challenge some people's world views in Japan and outside of Japan. I understand that."
14. Cutaway of news conference
15. SOUNDBITE (English) M.G. Sheftall, Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural History and Communications at Shizuoka University:
16. Pan of news conference
STORYLINE
Kampei Shimoide, mayor of Minamikyushu, and others associated with the project said on Wednesday they hope that registering the document collection as a UNESCO "Memory of the World" will help ensure it will convey the horrors and suffering of the war to future generations.

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