Review of "The Luckiest Kamikaze Pilot" Episode at The Infographics Show

By: Shane Lambert
Original time of writing: January 27th, 2025

"The Luckiest Kamikaze Pilot" is an episode on The Infographics Show that was published on January 26th, 2025. It tells the story of a WWII Japanese pilot who operated a Zero plane as part of Japan's air force. I didn't mind the episode, it was short (under 15 minutes), however, I was a little disappointed with it relative to other episodes on the YouTube channel.

Kamikaze fighters were pilots on suicide missions. Their job was to fly their planes into enemy ships with the hopes of sinking them. The strategy would be to trade one pilot and one plane for an entire ship in the enemy's fleet and any crew that would be part of the ship.

With this episode, I think The Infographics Show managed their audience's expectations wrong. When you look at the name of the episode, then you might expect a tale of a Kamikaze pilot who crashed his plane into an enemy's ship and somehow survived the crash. There's a little bit of clickbait in the title, I think. But what it tells the story of instead is a Kamikaze pilot whose missions were either abandoned or aborted time and time again simply due to chance events, like weather or inability to locate a target. In the end, his final mission is aborted at the buzzer, because Japan surrounded to the Americans just before taking off.

Exit link to The Infographics Show episode!

I did find that the pilot was mentioned in mainstream news in 2020 with a picture. I did not like the newspaper article but thought that some would want to see the pilot's picture.

It seems that he, Kazuo Odachi, published his memoirs of being a Kamikaze very late in life. An Internet search suggests that he is still alive as of the time of this article, aged 98 years old. He would be among a very small number of people still alive today who fought in WWII.

Star Tribune December 4th, 2020.