General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

For Those We Love (俺は、君のためにこそ死ににいく)

For Those We Love (俺は、君のためにこそ死ににいく, Ore wa, kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku, literally "I go to die precisely for you") is a 2007 Japanese war drama directed by Taku Shinjo that depicts young kamikaze pilots in the last months of the Pacific War and the restaurant matron who cared for them at the Chiran airbase in Kagoshima Prefecture. Shintaro Ishihara, then Governor of Tokyo, wrote the screenplay and served as executive producer, basing the film on the testimony of Tome Torihama, the real-life figure known as the "mother of the kamikaze" (特攻の母).¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	俺は、君のためにこそ死ににいく (Ore wa, kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku)¹
Release	12 May 2007, Toei distribution, Japan; 141 minutes¹
Director / writer	Directed by Taku Shinjo (新城卓); screenplay and executive production by Shintaro Ishihara¹
Historical basis	The true story of Tome Torihama (1902–1992), who ran a canteen near the Chiran kamikaze base and was known as the "mother of the kamikaze"¹^•³
Lead cast	Keiko Kishi as Tome Torihama; Satoshi Tokushige, Yosuke Kubozuka, and Michitaka Tsutsui as pilots¹
Setting	The Imperial Japanese Army special-attack (kamikaze) base at Chiran, Kagoshima, at the end of the Pacific War⁴
Other English titles	Assault on the Pacific: Kamikaze and I Go to Die for You⁵

Spoilers

Story and setting

The film is set at the end of the Pacific War, when the Japanese military, in a deteriorating position, formed the Special Attack Units (tokkotai) as a last resort, sending young pilots on one-way suicide missions in bomb-laden aircraft.¹ The young airmen gathered at the Army special-attack base at Chiran in Kagoshima Prefecture spent their final days there before flying out on their missions.⁴

At the center of the story is Tome Torihama, who ran a canteen serving the base and was affectionately called the "mother of the kamikaze" by the pilots. Unable to hold them back, she watched over the young men with maternal devotion while carrying her own complicated feelings about their fate.¹^•⁶ The film is structured as an ensemble piece following several pilots: Nakanishi (Satoshi Tokushige), torn over his duty as a soldier, entrusts the mailing of his personal effects to Tome; Bando (Yosuke Kubozuka), hastening his own death after losing comrades, asks Tome to tell his father that he volunteered for the special attack only after his friends had died; and another pilot (Michitaka Tsutsui) murmurs to her that "Japan will lose the war."⁶

Ishihara's screenplay draws on episodes Torihama related during her lifetime, and the film also touches on how the special-attack campaign began and how the first pilots were chosen, including the futility of missions cut short by poor maintenance.²^•⁴

Production

Ishihara conceived the film after hearing Torihama's stories and being moved by them; the opening of the film carries his message that he wished to convey the "hidden, sad yet beautiful stories" of the pilots he heard from her.²^•³ The production recreated the Hayabusa fighter from period design drawings at a reported cost of 50 million yen.⁶ The crew included cinematographers Masaharu Ueda and Hiroyuki Kitazawa, composer Naoki Sato, and art director Hidekazu Ozawa.¹

The large cast pairs established actors with younger performers: Keiko Kishi plays Tome, while the pilots are played by Satoshi Tokushige, Yosuke Kubozuka, and Michitaka Tsutsui, supported by Taiki Maekawa, Mika Tobuta, Noriko Nakagoshi, Sachiko Sakurai, Naho Toda, Yoko Minamino, and others.¹ In interviews before release, Tokushige and Kubozuka said they had told the director they did not want to appear in a film that would either affirm the war as "not a mistake" or treat it as something to be settled, and described the project as an effort to make the pilots' lives known to many people rather than a conventional war film.²

Reception and interpretation

The film's nationalist pedigree made it controversial before and after release. The South China Morning Post described it in 2008 as both a eulogy for the kamikaze pilots and, in its view, an attempt by Ishihara to glorify Japan's militarist past.⁷ Japanese critics were divided: one eiga.com review argued that the film should not be dismissed unseen as mere war glorification, reading three distinct perspectives in it, Torihama's grief, Ishihara's celebration, and director Shinjo's sense of futility, and concluding that Shinjo's restrained long-shot direction made it an anti-war film in which sorrow quietly accumulates; the same review noted that the film does not extend its imagination to the deaths such devotion to country inflicted on others.⁸

Academic writing places the film in a cycle of 2000s Japanese war films, alongside Men of the Yamato (2005), Sea Without Exit (2006), Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (2011), and The Eternal Zero (2013), that balances lamentation for the war's destruction with celebration of self-sacrifice, while critics argue these films evade or deny Japanese responsibility for the conflict.⁹ The scholar Aaron Gerow observes that the film has difficulty linking the individual and the collective in its form, shooting much of the action in medium-long and long shots, and that it remains divided over how to represent the nation.¹⁰ A study of the tokko pilots in popular culture concludes that neither the image of the "suicide bomber" nor that of the "cosmopolitan patriot" fully does justice to the pilots' history.¹¹

In the United States the film circulates under the title For Those We Love and has been available on streaming services.¹²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › War and historical films (individual works) › War action and adventure › War action films released since 2000 › Released 2000 to 2016

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?