I have 2 sources which claim that the Kami Kaze suicide pilots were not volunteers.
One was the excellent movie “Eternal Zero” were people were appointed as Kami Kazes. Very touching but until then I believed the books that those were volunteers. (To my shame i didn’t really question that).
It’s just to have something showing that the truth is more complicated than that and probably sits in the middle.
Knowing that for centuries an incalculable amount of Japanese willingly sacrificed themselves for their country / clan / personal code of honor. So there was definitely eager volunteers for the kamikazes.
We also have an incalculable amount of Japanese that refused to sacrifice themselves. So there must have been some that resisted being forced into a kamikaze role.
As for the process, it is simply a part of society. As a Japanese in Japan, you don’t have a choice to become part of this society since you are born in it. And you will conform to an extent to what society expects of you. Even if that is becoming a kamikaze.
And this isn’t necessarily a bad process. This is how children learn how to act as adults. It allows the teaching of basic decency. If the society is a kind and benevolent one, it will produce kind and benevolent people in general.
I found this article about how Max Hastings, whose books were often used as sources for the regular episodes, views on this.
Basically, there were some fanatics, but when they had died it came closer to the Volkssturm in Germany, indoctrinated individuals who were forced into that role by societal expectations
Many thanks, I read conflicting reports and my Japanese is just very bad vacation level. Dan Carlin said somewhere in his episodes that the military provided zero kamikazes so they all were forced by shaming which kind of works in the Japanese culture of the time and even now the honor system is prevalent and some Japanese movies actually criticize that. Japanese movies are great, I used to watch them in planes before Covid! Should do this more!
Read this book and I guess you will get a much more varied impression of kamikaze. The foreword expresses the difference in Japan and German approach to war. Germans were trained to kill, Japanese were trained to be killed. I think this gives a good explanation of the Japanese “no surrender” approach https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/K/bo3750674.html