A ceremony commemorating the 1944 Japanese kamikaze attack in the Philippines

MABALACAT, Philippines (Kyodo) – About 150 people from the Philippines and Japan attended a ceremony on Friday in Mabalacat, Luzon, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the first suicide air attack by Japanese forces on American warships during World War II .

Planes of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s special kamikaze attack unit took off from Mabalacat Airfield and on October 25, 1944, struck American warships in the Leyte Gulf in the central Philippines, sinking one of the warships.

The ceremony was organized by Clark International Airport Corp. in cooperation with the Tokkotai Memorial Foundation based in Tokyo, which honors fallen members of the unit. During the event, local people and representatives of the foundation laid prayers and wreaths.

Nancy Paglinawan of the corporation that manages the sanctuary for special attack pilots said: “The kamikaze shrine is an important reminder that in any war there are no winners, only victims and that this kamikaze experience must never happen again.”

While Paglinawan expressed regret that wars are currently ongoing in some parts of the globe, Shigeru Iwasaki, director of the Japan Foundation, said: “The greatest deterrent to aggression is the spirit of every citizen caring for his homeland and his compatriots.”

Nearly 4,000 Japanese are believed to have died in suicide air attacks carried out in war zones in the Pacific by the end of World War II with Japan’s admission of defeat in August 1945.