Dimensions of Meaning
Semantic Differential was introduced at the apex of the golden age of quantitative psychology. The theoretical underpinnings of the Osgood's semantic differential have roots in the medieval controversy between the nominalists and realists. Nominalists asserted that only real things are entities and that abstraction from these entities, called universals, are mere words. The realists held that universals have an independent objective existence either in a realm of their own or in the mind of God. Osgood’s theoretical work also bears affinity to linguistics and general semantics.

Osgood's Semantic Differential  Osgood’s semantic differential was designed to measure the connotative meaning of concepts. The development of this instrument provides an interesting insight into the border area between linguistics and psychology. People have been describing each other since they developed the ability to speak. Most adjectives can also be used as personality descriptors. The occurrence of thousands of adjectives in English is an attestation of the subtleties in descriptions of persons and their behavior speakers of English developed over millennia. Roget’s Thesaurus is an early attempt to classify most adjectives into categories and was used within this context to reduce the number of adjectives to manageable subsets, suitable for factor analysis.

Evaluation, potency, activity Factor analyses of adjectives typically return three factors: evaluation, potency, and activity. Evaluation loads highest on the adjective pair 'good-bad'. The 'strong-weak' adjective pair defines the potency factor. Adjective pair 'active-passive' defines the activity factor. This factorial structure makes intuitive sense. When our ancestors encountered a person, the initial perception had to be whether that person represents a danger. Is the person good or bad? Next, is the person strong or weak? Our reactions to a person markedly differ if perceived as good and strong, good and weak, bad and weak, or bad and strong. Subsequently, we might extend our initial classification to include cases of persons who actively threaten us or represent only a potential, danger, and so on. The evaluation, potency and activity factors thus encompass a detailed descriptive system of personality. Osgood's semantic differential measures these three factors. It contains sets of adjective pairs such as warm-cold, bright-dark, beautiful-ugly, sweet-bitter, fair-unfair, brave-cowardly, meaningful-meaningless. Semantic differential can be used to describe not only persons, but also the connotative meaning of abstract concepts. 
Silver scarf  There are many stories by surviving soldiers on both sides of the war. Few of these stories are as fascinating as those of Japanese pilots wearing white band of the red raising sun over their foreheads. Around their waist they had sennibari, a cloth sewn with a thousand stitches by mother or sister. Around their neck there was a silver scarf as the one worn by Shinichi Ishimaru, 22, the legendary baseball player and kamikaze pilot, who died in May, 1945. Before their last dive, most of kamikaze pilots opened the side windows of their cockpits to be closer to the nature with which they soon were to be one; their silver scarves were seen flying in the wind during their final encounter with the enemy. 
God’s storm The word kamikaze in Japanese consists of two Kanji characters. The first pictograph means God and the second wind, storm. The name kamikaze originated during the time of Mongolian attempted invasions of Japan (in 1274 and 1281) when their invasion fleets were destroyed by storms, later described as divine. Kamikaze pilots began operating in October 1944 at Leyte Gulf. At Okinawa, the scene of a bitter 3-month air, sea, and land battle, Kamikaze pilots made over 1,500 individual attacks. Altogether, they sank or damaged about 400 U.S. naval vessels.

Aerial view during a fire-bombing raid

Tokyo Morning of March 10, 1945

About soles of military boots Toward the end of the war, the American aircraft carriers were closing in on the Japanese islands and the aerial bombardment of Japan intensified. The use of incendiary bombs increased. Postwar interviews with American pilots indicate that during the night fire bombings that were done from between 5,000 and 7,000 feet they often felt the heat of the fires through the soles of their boots. The M-69 incendiary bombs dropped on Tokyo during the night of March 10, 1945 were dropped in cluster of 38 within a container. One B-29 usually carried 37 of these containers. For the attack on Tokyo, over 300 B-29’s were involved which dropped about half-a-million incendiary bombs. The bombs exploded on contact with the ground. When they did this, they spread a jelly-petrol compound that was highly flammable. In parts of the city, the fires joined up to create a firestorm. The fires burned so fiercely and they consumed so much oxygen, that people in the locality suffocated. About 130,000 people were burned during that night raid. The odor from burning human bodies was so awful that some pilots of the low-flying aircraft vomited.

Fire-Bombing of Tokyo, March, 1945

White phosphor bombs create a wall of fire which cannot be extinguished by water with temperatures reaching the melting point of steel. Curtis LeMay, the main architects of the fire-bombing of the Japanese cities said after the war ended:
 
“I suppose if we had lost the war,
I would have been tried as a war criminal.”
 
The fire-bombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945 was followed by thousands of further sorties against Japanese cities and by another fire-bombing raid on Tokyo on May 26, 1945. The fire bomb raids were not the only raids on Japan, there were more regular raids using conventional high explosives, followed by the nuclear raids of 'Enola Gay' on Hiroshima that killed at least 80,000 people and of 'Bock's Car' on Nagasaki, killing about 74,000 people. Bombing of Japanese cities killed mostly women, children, and elderly, as men were fighting the war elsewhere.
The wall of steel The high number of civilian casualties and the imminent danger of invasion of their homeland created a generally shared, highly emotional and protective attitude among Japanese pilots. The presence of this state of heightened emotionality bears direct relevance to our narrative. Japanese pilots, struggling to avert the advancing American armada, faced overwhelming odds attempting to break through the wall of concentrated firepower surrounding the enemy aircraft carriers. As the probability of penetrating the defenses of naval targets and returning alive decreased, the probability of not reaching the targets and perishing anyway increased. With the rapidly diminishing military power of Japan, these two probabilities shifted - the probability of not reaching the target and sacrificing one’s life in vain rapidly increased. At this point, some Japanese pilots loaded their planes with explosives and dove toward the American carriers in order that their sacrifice would not be in vain. Postwar interviews with surviving Japanese pilots indicate that some of them viewed the actions of Kamikaze pilots as being rational, justified, and meaningful.

From darkness to nothingness This analysis contrasts sharply with the American (and contemporary Japanese) interpretation of Kamikaze pilots as fanatical, illogical, and irrational. These perceptions are confirmed by the current societal climate of Japan, documented by Michiko Hasegawa (1984). In From Darkness to Nothingness she opens her phenomenological analysis of the contemporary Japanese postwar generations as follows. ’Individuals in any era perceive a demarcation between the years preceding and following their own births. The years preceding one’s birth are bathed in darkness. Birth is the beginning of time for an individual; anything occurring before this precedes time itself. Those of us born in the postwar years see ourselves as children born of darkness. The war years were said to resemble the Dark Ages. We were taught that for inexplicable reasons the entire country had gone mad, thinking it could achieve the impossible and convinced that wrong was right. Defining oneself as a product of darkness is not comforting. We imagined that those responsible for the creation of the Dark Age had been punished and that the rest had repented and exorcised the darkness from themselves. The period, in short, was obliterated. Instead of seeing ourselves as children of darkness, we became accustomed to the idea that we were born of nothingness.’ Hasegawa’s perspective helps to understand the contemporary Japanese views of the Kamikaze pilots.
 

Table 1. Average Ratings of Kamikaze Pilots on the    Semantic Differential Scales.

Bright and beautiful In order to objectify Hasegawa's tenets, we constructed a questionnaire, based on Osgood's Semantic Differential. The Semantic Differential uses bipolar adjectives to locate connotative meanings of concepts within the space defined by the evaluative, potency and activity coordinates. The questionnaire was accompanied by instructions:
 
Toward the end of World War II, some Japanese pilots dived their planes into enemy carriers, sacrificing their lives. They became known as Kamikaze pilots. Using the rating scale below, please indicate your feelings about these pilots.
 
There were two sets of questionnaires-one in English, and one in Japanese. The questionnaire was administered to groups of American and Japanese students. Results of this study are shown in Table 1.
 
 Semantic differential can help us to see facets of attitudes and opinions that do not show in the course of standard opinion research. On the obvious scales of the semantic differential, similar to questions that may be asked by opinion pollsters, there were no differences between the Japanese and American students. However, on the subtle scales, while the American students viewed the Kamikaze pilots closer to the dark and ugly poles of the semantic differential, the Japanese subjects viewed Kamikaze pilots as bright and beautiful.

Table 2. Average ratings of Kamikaze pilots on the orthogonal Evaluation, Potency, and Activity scales

Fig. 2. Average ratings of Kamikaze pilots by the American (blue) and the Japanese (maroon) on a seven-point rating scales with origin located at the point four of Evaluation, Potency, and Activity orthogonal scales.

Inscrutable and threatening  Let us reflect the Warm-Cold scale and interpret the Cold pole as indicating a threat (Potency factor). Next, define the Evaluation factor as an average rating on the Beautiful-Ugly and Sweet-Bitter scales of the semantic differential. And, finally, let us approximate the Activity factor by the Bright-Dark scale. Subjects’ ratings on these three orthogonal dimensions are shown in Table 2 and plotted in Figure 2. Within this new interpretative framework, results of the study indicated that American perceived the Kamikaze pilots as threatening, evaluated them less than Japanese, and viewed them in a chiaroscuro light as shadowy, inscrutable figures.

References

Krus, D.J., & Ishigaki, Y. (1992) Kamikaze pilots: the Japanese vs. the American perspective. Psychological Reports, 70, 599-602. (Display in English, Display in Japanese).