After American forces landed on Okinawa on April 1, 1945, the Japanese navy sent the battleship Yamato on a special attack operation to Okinawa. Rear Admiral Kami Shigetoku proposed it. The commander of the Combined Fleet, Toyoda Soemu, approved it. The vice chief of the Naval General Staff agreed, and the Chief of the Naval General Staff, Oikawa Koshirō, gave tacit consent. Itō Seiichi, who commanded the Second Fleet, strongly opposed it. In the end, he accepted it.
In “Kūki” no kenkyū (A Study of “Air”), the critic Yamamoto Shichihei used the sortie as his example. Everyone who called it reckless, he wrote, had detailed data and clear grounds. The force that made the final decision, and left no other choice, was the kūki, the air, and nothing else.