Divine Soldiers of the Sky

In September 1942, the film company Nipponeigasha released Sora no Shinpei, a 55-minute documentary on the training of the Japanese army’s paratroopers. The movie was supported and supervised by the Army Aviation Headquarters and clearly belongs to the genre of kokusaku (national policy) films that fully complied with the government’s wartime ideology. The film followed a group of young soldiers through all stages of their training, starting form initial gymnastics, parachute packing, leaps from a mock-up aircraft and a jump tower up to their first deployment out of a flying aircraft. The movie and its eponymous theme song became widely popular. It was even screened in the occupied territories with the local audience reportedly waving their hands and stamping their feet to greet “the saviors” descending from the sky.