"One man - One Ship"
I'm not sure to what degree this practice was followed; in practice a salvo launch would require significantly more training than the Japanese could have allowed.
Of course, I absolutely agree with you and I've already stated before your entry that Japan lost the war at Midway, but at the same time, simply because you lose early, it doesn't mean that you can't analyze mistakes made later. I'd like to say it's a bit of a Chinese thing, the urge to critically analyze the past (Sima Qian, Qing Dynasty history promulgated by the Republic of China, etc).
Another mistake with the Kamikaze corps was that it violated the basic principle of suicide warfare. Suicide warfare works when you begin a war with it; consider the American Alamo or for that matter, King Gou Jian's Yue army, where the front rank of his infantry square would deliberately decapitate themselves to disorient, intimidate, and confuse the enemy.
Kamikaze, as a military weapon, was a weapon beyond its time. It used human beings, unfortunately, as the guidance component of what was effectively a cruise missile. Modern naval warfare, on the other hand, is dominated by cruise missiles, air-launched and sea-launched, although we use a guidance unit instead of a human controller.
However, the Empire of Japan's resort to it towards the end of the war was tactical incompetence. With an "ethos" of "bushido", as well as a history of successful Banzai charges against the Chinese in the First Sino-Japanese War, it should have been expected that suicide warfare should have played a role by the very start. Kamikaze, by virtue of heavy explosive payload, as well as precision human guidance, would have been more decisive than dive bombers in many of the battles before Midway and could have helped turn the balance.
Once again, consider the case of Gou Jian as well as the American psychological response to kamikaze attacks. The Americans, being generally practical and consequentialists, were not impressed by the Japanese resolve to die, especially since the Americans were already winning the war. On the other hand, if you consider the psychological warfare of Gou Jian, there is an intimidation value when suicide warfare is used to enhance the effect of the conventional army; i.e, at the start of the war, there was a feeling that the Japanese were supermen, due to their rapid advance against Western territories and the powerful combination of the highly-trained and dedicated Imperial Japanese Air Corps and their ultra-maneuverable Zero. There, a willingness to conduct suicide warfare, against an opponent who was already intimidated, would have had a devastating psychological effect.
In general, though, if you read Pankaj Mishra's description of Japanese pre-war government, it was a grievous series of missteps by the Japanese high command that resulted in Hiroshima. The deal presented by the American government was perfectly amenable, although difficult to suffer, and Yamamoto correctly understood that in a prolonged war, enabled by the vast distances across the Pacific, Japan had no chance. Instead, as someone who is ethnic Chinese, I am gleefully watching the latest Chinese GDP figures (the recession won't last past 2020) and debating the failures of the Imperial Japanese High Command.
@Lezt
But none of the Allied aircraft ever matched the Zero in maneuverability. Range was definitely a plus, yet the way the war developed low-speed maneuverability became irrelevant.
As to whether maneuverability in general is useful; the idea that maneuverability is obsolete is flawed, as is the idea that maneuverability is paramount. Times and military doctrines come and go; the Zero's emphasis on ultra-maneuverability might have been its greatest flaw in WW2, but in Vietnam the USAF's inability to consider maneuverability, and its emphasis on BVR, allowed the Vietnamese to give the Americans a bloody nose. The USAF currently believes that maneuverability is irrelevant, which I think is mostly correct; maneuverability is mostly useful right now as a way to reduce BVR NEZ, and WVR off-boresight missiles will punish cruelly anyone who still believes that a missile with a man in it can dodge a missile with electronics without killing the pilot. However, long-term, we don't know how maneuverability will develop. With unmanned aircraft, aircraft now have the potential to outmaneuver missiles. With radar-jamming AESA, it may become the case that a combination of active jamming and blinding lasers could make it so that the ability to point your AESA on your opponent could become as dominant as the ability to point your gun was in the pre-missile era. And with more developed lasers, we could reach the era that BVR and WVR missiles alike are shot down by point defense, and it's the ability to point your laser at the enemy that decides the war.
