Well, the hard reality was that by 1944, conventional air attacks had become de facto suicide attacks for most Japanese pilots attacking American naval task forces. For example, the Battle of the Philippine Sea justly earned the nickname the "Marianas Turkey Shoot" because the Japanese air units lost over five-hundred aircraft attacking the US fleet with only minor damage to the USS South Dakota to show for their efforts. The reason for this lopsided tallies stemmed from several causes. Although Japanese aircraft had a rough qualitative parity with American aircraft at the start of the war, the Japanese had lost whatever technological edge they had possessed by 1943. Newer models of Japanese aircraft often had unresolved technical faults as they were rushed into production and decline in material meant a loss of quality control. Nor were Japanese pilots and aircrew as an elite corps as they once were. The Japanese only belatedly expanded their training regimen and fuel shortages further cut into their replacement pilot cadres desperately needed after the attritional battles over the Solomon Islands and New Guinea. In contrast, American training programs had hit their stride by 1943 and there were no shortages of American pilots. Moreover, the American fleet had greatly improved its air defense network over the course of 1942-43 with radar networks, proximity fuses, and a CAP doctrine that made conventional Japanese air attacks a highly risky proposition.

While some popular history cites the Japanese Bushido code as a prime motivating factor for Japan's recourse to Tokkō (special attacks), it was only one of several factors that led to the Kamikaze. In light of the major defeats like the Philippine Sea, it made a certain amount of logic to employ suicide attacks. Massed suicide attacks upset existing American air defense doctrine which was primed to beat off conventional attacks. Initially, the Tokkō aircraft were semi-obsolescent models of aircraft and as Tokkō doctrine evolved, they used a mixture of outdated aircraft and current airframes. Thus the Kamikazes were in a grim way a more cost-effective method of attack for the Japanese; they used aircraft that were no longer viable front-line machines and these aircraft could occasionally gain results their more advanced brethren were finding more difficult to achieve. It also bears mentioning that Japan did not entirely abandon conventional attacks in the late war either, with conventional attacks having isolated successes like the near-sinking of the USS Franklin.

It should also be noted that American air defense adapted to the Kamikaze threat quite quickly after the initial surprises. The American task forces beefed up their fighter wings and expanded their radar picket lines to gain advance warning of a Tokkō attack wave. As the Kamikazes became less effective, Japan sought to refine its tactics and design aircraft purposely designed for one-way missions. These aircraft, as well as a variety of surface and subsurface vehicles, used existing stocks of war material and sought to swamp an American invasion force with barely trained conscripts. These vehicles like the Ki-115 were poorly designed and short-ranged, thus only point defense weapons, hence the need for large quantities of the them. The presence of so many suicide craft became one of the dominant leitmotifs of Allied occupation troops tasked with the demilitarization of Japan. However, the effectiveness of these craft was dubious at best and the few occasions purpose-built suicide craft did meet Allied forces, the results did not speak well for Tokkō as a strategy to stave off defeat.