So what are these “normal human standards” Lynn Jackson is talking about? With this phrase, she’s referring not to the set of traits common to most humans but rather to the broader concept of “humanity.” Typically this term is used to indicate the capacity to experience emotions, with the ability to love being the crucial element. Conversely “inhumanity,” although it bears the connotations of cruelty or sadism, essentially denotes the inability to experience emotion or sympathy.
According to one line of thought, what makes us human is our capacity for empathy. What this means is, if I see things and feel things a certain way, I can make the cognitive analogy that others also see and feel things a certain way. The theory is that the development of the empathic capacity marked a major step in the evolutionary process of the human brain. In other words, we can say that what makes us human is our ability to understand the sorrow another person feels by drawing on our own experiences.
What fascinates me is that the main elements that differentiate us from the other animals, such as the ability to reason, have little to do with “humanity” when seen from this point of view. To the contrary, logical thought, which is the gift of reason, is often shown in a negative light as being “inhuman.” It is therefore not unreasonable to view machine intelligence, which is based exclusively on logic, as something that is fundamentally inhuman.
Yukikaze frequently depicts this inhuman lack of empathy. In the beginning of Chapter I, the SAF’s mission to bring their data back to base even as they watch their comrades die in battle is criticized as being “inhuman.” The reader soon discovers that the target of this criticism is the book’s hero, Rei Fukai.
In his very first appearance, Rei is depicted announcing in an emotionless voice that his fellow pilots have been shot down. He then decides without any hesitation that a plane, which is by all appearances an allied unit, is an enemy and coolly attacks it. In the following pages, the military doctor who treats him refers to him as a “machine.” In this way, the author appears to be inducing the reader to see Rei as an inhuman character.
However, in the same chapter Rei’s behavior is far different from that of a “machine.” He declares his trust in his plane, grumbles about General Cooley, and talks with Major Booker, his only friend, about a woman he was involved with. And, recognizing his own powerlessness in the face of the unknown JAM, he feels anger, grief, and anxiety. “What am I doing? Why am I here?” he asks. The chapter begins with an epigraph telling us that he’d been betrayed by much of what he had once loved and that his only emotional support now came from his fighter plane. Establishing that he has known both love and hate makes it difficult for a reader to regard Rei as inhuman. Lynn Jackson’s understanding of the SAF pilots as “machines that are, through some accident of fate, in human form,” is incorrect as far as Rei is concerned.
Rei’s affection for Yukikaze also undermines the concept of him as a machinelike individual. It is a uniquely human trait to feel empathy not only for another being like oneself but also for animals or even inanimate objects. That he feels empathy for a machine is, ironically, a powerful confirmation of Rei’s humanity. The irrational trust he places in Yukikaze, the faith he has that she would “never, ever betray him,” and his extreme fear of her becoming independent of him negate any claims that he is inhuman and mechanical. Rei’s callous, inhuman exterior is consistently betrayed by his inner humanity. Furthermore, from the very start of the story, the author continually portrays Rei questioning what it is to be human.
Now let’s look at Chapter V, “Faery – Winter,” wherein Major Booker directly addresses the issue of what it means to be human. Imagining what it’s like for the wounded Lieutenant Amata, Booker judges him to be
a soul that was easily bruised. He was a man endowed with the rich, common humanity you hardly ever saw in Boomerang Squadron. Humans cannot live alone. Amata couldn’t live estranged from his friends. Rei, however, was different. Impersonal, detached, it was as if he had no need for human contact at all.
In other words, valuing relationships with other people is a mark of being human. Considering affection to be an aspect of human nature is a natural thing to do, but on the other hand selfinterest also plays a major part. (Indeed, it may be an essential attribute of all life.) So how do we reconcile this contradiction? I can’t help but feel that Yukikaze addresses the gap between human nature and human kindness in various scenes.
“Not my problem” is the favorite saying of the soldiers in Boomerang Squadron. The squadron was put together by General Cooley, its membership consisting of soldiers with little sense of sociability or cooperation. As you might expect, as a group they lack empathy for others; they are all individualists with enough mental strength to endure the isolation imposed by their mission. Their thinking is extremely logical, making them elite soldiers who have a high probability of survival on the battlefield. Does that make them inhuman? Major Booker seems to think it does to some extent, but at the same time he also understands the severity of their duty.
Yukikaze is a story of a possibly endless war with unknown invaders. The author has constructed an extreme situation in which the bizarre battlefield and the enemy being fought aren’t seen except from the perspective of high-velocity air battles. This does not seem like an auspicious setting for an inquiry into human nature, and yet that is the author’s constant aim. At one point Major Booker asks, “Should we therefore abandon our humanity?” It is a question that goes grandly round and round without ever arriving at the desired answer. Extended to its extreme meaning, that question is: do we abandon our humanity or do we choose death? Booker chooses to help Amata in order to wriggle out of that conceptual tight spot, to attempt to regain some of his lost humanity. He goes so far as to admit to himself that he’s doing so to atone for how he must send his best friend out into the battlefield again and again.
Major Booker is the other main character in Yukikaze, a man tormented by the suffering and lives lost to an absurd war. A man who feels that, rather than revealing humanity’s true nature, the war is actually erasing it. He fears that the only way to beat the JAM is for humans to become machinelike. The SAF soldiers’ inhumanity is deliberate. Booker observes that, “Even if the Earth were to vanish tomorrow, they wouldn’t shed a single tear.” Even regarding Rei, his best friend, he thinks about how “that expressionless look on his face never changed, no matter what chaos was happening all around him.” Major Booker has a terrible foreboding about the consequences of these “inhuman humans” coming into being. Something similar to his desire to preserve his subordinates’ humanity on a harsh and strange battlefield shows up in the book’s sequel Good Luck, Yukikaze, although in less dire circumstances.
Although Rei is perceived as inhuman, we can definitely see that he is cognizant of his own humanity. When the realization begins to dawn on him that the war against the JAM is one of alien versus machine and that humans are unneeded in it, he reflexively denies it out of fear. The inhuman, rational response would be to calmly accept being a part of the machine.
Chapter IV, “Indian Summer,” ends with a touching scene in which Rei sheds tears for the fallen soldier Tomahawk John, an act that truly belies his image as a “callous soldier.” In that moment, Rei’s inhumanity is exposed as nothing more than a mask he wears, a shell he maintains to protect himself. Tomahawk John, whose mechanical heart has been attacked by the JAM, asks “I am human, aren’t I?” just before he dies. “Of course you are,” Rei answers and then thinks back to when he told Tomahawk, “You’re alive…Or are you telling me that you’re actually a corpse?”