In the six decades since the bitter wartime enmity between America and Japan climaxed with the atomic bomb attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan’s subsequent surrender, America’s “image of the Japanese has completely changed,” said the filmmaker Risa Morimoto, director and co-writer of “Wings of Defeat,” a new documentary making its American premiere tonight at Japan Society. “The image of the kamikaze has not.”

A first-person journey toward accepting a surprising convergence of military history and family history, as well as an unusually nuanced examination of the kamikaze corps itself, “Wings of Defeat” offers a personal and acute nonfiction look at one of the most notorious yet undocumented chapters in the annals of World War II.

Ms. Morimoto, who was born and raised in New York by Japanese parents with close family ties to their birthplace, is uniquely qualified to assess how both Americans and Japanese have dealt with the legacy of the infamous flying suicide bombers who deviled Allied ships in the closing years of World War II. Two years ago, Ms. Morimoto discovered that her beloved uncle had been a kamikaze pilot scheduled to give his life for emperor and empire when Japan surrendered in 1945. “He had trained, but he never went on his mission,” Ms. Morimoto said. Moreover, her uncle, who took his secret to the grave in the 1980s, wasn’t the only kamikaze pilot who outlived the empire for which he had been expected to die. “There were other people who survived because they never took off,” Ms. Morimoto said. “They were waiting for their turn to come around, but then the war ended.”

This revelation completely altered the filmmaker’s impression of a military unit vilified in American popular historical consciousness as perhaps the most grotesque illustration of Imperial Japan’s power-mad desperation. “Until that point two years ago, I never really questioned the stereotype of the kamikaze,” Ms. Morimoto said. “I just assumed that they were all crazy, that they were all fanatics. That’s what was so frightening.”

In an effort to uncover the human faces and recount the individual experiences behind an institution predicated on martyrdom and sacrifice, Ms. Morimoto and her producer and co-writer, Linda Hoagland, reached out to some of the last remaining kamikaze pilots — men who trained but stood down at war’s end or, in some cases, turned back mid-flight or crash-landed due to equipment mishaps. “Over in Japan, the stereotype is that the kamikaze were these self-sacrificing heroes,” Ms. Morimoto said. “It’s a very simple, patriotic myth, completely opposite of what we think over here but still very one-dimensional.”

The personalities of the four Japanese air force veterans who appear in “Wings of Defeat” are anything but one-dimensional. Now in his 80s, aerial ace Shigeyoshi Hamazono is still the picture of the driven, competitive fighter jock. Mr. Hamazono was transferred to a kamikaze air wing in order to capitalize on his combat fame. He remains bitter about the “honor” he barely survived. “He’s still pretty pissed off,” Ms. Morimoto said. “Who wouldn’t be? You’re one of the best pilots and they tell you to go and die? It makes no sense.”

Takehiko Ena is memorably eloquent about the appalling waste common to all wars that is illustrated with inescapable clarity by the kamikaze ethos. Mr. Ena, who has dedicated much of his life to honoring Japan’s forgotten 4,000 kamikaze war dead, will be present at tonight’s screening along with fellow kamikaze veteran Takeo Ueshima, and U.S. Navy veteran Fred Mitchell, a survivor of the USS Drexler, one of 34 American ships sunk by Japanese suicide attacks.

Other compelling voices from the past emerge from period newsreels, stock footage, and documents interpolated with Ms. Morimoto’s and the pilots’ contemporary testimonies.

“We went through over a hundred hours of footage and hundreds of photos,” Ms. Morimoto said. Surprisingly, much of the astonishing period footage portraying the one-way kamikaze missions as heroic and necessary were stored in Washington, D.C., not Tokyo. “We got a lot from the National Archives. Because Japan lost the war, they confiscated all these Japanese newsreels.”

This rare and unique view of how Japan’s war-era government viewed itself has remained unexplored in part because of the way in which the films were written and narrated. “You have to have an incredible knowledge of Japanese to understand anything that they’re saying,” Ms. Morimoto said. Ms. Hoagland, who was born, raised, and educated in Japan and is one of the most sought-after English-Japanese translators in America, was able to decipher what Ms. Morimoto describes as the newsreels’ archaically worded “fascist language” — no longer in use in Japan.

An on-screen research encounter in a private Japanese museum dedicated to the kamikaze experience yielded perhaps the single most touching and heartbreaking artifact on display in “Wings of Defeat.” “It was so incredible because no one ever goes in there and you could touch everything,” Ms. Morimoto said of the basement room crammed with kamikaze paraphernalia. “They had textbooks, lunch pails, uniforms — it was very personal.”

Among the detritus of a group of “boy soldiers” recruited to fly one-way attacks as teenagers was a training book self-illustrated by a long-dead student. “It was so emotional when I looked at that stuff,” Ms. Morimoto said of the beautifully rendered pictures of war planes on successful suicide sorties sketched in the book’s gaps and margins. “They were like the drawings of any other kid who doodles in a notebook during class.”

“Wings of Defeat” screens tonight at 8 p.m. at Japan Society (333 E. 47th St., between First and Second avenues, 212-832-1155).