Kazuhiro Suzuki, Japan’s ambassador to Australia, still carries the weight of his father’s past life as a kamikaze pilot

News Snapshot:

When Kazuhiro Suzuki remembers his father, he recalls the scars of war, and feels the weight of the past. Japan's Ambassador to Australia has taken a relatively low-key approach since he arrived to Canberra in May — at least when compared with his famously exuberant predecessor, Shingo Yamagami. But the quietly spoken envoy has a powerful family story that runs like a thread through Japan's modern history: its ruinous embrace of militarism and empire in the 1930s and World War II, the colossal brutality and loss of life during the final spasms of that war in the Pacific, and its...