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Japan’s Minister of Defense Shinjirō Koizumi posed with a cardboard drone on Monday during a meeting with drone manufacturer AirKamuy. The AirKamuy 150 is a cheap pre-fab cardboard drone meant to die on the battlefield and it comes shipped in a flatpack like an IKEA shelf.

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[-] HetareKing@piefed.social 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Kami meaning god and kami* meaning paper do have different pitch accent patterns, but that's never kept Japanese speakers from doing wordplay. In fact, the pun works even better in Japanese than it does in English. However, I think they would be confused why someone would want to name it that for a couple of reasons:

  1. The suicide bombers from WW2 would probably not be the first thing on their mind when hearing the word "kamikaze". In the first place, the reason they were called kamikaze was because they were likened to the "divine wind" that prevented the Mongols from invading Japan twice. And the few times I've actually heard "kamikaze" being used in Japanese, it's always used figuratively.
  2. It's not actually made of folded paper. This is danbooru kurafuto (cardboard crafts), not origami.

*) It becomes "gami" in "origami" because it's the second part of a compound word, but the word on its own is "kami".

EDIT: I just realised something: the company making these is called AirKamuy. "Kamuy" is the Ainu word for god. So if you squint real hard, it does kind of invoke kamikaze. Probably not intentional, though.

this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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