Why did kamikaze pilots wear helmets?

Answer 1

All military pilots wore leather flight helmets during WW2. They are called helmets, but actually they were soft leather caps that covered the ears and back of the head; not like the safety helmets of the jet age. The "helmets" had straps for the pilot's goggles to be attached to. Pilots in those days had to have goggles, because propeller driven airplanes could be flown with their canopies open, and pilots could stick their heads outside of the plane's cockpit to get a better view, as when landing. The flight "helmet" also kept the wind (and cold) from deafening the pilot's ears, as it had had leather flaps to cover the ears.

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Even if the kamikazes had access to the helmets of modern aviation, though, wearing them wouldn't be a pointless endeavor on a mission to crash their planes into American warships. If you're familiar with aviation or even gravity, you know that a pilot's helmet is not going to do much good in most crashes. A plane meeting another solid object abruptly normally results in death, no matter what the pilot has on his or her head. What a helmet, or even a softer leather flight cap, is good for is protecting a pilot's head from getting knocked by the cockpit canopy during high-speed, mid-air maneuvering, like the kind you have to do to avoid gunfire while nosediving into a ship.

Couple this with the fact that kamikazes sometimes had to abort their missions before the explosive finale due to turbulence, weather or visibility issues, and the pilots' protective headgear becomes much more apparent as an aid to help them complete their mission, not necessarily survive it.