So Sad to Fall in Battle

by Kumiko Kakehashi

  I suspect that there was a further reason why Kuribayashi did not make a banzai charge, no matter how bad things got.

  The victim of a series of policy changes in the overall strategy of the military central command, Iwo Jima ended up having to face the enemy all by itself.

  Initially the Imperial General Headquarters had regarded Iwo Jima as important. Why else would they send twenty thousand soldiers to the place? But as the Americans’ invasion got nearer, the island was suddenly labeled worthless and cut off. The Japanese forces on Iwo Jima ended up having to fight with almost no support from the air force or the navy. Daihonei Rikugunbu 10 Shôwa nijû-nen hachi-gatsu made (“Imperial General Headquarters Army Section, Volume 10: Up to August 1945”) in the Senshisôsho official history produced by the Military History Department of the National Institute for Defense describes how the Imperial General Headquarters took the news of the fall of Iwo Jima.

  The military central command had foreseen the loss of Iwo Jima to some degree. They praised the gallant fighting of the defense garrison and admired the way Kuribayashi had exercised his command, but did not display any very marked reaction.

  They “had foreseen the loss of Iwo Jima to some degree” so they “did not display any very marked reaction.” How casually the war leaders were prepared to give up on twenty thousand lives!

  The Imperial General Headquarters ran through a series of stopgap policies that had no relation to reality, and then, when they got deadlocked and had nowhere to go, they wrote places off as hopeless. The result was soldiers going to their deaths in banzai charges that they themselves knew to be almost ineffectual in places the headquarters had decided to abandon, while the generals killed themselves by committing hara-kiri. This is what happened on Attu and Talau, and at Saipan and Guam. My guess is that Kuribayashi did not want to be party to the fraud of calling such a death by the meretricious name of gyokusai, “honorable death”—a combination of the ideograms for “beautiful jewel” and “pulverize”—or of using the samurai aesthetic to conceal mistaken projections and foolhardy strategies.

  Kuribayashi was a rationalist, and he loved the soldiers who served under him. If they were in a battle from which they could not return alive, then the least he could do was give them a “worthwhile death,” and that is why his policy of not allowing banzai charges stayed consistent from first to last.

  Kuribayashi was a warrior who respected the realities, if not the aesthetic conventions of war, and the extreme campaign that he waged on Iwo Jima and the manner in which he chose to die showed just how empty the values professed by the Japanese military establishment were.

  The American encirclement relaxed a little around the nineteenth. Kuribayashi took his time examining the situation, and on the evening of the twenty-fourth judged that the siege had loosened sufficiently to provide a window for the attack.

  According to Ôyama Jun, one of the survivors, Kuribayashi delivered a speech before the attack on the night of March 25.

  Even if I should perish before you in the battle, the glorious exploits that you have carried out will never be forgotten. Japan may now be losing this battle, but the people of Japan are burning at your loyalty and your patriotism; they are praising your glorious deeds; and the day will come when they offer silent prayers for your ghosts. Be easy in your minds and sacrifice yourself for your country.*

  “I will at all times be at your head,” Kuribayashi had said in the appeal telegraphed to all the surviving men, and, true to his word, Kuri-bayashi took up his position at the head of around four hundred men from the army and the navy. They rose above despair and summoned up their last reserves of willpower.

  Normally during a final all-out charge, the commanding officer would commit hara-kiri behind the lines. But this was yet another convention that Kuribayashi ignored. A document related to practical training on Iwo Jima from the Ground Self-Defense Force Officer School says: “There is no other example in the history of the Japanese army where a division commander (army corps commander) led the charge himself. This all-out counterattack is highly unusual.”

  Led by Kuribayashi, the group moved south along the coast down toward Mount Suribachi and fell upon an encampment of marines and army air corps just after five o’clock on the morning of the twenty-sixth. The Americans, who were confident that organized resistance by the Japanese was long over, fell into panic. After a furious fight at close quarters lasting for around three hours, the Japanese had inflicted 170 casualties on the Americans. The surviving Japanese soldiers then made a charge onto Motoyama and Chidori Airfields, where the majority of them were killed.

  The Americans did not know that Kuribayashi had led this attack. It was nothing like a banzai charge. The Japanese soldiers made a silent and well-organized attack that took the Americans by surprise and caused them unexpected damage. The entry on “Iwo Jima” in the United States Marine Corps History evaluates it thus: “The Japanese attack on the early morning of March 26 was not a banzai charge, but an excellent plan aiming to cause maximum confusion and destruction.”

  At some point Kuribayashi was seriously wounded in his right thigh, but still pushed on, carried on the back of a first sergeant attached to the headquarters. He is thought to have died either from loss of blood or to have taken his own life with a pistol shot. No one survived who witnessed the last moments of this commander who fought side by side with his men until his own death.

  THE MORNING KURIBAYASHI DIED, the 77th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army landed on the Kerama Islands of Okinawa, 1,380 kilometers away from Iwo Jima. The civilians were drawn into the battle, and this marked the start of the Battle of Okinawa, which eventually produced so many—some say one hundred thousand—civilian casualties.

  *From Okada Masukichi, “Iô-Jima ni Kakeru Shôgai” (“Lives on the Line at Iwo Jima”), Maru, June 1959.

  EPILOGUE

  YOSHII WAS FORTY YEARS OLD WHEN HER HUSBAND LOST HIS LIFE on Iwo Jima. A housewife ever since her marriage at the age of nineteen, she was suddenly responsible for earning the family livelihood while also taking care of her three children.

  Takako, Kuribayashi’s second daughter, can remember her mother out in the streets of Nagano just after the war, where her family home was located, selling dried cuttlefish she’d somehow managed to get her hands on. After the family returned to Tokyo, Yoshii rented a small place near Nagano station, where she sold wooden clogs and other footwear.

  She later worked as an insurance saleswoman, and eventually got a job as live-in matron at the staff dormitory of a spinning company in Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward. Takako lived in the dormitory building with her mother until leaving high school. The two women then lived in a one-room apartment, sharing cooking and toilet facilities with the other residents. When relatives of soldiers who had died on Iwo Jima visited them to borrow money, Yoshii would hand over as much as she could with an apology: “I’m afraid this is all that we’ve got….”

  “My mother had been brought up as a lady, and even after getting married she had been taken care of by my father. She had never worked in her life before, but she still managed to raise us during the terrible times after the war by doing things like selling cuttlefish out on the street. And more than that, she sent not just my elder brother, but me, a girl, to university.”

  Kuribayashi never ordered his wife to live as a proper soldier’s wife, taking care not to soil her husband’s good name after he was gone. Indeed, he seems to have said quite the opposite in his letters from Iwo Jima. In one dated September 4, 1944, he tells her that he’s depending on her to bring up the children and continues: “From now on, don’t worry about things like keeping up appearances or what other people say about you. What’s important is for you to believe in yourself and go your own way.”

  A lieutenant general, Kuribayashi was posthumously promoted to full general in recognition of his heroic defense of Iwo Jima. Yoshii was therefore supposed to live with the pride proper to the wife of a general. But in her case
that did not mean guarding the family name and passing the exploits of her husband down to her children and her children’s children. That was not what her husband wanted from her.

  Other people and appearances don’t matter, believe in yourself and live your way. Confront harsh reality head-on, and be strong together with your children. That was what Kuribayashi asked his wife to do when he knew that he would no longer be able to take care of his family. And Yoshii rose to the challenge, living through the postwar years with a strength that had nothing to do with worldly appearances or the opinions of other people.

  One day after the children had grown up and left home, and she was able to live a less fraught existence, Yoshii had a dream. Her husband, whom she knew to be dead, stood grinning in the entryway of their house dressed in his army uniform. When she appeared startled, he said gently, “I just got back now.”

  Ah, she thought, so you did come back to me after all. Happiness flooded her heart—and then she woke up. Even after she realized that it was a dream, the joy remained undimmed. Her husband had looked genuinely happy.

  Very soon after that came the news that, after twenty-three years, the United States would be returning the Ogasawara Islands to Japan.

  —

  I VISITED MATSUSHIRO-MACHI, Kuribayashi’s hometown in Nagano, in the early summer of 2004.

  The erstwhile castle town of Sanada Jûmangoku, Matsushiro-Machi was also the birthplace of Sakuma Shôzan, a leading progressive from the last years of the Tokugawa regime. The house where Kuribayashi was born is located in a quiet fold of a hill a little to the south of the center near the historic sights of Sanada’s residence and the Matsushiro Civil and Military School. As you walk up a gentle incline, the first thing you see is an old stone storehouse, then, beyond that, there stands an old two-story house with a tiled roof and white plaster walls. The house dates from the early Showa period, and the garden is full of white and pink peonies.

  I was welcomed by Kuribayashi Naotaka, the present head of the family. Naotaka is the grandson of Kuribayashi’s elder brother, Yoshima. He was born in 1945, after Kuribayashi’s death, and is the principal of a junior high school.

  The Kuribayashis are an old family. They have lived here since the Warring States period (1467–1568), when they were “country samurai” administering a barrier station for the Sanada clan. A country samurai is a samurai who does not move his abode to the castle town of his lord, but stays and farms in his own home place.

  In the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), the Kuribayashis became clansmen of the Matsushiro clan, and in the Meiji period (1868–1912), they invested in the silk-reeling industry and the banking business, but failed in both due to “samurai business methods” (an aristocratic tendency to regard commerce as beneath one). Their house burned to the ground in both 1868 and 1881. In 1891 his parents were working hard to rebuild the place when Kuribayashi was born.

  Yoshima’s eldest son Sunao wrote an unpublished essay about his uncle’s youth. Entitled “The Young Days of Kuribayashi Tadamichi,” the handwritten manuscript is preserved in the house. In it we learn that Kuribayashi’s father, Tsurujirô, engaged in the lumber and civil engineering businesses, while his mother, Moto, ran the farm with the servants. The parents were always busy, and from an early age the children used to help with domestic tasks like scrubbing the corridors and taking care of the garden. Despite being born into a “good” family in the provinces, Kuribayashi’s upbringing was simple and hardworking, and had nothing to do with luxury.

  Kuribayashi progressed from Matsushiro Higher Elementary School to Nagano Middle School (currently Nagano High School). His grades were excellent and his English was particularly good—he is even said to have dreamed of becoming a roving foreign correspondent. According to anecdote, while on Iwo Jima he told the reporter Shishikura Tsunetaka that he had thought about becoming a journalist himself. And indeed, he sat the entrance examination not just for the Military Academy, but also sat and passed that for Shanhai Tôa Dôbun Shoin, a prestigious college for Japanese students in Shanghai, China. Kuribayashi was unsure which to choose, but finally decided to go to the Military Academy on the advice of his teacher.

  After that he took the typical path of the elite officer, attending the Army War College and going abroad to study. But he never worked in the Imperial General Headquarters, never had any involvement with politics, and was not interested in the jockeying for position that went on between the different army factions.

  His progress up the ranks was not especially fast for someone who had been honored with a saber from the emperor on graduation, and his appointments to major general and lieutenant general were both a good six months behind his fastest contemporaries at college. His career was surprisingly unglamorous—he spent a long time in a post where he was responsible for the army’s cavalry horses—and nothing really stands out until he was appointed commander in chief on Iwo Jima.

  Iwo Jima was not just a remote place; you were unlikely to make it back home alive. Many other generals came up with excuses to wriggle out of being sent there and, in a sense, Kuribayashi was the only one foolishly honest enough to say yes. Once he had accepted, he fulfilled his duty heroically, as I hope this book shows. In matters of war, Kuri-bayashi was a rationalist, but when it came to his life philosophy, he had an almost naive conviction that a soldier’s duty was to go out to the front lines and put himself in harm’s way.

  An examination of Kuribayashi’s experiences on Iwo Jima reveals such a gulf between the men who risked their lives on the front and the top brass who were responsible for overall direction of the war that one is reluctant to apply the word “soldier” to both groups. The staff officers ensconced in the safety of the Imperial General Headquarters did not even try to find out how the war was really progressing, but just drew lines on a map and declared: “Such-and-such place must be defended to the death.” Kuribayashi was on the receiving end of those orders, and he was the one who went out to an isolated and unsupported battle zone.

  In February 1994, the first Japanese emperor to set foot on Iwo Jima composed a poem there.

  The men who fought heart and soul,

  Still sleep beneath the ground

  On this sad isle.

  The central command may have written the island off, but Kuriba-yashi’s twenty thousand plus men were still determined to do their duty as best they could and put up a formidable fight. Each and every one of them truly “fought heart and soul.”

  The emperor’s poem and Kuribayashi’s death poem in his farewell telegram are linked by a common word: “sad,” the very word that the Imperial General Headquarters chose to alter, changing “so sad we fall” to “mortified we fall.”

  It is no coincidence. After the passage of forty-nine years, the emperor of a new and different epoch acknowledged Kuribayashi’s fine poem. And he did it on the sands of Iwo Jima, the very place where Kuribayashi wrote about the sadness of the soldiers going to their deaths.

  THE KURIBAYASHI FAMILY GRAVE stands in Takitanzan Meitokuji Temple not far from the house where Kuribayashi was born. Meitokuji is an ancient temple, and generation after generation of Kuribayashis have served as parish representatives.

  Naotaka took me to the cemetery. After we passed through the quiet temple precincts, the cemetery spread out before us ringed by the fresh foliage of trees. The mountain onto which the cemetery backs is Mount Minakami, which contains the ruins of the Matsushiro Imperial Headquarters.

  The Matsushiro Imperial Headquarters is an underground bunker complex. It was built to accommodate the Imperial General Headquarters, the Imperial family, government ministries and agencies, and the national broadcaster, all of whom were to move out of Tokyo before the decisive battle for the homeland. Construction began in November 1944 at Mount Zô and Mount Maizuru as well as Minakami and continued without a single day’s pause until August 15, 1945.

  At exactly the same time Kuribayashi was working frantically to dig his underground bunkers on Iwo Jima,
another large-scale bunker complex was being excavated in the very place where he had been born and raised. Both were expected to save the nation.

  The plan to move Imperial General Headquarters to Matsushiro was top secret. The words “Imperial General Headquarters” do not appear anywhere on the original blueprints; instead, the facility is called “Matsushiro Storage Space.” Kuribayashi, however, seems to have known what was going on, as this passage from his November 28, 1944, letter to his elder brother, Yoshima, suggests: “As regards the military facility at Mount Minakami, they are starting to implement a plan, which was pending until recently. I think it extremely unlikely that the enemy will bomb the area.”

  Standing in front of Kuribayashi’s grave, you can see Mount Mi-nakami off to the right. Peaceful and dripping with lush green, it is hard to believe that within its womb is a vast, dark cave fathered by war.

  His grave is simple: an ordinary rectangular upright stone on which the words “The Grave of General Kuribayashi Tadamichi” are carved. There is also a single sentence from a letter dated January 12, 1945, that I had just been allowed to read: the last letter he sent to his brother Yoshima in the house where he had been born: “Finally, should the worst come to the worst, I don’t mind where my grave is located. A single stone shaft with the words ‘The Grave of Lieutenant General Kuri-bayashi Tadamachi’ is all I need.”

  There was a holder for name cards beside the grave. It contained two cards. The families of the men who lost their lives on Iwo Jima still come to pay their respects. Few of them visit the Kuribayashi house, but they all offer incense and prayer. The soldiers on Iwo Jima came from all over Japan, and the addresses on the two cards were both from Kanagawa Prefecture near Tokyo.