The Blossom and the Firefly

by Sherri L. Smith

  1947

  CHAPTER 65

  HANA

  Sensei says it will be a somber ceremony, but the other students call it a celebration. Yasukuni Shrine—the monument to our war dead that I had hoped to visit one day—is having a festival, the Mitama Matsuri. July will be a month for honoring those who died in service to the war. Like during Obon, the Buddhist festival for the dead, the shrine will be lit with thousands of lanterns. There will be music and processions and remembrances. We students of Tokyo Music School have been invited to play. Miyagi-sensei shares the news in class today. A cold hand grasps my stomach at the thought.

  I should have visited before now. I should have gone every day to pay my respects. But I could not. It felt too much like saying goodbye. And Tokyo is a place where it is easy to forget the past. So much of the city was destroyed in the war; modern buildings are rising all over the place. This is a new Japan, unlike Chiran, with its samurai houses, the same families behind the same stone walls for generations. Tokyo is full of new life. Gaijin bloom like wildflowers here, and seven languages are spoken on every corner, a patchwork of color and newness every day. Even our classroom is new, the paint still fresh on the walls.

  I feel new, like the city. Each day we play our instruments, I feel more cemented to my self. And yet the thought of playing at Yasukuni surprises me, scares me a little. For all of my newness, I have not been willing to say a final goodbye.

  “Hana-san, are you well?” Sensei asks. Although he is blind, he pays attention. The other students have not stopped gabbling their excitement. But my voice has not joined in.

  “Hai, Sensei. Thank you.”

  I am well enough, I tell myself. But that night, as I play in my dormitory room, I weep and don’t try to stanch the tears.

  CHAPTER 66

  TARO

  “Are you finished?”

  “Almost.” Taro gave the plans a final once-over. He nodded and grabbed the edges, rolling the blueprints into a tube. “Please tell my father I am done.”

  The office boy nodded—he couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, but he was a diligent worker. He ran the plans down the hallway to Taro’s father’s office. The drawings would be turned into actions, then steel. New buildings were springing up all over the city. New vehicles. New civilian aeroplanes. Several of them were his father’s design. A few details were his own. It was satisfying. At first, even the smallest of pleasures carried a tinge of guilt. But he was learning to take the bitter with the sweet.

  Taro rolled down his shirtsleeves and checked the clock on the wall. He had half an hour to make it to the station. He grabbed his coat and bag and ran.

  The platform was crowded. Families traveling, and businessmen. It was as if the country were a limb that had fallen asleep, and now it tingled with the flow of people, coming back to life.

  He found a seat by the window, folded his coat in his lap, and watched the city roll by. The rattle of the train suited him. The strange flat clouds in the sky, like brushstrokes of white on blue. He fell asleep with his head against the window. It was the deepest sleep he’d had in years.

  CHAPTER 67

  HANA

  Even in a city as large as Tokyo, Yasukuni Shrine is bigger than I could have ever imagined. We students cluster around Sensei, entering the grounds early to set up for the day’s festivities. Oblong white lanterns are hung in great stacks along the causeway that cuts across the grounds, forming a tunnel of white walls and open sky. Thirty thousand lanterns, Mayoko tells me. She is from Kyoto, and a marvel on the shamisen.

  We pass by the great bronze statue of Ōmura Masujirō, the founding father of the Imperial Army, and two great stone lanterns that tower above us like trees. The causeway continues under the Daini Torii, the second gate—the first, the Great Gate, having been taken down during the war. The Daini Torii is made of weather-blackened bronze, two great pillars held apart by a wide beam, crossed at the top by an even greater beam. The skin on the back of my neck shivers as we pass beneath its shadow, but not from cold. This is a sacred place.

  July in Tokyo carries a heat and humidity like I’ve never known. By the time we reach the wide protection of the Shinmon Gate, I am sweating. My days of hauling wet sheets and marching up hills are behind me. I’ve become a soft city girl now.

  Sensei has us set up in the shade of the Shinmon, where its thick cypress pillars hold up a slanted roof. The doors of the gate are open, each marked with massive golden chrysanthemum medallions. Beyond this portal lies another gateway and then the Hall of Worship. Other musicians and performers continue on deeper into the grounds. There are teahouses and even a Noh theater here. They will all be full today when the gates open to the public, and tonight when the lanterns are lit.

  Once we are settled, Sensei excuses himself to light incense for the dead. The others wander off in twos and threes to explore the grounds, until only Mayoko and I are left.

  “Who did you lose?” she asks me. Mayoko is a year older than I am. Old enough to know that it’s not a matter of if we have lost loved ones, but of how many. She had a sister, a schoolteacher engaged to an Okinawan man, who died in the gyokusai there. It pained me to learn of it. The Lily Corps girls were the same age as the eldest of the Nadeshiko and a few years beyond. But while we served in the halls of our old school building, they tended soldiers in tunnels and trenches in the midst of battle. Of the two hundred forty girls and their teachers, only a handful survived the invasion and the aftermath. Such different paths for each of us, it’s hard to fathom.

  Mayoko is looking at me, but I do not know what to say. “We served tokkō during the war,” I say at last. “I should pay my respects to them.”

  She nods and does not follow me, opting to stay with the instruments.

  But I do not know where to go. They say there is a great book of names here, of all the dead. If I were to ask a priest to find one name for me, what would it serve? Would I feel better? Different?

  I think not.

  I purify myself at the Ōtemizusha font, ladling tepid water from the basin over my left, then my right hand. I pour water into my mouth, then purify the ladle, too. And then I approach the prayer hall to make my offering.

  I drop a coin in the box and step forward, bowing twice. I clap my hands once, twice to show appreciation and respect. A final bow, and I am backing away. It is a strange feeling. As though I am here and yet not here. I feel closer to him playing the koto than I do in this holy place. I cannot bring myself to say goodbye.

  I am grateful when the festival opens, and Sensei tells us to prepare ourselves. When he is ready, we bow to our instruments, we bow to the crowd. Sensei claps his hands twice for our attention, and we begin.

  CHAPTER 68

  TARO

  He should have come sooner. He could have. But that didn’t matter; now he was here.

  The massive torii gate rose before him like a doorway. He walked the aisle of unlit lanterns, pushed and pulled by the growing crowd. So many Japanese in one place. He felt an unbidden surge of pride. And then he was through the wooden doors of the Shinmon Gate and following the flow of people to the steps of the Hall of Prayer.

  Here, Taro stopped. He would pray and leave offerings—a coin for each of the pilots in his two squadrons. But first he would make the offering that mattered most.

  Finding an edge of the steps where people could move around him with ease, Taro sat down on the warm stone. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, purchased along with a booklet of matches at the station.

  “Kenji-chan, you know I don’t smoke. These are for you.”

  He lit the first cigarette, coughing as he drew smoke into his lungs to keep it burning. He waved the stick in the air like incense. He lit the next cigarette, and the next, until the entire pack was burning, lined up like aeroplanes on a runway, on the bottom step of the temple.

  “He
y, you can’t do that,” someone said. An attendant was staring at him accusatorily.

  Taro bowed without rising.

  “Apologies. They are for the dead. But I would be happy to offer one to you.”

  The man recoiled and backed away. Taro bowed again, and the man returned it automatically before fading into the crowd.

  Nakamura laughed.

  Or at least Taro thought so.

  He went to the water pavilion and chose a ladle. With each scoop of water, he felt lighter, cleaner. With the final drops poured into his mouth, the taste of bitterness washed away. He was grateful. Grateful.

  He bowed, clapped. With the tossing of each coin, Taro said farewell to his friends.

  The whole of Yasukuni spread out before him, like the entirety of Japan, of the world, no longer at war. Each and every citizen of every country uncertain of what would come next.

  He could feel hopeful, he decided. Or sorrowful. Worry still creased his father’s brow, even when he slept. The old world was on trial—the men they had followed, the lives those men had spent for the illusion of future prosperity. Korea, China, the Philippines, Japan. None of them would ever be the same. The only thing that was certain was change.

  That was what living meant, after all.

  He made his way through the crowd, past the prayerful and the performers—here a stage play, there a lone musician, there an entire band.

  The three gates rose before him. He would pass through each, returning to the world.

  A sound brushed his ears. A tune familiar. The song sliding into its frame like the pictures of the kamishibai man. A place, a time, a face, all as they had been two years ago.

  Taro turned. The crowd parted momentarily, opening a tunnel of light.

  At the end of it, a young woman sat on a cloth on the ground surrounded by a small group of musicians.

  Her hands flowed across a beautiful koto.

  “Haru no Umi” on koto and shamisen.

  He stepped toward her as the music ended. The drumming continued, a tattoo in his blood, a pounding his heart could not contain. Lashes like black butterflies. Eyes wide as rivers, deeper than wells. A memory of dancing, of cherry blossoms in the rain.

  CHAPTER 69

  HANA

  The strings of my koto fade into silence. The crowd murmurs, applauds. I have come to Yasukuni to honor those who were lost, to pay my respects to the dead. And now it is over.

  A pang of emptiness washes through me. What was I expecting? No glowing fireflies. No ghostly violin. I slide the picks from my fingers. The performance is over. The day at an end.

  The crowd parts and moves on. Around me, my classmates prepare to do the same.

  I reach for my koto case, but something stops me. As if my name has been spoken out loud. I look up.

  And there are miracles.

  For there is Taro.

  Taro. Taro. Taro.

  I raise my hand, trembling. And wave.

  Hello.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Research is one of my favorite rabbit holes. I don’t remember what I was chasing that day—some tidbit on World War II aviation, no doubt—when I found myself staring at a photograph online: A row of Japanese schoolgirls in dark middy blouses and shining bobbed haircuts stand smiling and waving at the edge of a runway. Their arms are full of cherry blossoms. Their eyes are on a departing fighter plane. It was black and white, the resolution poor, but the image struck me. I read the article that accompanied the photo. And that is how I first learned about the Nadeshiko Unit girls of Chiran Junior High School in Japan. It’s also how I learned about the Chiran Peace Museum, dedicated to the memory of the 439 tokkō pilots who flew out on their last missions from Chiran’s Army Air Force Base. Kyushu is the southernmost island in the Japanese home island chain. Chiran was one of the closest bases to the action—a mere two-and-a-half-hour flight to Okinawa. I was hooked. I wanted to know more. Fortunately, M. G. Sheftall’s in-depth book, Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze was waiting to fill me in. (See page 306 for more books on the subject.)

  The first official tokubetsu kōgeki, or “special attack” unit, was formed in the fall of 1944. Japanese forces were flagging. A new plan of attack was needed if the Empire was going to win the war. In previous months, some pilots had crashed into enemy ships of their own accord—perhaps due to damaged airplanes. But now the style of attack would be sanctioned and planned. As with any war, the final numbers are uncertain, but according to some estimates, there had been nearly two thousand tokkō sorties, scoring less than five hundred hits on Allied ships, and sinking forty-five. As a result, over seven thousand British, American, and Australian sailors died.

  According to The Mind of the Kamikaze by Takeshi Kawatoko, a fact book published by the Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots in Chiran, 1,036 men died as tokkō pilots. Other sources put the total number of tokkō upward of 3,800. (It’s possible the Peace Museum’s numbers are restricted to army pilots. There were also navy pilots and Kaiten torpedo attack units.) By the museum’s count, of the thousand-plus pilots, 269 were university students and 335 were boy pilots, like Taro and Nakamura.

  Chief in remembering the fallen pilots was Tome Tomihara. Known as “the mother of the tokkō,” Tome did all she could to make the young pilots comfortable during their time in Chiran. After the war, she raised money to build both a shrine and the museum in Chiran. Her restaurant expanded to an inn in order to accommodate the families of those who served and died. During the Allied occupation, Tomihara-san cared for the incoming American soldiers with as much kindness as she had the Japanese before them. She is known throughout Japan as an exemplar of kindness—the Mother Teresa of her country.

  Chiran Girls’ School closed in March 1944 when the students joined the war effort. The Nadeshiko Unit (the flower is part of the school crest) sent its sixteen-to-eighteen-year-olds to Nagasaki to work in a torpedo factory, while the lower three grades worked in the potato fields or dug air raid shelters. On March 18, 1945, American planes called Hellcats attacked the area. Some villagers were killed. The next day, the girls were reassigned to the tokkō at Chiran Army Air Force Base.

  Many of the girls’ experiences in this book are inspired by the school diary kept by Maeda Shōko. The original diary is kept under glass at the Chiran Peace Museum. An English translation can be found in Samuel Hideo Yamashita’s Letters from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese. It was common for people to keep personal diaries in World War II Japan, and compulsory for students. Teachers would review the diaries weekly to make sure the students’ spirits were high. From this book and others, I was able to read firsthand accounts from students, adults, and tokkō pilots. Unfortunately, many of the young people’s diaries have yet to be translated from Japanese. I was lucky to find Dr. Yamashita’s translation.

  The inclusion of “comfort women”—mostly non-Japanese women forced into prostitution for the Japanese military—is based on general history, rather than specific evidence of their presence in Chiran. Despite considerable research, it’s only in Maeda’s school diary entries from April 1945 that I found a mention of “comfort-troop dancers.” It’s unclear if these dancers are “comfort women” or perhaps part of a USO-like entertainment group, but I chose to take the opportunity to acknowledge the legacy of these unfortunate women.

  It was the philosopher George Santayana who said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Japan’s treatment of the events of World War II continues to evolve. Peace museums exist across the nation acknowledging the events of and lives lost during the war. On my research trip to Chiran, I was joined by several schoolkids on class trips. It was both sad and heartening to see them comprehend the human cost of the Pacific War. The scene was repeated later that week on a visit to the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. There, my guide expressed sur
prise at seeing so many school groups present. When I said it seemed to be a rather obvious destination, she replied, “They used to just go to Disneyland.”

  Times are changing. May we change with them, and for the better.

  GLOSSARY

  AMATERASU ŌMIKAMI • the sun goddess, the Shinto deity from whom the Japanese Imperial family is said to descend

  ANKO • red bean paste

  ARIGATŌ GOZAIMASHITA • polite form of “thank you” often used by store clerks

  ARIGATŌ GOZAIMASU • polite form of “thank you very much”

  BANZAI • an exhortation to live ten thousand years

  BUSHIDO • the samurai code of honor

  BUTSUDAN • a Buddhist altar used for paying respects to deceased family members

  -CHAN • (suffix) shows affection

  CHIRAN • a town in the south of Kyushu

  CHIRIMEN • a type of silk

  DAINI TORII • “Second Gate”; the second gate at Yasukuni Shrine

  “DŌKI NO SAKURA” • “Cherry Blossoms of the Same Period,” a popular war song

  DOMO ARIGATŌ • “thank you very much”

  FURO • a Japanese soaking bathtub

  FUROSHIKI • a cloth used for wrapping and carrying items and gifts

  GAIJIN • outsider, non-Japanese

  GEISHA • a traditional Japanese hostess and entertainer

  GETA • traditional wooden platform shoes

  GUNKOKU-SHŌNEN • “military youth”; students in a military academy

  GUNSHIN • a war god

  GYOKUSAI • “shattering of the jewel,” an honorable suicide in the face of defeat

  HACHIMAKI • a samurai headband