Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

  The motivational package for the tokkō flyers themselves did not have to be so consciously concerned with romanticized ideals like bravery and loyalty, dying for Emperor and Fatherland. Those boys had long since been indoctrinated with such values, and moreover, they had spent the last two years since Midway watching their older brothers die and their nation’s armed forces getting steadily trounced westward across the Pacific by the seemingly unstoppable Americans. In their case, the desire to avenge losses and the lure of empowerment were the right psychological buttons to push. These motivational factors could be enhanced through regalia and ceremony – speeches could be written and, as always, appropriate “traditions” could be invented as needed.

  For a smooth-cheeked 18-year-old just out of flight school, there would be an undeniably seductive power in the notion that he could tie on a headband, sit behind the controls of an aircraft and change the course of history single-handedly. This excitement would have a trickle-down effect on the military establishment as a whole, spreading from there to the entire nation, playing on the great hope inherent in the idea that when you were losing a game playing by rules favoring your opponent, you always had the option of changing those rules. As a fearless militant engaged in what later generations would call asymmetrical warfare, you could confound your foe’s logic, play on his worst nightmares and, in the process, destroy his will to continue fighting. This was the power – and the beauty – of the tokkō concept; it was Poe’s “imp of the perverse” in organizational form, a Dostoevskyian hatchet in the brain pan of Western rationalism, so far out of the box that even the best of the Americans’ three-dimensional thinkers – their think tanks of pipe-puffing geniuses sequestered in the bowels of the Pentagon – would never be able to come up with a workable counterstrategy. What kind of people are capable of this? They’re mad! they would scream, fretting and conferencing as their fleets were scuttled and their sons and brothers died in terror and flaming agony, Fighting like this and we’re still only in the Philippines, for God’s sake! What will they do when we try to invade Japan!?

  In the end it would come down to a brutal duel of national and civilizational will – the Japanese ability to absorb the systematic extermination of their young men versus the Americans’ stomach for the sacrifice of their own. Ōnishi and growing numbers of flag-rank officers were increasingly convinced that, when it came down to such a contest, the Americans would blink first. For all of their steel mills and shipyards and skyscrapers and Western Union cables spanning the globe, there was still one gaping breach in their ramparts – Americans were skilled at the rhetoric of justifying their wars, claiming the cause of freedom or justice or individual liberty whenever it suited them, but there was no principle they were prepared to sacrifice everything for. In the essence of their souls, they were pragmatists who fought to win as quickly and painlessly as possible. They preferred their heroes coming home alive to having them come home in boxes. Theirs was the bravado of gunslinger show-offs, the pearl-handled machismo of gangsters, flying into battle to kill pure and virtuous Japanese boys and bomb innocent women and children in Japan’s cities in high-performance aircraft emblazoned with paintings of naked women and cartoon characters. The Americans blasphemed the sacred art of war as much with their tastelessness as with their undeserved successes, and they were all the more despicable now that they were winning. Victory had to be seized from their grasp, whatever the cost. If they could not be made to lose, then they would never, ever be allowed to win. Not while a single Japanese was still drawing breath.

  Push hard enough, sacrifice enough, and there would come a point when Washington would order its ships home. Once American voters knew what was happening to their sons, the politicians would have no other choice.

  Tokkō seemed like the best chance for being able to push them to this point. But all those fine young men…all that blood…

  And in whose name?

  5 Poster BoyAt 0300, there were two sharp raps on the door to the admiral’s room. The door creaked open and yellow light spilled in from the hallway around a silhouetted head and shoulder. The admiral blinked a few times and Tamai’s rugged features formed in the glare.

  “Come in,” the admiral said. “I’m awake.”

  “There’ve been some developments, sir,” Tamai said. “While you…slept. We assembled and spoke to the NCO pilots last night, briefed them on the situation, and they all volunteered… To a man, sir.”

  The admiral sucked in a sharp gulp of air, almost like a choked-back sob, then let it out in a low, forlorn sigh.

  “To a man…,”the admiral said.

  “Yes sir. We’ve also come up with a most suitable candidate for the tokkō unit leader. A young lieutenant named Yukio Seki. Naval Academy man. Class of Forty-one.”

  The choice was inspired. Of course it had to be an officer, and better yet, a Naval Academy man. It had to be made to look like they were prepared to sacrifice one of their own – a strapping, heroic, capable professional naval officer, not some farmboy crammed through flight training and hardly able to keep a control stick steady between his knees. There would no doubt come a time when it would be up to such innocents to carry the weight of the campaign, and perhaps sooner than most people thought, but that time was not here yet. This was a time for heroes.

  Even among a politically docile populace well conditioned by seven decades of sacrifice-intensive Emperor worship education, pumped up by Arima’s Taiwan heroics and helped along the straight-and-narrow by 1920s “thought crime” legislation[36], it was still inevitable that there would be voices – perhaps even in public – expressing doubt that the nation had to sacrifice the flower of its young men in such deliberate and decidedly irreversible fashion. It would be the Navy’s job to convince the nation that, indeed, it was just such sacrifice and nothing less that was required of the Japanese race in this, its darkest hour.

  For this, they needed a ritual sacrifice – a boy scout to crucify, grieve over briefly, then deify. Seki seemed to fit the bill perfectly. He came from a lower ranking ex-samurai family that had fallen on hard times after the Meiji Restoration; he was twenty-three – old enough to be taken seriously, but still young enough to break hearts; newlywed; captain of his junior high school[37] tennis team; modest and mildly introverted; highly intelligent; and devoted to his impoverished, widowed mother (he had only attended the Naval Academy in the first place only because he did not want his mother to be burdened by tuition for a private school). Seki was a skilled aviator and experienced instructor for basic flight training at Kasumigaura, straight out of advanced flight school himself; he had had some combat as a carrier-qualified pilot in the CBI theater flying Aichi dive-bombers. His records showed high evaluations straight down the line from the Academy on, with the only negative entries a few minor breaches of uniform regulations – long hair, shoes not properly shined – misdemeanors which could be written off to youth and human fallibility. So he was a bit of an individualist. All the better for the first fellow – the one everyone would remember after all of this was over – to have a little ningen kusasa (“whiff of humanity”) about him. Seki had excellent qualifications, proven leadership ability and, as the piéce de resistance, sizzlingly photogenic charisma.

  The education system had done a wonderful job raising – no, creating – Seki’s generation, snipping buds and turning branches with the patient guidance and loving care of a master bonsai gardener. These children were the fruit of a diligent, prudent, concentrated national effort to create an inspired, dedicated population base ever since Emperor Meiji’s Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890. This was a factor often overlooked by students of modern Japanese history: the Meiji Restoration did not just bring about quantum leaps in the nation’s technological prowess and economic might; far more profoundly, in the grand scheme of things, it placed the potential for greatness into the character of its commoners, teaching them that, contrary to what the Westerners preached with their poisonous and selfish liberalism, gr
oup loyalty and a properly deferential stance toward your superiors did not necessarily mean living on your knees. In the New Japan, rather, these values could be seen as a matter of honor and as a self-conscious, self-aware celebration of one’s Japaneseness.

  Anyone had to admit that it was an obscene waste to destroy a fine young man like Seki. Add some gray into his hair and wrinkles onto the visage staring up from the dossier page and you could be looking at the face of a dignified doctor who might cure cancer someday, create a vaccine for polio, make crippled children walk again. Perhaps you were looking at a professor who would inspire a generation of young minds passing through his classroom in a long and illustrious career. How about an artist who would be heralded the world over, spreading Japanese culture and bringing glory upon himself and his country? A progressive prime minister who would see the nation through the 1980s on a wave of prosperity? Someone’s loving, supportive husband. Some lucky child’s devoted father. A kind old man who doted on his grandchildren.

  But on the orders of a blunt-nosed farmer’s son from Hyōgo, this beautiful young man’s promising future would be turned into a flaming wreck and a mangled corpse, splattered over the deck of an American warship at six hundred kilometers an hour.

  Now that was truly breathtaking egalitarianism at work. Meiji’s social reforms had not abolished the warrior caste – they had simply relaxed its membership requirements[38], and for the Japan of 1944, this meant that there were only two kinds of Japanese left in the country: the Emperor, who was the living, breathing essence of Japan itself, and then, on a perfectly horizontal plane immeasurably lower than His Majesty, an entire nation of modern-day samurai, active or reserve. “A sublime sense of self-sacrifice must guide you throughout life and death,” the Emperor’s citizen-soldiers were told. “Think not of death as you push through with every ounce of your effort, fulfilling your duties. Make it your joy to do everything with all your spiritual and physical strength. Fear not to die for the cause of everlasting justice. Do not stay alive in dishonor. Do not die in such a way as to leave a bad name behind you.”[39]

  That was it – the Lord’s Prayer of the New Samurai; the crux of the whole “honorable death of the one hundred million” mentality – what made it possible for a Hyōgo farmer’s son to order a dashing young scion of the ancient warrior caste to his death and expect total obedience. It was this heady new elixir of populist pie-in-the-sky that was responsible for the tokkō phenomenon, not the kind of lower cerebellum panic instinct that sent the civilians over the cliffs at Saipan. The difference was more obvious than might appear at first glance. A Western observer might be tempted to write off tokkō as some bizarre curio of Eastern thought and behavior – national character molded by ancient philosophies shrouded in mystery, or even an innate Japanese suicide gene. But tokkō had not arisen from such origins. Nor was it – contrary to the claims of the Young Turks who had been clamoring for tokkō for years now – a natural extension of samurai traditions. Rather, it sprang from a conscious elevation of devotion to duty and celebration of ethnicity to the level of state religion. This value system could only have crystallized only in an industrialized, mid-twentieth century culture, with all of the powers to mold mass opinion that well-organized compulsory educational systems, high-speed printing presses, the motion picture camera and radio broadcasts provided its leadership. This banal reality was something that Japanophile Westerners – who tended to see only silky kimono sleeves, Zen proverbs and misty mountain temples behind everything the Japanese said or did – would never understand, and that few Japanese themselves – holding on to their own desperate, Orientalism-in-reverse belief in their cultural uniqueness that such Western stereotypes reinforced – would ever admit.

  But Ōnishi understood. And while he did not accept most of the “official beliefs” proselytized for mass consumption at face value, he did believe in the sanctity of the ideals and institutions these beliefs were created to defend.

  Despite what the academic fairy-tale spinners claimed, the Japanese race in 1944 was not an ancient one; it was the newest nation on the face of the planet. While other peoples still struggled to rise from the ashes of archaic, stultifying nobility systems, or threw away thousands of years of cultural identity on socialism, or staggered punch-drunk through the never-ending Darwinian fistfight of market capitalism, this new way – the Japanese way under His Majesty’s benign and infallible guidance – implied a world of benevolence and wisdom where loyalty would be the sole measure of a man’s worth. This was the way of the future, the only hope for a world of peace, harmony, and, most importantly, order. With a little luck, young heroes like Yukio Seki might yet light that way to the “eight corners of the earth”[40] with the funeral pyres of their brave sacrifices.

  These were soothing sentiments. But other voices still haunted the admiral.

  What of the pain of the mothers who would lose these young men? How could anything justify that?

  Not all that long ago, Lieutenant Seki had been a proud mother’s fine little son. Mrs. Seki had wept with joy at her son’s first tottering steps, played with the golden peach fuzz on the back of his sunbrowned neck in the family’s wooden bathtub, tickling the whorl of hair on the back of his scalp while his laughter rang high and sweet as an angel’s chorus. She was the one who had dealt with all the diapers, dishes, laundry and scraped knees, scrimping and saving to buy her boy a tricycle he wanted, or to get him some nice clothes for his formal elementary school photo. She was the one who had gotten a rash of goosebumps the first time she heard her twelve-year-old’s voice crack and sound like a man’s for a fleeting instant and fretted over the late hours he kept studying for his entrance exams. And finally, she was the one left standing alone on a gray, windswept railway platform watching with a mixture of sadness and pride as her uniformed young man, the object of all of her years of love, tears and affection, her only child, the last vestige of her flesh and blood on the planet and the last surviving male of the proud House of Seki, was whisked off into the big, cold world to do great and wondrous things for his country.

  And now Ōnishi was about to sign orders that, in destroying this innocent woman’s world by taking away everything she loved, would murder her just as surely as if he put his Nambu service pistol to her head and pulled the trigger.

  Of course, people would say that only a man who had never known a parent’s love for a child could do such a thing. Such talk would burn, but it would have to be endured for the sake of duty. For the sake of the country.

  But then again, maybe such criticisms would be true. Maybe he deserved a little time twisting in the breeze, or tied to the roasting stake. The admiral himself could add readily to the list of charges against him in the murder trial his reputation would someday become; maybe he really was just an unhappily married, burned out fiftysomething with volcanic guts and chronic insomnia – a spiritually desolate old man who had not known any love since his mother’s death over thirty years before. Childless, hopeless, unloved and unloving – it seemed a likely profile for the kind of man who could order tens, hundreds, thousands of young men to commit suicide on the pretext of duty, honor, country. “The only practical way I see of our accomplishing our mission will be to use Special Attack techniques…” Who was he trying to fool? Himself, first of all. Wasn’t this really all just a big charade, part tantrum for blowing a war that had started out so well (or that should never have been fought in the first place), part morbid massacre fantasy, part power trip because it…because it…well, because it could be done? Affirmative to all the above. Damning evidence that the only convincing explanation for his decision was that he was a heartless monster. After all, how could a human being capable of love also be capable of giving orders like this?

  Well, maybe that all depended on how you defined the term “love.”

  The admiral considered himself to be full of love, just as much as the next man, maybe even more. But the love that burned in his heart was not the kind that a male fel
t for a female, or that existed naturally between a parent and a child. No, his was a love that only a Japanese man could experience. Love of Emperor, of homeland, of culture, of blood.

  Now those were things worth dying for.

  For a Japanese man of honor, there was no possible counterargument to these moral absolutes. Seki and his comrades had the opportunity to die glorious deaths while striking a grievous blow at the enemy, gaining immortality in the pages of history and avenging the deaths of comrades and loved ones in the process. They would never have to know the bitterness of defeat, never see their wives, sweethearts and sisters defiled by an occupying army of barbarians. The issuing of tokkō orders under such circumstances was an act of the most profoundly heartfelt love, faith and mercy. While the admiral would never stop grieving for the young men he sent off to die, he would also never doubt the integrity and necessity of his decision or the righteousness of his cause.

  Ōnishi handed Seki’s dossier back to Tamai, pulled on his boots and went downstairs to join his adjutants and the 201st staff at the map table on the first floor.

  6 Fed Up With Losing And Ready To DieDawn found the admiral and the other officers still bent over their maps. Mabalacat was socked in under a blanket of dripping humidity from a heavily overcast, ill-tempered monsoon season sky. Although the weather was terrible – even dangerous – for flying, the 201st had put search planes up several hours earlier. Not surprisingly, no one had been able to get a fix on the Seventh Fleet’s escort carriers, although they were believed to be operating somewhere off Samar Island, perhaps headed south for Leyte. Based on the premise that numbers would improve the chance of finding something, there was some merit to the idea of just sending up a reconnaissance in force, with the Zeros rigged for tokkō and ready to attack at first sight of the enemy. But what if they got lost in the bad weather, ran out of fuel, and had to ditch in choppy seas? What if, milling around the general area of operations with their eyes glued to the water looking for American flattops, they were jumped and mauled by Hellcats? An ignominious official debut for the tokkō tactics would be utterly disastrous both in terms of morale and the future conduct of the war. News of a flopped operation here would go all the way to the top. Perhaps all the way to the Emperor himself.