Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

  *****

  At 1045, as the shock of the first grim Surigao communiqué – followed so quickly by the elation of the Kikusui Flight reports – was still being digested in command posts all over the Philippines, the Shikishima Flight was clearing the last spiny, mist-shrouded mountain ridges of Samar Island at a stiff clip before breaking out over the Pacific. It was a Zen warrior’s moment of the type that Seki had dreamed of since his days as a teenage midshipman. The doubts and despair about life cut short and everything that might have been, thoughts of his wife and mother that had ruined his sleep for the past four nights[51] – all that mental static had to be banished. In order to strike true and clean, his mind and eyes had to be clear. He was at peace with himself and at war with an enemy who had a flotilla full of fat, juicy targets waiting for the taking.

  It was a good day to die.

  *****

  The 1AF HQ communications room orderly knew what to do as soon as the cable from Mabalacat came through. Grabbing up the paper, he ran to Vice Admiral Ōnishi’s office, knocked, and opened the door to find the admiral up and pacing, pallid-looking, beads of sweat on dripping from his buzzcut to gather around the tight collar of his uniform shirt.

  “Another report from Mabalacat, sir,” the orderly announced. “Just in.”

  “Is it the Shikishima Flight?” the admiral asked, wide-eyed. “Lieutenant Seki?”

  “Yes sir. I believe so. And details of this morning’s strike out of Davao, also, sir.”

  Ōnishi snatched the typed cable from the orderly’s hands and sat down at his desk, his brow furrowed as he pored over the news.

  The first tokkō to make apparently successful hits were Zeroes out of Davao from the Kikusui Flight. The planes sortied at 0630 with the Yamazakura and Asahi flights. Soon after take-off, one plane from the Kikusui Flight was forced back to base, unable to retract its landing gear. A stupid maintenance error. Another two planes – one each from Yamazakura and Asahi – turned back with engine trouble shortly after that. Not even at the target yet, and nearly half the force was already out of the fight. Inexcusable. American CAP destroyed two more strikers on the way in, leaving two strikers to arrive over an element of American escort carriers at 0740. Two of the carriers were confirmed burning by one of the Kikusui escort pilots, the only man in the entire formation who made it back from the target area alive.

  This was not the most auspicious debut for the tokkō units the admiral could have imagined, but still, two carriers for two Zeros. That was not bad. Not bad at all. He skimmed halfheartedly over the Davao administrative details to get to the Shikishima report.

  The name at the top of the escort/witness action report – Warrant Officer Hiroyoshi Nishizawa – made the admiral sit up and take notice, and for an instant, a mean red jag of anger flashed through his head. What were they doing risking national heroes on tokkō escort missions for!?[52]

  But then again, this hadn’t just been any tokkō mission. It had been the tokkō mission. The national will galvanizer. The one a proud and grateful populace would hear about the following morning.

  The admiral read on.

  Apparently, Shikishima Flight had not been able to sneak in the back door quite as successfully as the Davao boys had. Although they managed to get under the radar umbrella, the American CAP made visual contact and vectored in on them less than a minute out, forcing Nishizawa and the escorts to fight a hole through the Hellcat screen for Seki and the other strikers to exploit. In the ensuing dogfight, Flight Officer Sugawa’s Zero was hit by AA and exploded. Nishizawa accounted for two Hellcat kills[53] as the Shikishima strikers went into their final dives.

  As the escorts had not exactly been in a position to observe at their leisure the events unfolding, there was no clear picture of what happened next. Under the circumstances, however, Nishizawa had done a reasonable job of relating what he could. Patching together various snippets and pieces of information from the other escort pilots upon their arrival at Cebu after the mission, he determined that one of the strikers had been downed by AA, but that at least four of the American carriers were hit, with one or two of them definitely damaged badly enough to be considered write-offs. There was no way to confirm how many of the stricken escort carriers had been sunk, but in keeping with Combined Fleet policy of late, it would not be untoward to report that all of them had gone down.

  “Yoshi, kore de nantoka naru” (“Okay. Now things will start rolling.”) the admiral muttered, leaning back in his chair.[54] He massaged his temples and let out a long sigh that was fatigue and relief in equal parts.

  Four confirmed hits. In writing. Right there on the paper, and signed by a living legend, no less. That was good enough for anyone. Four escort carriers by Shikishima Flight, another two by Kikusui Flight this morning. Scratch six flattops. Declare another national day of celebration. The Emperor and the nation needed some good news right now and 1st Air Fleet had just provided some.

  *****

  Twelve hours later, after all-night negotiations with Fukudome to create a large combined naval air command and greatly expanded tokkō force in the Philippines, the sobering statistics of losses from Operation Shō were still being tallied. The numbers were devastating: four aircraft carriers; three battleships, including the Musashi, which along with her superbattleship sister Yamato had been an icon of national pride; six heavy cruisers; four light cruisers; twelve destroyers; four subs; and, counting the planes on Ozawa’s carriers along with numerous land-based units destroyed in the air and on the ground by Task Force 38, Seventh Fleet’s escort carrier planes and the US Army Air Force, the greater part of the aviation strength of the Japanese Navy. Leyte Gulf had indeed turned out to be another Actium, but victory had gone to the Americans.

  The Japanese Navy was all but finished as a conventional seagoing fighting force. Tokkō, which had provided the only glimmers of good news during the entire dismal Shō fiasco, was looking more and more like the only viable weapon left in the Navy’s arsenal. Vice Admiral Ōnishi was determined to do everything in his power to see that this was how the situation would eventually be explained to His Majesty. First the Navy, then the Army, and finally the entire nation would have to accept – then become – tokkō if there was to be any hope at all of the Americans being stopped.

  This was a time for heroes – proud Japanese heroes – and before it all was over, there might very well be one hundred million of them.

  To be honored posthumously, of course.

  Section Two: All Boys Dream Of Flying

  7 An Old Man’s DreamMarch 2002 – I am walking past the northern moat of the Imperial Palace grounds in Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo, headed for the headquarters of the Association of Former Imperial Army Officers – otherwise known in these parts by its traditional Japanese name, Kaikōsha. The Kaikōsha was originally established as an army officers’ association in 1877. The year was auspicious for the new Imperial Japanese Army, seeing the service eliminate the last domestic armed challenge to Emperor Meiji’s consolidation of national authority by neutralizing Takamori Saigō’s Kyūshū-based Seinan samurai rebellion. However, the army’s success was significant not only for its obvious benefits to the new regime in Tokyo. More crucially – and ominously – the victory also had the effect of propelling the army into a position of coddled favor and political prominence in the Imperial government that it would maintain for the next sixty-eight years and relinquish only after the accrued consequences of its actions and policies had resulted in Tokyo and most of Japan’s other cities being turned to ash.

  The year also saw the Imperial Military Academy produce its first graduates, laying the foundation of the nation’s officer corps. As the Emperor’s army grew in status and influence, so did the status and influence of the Kaikōsha. Membership in the organization soon became de rigeur for career army officers of all ranks, and by the early twentieth century, it had branches in every major city and army installation in Japan, as well as in Korea, Taiwan, and other exotic locales in
the Empire’s rapidly expanding portfolio of colonial possessions.

  In addition to serving as a kind of hybrid USO/Officer’s Club/Veterans of Foreign Wars/IMA Alumni Association, the Kaikōsha also functioned as a powerful lobby group for army interests, patriotic educational policies in the nations’ schools and improvements in government benefits for military personnel, dependents and pensioners, among other issues. Given this tradition of political clout and the threat it posed as a potential après guerre rallying point for ancien regime militarists, the Kaikōsha – along with its naval counterpart, the Suikōsha – was one of the first zaidan hōjin[55]abolished y GHQ at the beginning of the Allied Occupation. However, the association (and the Suikōsha) was not vanquished forever, but merely relegated to temporary dormancy. In 1954, with Douglas MacArthur’s democracy babysitters already two years gone and the nation’s sovereignty safely restored, the Kaikōsha resumed activities. Fifty years later, the association remains active and, just as it was in “the good old days,” almost exclusively the domain of old IMA grads.

  In both its prewar and postwar incarnations, the Kaikōsha’s Tokyo branch has always served as the organization’s national headquarters, and despite several moves, it has never been farther than a good outfielder’s toss from Yasukuni Shrine. The physical proximity is fitting, as many of the modern day functions of the two institutions are intertwined, and in the case of the archiving of military records, actually shared. Like Yasukuni, the Kaikōsha’s energies are devoted to: memorial services honoring army war dead; documenting and interpreting the nation’s military past in a manner that will restore Japanese patriotic pride; facilitating the social activities of the rapidly dwindling ranks of war veterans; and maintaining its ongoing tradition of lobbying for right-wing interests in political issues. At present, the most critical of these ideological campaigns are for the reinstatement of national sponsorship and official recognition of Yasukuni Shrine (both privileges have remained abolished since the end of World War II, despite the return of Japanese sovereignty), and for the propagation of what is euphemistically known as “correct” Japanese history education in the nation’s schools, particularly where curricula involve handling the interlinked subjects of the rise of Shōwa Era militarism and what is generally referred to in right-leaning Japanese historical interpretations as The Great East Asian War of 1937-1945[56].

  The fundamental points of what could be called the “Yasukuni/ Kaikōsha Stance” (and the basic position of most other right-wing historical interpretation arguments) are:

  ● the Great East Asian War was the result of Japan being threatened by other powers, and the nation’s actions constituted a legitimate defense of strategic interests;

  ● the war was fought to free Asia of Western colonialism/hegemony;

  ● the Nanking Massacre, POW slavery and vivisections, “comfort women” forced prostitution policies and other purported Japanese wartime transgressions either never happened or have been grossly exaggerated by “Japan bashers” – both domestic and foreign – eager to vilify the nation’s conduct in the war for political purposes or possibly even financial gain (through reparations, etc.);[57]

  ● the current state of history education in Japanese schools is an unhealthy legacy of Allied Occupation policies designed to keep Japan eternally humbled and weak;

  ● the Tokyo International Tribunal to try Japan’s “war criminals” was a sham trial of “victor’s justice,” and the men and women executed as a result of its verdicts gave their lives for Japan and thus deserve to be honored just as military personnel who died in combat;

  ● Yasukuni Shrine is the only facility in Japan that can legitimately claim to serve as a memorial facility to honor the nation’s war dead in toto.[58]

  “Incorrect” history, conversely, means any academic or educational interpretation that portrays the conduct and motives of the Imperial armed forces during the war in anything less than a heroic and morally justified light, or that denies the status of Yasukuni Shrine as the nation’s premier war memorial facility.

  Controversy has always surrounded this stance, and while the Kaikōsha’s views have never dominated public opinion in postwar or modern Japanese society, its voice has shown ironclad consistency over the years and has long had the ear of some of the nation’s most powerful politicians. Given the emeritus status of so many of its nearly 14,000 members in business, political and social spheres, the Kaikōsha’s influence is greater even than its considerable size might imply. However, these numbers are dropping off sharply as infirmity and death from natural causes now begin to ravage the ranks of the last IMA classes[59]. The youngest full members are pushing eighty as of 2004, and there are no plans to “open the books” for a new generation of members. Barring any change in membership requirement policy that will bring new blood into the organization, the Kaikōsha is not much longer of this earth, and is destined to fade away like MacArthur’s metaphorical old soldier when there are not enough members left to carry its torch.

  Perhaps in light of the demographic realities facing the organization, it is fitting that the premises occupied by its Tokyo branch are considerably more modest than the grand stone palazzo – no longer extant – it called home until 1945. Tokyo’s Kaikōsha is at present located on a bar and restaurant-lined side street in Kojimachi, Chiyoda Ward, housed in a six-story building owned by a dentist who lives in a penthouse on the top two floors and drills teeth on the first. On the three floors in between, the Kaikōsha has a canteen/club room, conference rooms and administrative offices.

  The façade and lobby of the building have had recent makeovers with chrome, marble and opalescent white tile (perhaps symbolic of the dental clinic’s function?), making the structure appear to be much newer than it actually is. The building’s true Sixties soul, however, is to be encountered on the Kaikōsha-occupied floors, where as in all Japanese office interiors dating from the era, three or four decades of chain-smoking occupants have coated every possible surface with a yellow nicotine patina that no amount of detergent and elbow grease can ever quite remove.

  But despite the beige walls and linoleum floors, the space seems imbued with a nostalgic Camelot energy of happier times – of an era when Japan’s economy was on a rocket sled of double-digit annual GNP growth and all was right with the world. Rounding corners and peering into open doors, one half expects to bump into Brylcreemed businessmen in blue serge suits, horn-rimmed glasses and pencil ties on their way to Lockheed-funded geisha parties, or to see rooms full of uniformed, bouffant-coiffed office girls clacking away on abacuses and gigantic kanji typewriters.

  The clubroom of the Kaikōsha on the second floor of the building has a small counter with stools, but most of its floor space is taken up by three or four round formica tables ringed with Age of Aquarius airport lounge swivel bucket seats. The walls are lined with the handiwork of artistically inclined members, mostly army- and IMA-themed oil paintings and military scale models in glass display cases.

  Against the back wall, several pairs of cushy beige chairs face one another, separated by small glass top tables and from the rest of the room by a wall of photosynthetically-challenged rubber plants. One of the chair-table sets is occupied this morning by a small group of old smokers gathered around a Japanese chessboard. Apparently, a move in the game is being hotly contested, as the old men are engaged in a mixture of laughter and angry snarls. They do not take much notice of me when I park myself in one of the bucket lounge seats and order a cup of coffee from a mildly flustered middle-aged waitress. This reception is quite different from the one I got a month earlier, when I first visited the premises and people in the room looked at me like I had just walked down from the ramp of a flying saucer in a silver suit to utter “Gort, Klaatu barada nikto…” Nevertheless, as the minutes go by, I am beginning to get some curious stares, and I feel some measure of relief when my interview subject – Toshio Yoshitake – arrives and we head off to a private conference room for our interview.
<
br />   *****

  Toshio Yoshitake still has “the dream” sometimes – the one where he is back on the flight line of that bomb-cratered airstrip on Negros Island in the Philippines, sitting with the other army pilots under the palms in that same steel gray morning rain, waiting for the weather to clear and the order to climb into the planes. Sometimes he forgets that he is an eighty-year-old having a fifty-eight-year-old dream, and blames the déjà vu he always feels here on crossed signals in a fatigued twenty-two-year-old brain…

  …but tired or not, none of the young pilots on the flight line this morning is thinking much about sleeping. Anticipation and nerves keep eyes open and mouths firmly shut, the electricity of the moment paralleled in the metallic razz of sap-fattened bugs and the green whisper of light rain on foliage. There are occasional clinks and snaps of cigarette lighter lids, always followed by sighed exhalations of smoke. One pilot is leaning back against the trunk of a palm, looking at photos he has pulled from his pocket. The pilot next to him chews the stem of a long blade of grass as he gazes off to the east toward the twin volcanoes of Mandalagan and Silay, misty blue in the rain, beyond which lie American ships and destiny. The others just stare at their hands, down at the ground, or off into space, figures in a muted earth tone tableau of young men quietly saying goodbye to the world.

  Under the meditative weight of this somber lull, each lung-filling yawn or scratched cowlick is someone’s small celebration and savored affirmation of a life that will cease to be in an hour or two. Socialized from boyhood to respect silence, these middle class sons of rice farmers, schoolteachers, and small business owners share an unspoken understanding that this flight line downtime is probably the last chance in their mortal lives to be alone with their thoughts – to daydream, ruminate, fantasize, or just dwell on the white noise of rain-sizzle through palm fronds, the smell of wet grass, and the feel of warm sea air on their cheeks. There is no nervous banter. No pretentious blather or maudlin yammering. There has already been a send-off speech this morning, and there have been countless others in the past few weeks. No need for any more. “Dulce et decorum” lectures and pontifications on the meaning of it all are best left to the crickets in the grass.