There is a short send-off speech and a subdued saké toast in the drizzle with Lieutenant General Terada (which the army public affairs officers and Nichiei folks obviously do not consider enough of a photo op to show up for), after which the pilots file off to their standby area under a row of palm trees by the flight line. The planes have already been gassed up and loaded out. There is nothing to do now but wait for the order to go.
The pilots take advantage of the downtime to be alone with their thoughts. The drizzle sizzles through the palm fronds. Bugs sing in the trees and grass. Yoshitake is struck by the feeling of being pinned like a collector’s butterfly to this surreal and frozen Zen moment while time races on tirelessly toward conclusions everywhere but here. He shrugs off a weird déjà vu sensation, writing it off to nerves and fatigue. His thoughts turn to loved ones.
The somber flight line reverie is snapped when the attack order comes down from the flight ops shack a little before seven: takeoff immediately, assume heading of 095 to avoid lingering cloud cover over Cebu, then take heading of 085 until the American convoy is spotted. Just follow the headings and you will not miss the target, they are told. The Camotes Sea is so full of American ships this morning you can walk across to Leyte without getting your feet wet.
The pilots jog the short distance to their planes. Ground crews already have the engines warmed up and running. Yoshitake is amazed by the serendipity that the officer in charge of the flight line is Lieutenant Masuda, an old squadmate from academy days. There is a handshake and a brief conversational exchange over the engine noise, but neither schedule nor circumstances allow for any more than that. The men exchange a salute and shoulder slaps before Yoshitake climbs into the cockpit of his plane and guns the engine. Black smoke belches from the exhaust pipes.
Masuda jumps up on the wing of Yoshitake’s plane and pops his head in the cockpit.
“Everything okay? You sure you can take this up today?”
“Okay. Ready to go,” Yoshitake answers, after a barely perceptible delay. He is lying. The engine is low on rpms and giving only about 80% power. There is a lot of bomb under the plane and not nearly enough runway or engine power to get it up into the air with, but he is not about to punk out behind a bad engine again. There have been enough sendoff speeches and forced smiles for the benefit of farewell party guests. Today is the day, and that’s that.
Masuda understands without having to be told anything more, gives his old roommate a final slap on the shoulder, and hops off the plane to pull the chocks away.
Itoi, as the ranking pilot here, is in the lead of the planes taxiing for the runway. He goes into max revs and his Ki-51 seems to take forever to get off the ground. He just clears the trees at the end of the runway as Yoshitake, with a prayer on his lips, pulls a red knob on the instrument panel to put the engine into emergency overboost.
The engine wheezes and coughs. The plane begins to roll over the bumpy, muddy ground, but not nearly quickly enough. A hundred meters of runway goes by. Two hundred. The airspeed needle creeps across the indicator dial while the trees at the far end of the field get big way too quickly for comfort.
There is now more foliage than sky in the windscreen glass. Speed is still too low, but it’s now or never. Yoshitake drops a few degrees of flap and swallows hard as he begins to ease the control stick back, bracing for a stall-out or, more likely, an impact with the trees. The plane bounds once. Twice. Once more and it is aloft, yawing to the right with overboosted engine torque.
Trees!
There is a loud thwack as the Ki-51 takes about half of the top of a palm tree off. The plane shudders under the impact, yawing even more and on the verge of stall-out, but somehow it stays up. The engine is none too happy about any of this, and is vociferous in its protest, but it is doing its job.
The flight forms up over the field and gets some altitude before assuming the heading for the first leg. Still only a few minutes out, Yoshitake’s wheezing plane is streaming a thin band of smoke and already falling way behind the formation. Itoi and the others are pulling away. Their planes are rapidly shrinking into black dots in the windscreen.
There is no use getting too worked up about falling behind. Although in an unexpected way it helps keep his mind occupied. The dominant emotions of the moment are impatience and determination.
Twenty minutes out, the formation is skirting a cloud bank over Cebu at about five thousand meters and turning into their attack heading. It is still somewhat overcast here, but the sky in the direction of the target area is sunny. Yoshitake, now at least two or three kilometers back from the formation, can still make out the other planes, but just barely. Black blossoms of smoke soon darken the horizon to the east. The Americans are putting up anti-aircraft barrages. From the looks of it, there must be hundreds of ships out there. Yoshitake feels his pulse quicken.
Just fly for the smoke puffs. That’s where the ships are. They’ll lead you right in.
He zones everything else out and focuses on the smoke. His entire being is pulled forward toward the battle as the plane clears the coast of Cebu and heads out over a bright aquamarine sea shimmering in the overcast sunlight.
Every synapse in Yoshitake’s nervous system fires instantaneously as a huge, shiny blue-black bat with white stars on its wings suddenly looms up from out of nowhere directly in front of him, almost completely filling his field of vision.
The trigger button! Press the trigger button!
Yoshitake can hear the little voice echoing up from his cerebellum but his hands are glued to the stick. He can’t move a muscle.
The Hellcat levels off to the side and slightly in front of Yoshitake’s plane in a leisurely maneuver almost close enough to touch wingtips. The pilot – a big, red-faced man who looks uncomfortably cramped in his cockpit – fixes Yoshitake with an expression clearly readable as a mixture of disdain and pity before pulling straight up and away into a rocketing zoom climb. Yoshitake is just beginning to take it personally when fist-sized, fluorescent pink fireballs start streaming by either side of the canopy.
For the first time in the encounter, Yoshitake’s reflexes kick in on cue. He yanks the drop tank release lever to lose the bomb and the plane is suddenly as light as a biplane trainer. He puts some of the Ki-51’s fabled low-speed maneuvering to the test to jink his attacker off his tail and bring the fight down to the deck. By dropping his altitude to the wave tops, he has lost his vertical options and most valuable spatial dimension in terms of escape, but the faster bad guy, a second American fighter that Yoshitake can make out as another Hellcat, is put at a disadvantage as well. An experienced fighter pilot will give up a limb or two before willingly surrendering speed at low altitude in a combat situation. Therefore, if the American knows what he’s doing, dropping speed to pump lead into Yoshitake’s tail at will is the last thing he is going to want to do. His attacks will be limited to boom-and-zoom runs with a firing window of only a few seconds at a time before he has to pull up to avoid augering into the water. If Yoshitake can jink around enough during these short attack runs and avoid stalling out, maybe he can buy time to try to think of some way out of this mess.
The Ki-51 is scooting over wave tops and within sight of a tree-lined island when its American tormentor comes in for another run. Yoshitake braces for hits and a split-second later the cockpit is filled with shattered instrument panel glass, flying dust and debris and the acrid smell of smoke and aviation fuel. The engine sputters and dies. The Ki-51 is now a powerless glider losing speed fast.
Something in Yoshitake’s mind registers a black clearing in the palm trees past his starboard wingtip and he instinctively yanks the sluggish control stick to head for it. Spread out before him in splendor and glory is an asphalt airstrip cleanly splitting the jungle overgrowth in half. It is a heavenly choir moment, but way too early to join in the singing. He is rapidly running out of speed and altitude but still a good clip from the end of the runway.
He is too low to bail out, and ditchi
ng in a fixed-landing gear aircraft is not recommended if he wants to keep his spinal column intact. His only chance is to make it to the runway. The water is changing color – going tan and shallow – but the end of the runway is creeping over the top of the engine cowling. Pulling back on the stick to try to get some altitude will just cause a stall.
The wheels hit hard a few meters from the end of the runway, on sand already sloping down toward the water.
There is a huge boom and suddenly Yoshitake is watching himself floating in a wooden boat in an upside-down black void. The sensation is not entirely unpleasant, nor is the smell of aviation fuel that fills the air. He does not register any pain or fear other than a vague loneliness and a desire for some light. He pulls at his harness buckle to reach for a patch of blue sand hovering somewhere over his shoulder, and the world falls on his head.
*****
“Hitting my head like that snapped me out of it,” Mr. Yoshitake says. “When I came to, I realized that I was hanging upside down in my plane.”
I must have made a humorous expression of surprise here, because Mr. Yoshitake unexpectedly flashes big old man teeth in a high-wattage grin I realize is identical to the one on the face of a beaming young man in wartime photos I have just finished thumbing through.
“I started digging around an open space on one edge of the cockpit,” he writes in his wartime memoirs Nagai Hibi (“Long Days”). “I heard voices, and then I clearly remember people actually jumping back in horror for a second when my head popped out from under the plane and into view… About half of my scalp from just below the hairline had been lifted up and off my head.”
Once they had regained their composure, Yoshitake’s rescuers identified themselves as navy personnel. He was at a small naval airstrip on Mactan Island. He was pretty banged up, but the injuries were not life threatening.
After recuperating in the first aid shack on Mactan, he was sent back to Pollock Airfield, where he spent the next two months witnessing the military and moral meltdown of the Japanese occupation forces there and on the rest of Luzon Island. Riding on one of the last Japanese aircraft to leave Luzon, he spent the remainder of the war in Taiwan awaiting new tokkō orders that never came. He was repatriated in February 1946 after serving as a “volunteer” medic’s assistant in the Taiwan countryside at the behest of local Kuomintang and Allied authorities.
So, did his traumatic experience over the Camotes Sea in late 1944 give him a lifelong fear of flying? Not a chance. He joined the Japanese Air Self Defense Force as soon as that organization was established, serving his country again as a military pilot and flight instructor for the next thirty years. After retirement, he started a successful aerial photography and mapping company, and continued pleasure flying in his spare time. His logged his last flight hours in 1993.
Yoshitake wishes he could still fly, but admits that his eyesight and reflexes aren’t what they used to be anymore. He flies only in his dreams now. Usually, these are pleasant – soaring over the troubles and trivia of the earthbound world, high and free in the great blue. Sometimes, though – perhaps a few times a month for the last fifty-eight years, more when he’s under stress – the dreams are not so good, and he is back on the flight line at Bacolod waiting for the order to get in the planes or flying toward those black flak clouds on the horizon. In the worst dreams, he is not flying at all, but running through the jungles of northern Luzon during a B-24 carpet-bombing raid over his position that kills half of the men in his new unit in seconds. But always – good dream or nightmare – he gets to meet once again with the best friends he ever had: Captain Takaishi and his IMA classmates in the Sekichō Unit. And along with the bittersweet joy of these regular nocturnal reunions invariably comes a feeling that maybe he was supposed to have died with his squadron mates. Maybe he had just cheated fate to survive that crash and last all these years to start a family, work in a fulfilling career, pursue hobbies, enjoy retirement, play with his grandchildren, watch sunsets. He has never really shaken this nagging survivor’s guilt all this long half-century, but he manages to cope with it one day at a time. One way to do this is to look at his life since that fateful day in 1944 not as something stolen but as a gift. It is a sentiment I will hear often in interviews with other tokkō survivors in coming months.
“I have lived twice,” Yoshitake says. “I died in that plane crash, and was born again when I was pulled from the wreck. I’m not a religious man, but I have to think that something or someone decided to give me this time for a reason, and there is never a day that I do not feel grateful for it. Perhaps I have been living not only for myself all this time, but also to make up in some way for the long lives my comrades missed.”
Yoshitake leans back in his chair to fire up another of the creosote-smelling Shinsei cigarettes he has been smoking throughout the interview. There is a faraway look in his eyes now, but there is a twinkle in them, too, like he is in on a secret that I, not present on his particular St. Crispin’s Day, cannot be let in on until I have paid some more dues. It is a look you often see in the eyes of older men whose hearts, in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s metaphor, were touched with fire in their youth. God and favorable defense treaties willing, Yoshitake and his seventy- and eightysomething former comrades-in-arms will be the last generation of Japanese ever to have it.
“I’ll tell you what war is,” Yoshitake says, almost as if he has been reading my mind. “It’s a situation in which a person has absolutely no control over their own destiny. Everything is out of your hands. You can’t stay alive when you want to, but you can’t die when you want to, either.”
Section Three: The Ultimate Smart Bomb
10 The Yokaren CandidateIt is April 2002, and I am visiting Tokurō Takei’s comfortably sunlit Japanese/Western-style home in Hamamatsu, Japan for the first time. His wife meets me at the door with a deep bow, which I return with one of my own before handing over a gift-wrapped box of rice crackers and offering a stock Japanese apology for imposing myself like this. Mrs. Takei receives my gift with another bow and, as etiquette dictates, politely refuses to acknowledge my need to apologize. I remove my shoes in the ground- level foyer, and step up on to the raised floor of the house in my stocking feet. Mrs. Takei offers me the customary house slippers a visitor to a Japanese house will typically wear. I decline the offer on the valid grounds that my feet are too big for the slippers, and we share a quick if bashful laugh over this footwear conundrum while she shows me to the living room sofa.
I would guess that Mrs. Takei is in her late sixties or early seventies. She has the doe-eyed, rich caramel brown variety of Japanese face that is often seen in her hometown of Okitsu and the other fishing villages squeezed between mountains and the Pacific Ocean on the coast of eastern Shizuoka Prefecture. It is a warm, sunny visage that conjures up forebears from milder climes than the tough Yayoi culture rice farmers who sailed from the Korean peninsula two millennia ago to wrest control of the archipelago from the aboriginal Jōmon culture and leave the deepest footprints in the genetic makeup of modern Japanese.[68]
Any vestigial memory Mrs. Takei may have of her ancestors’ multicultural experience is obviously not kicking in to help her to deal with welcoming a foreigner into her home. When not in motion plying me with green tea and cookies while we wait for her husband to come to the living room, she stands a few steps behind the sofa and just out of my field of vision. I can sense her nervousness, and am not sure if her taciturnity stems from fear and shyness or from her assuming that a language barrier will make any attempts at meaningful conversation a mutually embarrassing exercise in frustration. Accordingly, neither of us says anything. I sit on the Takeis’ sofa looking at naval citations on the wall and plastic models of Zeros lined up on the bookshelves while Mrs. Takei maintains her vigil safely out of sight.
The cultural dynamic of silence at work here – which I have encountered thousands of times during my Japanese sojourn – is not particularly uncomfortable for me (although it may be for Takei-
san, uninitiated as she is to visits from international men of mystery). Over the years, I have lost my quintessentially American fear of conversational lulls longer than a few seconds, so this particular silence does not faze me. Nevertheless, I am beginning to feel a tad guilty over Takei-san’s obvious discomfort, so I decide to try to put my hostess at ease with a little demonstration of Japanese language ability. Etiquette gives me an in here – it will not be untoward for me to apologize once again for my rude intrusion (under the rules of Japanese etiquette you can never truly apologize too much for anything). The tit-for-tat torrent of stock platitudes my apology will trigger can be found virtually word for word in any basic Japanese conversation textbook, but then again, sometimes clichés can be reassuring, and I suppose this has as good a chance of breaking some ice as anything else.
“Please excuse my rudeness at imposing on your hospitality like this,” I say. “And on a weekend, at that.”
“Iie, iie,” Mrs. Takei says, fanning a hand in front of her nose in a Japanese gesture of denial often misinterpreted by Westerners as a reaction to some foul odor. “I’m the one who should be apologizing for our cramped house.”
“No, no. It’s not cramped at all. It’s lovely. And your tea is delicious.”
“I’m sorry about its poor quality.”
“These cookies are good, too.”
“It’s just some local confectionery. Nothing special.”
“You really didn’t have to go to the bother of buying them just for me.”
“Oh, no trouble at all.”
Running out of things to say, we exchange a quick series of head nods – like bows from the neck up – just as Mr. Takei enters the room and rescues us from having to commit to another round of head-bobbing niceties.
Takei-san is a short, lean, and fit man of seventy-three, and although his hair is white, he still has most of it. His facial expression is dignified and a bit distant, not what I would call extremely emotive. But it does have one – or rather two – striking features. As we shake hands, I am taken aback by Takei-san’s steel gray eyes, which are as limpid and cool as puddles in a tin rain gutter under a cloudy sky. As eye color other than an oily ebony or a rich mahogany brown is extremely rare in Japanese, the Siberian seawater in Takei’s eyes has my mind on the migrations of ancient peoples again.
Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze Page 12
