Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

  However interested I am in this topic, though, I have not visited Takei-san today to discuss Japanese anthropology – well, at least not any more than it pertains to the mindset of young men deliberately crashing their aircraft into things. But we must establish trust before we can reach a stage comfortable enough to attend to such meaty matters. And as the only man sitting on this sofa now who has not flown a warplane, or seen his friends killed in front of his eyes, or publicly repeated a vow to die for his country and meant every word of it, the burden of establishing this trust clearly falls squarely upon my shoulders.

  It is apparent that Takei-san, at least at this point, does not quite seem to know what to make of me, and in his own masculine way, he is just as shy as his wife. As we go through our opening banter, he comes across as cautious, and, of course, he has every right to be so. Most tokkō veterans have had the experience of dealing with unscrupulous writers or researchers or journalists looking for juicy stories and conspiracy angles at one time or another, and many of these former warriors have been burned come publication time because they were duped into giving trust where it was not warranted. For my own interview to work, I have to prove myself worthy of the information I seek.

  A skeptical war veteran interview subject will ask in so many words – and squarely within rights – “Why should I let you in on this?” It is not so much a matter of “What am I going to get out of giving you this information?” as it is “Why should I trust you with interpreting my experiences accurately, on something this important?” I have been able to answer this question to most of my interview subjects’ satisfaction during field research for this project, but I can never afford to be complacent, because no two approaches are the same, and each requires caution and tact. Some subjects want the questions fast and frank, while others take umbrage and clam right up under such a barrage, preferring their questions spoon-fed and gift-wrapped. But at either end of that continuum and everywhere else in between, the best way of steering an interview into a mood of candid comfort hinges on finding commonalities. Obviously, this is not always easily done when the parties involved are a seventy- or eightysomething Japanese combat veteran and a forty-year-old American who has heard shots fired in anger only in the Bronx.

  I have often found that my ex-West Point cadet credentials can grease the hinges a bit with even the crustiest and most irascible of these old fellows. Admittedly, they are the only real military qualifications I can claim, but the brand name value of the Academy as the alma mater of His Royal Highness Douglas MacArthur still carries enormous weight with older Japanese, and it has opened more than one door for me during my career here. My stories about cadet life – especially plebe year hazing – find an interested and even nostalgic ear with men of Takei’s generation, and help establish those above-mentioned and elusive commonality bonds.

  Another link, sadly, is that my being an ex-pat New Yorker with family members and friends living on the island of Manhattan in our post-9/11 world also gives us a bond of pain, for I now share with my elderly Japanese counterparts the experience of watching from afar – unable to help – as my home was attacked from the skies.

  Takei-san and I talk about 9/11 for a while. In all of the discussions I have had with Japanese veterans on this topic, I have not picked up on the slightest shred of any “So, how did you like being on the receiving end for a change?” schadenfreude in their comments, and toward the American people they have expressed only feelings of sympathy, shared outrage and solidarity. If Takei-san and his former comrades-in-arms harbor any negative feelings toward America in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, it is resentment against the American mass media for its culturally insensitive and historically ignorant likening of the mind-set and methods of Al-Qaeda with the Japanese tokkō program of sixty years ago. While an argument can perhaps be made for parallels between the pathological mindset of a Bin Laden and that of the more fanatic policymakers in Japan circa 1944-1945 by replacing fire and brimstone Wahhabist pipe dreams of global theocracy with the Japanese militarists’ racial mysticism and revenge fantasies against Western hegemony, I believe the basic motives and worldviews of the actual suicide bombers for these respective causes are fundamentally different. What the Japanese tokkō personnel themselves did – at least at the rank-and-file level of the men at the control sticks of the aircraft – was done out of a misguided but sincere belief that their actions were saving home and family, under irresistible institutional and sociocultural pressure. These motivations could not be more different from the theological distortions, nihilistic glorylust and ressentiment-fueled rage that motivate Al Qaeda’s minions.

  In late 1944, American fleets were closing an iron stranglehold on Japan. By 1945, these forces had been marshaled into invasion fleets, and Takei, his comrades and the entire population of Japan were told over and over through every information dissemination organ at the disposal of the state that the men on those ships were hell-bent on rape, destruction, and nothing short of genocide[69]. It was only natural that young men with a strong duty concept, deep love of country and family and insufficient worldly cynicism to doubt the shpiel from on high would want to do everything within their ability to stop such an enemy force in its tracks.

  An armada of racist, murderous rapists is closing in on your homes! They’ll rape and slaughter your mothers, sisters, and daughters in front of your eyes before your own slow, agonizing death unless you follow our instructions to the letter!

  For a panicked population that was incapable of doubting the integrity of their authority figures, who needed stronger exhortation to resort to extreme measures than that? The rank-and-file cannot be blamed for falling over each other in the rush to line up for tokkō. And if anyone should ever doubt that a campaign of misinformation for propaganda purposes was going on, consider that if the authorities had really believed that the American invasion force was going to be a million man-strong Einsatzgruppen of racist, bloodthirsty sex maniacs, then Emperor Hirohito would have never ordered the surrender, nuclear-bombed cities or not.[70] Under such circumstances, an imperial order for the nation to fight on to the last man, woman, and child would have been entirely justified.

  But the Emperor did not issue such an order, because at the bottom of his heart, he knew the Americans could be trusted, and I am sure he knew that if it ever came down to it, working with Democrats and Republicans would be a considerably more pleasant day at the office than cutting lumber in a Siberian gulag for commissars. Personally, I think he knew that all along. That he did not act earlier on his convictions and save millions of his countrymen in the process is something for which he can now be held accountable only to history.

  Of course, the emperor’s instincts turned out to be right. Concurrent with Germany’s and Italy’s postwar experiences, the American-led occupation of Japan that followed Hirohito’s surrender proclamation was without parallel the most benign and (at least economically) beneficial for a vanquished nation in the history of warfare. The Japanese people today owe their lives to the wisdom of the emperor’s decision, but they owe their freedom and prosperity to the unprecedented patience and generosity of former enemies. There can be no more damning argument against the racial pride mumbo-jumbo Japan’s wartime leadership put over on an entire nation while cheering it on to the brink of self-extermination in the last year of World War II.

  Takei-san nods throughout my monologue, but the gesture may be more Japanese politeness than wholehearted support. I am not sure if he agrees with me, but I do believe that I have at least convinced him that I have given these matters a lot of thought, and that gives us enough momentum to leave current events and historical theory behind us, and to begin talking about his war.

  “Everyone likes to think that the tokkō pilots were happy to die for their country, but I don’t think most of us were really like that,” Takei-san says, when asked about his mindset circa 1944-1945. “We did not want to die – at least not like that (i.e., in tokkō tactics). We were not
afraid to fight, but we wanted to come home to our families alive after the fighting was over. And nobody except for admirals and generals believed all that “die for the emperor” business. We were fighting to protect our homeland and, most of all, our families.”

  “Do you ever feel that your life was deliberately spared for some reason?” I ask, recalling Yoshitake-san’s almost theological explanation for his own survival.

  “No, no,” Takei-san says, mirroring the hand gesture of denial his wife made a few minutes ago. “I never really went in too much for that destiny stuff. I think I was just lucky, that’s all.”

  Obviously, Takei-san is not someone most people would be tempted to call a very religious man, at least not in terms of religion having a significant presence in his daily life. Nevertheless, every New Year’s Day he visits the local Shinto shrine with grandchildren in tow to pray for his family’s health and well-being over the next twelve months. Shinto rites were also observed for his daughters’ weddings, and in groundbreaking ceremonies for every office building, shopping mall, and hospital he helped put up during a lifetime in the construction business. As is the case with most of his countrymen, these rites are perhaps more reassuring affirmation of cultural identity and subtle reminders of the impermanence of worldly things than acts of religious devotion. However, when the transition to be marked is someone’s passage to the afterlife, Takei-san’s normal mode of healthy agnosticism is cloaked in the smoky incense and ornate mantle of Japanese Buddhism, and the prayers he will chant at a funeral along with the presiding monk and the other mourners are ostensibly offered in hopes that the soul of the dear departed will reincarnate on a higher plane than the one it has just left. Like most Japanese in similar situations, Takei-san may not believe – or even completely understand – everything he is repeating, but vague theology and incomprehensible ritual have never been problems with the variety of Buddhism practiced on these shores.

  Buddhism’s spread throughout Japan during the Sixth century A.D. is a quintessentially Japanese story of cultural absorption and subsequent adaptation to local needs and tastes. Assuming a major nation-building role soon after its arrival, the religion served as a conduit for political philosophy, high culture, technology and the kanji writing system imported from the Asian continent[71]. In its Japanese permutation, it has proved over the subsequent millennium and a half to be as jealous of its turf as it is flexible in its doctrine, withstanding the sands of time and several centuries worth of Christian missionary activities without relinquishing hold on the professed faith of more than 1 or 2 percent of the Japanese population since Francis Xavier’s frustrating tour of Jesuit duty in the country in the sixteenth century.

  Buddhism’s tenacious survival at the top has been made possible by the wind-sensitive political savvy of its prelates at key points in history, and their ability to shove the knife when confronted with rivals. The theological flexibility the religion demonstrated in its co-opting of native Shinto animist beliefs and the ease with which it lends itself to spinoff cults and faiths has been another secret of its durability. But certainly its main tenet of saisei reincarnation has been the greatest part of Japanese Buddhism’s appeal over the centuries for the hearts and minds of a rice-growing culture ill at ease with linear interpretations of time and more at home with cyclical concepts of life and death, sunrises and sunsets, the carousel of the seasons and the sensual distinctions each brings, everyone snug and comfortable in the knowledge that this is a world without major surprises or abrupt end, amen. For a farming culture, it is not the possibility of right or wrong pathways to ultimate destinations, but rather this assurance of predictable repetition that is most comforting.

  Similar to the doctrine of other Asian creeds in the Mahayana tradition, strict interpretation of the Japanese Buddhist cycle of reincarnation is karmic (although few Japanese believe this now), and the afterlife destination of a human soul is determined largely by what it did with the last corporeal vehicle of flesh and bones it was given a chance to jump into and take out for a test drive. At one end of the spectrum, for those rare souls patient and virtuous enough while alive to have achieved satori enlightenment – the Buddhist equivalent of a winning Powerball ticket – escape velocity from this plane of material illusion can be reached for an afterlife launch straight to truth and godhead. Thought along these lines has been coopted into the modern Shinto tradition holding that the souls of dead servicemen dwell for eternity in their heaven-on-earth amidst the cherry boughs at Yasukuni Shrine.

  At the other end, for souls whose previous incarnations incurred insurmountable bad karma by living particularly greedy, spiteful or uncharitable lives, waits an indeterminate period of lonesome purgatory and earthbound wandering as gaki or o-bake, the hideous but relatively innocuous phantoms and hobgoblins with which late nineteenth century proto-Japanologist Lafcadio Hearn was so fascinated, and which continue to play starring roles in the popular ghost stories of Japanese young and old. But the majority of us regular folks and run-of-the-mill lustful materialists are sentenced to run the eternal karmic hamster wheel for untold aeons, shunting back and forth in constant transmigration between life and death, and will continue to do so until karma allows us to get off the ride once and for all.

  A transmigrating soul slated for a return to this mortal coil could have drawn a cushier re-entry point slot on the time/space continuum than an impoverished Japanese day laborer’s home on the outskirts of a gritty regional industrial town in the first year of the Great Depression, but that was the hand dealt to the soul that became Tokurō Takei on February 10, 1929, in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture. Tokurō was born the third child and third son in a string of Takei children that was soon to include a daughter and a fourth son. His parents were wise enough to have learned the importance of a good education after finding out firsthand what it was like trying to succeed in the world without one, and though the family finances hung perennially on a frayed shoestring, school tuition always got paid in full and on time. If the Takei children ever had reason to doubt the wisdom of occasionally having to go without new clothes at the start of the school year because their mother thought it better to spend the money on textbooks, all they had to do was look at the cracked calluses on their father’s gnarled hands after a day of swinging an ax on a logging site or sorting leaves at a tea factory to appreciate their mother’s sense of priorities.

  When Tokurō graduated from elementary school in March 1941, most of his other classmates from the neighborhood opted – either from disinterest, impatience or domestic financial straits – to close their textbooks once and for all after their successful completion of what Japanese law determined to be a sufficient compulsory education. Many of these boys had life tracks already plotted out as helpers and eventual heads of family businesses or as apprentices to craftsmen. Others secured employment right out of grade school with tiny but well-paying local manufacturing firms like Suzuki or Yamaha Motors, whose workers were putting in overtime to fill military contracts for small gasoline-burning motors used in field generators by signals and communication units with the army in the Chinese campaign[72]. With hostilities in China already four years old, and conflict with America and Britain looming on the horizon, Japan’s wartime economy was gearing up into full swing, and Hamamatsu was enjoying a ride right up near the crest of this boom.

  With work aplenty to be had, the temptation was great for Tokurō to grab up a plant job like so many of his friends and start putting some food on the family table. However, his parents would have none of this. Tokurō was going to make something of himself, and this future did not include pulling a drill press handle on a factory floor sixty hours a week or swinging a pickax in the hot sun all day for a living. After passing a moderately difficult entrance exam, Tokurō was enrolled in a five-year private vocational school to study engineering, a field his math and science ability seemed to indicate he might have a successful future in. In the meantime, the family would scrimp and save to scrape together
the entrance and tuition fees.

  Never forgetting his obligation to his parents for sending him to school, and always keenly aware of the sacrifices they had to make to keep him there, Tokurō was a diligent student for the next two and a half years. But as the war with America dragged on, rumors about the impending cancellation of student draft deferments increased, and more and more young men from the old neighborhood started coming home from the war fronts in white ossuary boxes, Tokurō began to see less and less reason to stay in school. Although he was still at least five years below draft age[73], it seemed likely that the war would still be raging when the inevitable akagami (“red letter” = draft notice) from the local draft board finally arrived some time in 1948. In his adolescent logic, it did not make any sense for him to continue his studies and be a further drain on the family’s finances when he was only going to end up getting drafted and killed in the war a couple of years later. There were also Tokurō’s two younger siblings to consider. They might want an education, too, and his sister would need money when she got married someday. Thinking of their well-being was the clincher, and there was no longer any doubt in Tokurō’s mind about what he should do. Without consulting his parents, he began discreetly looking into enlistment options.

  Tokurō soon found out that, as a fourteen-year-old, his options were pretty limited. In fact, the only games in town were for pilot training programs that carried heavy service commitments after graduation. The army’s Shōnen Hikōhei (“Youth Pilot”) program could earn him wings as an army corporal pilot by sixteen, but it also carried a hefty fifteen-year service commitment. Tokurō had also heard rumors about the brutality of army NCOs toward trainees, which was another prudent reason to take pause and weigh options. The navy, which everyone knew as the gentleman’s branch of service, had a similar Yokaren[74] (“Preparatory Aviation Training”) program that could land him what was then the most glamorous office-with-a-view in Japan: the cockpit of a Zero fighter. The decision may have taken Tokurō all of several minutes to make. Yokaren it was, and if he did not get in, he would just stay at school and wait for the draft notice to come in a few more years.