Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

  Iwao Fukagawa, a former IJA tokkō pilot, suggests that the mechanism at work behind such expressions was rooted in the smothering bonds of motherlove that dominate the psyche of Japanese children – especially sons – for their entire lives[116]. Worried that the emotional restraints of wanting to stay alive for mommy’s sake would hamper her son’s devotion to duty when the bullets started to fly, a Japanese soldier’s mother was liberating her child – as well as herself – from this pressure when she exhorted him to come home from the war as a pile of ashes in an ossuary box.[117] This thinking possessed a certain merciful if convoluted patriotic logic on the level of individuals, but moved into the realm of stark banality when institutionalized for mass consumption as the war dragged on and Japan’s prospects became irreversibly bleak. Patriotism was gradually morphing into the chrysalis of a national death cult, and by late summer 1944, as the government and media thumped the post-Saipan “honorable death of the 100 million” drum with ever-increasing ardor, this cocoon was beginning to split open and show mesmerizing flashes of dun wing.

  *****

  Hideo Suzuki’s career path detour from the School of Business of the elite Waseda University man to human glider bomb was fairly representative of the first group of seventeen Naval Reserve ensigns selected for the Jinrai program back in early autumn of 1944. At a Waseda reunion many years later, Suzuki heard an interesting anecdote from a former classmate who had worked during the war as a clerk in the Navy Ministry’s Public Affairs Office in Tokyo. One day in late summer of 1944, the clerk was delivering the day’s OUT box contents to the Ministry Message Center. Although he was not really supposed to even glance at the documents he handled, he had a bad habit of doing just that, and on this particular day, an asterisked name on a long personnel list caught his eye. The line read: “Suzuki, Hideo; Naval Reserve Officer Aviation Class 13; Waseda University Class of 1943; Hometown Atami, Shizuoka.”

  The clerk’s eyes ran down to the bottom of the sheet to find the asterisk notation, which read: “DEEMED SUITABLE FOR SPECIAL ATTACK PROGRAM AND SUBSEQUENT GUNSHIN STATUS.” Gunshin?! Why use that phrase when nobody on the list is dead yet? And what in the world did “special attack” mean, anyway? As far as anyone in the Navy PAO knew, that was just a phrase used in lurid propaganda copy for press releases about phantom news events, but there it was now on a Personnel Department memorandum, being used to refer to actual operations. His curiosity now piqued, the clerk stole a look at a memorandum paperclipped to the list. It read:

  “TO PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICE, SELECT SEVENTEEN CANDIDATES FROM THIS LIST YOUR OFFICE DEEMS MOST SUITABLE FOR GUNSHIN STATUS – AFTER THOROUGH PERSONAL BACKGROUND CHECKS – FROM THE STANDPOINT OF PROPAGANDA VALUE. PREFERENCE SHOULD BE GIVEN TO INDIVIDUALS FROM ELITE UNIVERSITIES AND/OR SONS OF SOCIALLY PROMINENT FAMILIES. BY ORDER OF THE MINISTER OF THE NAVY.”[118]

  The clerk went back over the list of candidates, and sure enough, all of the asterisked names were of graduates of Waseda, Keiō, Meiji, Rikkyō, and other elite private universities or public teachers colleges. Gunshin designation meant that the navy either expected or intended for all these young brains and rich kids to die. And why an odd number like seventeen? The clerk passed the sheaf of documents on to the Message Center with his questions unanswered, filed the event away in his memory under “anomalous PAO memorandum,” then promptly forgot about it for the next thirty years.

  He remembered these strange documents only when he met Hideo Suzuki – alive and thus spectacularly unqualified for gunshin status – at their college reunion in the mid-1970s. His thirty-year-old questions were answered when he found out that: Suzuki had been in the Jinrai, and Ōka suicide bombs were what the term “special attack” had referred to on those documents. Also, the odd number of seventeen gunshin candidates was rounded out to twenty on the first Jinrai pilot roster by the inclusion of three INA graduates. Ironically, although fourteen of the seventeen reserve ensigns in the original group went on to die in Ōkas[119], there were so many other aviators and other personnel dying in tokkō missions in other branches by the time they finally went on their own that they never received their gunshin recognition, and, in fact, died never having known that they had once been considered for the honor.

  In late August 1944, Suzuki and sixteen fellow gunshin candidates graduated from Tainan Flight School blissfully unaware that the committee meetings and rubber stamp thumpings of bureaucrats and P.R. specialists in the Navy Ministry were deciding their collective and individual fates. They had no idea that the nature of their service would be any different from those of their other Tainan classmates, and just like everyone else, their shooting war would begin as soon as they arrived at line units for advanced on-the-job training in their respective aviation branch specialties. In fact, things would get so hot and heavy from the get-go that Suzuki even forgot – as hard as that is to believe – about his volunteering for tokkō in the first place.

  The hard facts of the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June meant that large numbers of carrier pilots suddenly had no carriers to operate from, and the few flight decks that were left could not be given over to training newbies. Even though Suzuki had signed on for carrierborne attack planes, the logistical realities of the times resulted in the navy assigning him after graduation to a land-locked Nakajima B5N2 torpedo bomber[120] unit attached to the 953rd KKT, an anti-submarine flying boat outfit on an anonymous rock in the Pescadores, a small archipelago in the straits between Taiwan and mainland China. Sub contacts were rare, the natives were friendly, and the days long and languid. Had Suzuki been a dedicated slacker, the posting might have seemed a perfect place to sit out the rest of the war in relative peace and quiet. It might have, that is, until six weeks later on October 12, when Halsey ordered Task Force 38 to begin pounding Taiwan and the islands around it with the combined air strike capability of an armada of seventeen fleet carriers.[121] Suzuki’s war had suddenly become very real and noisy indeed, descending into a chaos of frantic antisub patrolling, dodging American fighters, and hunkering down in bunkers and slit trenches when air strikes hit the base.

  The worst of the American storm blew over in a few days, but sporadic harassment continued for weeks. On November 3, a “five-minute warning” siren sounded in the 953rd KKT base. Personnel ran out to the jetties and flight line to hustle the unit’s torpedo bombers and seaplanes into camouflaged revetments before the Hellcats arrived on the scene. Standard operating procedure was for the pilots or senior groundcrew people to get in the cockpits and steer with the rudder pedals while others pushed the planes (or in the case of the flying boats, pulled them with rope towlines) into their respective revetments. Suzuki was just climbing into the cockpit of his plane when one of his noncoms ran up, pulled him out by the shoulder, and told him to seek cover while he took care of the plane.

  A few seconds later, the air was filled with snarling radial engines as machine gun rounds started tearing through the area, sending up geysers of spray, runway gravel, splintering wooden planks and pilings, holing the airframes of the seaplanes lined along the quay. The Hellcats had come out of nowhere, and a hell of a lot quicker than five minutes since the siren warning. It had been more like one minute, tops.

  Suzuki’s plane was hit and went up in flames. The noncom scrambled out of the cockpit but was cut down in another hail of .50 cal rounds from a strafing Hellcat while most of the unit watched from an air raid slit trench, helplessly screaming for their comrade. Suzuki started to get out and help, but others in the trench pulled him back in. Flames were now sweeping through the area, fueled on aviation gas, ammo and pier wood, engulfing the planes at the docks and on the runway flight line. There was nothing anybody could do.

  After the fire had subsided enough to get through to what was left of the squadron’s aircraft, Suzuki and others found the noncom still alive but badly burned. With a bullet hole in his back and a massive exit wound that had blown out most of his abdomen, he managed to hold out for five agonizing hours in the bas
e infirmary before slipping away. The bodies of three other groundcrew members were pulled from the wreckage burned beyond recognition.

  This experience scarred Suzuki (who continues to have nightmares about it to this day), yet it also gave him even greater determination to die well when his time came. He was filled with gratitude for the noncom who had died in his place trying to save the seaplane. But in another sense, owing such an obligation to another human being was unwelcome and unbearable. How was he supposed to live with that kind of baggage on his soul?

  That evening, after the noncom’s death in the infirmary, Suzuki was summoned to the base command post and handed orders that had just come in from Taiwan Seaplane Operations HQ. Suzuki opened the envelope and realized that Taiwan HQ had not issued the orders – they had merely passed them on from higher up. He swallowed hard when he opened up the cablegram and found out just how high “higher up” meant. The orders read:

  NAVY MINISTRY 12 OCTOBER 1944

  ENSIGN HIDEO SUZUKI, 953RD KKT, WILL REPORT TO HYAKURI NAVAL AIR STATION, IBARAGI PREFECTURE, NLT 2000HRS 15 OCTOBER 1944 FOR SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT.

  BY ORDER OF THE MINISTER OF THE NAVY,

  ADMIRAL MITSUMASA YONAI[122]

  Special assignment? What the hell was that?

  Suzuki got a high-wattage surge down his spine and an instantaneous misting of forehead sweat when he suddenly remembered the volunteer paper he had handed in two months earlier at Tainan. Special Assignment? That could only mean Special Attack! Tokkō! It did not seem possible, but he had actually forgotten about all of that business. Had not thought of it in weeks, probably not since the air raids started.

  Suzuki looked at the orders again and got another jolt. They said he was supposed to be at Hyakuri – wherever the hell in Ibaragi Prefecture that was – on October 15th. That was almost three weeks ago! There was bound to be a serious shitstorm waiting for him at the end of all this.

  “What happened with these orders?,” he asked the HQ orderly. “Why did they take so long to get here?”

  “Look at the date, sir. They came in the day the raids started. I guess they got misplaced in all the excitement.”

  “Think they’ll buy that at my court-martial?”

  “Don’t worry about it, sir. I’m sure Taiwan will square it away for you.”

  As Suzuki packed his seabag back in the barracks, he rationalized to himself that at least the orders would get him back home to Japan one last time, even if it was only to face administrative punishment. Given all the horror he had seen and emotional baggage he had taken on today, that did not seem too big a price to pay for the privilege of getting out of here. Perhaps the orders could not have arrived with better timing.

  After finishing outprocessing the next morning, he reported one last time to pay his respects at unit HQ, and was sent off by the base CO with a hearty “Good luck” and a slap on the back, glad to be leaving and even happier about going home.

  As Suzuki’s orders were already three weeks old, the attached official rail itinerary was now useless. This meant that he would have to make it all the way to Hyakuri by wit and guile alone. With the dust hardly settled from the American raids and now the Philippines about to go all to hell, there was no telling how long it would take him to make his trip. He figured that when he finally arrived at Hyakuri, he could be as much as a month late.

  Getting back to Taiwan was as easy as hopping a liaison flight to Tainan. The real problem was how to get from there to Japan. Someone at Tainan said he knew of a destroyer about to leave for Japan, but even a sea voyage of a couple days was too long with the kind of orders he had hanging over his head. Only a plane would do, so he decided to wait, but once the destroyer was gone, so were his other transport options. He ended up spending nearly a week at Tainan trying to bum a ride until finally chancing upon a plane with an empty seat for him. It was a big Type 2 flying boat packed stem to stern with ossuary boxes carrying the remains of recently cremated naval personnel – mostly air raid casualties being sent back to their homes in Japan.

  Suzuki spent the five-hour flight up in the cockpit with the pilot, who by happy coincidence was a hometown junior high school buddy, and tried not to dwell too much on the other “passengers” in the back. But he could not help but think of them as the plane pulled into its final approach at Ibusuki, Kagoshima Prefecture, flying past the stately, Fuji-like slopes of Mount Kaimondake and over the pine-fringed white beaches of the Kyūshū coastline. Although the boys in the white boxes were also making their final trip home, they had been cheated out of getting to see its beauty one last time.

  At Ibusuki, Suzuki boarded a train to start the final rail leg of his journey to Hyakuri. His worries about rail accommodations were unfounded, and the orders in his pocket greased every potential choke point in the journey, jumping him straight to the head of every railroad station ticket line that got in his way. But even with smooth connections, it still took him two days just to get off of Kyūshū and make some decent headway up Honshū. Sleep did not come easily – if at all – in the long hours of racket and jostling on the crowded trains, but there was plenty of time to think about what lay ahead. Too much time, maybe.

  Headed north on the Tokaidō line and still a few hours out of Tokyo, the train slowed down to make a stop in Atami. It proved to be too much for Suzuki to resist. Figuring that he was already almost a month late and that a few more days could not get him into much more trouble than he was already in, he grabbed his seabag and squeezed his way off the car, which was already starting to fill up with more passengers. Of course, what he was doing was wildly impulsive, irresponsible, and unprofessional – not to mention illegal – but really, what were his superiors going to do about it? Put him in a plane and make him crash it into a ship? He was a tokkō pilot visiting home for the first time in thirteen months and probably the last time in his life. If anyone was going to dare to give him crap about that, well, they could just go to hell.

  When Suzuki rounded the last corner on the walk home from the station, he saw his mother dressed in earth-toned monpe work pajamas, bent over a dusty truck garden in the front yard of the family inn, weeding and pulling sad little tubers from the sandy soil. Suzuki stood at the front gate in silence for a few seconds, soaking in the details of this scene for future memory reference, remembering days when his mother would dress in a gorgeous kimono to entertain guests and VIPs in this same garden among carefully tended flowers and bonsai plants.

  “Mother,” Suzuki said, self-conscious of the frog in his throat. “I’m home.”

  *****

  Suzuki ended up staying for two days. His family did not pester him about the details of the last thirteen months of his life, and he saw no need in telling them about the nature of his next assignment or about the technically illegal nature of his visit. When not welcoming visitors at home or paying respects to neighborhood notables, he passed the hours stretched out on the tatami of his living room with his family members’ voices and the smells of home in the air, trying not to imagine what this room would look like when they held his funeral in it in a few more months.

  Leaving on the morning of the fourteenth, Suzuki did a good job of keeping his composure as he said his goodbyes, vowing to himself to get home at least a few more times. After all, it was not like Ibaragi was on the other side of the planet. Just eight or nine hours by train, tops. If he could get off on a couple of weekend passes before his sortie, there was no reason this had to be his last visit home. As he boarded the train at Atami, he tried very hard to hold on to these happy thoughts.

  Getting to Hyakuri was another exercise in hours of lugging a seabag through maddening crowds, and adding insult to injury, he was told upon his arrival that the “Special Attack” people had moved on to a new base deeper into the countryside two weeks earlier. He hung around to wait for a liaison car that would be making a run out to the base – some place called Kōnoike – in a few hours.

  After a spooky nighttime drive through pine ba
rrens and magnificent desolation to reach Kōnoike, Suzuki was spooked even more when he saw the sign over the main gate of the base.

  “It was a big sign, in beautiful, professionally done calligraphy,” Suzuki-san recalls sixty years later. “But when I read what was written on it – Jinrai – I thought ‘Divine Thunder? What kind of kooky outfit have I gotten myself involved with here?’”

  What he saw when he reported in to the Officer-on-Duty only confirmed his suspicions. When he entered the HQ shack, there was some kind of ceremony going on in a back room. The astringently sweet, meditative smell of funerary incense filled the air, and he could hear Buddhist chanting.

  “What’s going on?” Suzuki asked.

  “Lieutenant Kariya – one of the Ōka flight leaders – died in an accident yesterday,” the OD answered. “That’s his wake.”

  “Ōka?”

  “Yeah. Ōka. Sakura no hana. Cherry Blossom.”

  “An airplane?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough, Ensign. Welcome to the Jinrai. Now pick up your gear and go report to the CO,” The OD said. He pointed at the date on the Suzuki’s orders. “And you’ve got some explaining to do about this.”

  Suzuki walked down the hall, pausing briefly to bow toward the stranger’s wake before knocking on the door of the CO’s office. When a voice inside told him to enter, he opened the door to find a rather small, thinly mustachioed captain in his late forties at a desk covered with paperwork. The captain received and returned Suzuki’s salute, then told the ensign to stand at ease.

  “Who the hell are you?” the captain asked.

  “Ensign Suzuki, sir. Reporting for duty.”

  “Ah yes…The AWOL fellow.”

  “Sir? I was told that Taiwan would contact you with…”

  “We haven’t heard a damn thing from Taiwan,” the captain said, cutting Suzuki off. “Would you mind telling me what took you so long getting here?”