In 1995, when the Association Of IMA’44 Graduates compiled a class history of their air operations in the war, Fukagawa wrote down the following recollections of that afternoon:
After knocking on the CO’s door, I entered and reported for duty. For some reason, I remember the room as dark and shadowy. I stood there at attention for a while in front of the major’s desk, where he sat in silence for an uncomfortably long time. Finally, he spoke.
“Tomorrow, you are to report to the Akeno Main Campus,” he said, as if he had to struggle to get each word out. “They are organizing more tokkō units. Do you understand? Tokkō.”
“Understood, sir,” I said, and snapped a salute. Major Kanezawa returned it and dismissed me. As I walked back to the barracks – much more slowly than I ran there! – I thought of all the heavy hitters who had already gone on tokkō missions, never to come back. People like Koretoshi Wakasugi, who had graduated first in our IMA aviation class. I figured if tokkō was good enough for someone like him, it was good enough for me. I laid down on my cot, staring at the ceiling in a daze and trying to think things out when Arai stuck his head in the doorway again.
“Hey Gan-san,” he said, using my nickname. “Did you hear? They say we’re all going tokkō.”
We stared at each other for a few long seconds before he went on his way without another word.[167]
Fukagawa-san does not recall being particularly overwhelmed with fear or regret at having just been given orders to die, or even pity at the thought of the sadness his death would bring to his family. Rather, the predominant emotion he experienced as he processed the enormity of the news was an oddly comforting sense of relief. By this point in the war, nearly half of his IMA-Aviation classmates had been killed in operational accidents or combat, with many of the latter casualties the result of tokkō missions. He counted some of his best friends among the dead.
“For months, I had felt incredible frustration at being left behind, spinning my wheels with those trainees at Kita Ise while my classmates were in combat, fighting and dying,” Fukagawa-san tells me. “I remember thinking ‘So it’s finally come to this…Alright then. Let’s do it already’.”
*****
On the morning of May 4, Fukagawa and his classmates were trucked to Akeno, where they were formed up in the courtyard of the main HQ building with a large group of reserve officers and enlisted pilots. Some bigshot from Area Command issued formal tokkō orders to the assembly in a practiced, polished speech before surrendering the podium to an adjutant, who began reading names off a roster in groups of six. When Fukagawa’s name was called, he formed up front and center with a squad of five other pilots – two new reservist second lieutenants and three corporals. He had never seen any of them before.
Another staff officer approached the group, informed them that they were now the 197th Shinbu Unit, and that Fukagawa was their commander. The officer then marched them around the corner of the HQ building, where a photographer was waiting with a camera and tripod. After a formal snapshot of the group was taken, the staff officer walked over, shook each pilot’s hand and said “Thank you for your cooperation in volunteering to make this tokkō unit possible.” As the group was marched off for administrative paperwork in the HQ building, another group – ostensibly the 198th Shinbu Unit – was being formed up on the photographer’s bleachers. Fukagawa noted that his old IMA friend Shūzō Fujii was standing front row, center.
Soon after assuming his new command, Fukagawa was struck by the fact that until now, he had never been away from other Yōnen Gakkō or IMA personnel at any point in his seven-year military career, and that his new situation would require adjustments in his worldview and leadership style. From his perspective, the men in his command were quasi-civilians, and when giving explanations and orders to them he would not be able to rely on the system of common values and shared knowledge operant when interacting with fellow IMA men. Of course, the same was true when teaching raw college kids how to fly an Akatonbo, but that was hands-on activity. Communications were simple, intuitively obvious and direct, and his authority was reinforced by the students’ knowledge that if they did not follow his instructions to the letter, they might not walk away from the consequences alive.
But now, Fukagawa would be living, bathing, eating and training with his men twenty-four hours a day until their sortie orders came in – whenever that turned out to be. He would be counting on them as much as they counted on him. There was no time anymore for ceiling-staring and post-training naps. He was the taichō – the boss – and his job was to lead and take care of his men. The supreme test would come later, in the unit’s single combat sortie.
Fukagawa sized up his pilots as they settled into their training and barracks routines at Kita Ise and established a rapport with one another. He was relieved to find out that his two reservist lieutenants were not Tokusō products, but rather had come up through the much more thorough and professional Kanbu Kōsei officer candidate program[168] and had received standard flight training. One of the reservists, the cheerful Lieutenant Tadatoshi Makino, was a teacher’s college graduate from rural Fukui Prefecture. His classroom experience would prove useful during instruction phases of training.
The other officer – Lieutenant Toshio Abe – would also serve as the unit XO. The son of a Kawasaki Heavy Industries executive, Abe was a cosmopolitan Tokyo swell who had graduated from the Department of Engineering at Waseda University. Although his piloting skills were somewhere between mediocre and awful, he knew his way around a teahouse and was only too happy to share his knowledge about the Wonderful World of Women with his comparatively naïve squadmates. More importantly, though, he had a warm, “human touch” leadership approach most IMA types – Fukagawa included – were both incapable of and uncomfortable with.
“I may have been the taichō, but Abe was the ‘mother’ of the unit,” Fukagawa says, remembering his subordinate and close friend. “Abe was less demanding of people and more familiar with human nature than I was. He cared for the other pilots’ mental and physical well being, always offering an ear for their problems or a kind word of encouragement when they were feeling down. His presence in the 197th was a perfect complement for my leadership style. He added to our unit cohesion immeasurably, and I learned a lot watching him that helped me later in life, in different leadership situations.”
The unit’s performance was also enhanced by the high quality of its three enlisted men – Corporals Shinji Bandō, Kazuhiro Makiuchi and Tatsuo Yabuta. All were honor graduates of the army’s Shōnen Hikōhei pilot training program, which had been started during the early Thirties, when military aviation mania was sweeping the country in the wake of the Manchurian Incident. Similar in both function and popularity to the navy’s Yokaren system, competition for slots in the three-year program was as stiff as its fifteen-year mandatory post-graduation service commitment.
Schooled at several airbase campuses throughout the country, Shōnen Hikōhei trainees entered as fifteen or sixteen-year-olds and graduated as highly proficient eighteen and nineteen-year-old corporal pilots. Some flight cadets with proven scholastic and leadership ability were given shots at IMA appointments, but most graduates were sent directly to line units and – in later stages of the war – straight into combat in either conventional or tokkō roles.
The 197th’s new corporals lived up to the excellent reputation of the Shōnen Hikōhei program and were, in Fukagawa-san’s words, “real hotshot pilots” who flew like angels. Unlike their commissioned squadmates – who often bounced their Hayates all over the field when coming in for landings – the corporals always touched down on three points at once when they came down. Often, the officers found themselves swallowing their pride and asking for pointers on flying techniques. But as far as Fukagawa was concerned, there was nothing untoward about this at all, and thus no need to worry about bruised egos. In his book, such personal concerns took distant backseats to effective training, and if anybody had any knowledge or experience
that would improve unit performance, it did not matter what rank insignia the teacher wore on his collar. Military protocol was always respected, of course, and proper tone was maintained between the unit’s officers and enlisted men, but the camaraderie the squadmates felt for one another as pilots and their dedication both to the 197th and to its CO were what really made the unit special, in Fukagawa-san’s opinion.
In 57-ki Kōkūshi, he describes the effect this kind of rapport had on the morale and performance of the unit:
I trained my men hard, but they never let me down. And when we did formation flying, we were tight. We would take off and form over the field to turn, climb and dive as one, wingtip to wingtip, communicating our thoughts just by the merest glances at each others’ goggled, helmeted faces[169].
As the hard days of training continued, I knew that my men were ready for anything. But around this time, we began to hear rumors that the army was beginning to run short of tokkō aircraft, and that there was a possibility of our unit having to be parceled out piecemeal for sorties. One of my pilots, Corporal Bandō, addressed me directly about this.
“Taichō,” he said. “If my plane can’t fly on the day of our mission, I want you to let me ride in the fuselage of your plane so you can take me along.”
I was touched by Bando’s purity of spirit, sincerity and bravery, especially as I knew that he was battling with the same fears of death that we all were. Knowing that one of these days I would have to order him and the other pilots in the unit on the mission that would seal all of our fates was an emotional burden I could bear but never get used to. As a leader, it was a thankless position to be in.[170]
While the grim nature of their impending first and last combat mission was never far from their minds, Fukagawa never once asked his subordinates what they thought about tokkō. To do so would have been bad for morale, and just as critically, it would have reflected poorly on his “moral fiber” and abilities as a leader. If the unit was to function at its best, he could not allow his men to have such doubts, nor could he ever appear to have any himself.
“My father always told me that if you believe in yourself, you can do anything,” Fukagawa-san says, “and that even if a leader doesn’t know everything, he has to pretend that he does!”
Looking back, Fukagawa-san surmises that without six of the world’s best fighter planes and five excellent pilots under his command, such self-confidence would have been impossible for a 22-year-old who did not even have to shave everyday.
“I was so proud of my men,” Fukagawa-san recalls. “I thought that leading them into battle would be a fine way to go out. I had no regrets about dying if it was going to be like that.”
Like any competent military leader, Fukagawa recognized that unit pride was just as important a factor in maintaining the morale of his men as their confidence in his leadership abilities. Accordingly, when command encouraged the Shinbu units operating out of Kita Ise to come up with distinctive unit names and insignia to paint on the tails of their Hayates, he gave much thought to the matter. The planes, after all, would be carrying the pilots to their deaths, so something tasteless on their rudders just would not do. But while the lieutenant may have had a good handle on the workings of military psychology, his IMA education had not given him much of a foundation in artistic creativity, and he kept coming up with blanks when it came to this particular task. And try as they might, the lieutenants and corporals in the unit were of no help, either. There were a few proposals when the squad discussed the subject, but they were all hackneyed Japanese versions of “mom and apple pie” patriotic kitsch or stock samurai imagery that had already been overplayed to death in government propaganda.
In the midst of the 197th’s collective creative conundrum, the Kita Ise tokkō barracks were visited in mid-May for a PR newsreel shoot by a Nichiei cameraman named Takagi Toshirō, who had just been in Chiran a few days before. Fukagawa and the other pilots had read the papers and were generally aware of what was going on at the Kyūshū tokkō base, but they were eager for more information when they heard that the cameraman had just been there. The Nichiei man’s impressions of the base were somewhat at odds with what the newspapers were portraying.
“I’ll tell you this much,” the cameraman said. “It sure is a relief to be out of there. I couldn’t leave quickly enough.”
“Why?” Fukagawa asked.
“Because I just didn’t think I could take the atmosphere down there much longer,” the cameraman answered. “There are all these send-offs and speeches. Then they line the boys up, have them face in the direction of their hometowns and sing farewell songs to their mothers before they leave for their missions. It’s too sentimental and maudlin. I like it much better up here in Kita Ise. You guys are cheerful.”
As the cameraman posed his subjects for a series of shots around the barracks, he noticed that, unlike the other Shinbu units on the base, the 197th had no unit emblem by the doorway of their day room. When Fukagawa explained the fix they were in, the cameraman smiled.
“Actually, I’m pretty good at this,” he said. “And I’ve helped a lot of tokkō units on other bases with ideas.”
“Looking at such cheerful fellows as yourselves,” he continued, “I think you should have a symbol that fits your mood. Happy, brave, resolute…Hey, how about Momotarō?”
A few of the pilots were at first taken aback by the suggestion that they use a fairy tale character as the unit symbol, but after a short discussion the naysayers were won over. The imagery was perfect. Momotarō – the heroic “Peach Boy” of legend who saved his homeland from marauding demons (long-nosed, blond, kinky-haired demons, it should be added) – was every Japanese kindergartner’s hero. Now Momotarō would be flying a Hayate to vanquish some more blond-haired demons! With Fukagawa’s enthusiastic approval, the cameramen whipped out a pencil and paper and drew up a tail emblem design on the spot.
Corporal Yabuta – who had some sign-painting experience – looked at the sketch and was confident that he could render it on the planes with no problems. After Fukagawa gave the final OK, the corporal ran off to scrounge up some paint. Black, white and red would be a rich enough palette for the job, and these colors were readily available in the maintenance shop storeroom. Within a couple of hours, all of the 197th aircraft were sporting the tail art, and everyone who saw the cameraman’s (and the corporal’s) handiwork declared it a masterpiece. Everyone – that is – except for the base CO, who came storming out of the Flight Ops shack looking like he was ready to stomp somebody flat.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, painting a woman on your planes like that?” he thundered. “Who do you think you are, Americans?”
Admittedly, the painted faces were pretty and adorable enough to be mistaken by an inartistic and judgmental eye for some form of pinup cheesecake, and had they in fact been so, the CO would have arguably been within his rights to lambaste such flagrant and gaudy effrontery to Japanese martial machismo. But after the imagery was explained, the now rather redfaced officer joined everyone in declaring his wholehearted approval of the artwork. And no one, of course, was happier than the Nichiei man, shooting footage of the scene that would be viewed by millions of people around the country in a few days time.
Inspired by the tail art and the basic plotline of the Momotarō story, Fukagawa came up with the unit name “Seiki Unit,” which employed the kanji characters for “subdue” and “demon.” Tapping theretofore untapped and unknown reserves of literary talent, he even came up with a unit poem[171] that cleverly parodied the verse forms used in the classic Japanese fairy tale:
Mukashi, mukashi, sono mukashi
Oni wo taiji shita Momotarō
Umarekawatte, umarekawatte
Yanki wo taiji!
Yaruzo, ossoro!
Seiki-Tai!
A long, long time ago, and even longer ago than that,
Momotarō the Peach Boy
Made quick work of the nasty demons.
&nbs
p; But now he is back, oh yes he is back,
To make quick work of the Yankees!
We’ll do it, huzzah!
Seiki Unit!
The poem was duly written up in classy calligraphy and posted over the entrance to the 197th barracks.
The pilots were also wont to chant alcohol-emboldened renditions of their squad uta when they partied with geisha off-post on Saturday nights. The preferred establishment of the 197th Shinbu – and also that of their frequent drinking partners in Second Lieutenant Fuji’i’s 198th – was an army-licensed teahouse in the nearby town of Kuwana. Army licensing meant that the teahouse was obliged to give special preference to military personnel, and was in turn exempt from alcoholic beverage and foodstuff rationing. Consumption of either commodity was limited mainly by the amount of money this army clientele wished to spend, and the tokkō pilots were always loaded.
As a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant, Fukagawa was earning a flight and hazardous duty pay-boosted monthly salary that was close to three times what most white-collar managerial level workers twice his age made. And with no lodging or food expenses, the pilots’ huge salaries were pretty much all gravy. Some of the flyers sent money home or contributed to patriotic fund-raising drives (unlike American War Bonds, these were actual cash donations to the state), but many – with newfound appetites in wine, women and song no doubt motivated by the Damoclean presence of tokkō orders perpetually hanging over their heads – blew money prodigiously on nightlife.
Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze Page 24
