The 197th Shinbu was no exception. And while it would have been difficult for Fukagawa and his men to eat and drink away all of their cash, the teahouse also offered various and tempting non-gastronomic methods of draining one’s wallet. After being shown the ropes by Lieutenant Abe, everyone became an old hand at the necessary protocol.
*****
During the spring of 1945, the army determined that the monotony of barracks life was having an adverse effect on the morale of tokkō personnel. In an attempt to counter this, it instituted a program of cyclically rotated billeting for its pilots in conjunction with civilian communities and religious institutions near tokkō bases around the country. Under Kita Ise’s version of the new program, each Shinbu unit would spend one week in their regular barracks, and another week billeted in seminar facilities at a nearby Buddhist temple. For the final week of each cycle, the units would spend their nights as guests in local homes.
When army authorities asked for volunteer host families, farming households with children tended to be approached first, not only because their dwellings were usually large enough to accommodate multiple guests at a time, but also because they were thought to provide a more wholesome spiritual environment. The main purpose of the program, after all, was to solace the pilots in their last weeks or months of life and give them something more tangible and immediate than wrinkled letters from home and wallet photos to remind them of what – or whom – they were supposed to be dying for. What better iconography for this purpose than a friendly farm family with a brood of cute kids?
This billeting was also intended to heighten patriotic awareness of the war effort on the part of the host families, which would hopefully spread from there to the local community as a whole. The host families knew perfectly well what their guests’ job title implied, and they were always careful to avoid any household conversational topic that might inadvertently stumble into talk about death of personal plans for the future. And while the families extended to the pilots all of the warm hospitality they could manage, there was always a certain amount of emotional distancing between host and guest that, for obvious reasons, was in the best interests of both parties to maintain. But the presence of young women in host households often had a way of skewing this delicate arrangement.
Once he knew he was going tokkō back in November of ‘44, Fukagawa told himself that he would never fall in love, and more importantly, never let anyone fall in love with him. It would not be fair for the girl, and moreover, a pure-hearted warrior had no business fooling around with women. Nevertheless, during the late spring of 1945 he allowed himself – in spite of his conscience – to became somewhat more than just friendly with the daughter of a host family. Photos and love letters were exchanged.
One summer Sunday when he was walking off-post, he saw the local Defense Women’s Association[172] practicing bamboo spear defense tactics in a local park[173]. He noticed his girlfriend among the trainees, chanting and spear-thrusting in unison with the group. Right then it hit him all at once – the whole reason for tokkō, and why it had to succeed. The nation’s warriors had to die to the last man if necessary to keep things from coming to the point where those plucky but helpless little housewives and schoolgirls would be running down to the beaches to try to hold off American landing craft with those bamboo spears. Such a scenario could not be allowed to come to pass, and it was this awful fate for the nation that the tokkō would fight to prevent. At that moment, Fukagawa lost any lingering doubts he might have had about the necessity of tokkō. And although he eventually outgrew his infatuation with the host family’s daughter, he never forgot that scene in the park, and the resolve it gave him to go all the way when his time came. The nation expected nothing less of its fighting men.
Fukagawa was not the only tokkō pilot at Kita Ise getting loveletters. As the war entered its final grim months, the tokkō community was fairly inundated with the attentions of what would today be referred to as groupies – in this case, womenfolk of a surprisingly wide age spectrum who tried to befriend and/or enter into romantic relationships with the pilots, harboring for the doomed young flyers an intoxicating mixture of romantic infatuation, patriotic gratitude and maternal instinct-fueled pity. Those too far from the bases for actual visits sent articles of clothing like embroidered flying scarves or handkerchiefs, photos of themselves in frilly dresses or knockout kimonos. The most popular items by far, however, were the sackfuls of gushing loveletters and poems that arrived at the barracks addressed To Whom It May Concern, these literary efforts often written in – or otherwise daubed and decorated with – the authors’ blood.
A very, very small number of pilots more mired in the muck of worldly desires than their more stalwart comrades were not beyond taking advantage of this female attention.[174] But the vast majority of the flyers were either too naïve and inexperienced with the opposite sex or too proud of their constantly reinforced status as Japanese Galahads to give much – if any – attention to girls. Moreover, Fukagawa-san recalls that there was a popular superstition among tokkō personnel at Kita Ise that pilots involved with women had training accidents, the rationale being that the female Shinto ten’nyo angels who were scheduled to be the pilots’ eternal companions after their tokkō dives would look down from the heavens, get jealous of the human girls and cause the pilots to crash in order to keep the objects of their divine affections out of the meaty clutches of mere mortal competition.[175] A more practical viewpoint on the issue held by many of the base personnel was that it was probably psychologically undesirable to socialize with women – or even close family members – because such distractions could cause potentially disastrous lapses in concentration when pilots were in the air.
As at any airbase running constant training flights, the danger of such disastrous lapses was always present at Kita Ise. On the morning of June 1, 1945, Corporals Bando and Makiuchi were practicing touch-and-gos on the runway while Fukagawa sat at the small flight ops tent referred to as the pisuto[176] with binoculars and a notebook, watching the proceedings and critiquing his pilots’ performance. Although attentive to what was going on in the air, Fukagawa did not feel any particular apprehensiveness as he watched the planes fly their clockwise, lozenge-shaped circuit around the field, lining up for landing approaches, lightly touching down on the airstrip, then throttling back up and returning to the pattern. It was a standard drill reinforcing elementary landing, take-off and banking techniques that even a pilot straight out of flight basic should have been able to handle in his sleep, and the monotonous consistency of the corporals’ performance threatened the observers in the pisuto with a rather boring morning. Fukagawa was kicking back in his canvas director’s chair and enjoying a warm breeze on his face when he saw one of the planes suddenly stagger and side-slip as it pulled into a turn with its landing gear and flaps down.
“THROTTLE!” Fukagawa screamed to no one, raising his binoculars to his eyes as he bolted up from his chair.
If the plane had been a little higher, the pilot might have been able to pull off a recovery, but it was not to be. With a heartbreaking lurch, the Hayate stalled, dropped like a rock, then disappeared in a blossom of orange flame and billowing black smoke. An eye blink later, a loud boom rent the air and hit Fukagawa like a punch to the solar plexus. Instinctively, he dropped everything he was holding and started running toward the smoke column as recovery vehicles whipped by him, spewing dust and dirt. By the time he reached the crash site, the charred body of nineteen-year-old Kazuhiro Makiuchi had already been pulled from what was left of the Hayate.
“Losing Makiuchi like that was by far the worst thing that happened to me in the army, and I still have nightmares about it.” Fukagawa-san tells me. “After the war, I tracked down his family in Wakayama Prefecture to apologize for the accident and pay my respects. But when I got there, I found out that only his older brother had survived the war. Of course, I think the brother had every right to tell me to go to hell, but he didn’t. In fact, we sti
ll keep up correspondence to this day, exchanging New Year’s cards and at least one long letter a year.”
But despite whatever emotional closure he might have gained from his Wakayama pilgrimage, the accident has haunted Fukagawa-san for the last six decades in waking moments as well as his dreams.
“I don’t know how many times I have run that crash through my mind, trying to figure out what went wrong,” Fukagawa says. “Of course, no one will ever know for sure, but after all of these years the best theory I have been able to come up with is that Makiuchi may have forgotten for a second that he was at the stick of a Hayate, and not one of the light Hayabusas he had been training on all those years in the Shōnen Hikōhei program. The Hayate was a very heavy-framed aircraft…the whole airframe was built around that big engine…and it had a much higher stall speed than the Hayabusa. But if Makiuchi had been in a Hayabusa, he would have made that last turn no problem.”
Minutes after Makiuchi crashed and burned, however, Major Kanezawa had suspected other factors at work in the accident. After cracking Fukagawa in the jaw for losing a man and an aircraft, the major – suddenly businesslike – asked if Makiuchi had received any visits from family members of late. Fukagawa replied that he had not.
“You know, sentimentality makes you lose concentration,” the major said matter-of-factly. “There have been army studies on this…Other cases where family visits can be directly traced as the cause of poor pilot concentration, which in turn resulted in fatal accidents. Keep your men’s minds on their jobs, Lieutenant. And that goes for yourself, too.”
*****
By early June, the Battle of Okinawa was entering its endgame phase. But tokkō operations were still pouring men and machines into the conflagration, and the 197th Shinbu had been expecting sortie orders any hour of every day for nearly a month. Although the unit’s morale had been high throughout this period, the waiting was helping no one’s nerves, especially in the wake of Makiuchi’s death. One way the pilots prevented flagging spirits was to write home regularly.
As soon as Yonekichi and Tsuma Fukagawa received the letter from their son telling them that he had been named the commander of a tokkō flight, they decided to get to Kita Ise any way they could. But deciding to go somewhere in Japan beyond the range of one’s own two feet and actually being able to go there were entirely different matters in June 1945. Even with sufficient funds, domestic travel by this point in the war was an extremely iffy business, especially by rail, and tickets were nearly impossible to get without connections and/or official orders. Regardless of the difficulties they knew they faced, the Fukagawas marched down to the Saga City stationmaster’s office with youngest daughter Teruko in tow Iwao’s letter in their hands. Touched by the appeal and honored to help the family of a tokkō pilot, the stationmaster produced the desired tickets. The Fukagawas reached Kita Ise twenty-four hours later on the rainy afternoon of Saturday, June 9, 1945.
Fukagawa and his pilots received the visitors in the unit’s dayroom. A Mainichi Shimbun reporter looking for human interest stories at Kita Ise on this particular day wrote up his observations of the Fukagawa family’s visit and other activities on the base for national publication. The article is translated and reproduced here in its entirety:
“Warm And Happy Families Of The Divine Eagles” (pt.2 of a two-part series)
by Army Correspondent Yanoi
(PHOTO CAPTION) “Surrounded by visiting family members, brave tokkō pilots enjoy homemade Abekawa-style rice cake confectionary [Photo by Special Correspondent Kunimoto][177]
June X, 1945, OXOX Airbase: There is nothing tokkō pilots hate more than bad weather, and you can see that in the rain-soaked faces of the boys clambering on the truck that will take them from the flight line back to their barracks.
“Dammit, another day late for Okinawa,” says unit commander Second Lieutenant Nogami[178], with only a towel bandana to keep his head dry.
The imagery of the grumbling, rain-soaked lieutenant boarding the truck proves to be too much for recent Shōnen Hikōhei graduate Corporal Nakane, who jibes “So says Prisoner Number One as he boards the truck back to his cell…”
This gets a hearty laugh from the other pilots, but Lieutenant Nogami stubbornly refuses to share in the mirth. This is out of character, actually, as the lieutenant is almost always bright and cheerful as he leads his men through their training, not wanting to delay even for a minute their sortie orders, when they will at long last spread their wings in Okinawan skies. It is merely the knowledge that this rain puts off that glorious moment one more day that gives the lieutenant a gloomy and pensive expression.
Suddenly, Lieutenant Nogami addresses this rain-soaked reporter.
“1945 is the year all of the heroes die, isn’t it? It has seen Mussolini and Hitler go out, and the end of the European War. So whose turn do you think is next?”
Waiting for my answer, the lieutenant stares at me with an intense gleam in his eye.
“Chiang Kai Shek?” one of the young corporals ventures naively but sincerely, temporarily derailing the lieutenant’s spell.
“No, dummy,” Lieutenant Nogami shouts. “You! Me! All of us! Japan’s numberless, nameless young heroes, that’s who! But you know what? This will also be the year of Japan’s final victory. Isn’t that right, Mr. War Correspondent?”
I nod vigorously, but in silence.
Lieutenant Nogami now faces his men.
“Listen up. We will have classes in night navigation after mess. Got it?”
While the pilots are at mess, I walk around the barracks area, visiting the quarters of various units. The barracks entrance of Second Lieutenant Fukagawa’s unit features a picture of Momotarō the Peach Boy, and below that, written in a broad, masculine hand, is the unit’s fitting name – Seiki Tai. The unit’s pilots are just as young and dashing as their hero, eagerly awaiting the moment when they will bravely and resolutely sally forth into battle.
Today, there are special visitors in the barracks. Lieutenant Fukagawa’s parents and younger sister have come from very far away to see him and his pilots.
“We rushed to get here as soon as we got the letter from our son telling us that he had been selected to be a tokkō flight leader,” says the proud father of this Divine Eagle, understandably at a loss for fitting words as he regards the fine, gallant young man his son has become.
“Eat, eat,” says Lieutenant Fukagawa’s mother, passing around the red and white Abekawa rice cake confectionary she has made for the pilots and brought all the way from home.
Watching this scene, I cannot help but feel that all that is noble and strong in Japan is right here before my eyes.
In the barracks next door, Nogami’s unit has begun its night navigation seminar. The lieutenant is holding a model airplane and explaining some point of tactics to a rapt audience whose young eyes burn with determination, following the model airplane’s every move and turn with the piercing gaze of hawks. The young men know that they will have only one chance at the enemy, and thus every precious second of their training counts.
Second Lieutenant X, a graduate of the elite Fukuoka Business High School,[179] informs me that he has left a sister behind on Okinawa.
“Even if it means not sleeping for three or four days straight, I want us to finish up our training and sortie as soon as possible,” says the lieutenant. “It we tarry and miss our chance to contribute to the battle, how could I ever make it up to my sister, who is fighting so bravely on Okinawa, even as we speak?”
“I am filled with pride and joy to be able to be a warrior who will get to die such a glorious death,” says Lieutenant X, who also attended graduate school at Aoyama Gakuin in Tokyo. “I will not fail to sink an enemy ship. The other day when I was getting my hair cut, the barber said ‘A tokkō unit is more than just a hisshi (willing to risk lives in performance of duty) unit…it’s a kesshi (resigned to dying in the performance of duty) unit, isn’t it?’ That was the first time since becoming a tokkō pilot t
hat I really thought about the significance in the difference between the two terms.”
Just shy of twenty years old, Corporal X is another Shōnen Hikōhei graduate.
“I felt so proud of myself when our tokkō orders came through. I thought ‘Now I can finally hold my head up when I see my old Shōnen Hikōhei classmates.”
No doubt the other young Divine Eagles can identify with the corporal’s heartfelt but humble expression of pride.
(Mainichi Shinbun, June 11, 1945)
That evening, Fukagawa called on his parents and sister at their room in the Yamada Ryokan, a nearby inn. The foursome sat on the tatami matting around a small table, with the men drinking saké and smoking and the women making thin tea and well-intentioned but half-hearted attempts at small talk about Saga and absent family members. Tsuma and Teruko did a decent job of appearing cheerful, but Yonekichi was having none of it. Uncharacteristically moody and quiet, he only became more so as the night dragged on and the women’s attempts at “normal” conversation inevitably died quick and merciful deaths under the surreal pall that hung in the air. Try as they might, no one around the table in the little hotel room could banish for more than a few moments at a stretch the thought that they were gathered as a group for what would probably be the last time. In a few more weeks – possibly even a few more days – Iwao would be nothing but a memory and a butsudan photo.
At blackout curfew, Tsuma drew the curtains to the room as per regulations. The single electric bulb hanging from the ceiling was shrouded with black cloth that let a forlorn beam of dim light trickle down onto the table and tatami matting in the middle of the room. Somebody yawned, and Yonekichi – in one of his few utterances of the entire evening – suggested that they all go to bed. Then, in the next breath, he said something that Fukagawa had not heard since he was a preschooler.
“Iwao,” Yonekichi said, too shy to look his son in the eyes but still with a strong father’s authority in his voice. “I want you to sleep next to me tonight.”
Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze Page 25
