Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

  There was an embarrassed silence for a moment as Fukagawa, his mother and sister exchanged looks in the low light, stealing glances at Yonekichi, now a slightly hunched silhouette raising and lowering the red glowing cherry of a lit cigarette in a corner of the room. Fukagawa broke the spell of the moment with a comment along the lines of his being a grown man now who did not have to sleep with his parents to keep away the hobgoblins at night. As he chuckled alone at his own attempt at levity, his mother stood with surprising alacrity and tugged him by his uniform sleeve out of the room and into the inn corridor.

  “Iwao-chan,” Tsuma said in an urgent whisper, sliding the room door shut after one last glance inside to check on her husband. “You know what kind of man your father is, and how hard it is for him to express tender feelings. And I know you’re the same way. But can’t you see what he is trying to say? Can’t you understand what he must be feeling right now?”

  “I’ll tell you some things that happened on the way up here to see you,” she continued. “Before we left for the train, your sister picked a bunch of beautiful blue azaleas for you in our garden. But when your father saw them, he flew into a rage, and screamed ‘Azaleas are for funerals! Your brother’s not dead yet! Throw those damn funeral flowers away!’ Of course, Teruko cried. It was a wretched scene, but I could say nothing, and your father was still fuming and stiff-lipped when we got on the train.”

  “Hours into our journey, your father still had not said a single word. When I asked him what was the matter, he said ‘I have loved and worked hard for my boy all his life. Now they’re going to make him disappear like a puff of smoke’. He said it loud enough for everyone sitting near us to hear. People looked at us strangely. Luckily, there were no policemen on the car, or who knows what might have happened?”

  “Iwao-chan, now you know how your father feels. Can you find it in yourself to show your father some affection in return? Just for tonight – forget that you are a big, strong soldier. Be his little boy one last time.”

  That night, for the first time in many, many years and the last time in his life, Iwao Fukagawa fell asleep holding his father’s hand.

  18 Belt Of A Thousand StitchesIt is November 2002, and Fukagawa-san and I are staying in a municipal community center in Yokohama for an overnight study session to catalog the contents of his wartime photo albums and scrapbooks. While time-consuming, the work is not as daunting as it sounds – I have already scanned the photographic materials and old newspaper clippings into my laptop, and cataloguing the material is a simple matter of clicking through the images with the IC recorder on and Fukagawa-san giving the play-by-play. My elderly friend is obviously delighted with all of this “high tech,” and we keep a brisk pace as he tries to find the words for the torrent of memories brought on by all these pictures of old comrades long dead, family scenes, children, Hayabusas and Hayates, smiling young men with sunglasses on their heads and samurai swords on their belts.

  I click the right arrow key on my laptop, and suddenly, we are looking at the famous shot taken by the Mainichi Shinbun reporter when the Fukagawas came to visit their son at Kita Ise. Fukagawa-san tells me to pause for moment, and is suddenly pensive.

  “My mother didn’t know how much food we already had,” Fukagawa says, pointing at the table spread in the picture, “and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she needn’t have gone to all the trouble of bringing those rice cakes for us all the way from Kyūshū, especially when I knew they were already running low on food themselves. The other pilots and I were enormously touched by their gesture, and we gave them a big bundle of canned goods, candy and cigarettes when they left. Of course, they insisted that they didn’t need it, but we insisted that they take it. Finally, they did.”

  “My father did not have it in him to come see me again,” Fukagawa-san continues. “It was just too painful. Look at the picture. You can see he’s the only one in the group not smiling. This picture really says a lot, doesn’t it?”

  “Did anyone else come to see you?” I ask.

  “My mother and Teruko came up one more time, a couple of weeks later, to bring up a senninbari they stitched for me.”

  The senninbari (literally “stitches by a thousand people”) was a talisman belt worn by most Japanese servicemen in the nation’s wars since the Meiji Era. Generally a plain cotton muslin waist sash decorated with a checkerboard pattern of dot-like stitches sometimes arranged in a connect-the-dots picture of a tiger[180], it also usually featured auspicious and/or otherwise symbolic kanji characters to protect and bring glory upon its wearer in battle. The custom began as a housewives’ superstition during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, but had spread nationwide by the time of the Russo-Japanese War ten years later. By the Second World War – like so many Japanese folk customs and new “traditions” – the belts had assumed semi-religious iconic status. Collecting stitches on street corners from female passersby became a major daily occupation for Women’s Patriotic League and Defense Women’s Association members and mothers, wives and sisters of servicemen about to be sent off to war. The activity was a common sight on street corners throughout the country from the late 1930s until the last days of World War II.

  The requirement that the belts bear stitch-dots by a thousand different women was representative of the tradition of powerful supernatural femininity/mother/fertility iconography – common among other animist agricultural cultures, as well – that was the backdrop for superficially hyper-masculine Shintoism. Covering the wearer’s navel, the senninbari was symbolically a placenta or umbilical cord remnant – a manifestation of motherlove in fabric. It was a spiritual tie between mother and son, and thus, collaterally, a magical link between female nurture and male strength.

  As their magical effect was supposed to be imparted through female touch, the belts were never washed, which in less than sterile combat conditions often meant that the sennin-bari became terrariums for various unwelcome flora and fauna.[181] Nevertheless, Japanese servicemen were extremely proud of the belts, although they jealously guarded them at all times from the eyes of other men.[182] This was due not only to the inappropriateness from a warrior machismo standpoint of expressing open sentimentality for a female – even for the sacrosanct mother figure Japanese men were normally encouraged to worship – but because it was thought that the very glances of other males could drain or sully the female magic in the belts, rendering them ineffective.

  Given that the major function of the senninbari was, ostensibly, to bring its wearer home from war safe and sound, there would seem to be a degree of contradiction involved in giving such a talisman to a tokkō pilot. Tsuma and Teruko were aware of this as they collected their one thousand stitches on Saga street corners, but they rationalized the gesture by telling Fukagawa that the belt was meant to bring him home safe and sound anyway – if only in spirit.

  When asked if he has preserved this treasure, Fukagawa-san tells me that he has, and that it is now on permanent display with other items of his wartime personal kit in a Japanese cultural museum near Budapest, Hungary. His katana sword, however, is too important to trust to anyone outside of the family. And although he did not have any sons, the sword will someday pass on to his oldest grandson.

  As a visit to the busily and happily cluttered study in his Yokohama home will confirm, Fukagawa-san is an inveterate hoarder. In addition to the above-mentioned items, he has an enormous and historically significant collection of other military/wartime mementoes. All of his pictures and newspaper clippings, his flight suit, his cadet cap from the IMA, even his parachute harness – he has saved almost everything from his warrior days, with the sole exception of something he has regretted losing for the last six decades: the hanayome ningyo (“bride doll”) his mother and sister handmade for him and also brought up on their second and last visit to Kita Ise.

  The giving of hanayome ningyo to sons and brothers in uniform was very popular among mothers and sisters of Japanese servicemen during the war, especially
for families of tokkō pilots. The sentiment behind the gesture was rooted in the expectation that many boys were going to die before they had a chance to marry human brides (or all boys, in the case of tokkō). In giving them doll brides, it was felt that a mother could experience at least some of the joy of seeing her son married off. More supernatural variations on the theme also afforded roles to the dolls as afterlife companions for dead servicemen, almost like Egyptian tomb figure or Chinese terra cotta warriors.

  Fukagawa-san recalls seeing some pilots around the Kita Ise tokkō barracks displaying bride dolls from home at the head of their bunks and saying goodnight to the figures when turning in after Lights-Out. But the young Fukagawa thought this sort of behavior spectacularly wimpy and maudlin – not to mention morbid – and he was having none of it. When his mother and sister presented him with the doll, he was grateful for the gesture, but also nothing short of mortified with embarrassment. Ten minutes after seeing his family members off at Kameyama Station, he gave the doll to the daughters of a local innkeeper and never saw it again. He would soon regret this.

  “After I got back to the barracks and read the letter my mother had also given me, I realized that she had intended for me to take the doll with me on my tokkō sortie. Of course, I wasn’t about to return to the inn and take the doll back from the children I had given it too. But I sure did regret that. I’ve regretted it ever since.”

  “Do you still have the letter from your mother?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Fukagawa-san says. “But it’s in another scrapbook I haven’t seen for years. I’ll try to find it for you.”

  We continue clicking through the photo scans, which are arranged in rough chronological order. At one point in the series, Fukagawa starts appearing in civilian clothes. Fukagawa-san tells me to stop and back up one frame, to a shot showing himself in full flight gear next to an adolescent boy in army cadet uniform.

  “That was taken with my little brother Nobuo in my backyard the day I arrived home after the war,” Fukagawa-san says. “My father said he wanted one last picture of us in uniform. I’m in my flight suit, and Nobuo is in Hiroshima Yōnen Gakkō uniform. He has a hibakusha techō (“Atom Bomb Victim’s I.D. Card”), you know. He was in Hiroshima the day after the bomb was dropped, returning to school after summer leave. When he arrived at Hiroshima, though, there was nothing left of his school. They sent him straight home again. Luckily, he never had any side effects from exposure to the radiation.”

  We come to a picture of a smiling, strapping, twentysomething Fukagawa in a dapper straw fedora.

  “Those are the clothes I rode the train home from Kita Ise in,” Fukagawa-san says. “The tokkō pilots were given priority for demobilization, because the authorities were afraid we might do something rash, so we got to go home pretty early. In fact, I was home even before the Americans started arriving.

  “That soon after the surrender, no one…especially officers…wanted to be seen in public in uniform. I traveled in a civilian shirt and wore that hat, but my pants and boots were military. When the train slowed down to pull into Saga Station, I took my uniform tunic and hat out of my suitcase and changed right there on the train car so I could arrive home looking like a soldier.”

  When Fukagawa rounded the corner of his home street that late August morning, he caused quite a commotion in the old neighborhood. Everyone knew he had been assigned to tokkō, so his sudden appearance was almost like seeing a ghost walking down the street. After this initial shock, however, neighbors began to call out to him in welcome. As for his family, they already knew from an earlier letter that he had survived and was on his way home, but this did not mean that there was no joy in the Fukagawa household when he darkened the doorway.

  “Most people talk about what dark, sad times the postwar was for them,” Fukagawa-san says. “But that wasn’t true in our house. My parents had three sons in uniform and all of us survived. The night I came home, all of the family members were together for dinner for the first time in many years. And I’m not ashamed to say that we all wept with happiness, man and woman alike. Lost war or not, that was one of the happiest moments of my life.”

  The conversation turns to the postwar era, when Japan’s economy was in shambles and a way of life and value system were gone forever.

  “My first job after the war was working in a displaced persons relocation center in a storefront near Saga Station,” Fukagawa-san says. “That was very therapeutic. I felt like I was helping Japan get back on its feet. I did this for about six months, then helped a childhood friend with a small trading company for a few years after that. After a while, though, I started to feel like I was just spinning my wheels. I needed to move on.

  “I remembered something they taught us at Fighter Basic…When you find yourself in a chaotic situation, climb for altitude. With altitude, you can get a better take on what’s going on around you, then pick the exact spot and timing for your return to the battle. Well, I applied this thinking to my own situation in postwar Japan, which was certainly chaotic. I was already in my mid-twenties, and still had my most productive years ahead of me, but I didn’t have all the time in the world, and I felt like I didn’t know where I was going as long as I stayed in Kyūshū. So, just like my instructor at fighter school always told me to do, I climbed for altitude. In my case, this meant heading for Tokyo.”

  Fukagawa packed up and headed for the big city in 1948, never looking back. But his struggles were only beginning. GHQ demilitarization policies meant that his once-elite IMA credentials were not worth the sheepskin they were printed on. At least officially – on paper – he had finished only an elementary school level education. But Fukagawa, always the fighter, pushed on, got qualified for university entrance exams by going to night school, and eventually graduated from the well-regarded Chūo University in 1952. He has lived in the Tokyo/Yokohama metropolis ever since, marrying a Kyūshū girl nine years his junior in 1953. He now has a daughter and three grandchildren – two boys and a girl.

  Fukagawa-san recently retired from a nearly fifty-year-long business executive career, and fills most of his days pursuing hobbies with his delightful and lovely wife. The rest of his time is taken up with the various IMA and Akeno Fighter School alumni, Kaikōsha, and veterans’ group activities he has been involved in since the 1980s. He has spent two-thirds of his long life in a land of peace and prosperity, but has never forgotten about all of the friends and comrades he left behind – who did not get to enjoy the peaceful and prosperous Japan he has been able to call home for the past half-century.

  The direction the conversation is taking reminds me of something I have heard in a prayer at the Setagaya Kan’non Buddhist temple, which has a chapel devoted to the memory of army and navy tokkō pilots. It is the venue for monthly meetings of the Tokkōtai Senbotsusha Irei Heiwa Kinen Kyōkai or, as this is usually abbreviated, Tokkō Zaidan. It is a memorial-cum-historical association whose members consist mainly of tokkō veterans, surviving family members of tokkō pilots who died in the war, and the odd American expatriate Japan scholar. In the prayer in question – which is chanted at the beginning of each monthly memorial gathering – there is a reference to the sacrifices of the tokkō pilots as being largely to thank for the rest of us being able to live in “this peaceful and prosperous Japan.”[183] While it would of course be unrealistic – not to mention culturally uncouth – to expect people to gather in a downtown Tokyo temple once a month for the last fifty years to sing the praises of Douglas MacArthur, GHQ reforms and massive postwar American aid packages, I have long found this “it’s all thanks to the tokkō” line baffling. But the operant logic here, as Fukagawa-san explains it, is all about the surviving postwar generation’s psychological need to pay back the tokkō pilots’ sacrifices the only way they could without a shooting war going on any more. They had to sacrifice their own lives to rebuild Japan from the ashes of defeat and make sure that a disaster like World War II never befell the nation again.

  Fukagawa-
san – now with a bit of stridency in his voice – goes on to explain that he feels that the dead tokkō pilots also saved Japan in that they were able to preserve some of Japan’s pride in defeat.

  “A race without pride forfeits its right to exist,” he says.

  He believes that the pilots were fighting for this at the end, when everyone knew the war was lost but flew their sorties anyway, and that in this sense, their missions were successful. The pilots were the epitome of integrity, purity of spirit, and courage – the finest young men the country has ever produced.

  “Any great nation is made and sustained by such young men. This is a universal given.”

  I ask him if he thinks this spirit is still alive in Japan – if the nation still has such human resources at its disposal.

  “Yes, that spirit is still here, just hidden now. These qualities are in our genetic makeup, even though the people in charge of educational policy in Japan seem to be doing everything they can to destroy them.”

  *****

  Fukagawa-san calls me in March 2003 to tell me that he has something very important to show me. After a long search, he has finally found his mother’s wartime farewell letter (written, obviously, without knowing that she would go on to spend another thirty-five years knowing that her son was alive, happy and healthy). The item is too important to trust to the mail system, so he wants to hand it over in person.

  We meet a few weeks later at the Shinkansen waiting lounge at Hamamatsu Station. Fukagawa-san is passing through Hamamatsu on his way home from an overnight excursion to a hot springs resort with some old IMA friends. The drinking and laughing last night went far past his normal bedtime of nine o’clock, so he is a bit road weary.

  We order some coffee and while we wait for it to arrive, Fukagawa-san rummages through his blue Naugahyde overnighter and customary collection of plastic shopping bags before coming up with a crumbling black leather bound scrapbook.