“Do those people in Tokyo realize what they’ve gotten us into?” he had thundered. “How are we going to win a war against a huge, affluent nation with limitless resources?”
When Shōko-san noticed posters like “Luxury Is The Enemy” and “A Drop Of Gasoline Is A Drop Of Blood” going up around town soon after the war started, she began to think that her grandfather might be right, after all. But doubts or not, she followed the example of her friends and neighbors in doing her work, avoiding objective comments about the war and trying to at least give the impression that she believed everything she was told.
Shōko, although gifted with a precocious intelligence, was nonetheless still a child of eleven or twelve. The idea that she might have been the only person in the community other than her grandfather with the political savvy to pick up on occasional glimpses of frightening reality like this is of course preposterous. There were others who knew things were not quite as peachy as the papers would have them believe. But like Shōko-san, these skeptics also knew well enough to keep their mouths shut about their doubts, and were careful to keep up the appearance of believing that there was nothing to worry about and that Japan was going to win the war. The times behooved taciturnity, for to speak one’s mind in public when one’s opinion conflicted with the official line was to risk social ostracism at the least, if not arrest for sedition after being reported to the police by neighborhood informants, who were only too eager to drop a name to get on the good side of the local authorities.[198]
Most Chiran residents, however, did not lose much sleep over doubts about the war. They slept the sleep of the innocent, secure in their belief that what the authorities told them about the war was gospel. But they cannot be completely faulted for buying the government line at face value. Their optimism was as much a matter of lack of information as lack of cynicism. Unlike city-dwellers, who had greater access to alternative (and thus illegal) news sources, citizens in remote areas were completely dependent on official organs for the dissemination of war news.
In wartime Japan, war news through official channels passed through three layers of filters before being made public: the top layer consisted of Imperial GHQ and public relations officers at the Army and Navy Ministries, who made the initial choices about what the public should or should not be told about, and concocted official whoppers where appropriate. The second layer consisted of cautious editorial staff and line-toeing journalists well seasoned in self-censorship who phrased this filtered information as patriotically – or vaguely, if the circumstances called for smokescreening – as possible. The third and last line of information defense was manned by the thousands of government censors at print and broadcast media facilities around the nation who gave the remnants of fact in these news releases one last picking over with magnifying glasses and tweezers before the word went out to the public.
Chiran’s schoolteachers did their part by keeping the discussion of war developments vague and to a minimum, seeing their duty as educators more constructively performed in organizing scrap metal drives[199] and putting their charges through a healthy daily regimen of close-order drill and group singing of patriotic songs. The students memorized books full of anthems about hot young blood and sacrifice, and might be forced to sing them at any time during the day. The musical activity the Chiran girls remember most clearly – and with the most distaste – was the constant singing of “Umi Yukaba.” Starting rather early in the war and continuing right up to the bitter end, children and teachers alike stood at rigid attention to sing it at the top of their lungs every day at outdoor morning assembly and any other time the student body was gathered for an event.
“Any occasion they could possibly think of, the teachers made us sing that song,” Reiko-san recalls. “Oh, how we hated it.”
I ask if this was because the girls understood the barely veiled suicidal message in the song’s lyrics.
“Not at all,” Reiko-san says. “We had no idea what we were singing, but we knew that we were sick and tired of it, whatever it was.”
The other women nod emphatically.
“Whenever I hear that song now it brings back so many bad memories,” Shōko-san adds to another round of nodding.
20 The Nadeshiko Unit Is Formed
As the singing and scrap metal drives dragged on, signs that no one could miss or ignore anymore began to appear in the community suggesting that the war situation was not necessarily developing to Japan’s advantage. One obvious indicator was that the number of funerals for young servicemen from the town increased dramatically. Another message was purely lexical, but telling nevertheless: the language in the papers and slogans in the posters became more strident and tinged with desperation. The change had been so gradual as to be barely noticeable at first, but by late 1943, as the food situation got tight and rationing became stricter, few people could have missed the significance of there now being a preponderance of flowery death euphemisms and more talk about “sacrifice” and “resisting to the end” in the media than about “winning the war” and “Asia for Asians.”
In March 1944, a harbinger of bad tidings on the home front came along that not even the thickest-skinned optimist could misinterpret. In that month, the Ministry of Education announced in a national emergency decree that regular academic lessons at junior high and high schools across the country were hereby cancelled for the duration of hostilities to free up adolescent labor resources for the war effort.
Chiran Girls’ School was not exempt from the wartime requirements of the state. When its students began the new school year in April, they were informed that they would be organized into a “volunteer” work detail unit. In honor of the blossom featured on the school crest and in hopes that the girls would live up to their honor as maidens of Kagoshima, their group was named the Nadeshiko Unit.[200] The sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds of the upper three class grades were packed up and sent off to Nagasaki, where they would spend the next seventeen months working at the big Mitsubishi Heiki Seisakusho torpedo factory. The lower three grades, which included Reiko and Shōko’s new third-year class, were deemed too young and vulnerable to be separated from maternal supervision, and were instead put to work in or close enough to town to be home for a bath and bedtime every night. With all of the local boys twelve or older committed to the war industry or military service, and schoolgirls, small children, housewives, old people and war invalids the only other potential workforce groups available in any kind of numbers, the local military authorities came to depend on Chiran’s pool of able-bodied twelve-to-fifteen-year-old girls as the prime source of volunteer labor in town.
For the next year, the girls did little else but dig. During harvest season, this meant pulling spuds, radishes and tubers from the ground in the sort of agricultural drudgery the farm girls were well accustomed to, but the rest of the time, they were excavating roomy and well-furnished bunkers and air raid shelters for the army in the local countryside.[201] These high-ceilinged spaces were dug underground or into chalky hillsides, and the work was dangerous, exhausting, and above all filthy. The girls dug for months with little rest, and wearing no protective gear other than “bōsai-zukin” padded hoods (not much more than floor cushions tied over the head). Luckily, there were no cave-ins, and other than calloused hands and sore shoulders, the worst indignities the girls suffered was the dirt that constantly fell into their faces, eyes, mouths, and clothes as they dug.
“I swear, some of those bunkers we dug out were big enough to put a house into,” Reiko says.
“And when we finished digging,” Kayoko-san adds, “they’d make us cart in sand and foliage to camouflage the shelter entrances.”
The shelters – and the residents of Chiran – got their baptism of fire on March 18, 1945, when the airfield and environs were shot up by American carrier fighter-bombers.[202] These attackers were not the first enemy planes the townspeople had seen – B-29 formations had been passing overhead at altitude on the way to Kagoshima City and other
industrial centers like Yahata, Kurume and Nagasaki farther to the north since the previous summer – but it was the first time that Chiran was the Americans’ intended target, and the Hellcats hit it hard.
“Some villagers were killed hiding in their slit trench bomb shelter during that first raid,” Reiko says. “But even with an airbase there, we didn’t get a single airplane up to defend against the raiders. This was when I really knew that things were not going our way.”
Shortly after dawn on March 27, the girls arrived at school for work detail in their usual monpe work clothes. Principal Utō and one of their young teachers, Miss Chosa, had the students form up as they always did before marching out to the day’s worksite. On this day, however, Mr. Yamaguchi – the head of the local Board of Education, Army Reservist Association bigshot and town hall heijikakari military liaison chief – was there, too. It was the first time since the formation ceremony for the Nadeshiko Unit almost a year ago that their activities had been graced by the presence of such a VIP.
After lining up and singing “Umi Yukaba” en masse, the girls were told to run back home, change out of their beat-up work shirts and into their normal school uniform sailor middy blouses, and then come back on the double. When everyone had formed up again, the teachers and liaison officer marched the squad of eighteen students down a path through the woods behind the school. None of the girls had ever taken the route before, so they had no idea where they were being led, outside of a vague directional awareness that they were walking toward the southwestern corner of the airbase. But that was impossible. Everyone knew the base was strictly off limits – even as army volunteer workers, the girls had never set foot inside its gates. Yet as they continued their walk through the woods, they were led past an AIRBASE PERSONNEL ONLY sign without breaking stride. Just as the girls were beginning to look at each other quizzically, the drone of a large number of engines, faint at first, could be heard overhead. The sound got louder, quickly.
“Take COVERRRR!!!”, Mr. Yamaguchi shouted.
Already seasoned air raid veterans by now, the girls knew what to do without further explanation, and they instinctively darted off into the trees and bamboo on either side of the path. As Reiko and Shōko huddled together in a thicket, they both penciled “SAYONARA” on a bamboo trunk. They had no idea where they were being taken, or if they were going to get bombs dropped on them at any moment. Maybe they were being taken off to be shot for stumbling onto some big army secret. For all they knew, this really was “sayonara.”
The engine drone from above became loud enough for the girls to feel in their chests. Looking up, they watched as a silver-glinting, contrail-streaming flight of twenty or thirty B-29s passed over.[203] As they watched the malevolent beauty of the bomber formation, they heard another loud engine sound, much closer and moving toward them on the ground. Just then, a big army truck rumbled down the forest path. Riding in back was a group of pilots in Hinomaru headbands who smiled and waved as they passed, jostled as the flatbed bumped along toward the airfield. The girls had no way of knowing it at the time, but the pilots they had just seen were on their way to the flight line to take part in the first tokkō sortie from Chiran.
“I remember the look Reiko and I exchanged at that moment,” Shōko-san says. “Living in Chiran, we had seen plenty of pilots before, but never pilots with headbands like that. We had only seen pictures of them in the newspaper, in articles about tokkō.”
When the high altitude B-29 formation was gone, the girls and their escorts continued walking deeper into OFF LIMITS territory, following the path in the direction the truck had come from. After a few minutes, they arrived at the bottom of a long, curving rise of packed-dirt-and-log steps. Climbing these, they reached a tranquil forest clearing domed with tall-trunk pine boughs softly rustling in the breeze. Mr. Yamaguchi halted the group in front of what looked like a small hamlet of half-buried log cabins, each with a few steps leading down to entrances below ground level. These structures were what the army called sangakuheisha (literally “triangle barracks”), so named because the sleeping quarters were sunken for defilade against flying bomb shrapnel and the only portion poking up over ground level were the sloped roofs.
A sergeant standing in front of the entrance to one of the sangakuheisha explained that taking care of this barracks area and whoever happened to be staying in it would be the girls’ responsibility until further notice. Their main duties would consist of doing laundry in the nearby river, cleaning and sweeping, bed making, meal and tea serving, and making sure that the foliage used for camouflaging the sangakuheisha was kept fresh and green. If the need for other duties arose, these would be explained as necessary. Finally, it was stressed that under no circumstances were the girls to tell anybody else – not even their own mothers or other family members – about the nature of their duties on the base.
In a little while, another truck came along the forest road from the direction of the airfield, but this was full of mattresses and blankets, rather than pilots. A scrappy supply corporal put the girls to work immediately, trundling the bedding from the road up to the pine clearing, then down into the damp, dark, unpainted interior of the sangakuheisha. The mattresses and blankets were laid out on tatami sleeping shelves lining both sides of the slat-floored corridors running the length of the barracks. There would be very little storage space for personal effects and no privacy at all for the pilots who had to sleep down here. There would not be much fresh air, either, as the only ventilation came from the sunken entranceways at either end of the hut. Steel helmets and canteens – presumably one set per sleeper – lined the walls, hanging on wooden pegs. The overall effect was like a slave ship with clean sleeping linen.
Although Reiko and Shōko had already surmised from their morning truck-sighting that the “guests” who would be staying in these dank barracks were tokkō pilots, the girls could not confirm this until that afternoon, when a formation of Hayabusa fighters landed at the base and the men who had flown them in arrived at the sangakuheisha compound. But as these “men” jumped from the back of the truck, still in their flight suits and carrying small canvas kitbags, the girls were surprised – shocked, even – to see that the pilots were in fact boys of seventeen or eighteen and not the hardened professionals they had always assumed were flying the nation’s warplanes into battle. The boys did not really seem heroic or dashing at all. Rather, they had a kind of innocent purity about them, free of worldly contamination. They were almost glowing – as if they were already halfway to heaven and happily resigned to their fate, answering the girls’ whispered queries about their mission with beaming smiles.
This particular group of pilots was only the first of many that the girls would serve at the sangakuheisha compound. The normal rotation of groups through Chiran could be anywhere from one or two nights to up to a week if attack sorties and/or incoming flights were delayed by bad weather or other unforeseen problems.[204] Although both the pilots and the Nadeshiko Unit members were under strict orders forbidding fraternization, it was only natural that with adolescent boys and girls thrown together in a stressful environment redolent with pathos, danger and constant reminders of mortality, some measure of emotional bonding was going to occur. These bonds grew stronger the longer a particular group stayed at Chiran, reinforced by long and languid interludes of downtime when the girls finished their chores early and were free to socialize with their “guests” for the rest of the day until the truck came along to take them home in the evening.
Statistically, the pilots broke down into two basic demographic groups – commissioned ex-college students in their early to mid-twenties from urban backgrounds, and mostly rural, working class enlisted men in the eighteen-to-twenty range. Many members of the former group were accomplished intellectuals and budding literary talents straight out of liberal arts programs in the best universities of the land. They often had their own reading material, preferring to keep their faces buried in their books the entire time they were in the b
arracks. Shōko had a temperamental affinity for these types, and liked to read her own favorite books – usually poetry – aloud for them. Some of these brainy young men were also trained teaching professionals fond of gathering the girls under the pine arbors to give lectures – not without some measure of show-off involved in their performances – on subjects like medieval Japanese literature or European modern art that left their captive audiences scratching their heads but deeply impressed nonetheless. However, the majority of the girls tended to bond with the enlisted men, who were closer to their own age and social background. The teeneaged pilots liked to sing and play games and were more interested in spending their last hours and thoughts with a soft, winsome face and a sympathetic feminine ear than in holding forth in weighty conversations about the meaning of it all.
Although the girls were aware of the importance of the pilots’ missions, and felt an enormous responsibility to help these young men and boys be as happy and comfortable as possible in the last days and hours of their lives, it was impossible to be completely objective about their work in a situation this emotionally loaded. As time went on, and the girls became quicker at making friends, feelings of sympathy and duty became complicated with the wrenching pain of knowing that they would have to say farewell to each new group of friends who briefly flitted in and then back out of their lives forever.
And in the meantime, out of earshot of anyone who was not a Nadeshiko Unit member, the girls would pray for rain. But no matter how heartfelt and earnest their pleas for inclement weather, the inevitable hour of sad parting would arrive when the attack orders came down and it would be time for the current group of tokkō boys to leave. On the morning of a sortie, the girls, many holding bunches of wildflowers to press into the hands of their favorite pilots, would go down to the airfield flight line. There, they were often accompanied by pilots’ family members who had traveled to Chiran and received special permission from the base commander to see off their sons, brothers and – on rare occasions – husbands. Although all onlookers and well-wishers – including family members – were under strict orders not to shed tears under any circumstances, these orders proved impossible to enforce, and the sobbing and crying out of the names of loved ones would always rise to a crescendo as the engines of Hayabusa fighters or Ki-51 assault planes gunned up for take-off.
Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze Page 29
