As proprietress of the sole army-certified restaurant in town, Tome Torihama had known all along what the girls were doing at the base. For one thing, her daughter Reiko – who was the same inveterate chatterbox at fourteen that she is at seventy-two – ignored the army’s gag order and told her mother everything the first night she came home from a workday of barracks duties. Tome was also able to glean a lot of information by piecing together overheard snippets of conversation from her uniformed customers, and knew that Chiran’s mothers had every right to be concerned about their daughters’ emotional and physical safety.
Tome worried, too. Every evening at dusk, she would stand by the window of the Tomiya Shokudō and listen for the truck that brought the Nadeshiko Unit members back to their homes after work (they had to wait until cover of nightfall to avoid getting strafed). Grimy and exhausted after yet another day at the base, the girls would sit in back of the flatbed and sing patriotic songs at the top of their lungs (but never, ever, “Umi Yukaba”). Only when Tome heard the girls’ singing and the sound of the army truck changing gears as it came up the main street could she feel safe about her daughter again – at least for the night – before the whole process started again the following morning.
*****
During early and mid-April 1945, there were two interrelated developments in the Okinawan campaign raging 500 kilometers south of Chiran that would conspire to end the Nadeshiko Unit’s airbase duties far earlier than the girls had originally expected. One of these factors was the very effectiveness of the tokkō sorties themselves. As losses in personnel and material mounted daily, American command put the highest priority on trying to knock out as much capacity at the mainland tokkō bases as possible before the Japanese planes could take to the air. Obviously, Chiran was high on the target list.
The second development was the Americans’ rapid capture of Yontan and Kadena airfields on Okinawa. When USAAF B-25 Mitchell, P-51 Mustang, and P-38 squadrons were flown in from the Philippines to begin operating from these bases, it meant that TF 58’s Hellcats and Corsairs could concentrate on fleet CAP for inbound tokkō interception and on tactical air support for the soldiers and Marines on the ground, relegating more of their secondarily important mission load of interdiction and harassment raids on Kyūshū tokkō bases to the army tactical air units, who were more than up to the task. Superbly trained and experienced in ground attack from the long Philippine campaign, eager for payback against the “Jap suiciders” mauling fellow American servicemen at Okinawa and plenty fired up at having the long-dreamed-of opportunity to strafe and bomb the Japanese “where they lived,” they took to their new combat role with a gusto.
During one mid-April raid on Chiran, a considerable number of bombs were dropped on the airfield. After the attack – with the drone of the American engines and choking, cordite-stinking smoke still lingering in the air – a vehicle was heard screeching to a stop at the bottom of the sangakuheisha compound knoll. There were shouted orders for two girl volunteers, and before they knew what was happening, Shōko and Reiko were being led to a staff car with a big hole ripped through the windshield and roof. A visibly shaken officer – who turned out to be none other than the base commander himself, Major Musashi Hashiguchi – grumbled for the girls to get in.
The car pulled to a stop at the southern end of the airfield. The girls were ordered out of the car and given five minutes to count the number of bomb craters on the runway. Of course, it was impossible for the girls to cover nearly fifteen hundred meters in only five minutes – especially trying to negotiate rubble-strewn ground in wooden geta – but they gave it their best shot, and counted as best they could, ever mindful of the staff car putt-putting at a crawl behind them. The faint sound of American engines flying away was another matter of concern, as it was always possible that the planes would suddenly double back to give the airfield one more good drilling in the hopes of catching personnel and vehicles out in the open. It was a trick the Americans had used before.
Breathless from smoke, nerves and fatigue, the girls finally reached the north end of the runway. Shōko had spotted eighteen craters, while Reiko reported seeing only seventeen. The officer was angry about the discrepancy in the count and threatened the girls with making them go back and do it again. Luckily, he did not back up this threat, but neither was he finished with the girls quite yet. Before rolling up his window and telling the driver to move on, he ordered them to go back to the compound and organize a work detail to start repairing the runway damage. The Nadeshiko Unit spent the rest of the day with shovels in their hands filling in bomb craters.
On April 18, as Reiko, Shōko, and the other girls were hanging freshly washed socks and fundoshi on the clotheslines at the sangakuheisha compound. There had been no flight line send-off on this day, so spirits were more chipper than usual, and the girls chatted and laughed with each other and a few of the barracks residents as they worked. The sun was bright, the sky blue and the birds were singing in the pine boughs. Vigilance was the last thing on anyones’ mind, but even in the off chance that there was an air raid this morning, the sirens would give everyone plenty of warning. They always had in the past. Besides that, the sangakuheisha were well-camouflaged, and the compound was apparently invisible from the air – even with clotheslines full of off-white underwear flapping in the breeze – as it had yet to be hit by the Americans.
Suddenly, the barracks compound’s mid-morning rhapsody was rent asunder by the distinctive roar of American engines overhead and crisscrossing chains of machine gun bullets stitching the pine needle forest floor. There were hoarse masculine shouts for everyone to take cover, barely audible over the din of aircraft, weapons fire, and shrill female screaming. The girls tripped and fell down in their ungainly wooden sandals as they scrambled to jump into sunken barracks entranceways and slit trenches with the pilots and other army personnel.
While everyone around her ran for cover, the ever-introspective Shōko watched in a stunned daze as an evil-looking, twin-boomed, shiny aluminum-skinned plane banked high over the treetops before leveling out and heading straight for her. Immobilized by deer-in-headlights paralysis, she seemed to watch from somewhere outside of her body as parallel trails of dirt puffs drilled the ground and raced toward her. Something – a friend’s scream, perhaps – snapped her out of it and she jumped out of the way at the last second as the bullets cracked the air around her and the plane buzzed over with an angry snarl.
Now huddling in a slit trench with some of the other girls, Shōko was being alternately hugged and berated by her sheltermates when the sight of the sparkling white collars on her friends’ middy blouses snapped her back to reality for the first time in twenty or thirty very long seconds.
“Our collars!” she shouted out. “They can see our collars! Tuck them in!”
The girls hurriedly did as Shōko said while trying to stay as small and low as possible. Whether or not the color of their uniforms was a factor in their being spotted from the air can never be known with certainty, but it seems probable that another general lapse in vigilance had some part in their predicament. As the girls huddled together in their trench, someone pointed out the dried-out leaves and branches on the roofs of the sangakuheisha. The girls had forgotten to change the camouflage covering on the barracks, and the foliage had dried out quicker than anyone had expected it to in the fine weather they had been enjoying of late. Instead of masking the compound, the bright yellow, desiccated foliage – contrasted against the deep green of the rest of the forest – must have been as conspicuous as a pattern of landing lights at night.
As the girls rued their camouflage carelessness, the twin-engine planes continued to rake the compound with machine-gun fire while others started dropping bombs on the air base runway. The Americans seemed neither anxious to leave anytime soon, nor particularly perturbed by the paltry AA fire from the base. And as usual, there was no Japanese opposition in the air to try to stop them.
“The Americans flew so
low you could see their pink faces and blue eyes and those big, square, white-framed goggles they wore,” Reiko recalls. “We hated to admit it, but we admired their cockiness, flying in so low like that. I’m still not sure if they were either very brave or just thought so little of us that there was nothing to be afraid of.”
Apparently, Japanese masculinity did not share the same objective admiration for this impudent display of American panache. One of the support troops ran out from a trench spitting mad, cursing and trying to throw rocks at the planes before a comrade scrambled out to pull him back in. A spray of machine gun fire for good measure riddled the spot they had been standing in an eye-blink before.
This was not the first time the girls had been strafed, nor would it be the last. It was, however, the last time they would undergo the experience at Chiran airbase. In fact, it was also the last time they would set foot on the base for the rest of the war. Major Hashiguchi was forced to admit that the morning’s air raid – and with a barracks full of media people witnessing the whole thing, at that – had been too close for comfort. While the imagery of stalwart little yamato nadeshiko serving tea and giving flowers to brave tokkō pilots was about as good as it got in terms of propaganda material, the country did not need to hear about fourteen-year-old girls dodging bullets on a Japanese military installation with no Japanese planes in the air trying to protect them, and it certainly did not need to hear about one of these girls stopping some of those bullets. It was not beyond the pale of imagination that one of the sappy hacks in the media barracks would write up something embarrassing in the event of a Nadeshiko Unit casualty that would somehow slip through the censorship cracks and make the papers. This was not going to happen on Major Hashiguchi’s watch.
The historical record is not clear on the role of parental pressure in this matter, but the very next day, Major Hashiguchi made a rare personal appearance at the Nadeshiko Unit’s morning formation. He personally thanked the girls for their services to date, then in the next breath told them that they did not have to bother coming anymore. For the next two months, until a combat nurse training program was started up for local girls in the neighboring town of Kawanabe, the Nadeshiko Unit was collectively out of a job.
But Chiran’s involvement with the tokkō activities on base did not end there. The local Defense Women’s Association, endeavoring to pick up the slack left by the cancellation of the Nadeshiko Unit work program, was eager to show the authorities that the town was still willing to help with the war effort. While most of the league’s members were housewives, and thus too busy caring for their own families to wait hand and foot on the residents of the sangakuheisha compound, they were genuinely eager to help out in other areas. Tome Torihama was instrumental in guiding their efforts, and personally organized official send-off detachments and unofficial support facilities for tokkō family members visiting Chiran.
No one who knew Tome could have been very surprised that she rose to the forefront in such activities. Concern for the well being of others came naturally to her. These qualities were in her blood, and selfless service was the dominant theme of every facet of her life, both professional and personal. The Chiran air base authorities had chosen wisely in deciding to designate the Tomiya Shokudō as the only army-approved rest and relaxation center in town, and Tome made good use of her establishment’s exemption as such from food and alcohol rationing to make sure there was always plenty on hand for the boys to eat and drink. When the cupboard began to run low and regular supply lines petered out, she would scour the countryside for every morsel or drop of saké or shōchu potato liquor she could get her hands on.[215] After all, she often remarked, how could you skimp on a meal for a young man that might be his last?
From the earliest days of Chiran’s special attack sorties until her death at the age of ninety in 1992, Tome was known by the pilots themselves, townspeople, veterans, journalists and eventually even national statesmen as tokkō no haha or “Mother of the tokkō boys” for the love and care she gave to the lonely, homesick pilots. Tome became a legend in her own lifetime, and has been afforded something close to sainthood now that she is gone. In the last years of her life, the author, right-wing pundit and current Tokyo governor Shintarō Ishihara famously remarked that Tome was “the closest person to a living Buddha I have ever met.”[216]
The anecdote on which the film Hotaru (“Firefly”) is loosely based is probably the most famous legend involving Tome and the Tomiya Shokudō. Reiko-san, now the only surviving witness to the episode, insists that it is true. The story concerns an enlisted pilot named Saburō Miyakawa of the 104th Shinbu Unit who was in Chiran awaiting tokkō sortie orders as the Okinawan campaign was winding to a close. During his inclement weather-extended stay in Chiran, Miyakawa formed an especially close bond with Tome and her daughters, and his patronage of their establishment was frequent and enthusiastic. But as is the fate of all good things, the relationship had to come to an end – clearing skies and sortie orders for the morning of June 6 brought the curtain down on the sergeant’s rustic idyll with his surrogate family-away-from-home.
On the evening of June 5, Miyakawa visited the Tomiya Shokudō for what would be – literally and figuratively – his last supper. The day also happened to be his twentieth birthday. After his meal, Miyakawa took a short stroll with Tome, her daughters, and a squadmate named Takimoto by the river that ran past the inn. The night was starless, and blackout regulations had the entire town under an inky pall. The only light visible was from a small swarm of fireflies meandering in the cool air over the riverbank. Somebody remarked at how pretty they were. After a short silence, Miyakawa cleared his throat.
“Obachan,” he started, using the diminutive, familiar term a young man uses when addressing an older woman for whom he feels something akin to a son’s affection toward a mother. “I don’t want to leave with any regrets, but I have to say this. After I’m dead, I really want to come back and see you again…Is that OK?”
“Of course,” Tome answered. “Come back anytime you want.”
Just then, one of the fireflies broke from the swarm and flew over to hover over Miyakawa’s head.
“That’s it,” the sergeant said. “That’s me. I’m going to come back as that firefly tomorrow night…Two of us will come back. Right Takimoto?”
“Uhh…Right,” Takimoto answered.
“And don’t let anyone chase those fireflies off,” Miyakawa continued. “Because it will be us. Promise you’ll sing Dōki no Sakura for us.”
“We will,” Tome said.
“It’s nine o’clock now,” Miyakawa said, looking at his glowing watch dial. “We’ll be back here this time tomorrow night. Make sure to leave the front door open for us.”
The weather the next day was cloudy in the morning, turning to light rain by evening. Around seven that night, there was a knock on the front door of the blacked-out Tomiya Shokudō. The door slid open. It was a long-faced, soaking wet Takimoto. He had been forced to turn back with engine trouble on the way to Okinawa. Sergeant Miyakawa’s engine, however, had apparently functioned perfectly, as had every other engine in the 104th Shinbu Unit’s planes. Takimoto was now orphaned, waiting for assignment to another unit, and trying to convince himself that people at the sangakuheisha were not looking at him askance. He was visibly miserable with his situation.
For the next few hours, Tome, Reiko and Takimoto sat in the blacked out restaurant listening to the radio and drinking tea. When the 9 o’clock news broadcast started, Reiko remembered Miyakawa’s promise to return. No sooner had she opened the door only a few centimeters than a big firefly came buzzing into the room, almost as if it had been waiting outside to be let in. It made a few circuits of the room, lighting up the darkened space with urgent phosphorescent flashes before stopping on a crossbeam in the middle of the ceiling, where it began a steady rhythm of flashing.
The humans in the room stared at the insect in disbelief for a few moments before Tome blurted what everyone else wa
s already thinking.
“It’s Sabu-chan!”[217]
“Let’s sing,” the sergeant said, slowly rising to his feet.
The threesome stood together and began singing Dōki no Sakura. It was not long before they were all holding one another by the shoulders as big, hot tears rolled down their cheeks. When the song was finished, the firefly flashed once more, then flew back out the open door and into the night. It never came back.[218]
*****
Sergeant Takimoto was not the only tokkō pilot to sortie from Chiran who had to turn around and limp back to base with engine trouble. Through May and June, as the Okinawa campaign reached its crescendo, the number of planes sent forth from Kyūshū in subsequent Kikusui waves increased exponentially. So, too, did the number of tokkō pilots aborting missions due to reported mechanical problems, with engine trouble, faulty instrumentation and landing gear failing to retract being the most common complaints. Usually, inspection of the aircraft in question confirmed the malfunctions to be genuine, but instances of “imagined” problems or even pilot-induced vandalism/sabotage were also increasing. For Chiran Airbase HQ and the local kempeitai detachment, this was a very disturbing trend that would have to be dealt with before it spread through the ranks and – perhaps even more distressingly – had adverse effects on the careers of certain professional military officers when and if rumors began to go around that there was a potential cowards’ mutiny simmering in southern Kagoshima.
Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze Page 31
