Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

  To the credit of the tokkō corps (though a tragic credit that is), this trickle of passive resistance to self-immolation orders never became a flood. But even a trickle of poor discipline or nonconformity was beyond the level of acceptability for the Imperial Japanese Army. Pilots suspected of any untoward motivation behind their decisions to turn back to base during sorties were duly made examples of by the Chiran administration. Beatings, public humiliation and ostracism were the usual penalties for most first-time offenders, who were nonetheless given another chance to redeem themselves through subsequent sortie reassignment. For pilots considered the most hopeless and pathetic cases, however, waited the most dreaded punishment of all – orders for a solo, unescorted tokkō flight. A pilot given such an order was being doomed to almost certain interception by American CAP before ever getting anywhere near a target. Flying without escort, his lonely, meaningless death would go unwitnessed, uncredited and unrecorded. It would mean nothing less than a consignment to oblivion not only in body but in soul and honor as well.

  The Chiran sojourn of Second Lieutenant Wataru Kawasaki of the 51st Shinbu illustrates well what could happen when a tokkō pilot began to have doubts about his mission. On the morning of May 2, the nine Hayabusas of the 51st Shinbu left Akeno Airbase in Mie Prefecture bound for Chiran, where they were scheduled to do a one-night layover before their sortie for Okinawa at dawn the next day.[219] Led by their commander, Second Lieutenant Akio Motoki (IMA ’44), the formation was flying in the vicinity of Bofu in Yamaguchi Prefecture when Motoki’s plane suffered total engine failure and was forced to ditch in the Inland Sea. The rest of the 51st flew on to Chiran, where Air Ops decided that it would be best to wait for their commander to arrive in a new plane so that the unit could sortie together. However, it took considerably longer for Motoki to get a replacement aircraft than anyone at first expected. Hours of waiting soon turned to days, and days soon began pushing a week.

  During their virtually unprecedented eight-day layover at Chiran, the pilots of the 51st became regulars at the Tomiya Shokudō. One famous anecdote with its origins in this patronage is the story of Second Lieutenant Fumihiro Mitsuyama, who on the night of May 10 revealed to the astonishment of the Torihamas and his squadmates alike that his real name was Tak Kyong Hyong,[220] and that he was an ethnic Korean. He then proceeded to emphasize his point by regaling his gape-mouthed audience with an impromptu solo recital of Korean folksongs. This is yet another Tomiya Shokudō vignette that has entered the pantheon of modern day Japanese legend by being worked into the semi-fictional plotline of Hotaru.

  For Wataru Kawasaki, the most crucial development during this Chiran interlude was considerably more personal. At age thirty, Kawasaki was not only the granddaddy of the 51st Shinbu, he was in fact one of the oldest pilots ever assigned to tokkō. A teaching professional with nearly eight years of classroom experience after graduating from Nihon University Teacher’s College, he was also recently married. His outlook on life was considerably different from that of his high-teen and low-twentysomething fellow pilots, and worlds apart from his IMA grad unit commander. It had been obvious from the earliest days after the formation of the 51st that he was its least gung-ho member.

  What finally – and fatally – cemented his mutually recognized status as the black sheep of the unit was the unannounced appearance of his wife Tsuneko at the Tomiya Shokudō on the afternoon of May 8.[221] With Tome’s thoughtful assistance, Tsuneko Kawasaki was able to find lodging at a local inn, where she made an open-ended booking for a room, intending to stay until her husband’s sortie. However, she may have been just as surprised as Lieutenant Kawasaki’s squadmates were when her husband exercised his choice of billets privileges as a commissioned officer and opted to spend his nights at the inn with his wife instead of at the sangakuheisha compound with his comrades. The sleeping arrangements raised eyebrows both inside and outside of the base gates.

  After three nights of what must have been a surreal emotional mélange of newlywed bliss and wrenching grief, the couple’s moment of truth arrived in the wee hours of May 11, when the pilots of the 51st headed toward the flight line through a gauntlet of Chiran ground staff, pilots’ family members, a white aproned official send-off detachment from the Defense Women’s Association headed by Tome Torihama, and, most conspicuously, a loudly weeping Tsuneko Kawasaki.[222] The subsequent send-off was one of the most cathartic anyone at the base could remember witnessing, climaxing with Mrs. Kawasaki’s fainting on the flight line as her husband’s plane took off. Tome caught her before she could hit the ground, and escorted her back to town.

  In no emotional state to endure a grueling day of train rides and interminable waiting, Mrs. Kawasaki decided to stay one more day to compose herself and gather the strength she would need for her return journey. As things turned out, she could have gone ahead and booked the room for the rest of the month, because that was how long she would end up staying in it. Her husband showed up at her room that evening with a hangdog look, mumbling something about engine trouble. The scene would be repeated twice more before the lieutenant – apparently no longer able to bear the stress of the abuse he was suffering at the base every day, his own family’s rejection of his new bride and, perhaps most critically, the shame of being unable to face death on a tokkō mission – crashed his Hayabusa into a railroad embankment a stone’s throw from his family’s Kagoshima home during a “test flight” his superiors at the base had insisted he make before being sent out on his unprecedented fourth sortie attempt.

  Although Wataru Kawasaki’s case was notorious, it was not isolated. Army Ministry memoranda at the time pointed out the dangers of demoralization and loss of willingness to die posed by the ready availability of worldly pleasures for tokkō pilots in the final days before their sorties.[223] And as instances of aborted tokkō sorties from the local airbase due to purported aircraft malfunctions increased, so did the tenacity and frequency of insidious rumors beginning to make the rounds in Chiran claiming to explain this rash of tokkō aircraft “malfunctions” as a matter of youthful indiscretions and overactive hormones. The head of the local kempeitai detachment shared these suspicions, and was eager to find out whether or not a sudden reaffirmation of the physical joys of living on the part of some of the tokkō boys might be responsible for all these “engine failures” and “landing gear troubles” that planes out of Chiran were having of late. He was well abreast of reports of rampant and improper fraternization – singing, game-playing and the like – between the pilots and the Nadeshiko Unit when the girls were helping around the sangakuheisha. And of course, he was fully aware of the constant stream of tokkō pilots back and forth from Tomiya Shokudō every night, and that the owner’s daughter Reiko Torihama had been one of the Nadeshiko Unit volunteers. In fact, she and another girl had been harrassed by the kempeitai before over suspicions of excessive fraternization with the tokkō pilots.[224] Who knew what was going on at the Tomiya Shokudō, other than pilots being fed past nine PM in violation of army regulations?

  Harassing teenage schoolgirls was bad enough, but when the kempeitai arrested Tome Torihama to get to the bottom of things once and for all, they crossed a line they should not have. Busting Tome in 1945 Chiran was about as appreciated a move as mugging Rosa Parks or Mother Theresa would be in a more contemporary context. When Reiko ran back to the Tomiya Shokudō and threw open the front door to announce what had happened to her mother to a room full of tokkō pilots, the young fliers immediately formed a posse and swaggered down to the kempeitai HQ. Tome was successfully rescued, but not before suffering a few haymakers to the jaw at the hands of her secret police tormentors and getting her face stomped into the floor by their knee-high riding boots. The scars on her head were a lifelong reminder of that night’s ordeal, but they were also a source of great personal pride for her. In her twilight years, she referred to them as her “badge of honor.”[225]

  Tome’s beating at the hands of the military police was a bad beginning for a s
ummer that only got worse as a slew of pestilence and privations was visited upon the town. The fall of Okinawa in late June eliminated the relevance of tokkō sorties from Chiran and the last one was flown on July 19.[226] Even so, the air raids did not let up, and periodic drops of American propaganda leaflets started rumors that an invasion was scheduled for the area. Reiko-san still has one the pamphlets, which was dropped in early August over the nursing school in Kawanabe she was attending with most of the other Nadeshiko Unit girls. Bearing the enigmatic slogan “An Emotionally Moving Handshake” (kandō suru akushu) it shows an American soldier and a Russian counterpart as looming, grinning colossi, shaking hands from opposite sides of the globe directly over an insignificantly small Japan.[227] On the back of the sheet is a verbose but rather amateurishly written surrender plea and a promise of fair treatment after the occupation. An explosively ominous coda to the innocuous pamphlets was added a few days later when a daylight raid by about thirty B-29s destroyed houses and killed residents on the outskirts of Chiran on August 12.[228] Yet again, the airbase failed to put up a single interceptor to try to stop the Americans.

  How confident these Americans are, Reiko-san recalls thinking at the time. The fighting is not even over but they are already making plans for what to do after they win…While she had to admit that the Americans probably had every reason to be confident, she still could neither come to terms with the notion that Japan was going to lose nor give up on the hope that Japan would somehow win in the end. She continued to believe that if things got rough, a miracle would save the day. Reiko and her classmates had been taught to believe in the invincibility of Japan practically since toddler age, and the myth died hard.

  “Our teachers told us that the Kami-Kaze would blow, just like in olden times,” Fusako Mori says. “It would flip over the enemies’ ships and sweep them away.”

  By mid-August,[229] living in Chiran without losing one’s sanity required the patience of Job. Concurrent with the invasion panic gripping its residents, an epidemic of dysentery hit the town during rainy season in late June and early July, then lingered throughout the rest of the summer. Originating on the base, the sickness soon laid low so many army personnel that the base infirmary could not handle the volume of patients anymore and its doctors had to requisition floor space at the local elementary school to use as a makeshift hospital ward. The situation was exacerbated by the army doctors’ refusal to diagnose the disease as dysentery – perhaps out of shame that it had originated on their watch at the base – instead insisting on calling it “intestinal catarrh.”[230] Less than vigorous hygiene standards spread contamination through soiled blankets and the hands of local volunteer nurses hand-spooning gruel and water to the afflicted. As the rainy season in Chiran is also rice-planting time, the traditional use of untreated human waste as paddy fertilizer no doubt accelerated the spread of the disease amongst the townspeople.

  At noon on August 15, when the voluntary nurse corps trainees at Kawanabe were formed up into platoons in front of the administration office to listen to “a special radio broadcast,” many of the girls were either in the early or recovering stages of the disease and could barely stand. The Emperor was going to address the nation on a matter of great importance. Most of the girls – as well as most of the other millions of Japanese formed up in front of radios around the empire at this very moment – expected to hear exhortations from His Majesty to fight on to the end.

  At the strike of twelve, a radio was placed in the window of the administration office and cranked to full volume while the girls stood at as rigid a position of attention as they could manage. The Emperor’s high, warbling voice was barely audible through the terrible static of the broadcast, and the ancient formal court Japanese he used made the message even more cryptic. Somehow, though, almost by a chain-reaction osmosis of whispers and exchanged glances, the gist of the message spread through the formation. As the reality of what they were hearing sunk in, another chain-reaction swept through the company and the girls began crying. Some did so with dignity, heads lowered and pigtails bobbing as they quietly wept and wiped their eyes, but other girls fell prostrate on the ground, sobbing loudly and pounding the dust with their fists.

  After the long spell of wailing in the dust subsided to sniffles, the girls were marched back to their barracks by the widely despised Miss Ueno, their teacher and chaperone from Chiran Girls’ HS during the nurse training course. Before being dismissed, the girls were told to prepare their luggage for their return home. They were still sniffling and packing their bags by their bunkbeds a few minutes later when Miss Ueno poked her head in the doorway.

  “Listen carefully,” she said in her characteristic crow-like squawk. “I want you to go home in pairs, and stay off the main roads, because the Americans might be landing paratroopers at Chiran Airfield any minute now. If you meet any Americans on your way home, make sure you kill yourselves by biting your tongues off before the soldiers have a chance to rape and murder you.”

  As Miss Ueno slammed the door and stomped off to go about her business, the barracks went berserk. What had been quiet sniffling a moment before was now hysterical, loud screaming. Many of the girls hugged each other, shivering in fear. Others, like Reiko, began pounding and kicking the walls and bunks, lashing out at anything but each other in their panic and rage. Some windowpanes were broken in the pandemonium.

  When they had gathered enough wits among themselves to halfway function again, Reiko and other friends from Chiran began their long walk home, using old farmer footpaths through mountain forests as much as possible to avoid the main roads. The girls arrived to find the town’s residents making panicked preparations to follow their primordial peasant instincts by literally heading for the hills.

  Her own family was no different, and with a couple of other neighboring families, they loaded up a push cart with provisions and blankets and went up into the mountains bordering the northeast edge of town to hide in a farmer friend’s shed. The party of twenty or so townspeople spent interminably long days in their mountain hideaway keeping their eyes peeled on the horizon for vehicle movement from the south while the menfolk, including Reiko’s father Shigekazu, made occasional foraging forays into the ghost town by nightfall. Along with whatever meager foodstuffs they could scrounge, the men brought back with them the latest scuttlebutt from the diehard holdouts still in Chiran proper, and each whopper was more outrageous than the next: “American paratroopers have occupied the airfield” – “The mayor has committed suicide” – “The Emperor has committed harakiri.” Rumor and fear mongering ran rife without anyone having laid so much as an eye on any Americans. In fact, no one had even seen or heard any planes overhead. Eventually, terrified anticipation downgraded to bored waiting, and after a week of eating nuts and berries in the hills and scaring one another half out of their wits, the families finally decided it was safe to go home.

  Despite the privations and pain of the war, there had been great disappointment and sadness for the townspeople when the surrender was broadcast. If anyone had experienced a sense of relief over the news, any expression of this emotion was either withheld out of respect for the recent dead or lost in the immediate post-broadcast pandemonium. As the bad drunk of the days after August 15 subsided into the hangover of a defeated morning-after Japan, the residents of Chiran came down off the mountains.

  With some semblance of a community functioning in town again, new waves of rumors started making the rounds. The more pessimistic told of coming famine and pestilence, or even genocidal fogs of poison gas dropped from the skies. Not everyone bought into this doom-and-gloom, but few doubted that at the very least the townspeople would have to endure witch hunts at the hands of American occupiers looking for wartime authority figures and, most likely, civilian collaborators with the tokkō program. Of course, if this last fear turned out to be legitimate, then nobody had more reason to fear retribution from Yanks bent on revenge than the Torihama family. Reiko and others became convinced t
hat Tome would be executed for all she had done for the boy-pilots from the airbase during the war. There were some sincere and thoughtful suggestions by friends and neighbors that Tome make a run for it and come back when everything had blown over, but she ignored them, determined to hold her ground and take whatever she had coming. In the meantime, she planned to do whatever she could to get back some kind of a life, and she suggested that everyone else get about doing the same.

  22 A Peaceful VillageAs show-stopping an entrance as it would have been, the Americans never got around to parachuting into Chiran. Rumors about what was in store for the town, however, continued unabated for months. These reached a peak in late November when prefectural authorities advised the township that a special unit of American marines – veterans of Saipan and Okinawa and probably to-the-bone Jap-haters – were coming to dismantle the army airbase facilities in a few weeks. The people of Chiran had worshipped the tokkō pilots as young gods, and extended every possible courtesy and cooperation to their efforts and those of the army air corps authorities. Thus, the thinking went, it was entirely reasonable to expect that the Americans, having suffered considerably under the attacks, would be coming to Chiran with revenge and mayhem as second and third agenda items during their cleanup mission.

  In the final days before the American arrival, the rumor mill went into overdrive – and the worst offenders were to be found in town hall, from whence an official advisory was issued suggesting that all the nubile young women in the village cut their hair to look like boys and do everything short of irreparable disfigurement to make themselves as physically unattractive as possible. As many households prepared baggage for yet another evacuation, the majority of the town’s young women and girls chose to follow the advisory, chopping their hair in gender-bending bobs and dirtying their clothes and faces with charcoal dust – anything to avert the eyes (and thus, it was hoped, the lust) of the feared Americans.[231] Reiko, taking measures one step further, hid in the attic of the Tomiya Shokudō for two weeks until her mother assured her that it was safe to return to civilization.