Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

  Late in 1934, Shirō felt secure enough to support his adopted son Akio[248], who at the age of ten was approaching the all-important entrance examination years that would in large part determine his path and status as an adult in Japanese society. Leaving operations at the nail factory in the hands of subordinates for a week, Shirō made a quick trip to Beijing to fetch Akio from the uncaring hands of his estranged wife Kiyoto, who was all too happy to wish the boy good riddance. She had her own life in the Chinese capital, comfortably set up as a self-proclaimed authority on haute Japanese culture for the expat community there, and had better things to do with her time than to look after a separated husband’s adopted nephew. The only tears shed for Akio’s departure were by the wrinkled old Chinese amahs and wet nurse hangers-on who had raised the child since he was a toddler.

  Safely back in Tokyo, Shirō and Akio now had the closest thing to a real family either had ever had, and establishing a relationship was unsure going for both of them. A live-in maid took care of the hands-on functions of running the house, but the emotional bonding that makes a house a household was slow in coming, if it can be said to have ever really come at all.

  “Watching father and son together, you got the impression that Shirō was not really sure how to treat the boy,” Naoko recalls. “So I guess he just fell back on what was natural for him. He treated him like a soldier.”

  Likewise, the adjustment was difficult for Akio as well. Making the transition from pampered Beijing luxury to Shirō’s simulated IJA boot camp regimen must have been a rude awakening for the gentle and introverted boy. Shirō laid out a detailed “chip off the old block” life plan for his nephew with no consideration whatsoever for the boy’s promising artistic and literary talents (which had attained a prodigious flowering during his long years in Beijing) or for his temperament, which was the antithesis of Shirō’s charismatic narcissism and merciless competitiveness. Nevertheless, there was never the slightest hint of rebellion on Akio’s part against his stepfather. The boy made it his purpose in life from then on to do everything he could to make his guardian proud of him, and he never looked back.

  The first step in Shirō’s master plan for Akio’s climb to success was for the boy to win acceptance to Seijō Gakuen Junior High School[249], a Tokyo prep school catering to children of the capital’s elite. After completing a course of studies geared toward helping students pass rigorous college entrance examinations, its graduates usually went on to attend the top schools in the country, universities like Tokyo, Kyoto, Waseda or Keiō. A considerable number of boys also opted for the service academies. Either track – civilian or military – virtually guaranteed a lifetime of power and status, and the network of friends and personal connections that a Seijō graduate formed during his time at the school would serve him well at every stage of a career that inevitably led to the halls of Japanese political, military or financial power.

  The next step called for Akio to attend the IMA. Shirō would not let his stepson end up hustling around the fringes of power with the Kokuryūkai, rich one day, living hand-to-mouth and dodging creditors the next. Akio was going to stay the straight and skinny, burn up the course and shoot into the highest stratum of the nation’s military-industrial complex to accomplish all the things Shirō should have done with his life but did not. It was too late for Shirō to ever hope to bask in his own glory, but there was still plenty of time to ensure that he would someday bask in Akio’s.

  *****

  The year 1935 saw a great deal of changes for the two-member family of Shirō and Akio Motoki. After a rigorous and expensive preparatory course of study with private tutors, Akio passed the entrance exam to Seijō Gakuen, matriculating in the spring of that year. He was doing well in his studies, his art and literary talents had taken a favorable turn toward model warplane building and fantasies of military glory, and he was also turning out to be a fine athlete – his sprouting, lanky height helping him to make a valuable contribution to the Seijō basketball team. Shirō couldn’t have been more pleased with his nephew’s development, nor with the progress of his business venture. The nail factory was chugging along nicely, and as icing on that financial cake, licensed production by big manufacturers was bringing in royalties hand over fist. Shirō was not just doing well – he was flush.

  He was not, however, completely free and clear of obligations. The Kwantung Army and Manchurian rōnin [250] connections he had called upon to help set up his business worked both ways. Now that Shirō was liquid, it was payback time, and he was beginning to attract hangers-on and moochers like a shark attracts scrap feeders. His house was always busy with various shady visitors and shakedown artists – characters in long capes on the lam from the cops or hitmen from other gangs; scarfaced scowlers who wore leather trenchcoats year round and always walked away from their meetings with attaché cases full of Shirō’s cash. Like it or not, Shirō had no choice but to pay up and shut up, because all of this activity was tied in with his most important obligation, i.e., his connection to rōnin patron saint Mitsuru Tōyama. The men who came around for handouts were, like Shirō himself, tied up somehow with Tōyama’s power and influence, and thus they could not be refused. The godfather’s beneficence, after all, was responsible for much of Shirō’s business success, and while Shirō may have been worthy of a few unsavory titles, he was not an ingrate.

  In late 1935, Tōyama invited Shirō to a fund-raiser at a high-class restaurant in Nakazu, Tokyo. During the party, he was seated next to a beautiful and slightly older woman, a wealthy and famous Nihonbashi restaurateur named Yumi Kaneko. By the end of the evening, he was so taken with her that he couldn’t think straight (the saké, of course, may have been accomplice to this condition). They left the party together, and during an incendiary romantic interlude of several days, they managed to squeeze in enough time to discuss several salient points regarding their relationship: firstly, they were madly, hopeless in love; secondly, it would be best for everyone concerned if Shirō and his stepson moved in to the Hamachō house; and last but not least, Lieutenant General Chojirō Onodera’s patronage had to come to an end.

  25 War CloudsIn February 1939, Yumi sold the Hamachō house and restaurant and went fifty-fifty with Shirō on a new house in Takadanobaba, a quiet Tokyo residential district far from Nihonbashi. As Takadanobaba real estate was much cheaper than Nihonbashi land, the sale of the Hamachō property left them with a sizable profit – in modern era American terms, probably something along the lines of several hundred thousand dollars. The couple promptly donated half of this windfall to the government. This was not a tax payment, but an actual out-and-out cash donation to a “patriotic” fundraising drive being conducted by the Army Ministry at the time. Given the strong pragmatic streak in each of their characters, Shirō and Yumi’s gesture would seem baffling if it were not for a series of seemingly unconnected developments that unfolded in the immediate wake of this generous endowment: the endless parade of grifters and shakedown artists that had marched through Shirō’s doorway for years stopped as suddenly as if a switch had been thrown. Moreover, there was no more of the low-key kempeitai harassment that had hounded Shirō since his return to Japan from Manchuria. At last, Shirō was out from under the cloud of government suspicion that had followed him since the Zhang Zuolin assassination in 1928.

  For Yumi, the move from Hamachō was much more than a simple change of address – it was a farewell to the karyūkai that had been her home and performing stage since birth. Giving up the restaurant meant giving up her last toehold in The Life and all the decades she had invested in creating her persona as a stellar fixture in the Nihonbashi scene. But now in her mid-forties, Yumi beginning to find it harder and harder to wake up every morning – well, sometimes afternoon now – after her nightly routine at the restaurant. And as painful as it was for her to admit, all she had to do was to stand in front of a mirror to see that there had been exterior changes as well. While she was too busy having fun to notice, someone or something ha
d sneaked up on her to put lines on her brow and a reed in her laugh, and the willowy teenage beauty and toast of the town was suddenly just another good-looking but hustle-wearied middle aged woman working the capital’s kicks and power game to keep her kimono collection up to date and the creditors paid off. There were hundreds of such women in Tokyo.

  Although her prodigious alcohol consumption would hardly be slowed by her retirement, Yumi would never dance or pour a drink for another paying customer again. It was time to put all of that behind her and get on with her new life. Time to molt. Thirty years in the limelight were over, but she could learn to live with that. She had money and relative security, she was in love, and she had pulled off what was generally considered an impossible dream for an old Nihonbashi girl – a free and clear break from her past.

  *****

  By early 1941, Shirō and Yumi had been under the same roof for over five years, with Naoko tossed into the complicated arrangement as a full-time member of this common law “family” since the end of her buyō apprenticeship two years earlier. Akio, however, was now out of the house, having been accepted at the IMA in fulfillment of the last major phase of Shirō’s master plan for the course of his life. Shirō could not have been happier about this, and was walking on air for weeks after the acceptance letter came through.

  Shirō had other reasons to believe that things were looking up. He was still doing well with his hardware enterprise, and he was fully aware of the opportunity implied in the warclouds that were beginning to gather on the eastern horizon. He could not help but be excited by the prospects of wild profits for a businessman savvy and bold enough to grab up his share of the lucrative military and naval contracts in the works. After hearing from friends in the Navy Ministry grapevine that there was going to be a need for extensive naval dry-dock and other anchorage facilities in the Borneo/Lingga Roads area in the Southwest Pacific “before the year was out,” Shirō planned a trip to the region to scout out potential investment opportunities. One look at a map was enough to know that, with its proximity to oil and other strategic material-rich British and Dutch colonial holdings in Singapore and Indonesia, the area was sure to be a major naval thoroughfare once the shooting started. If Shirō played his cards right, he could make a fortune, but his financial portfolio – impressive as it was – was still not enough to provide the kind of pump-priming scratch such major heavy industrial investments would require.

  Shirō’s solution to his wherewithal conundrum was to find himself a well-off silent partner, pick up stakes and move to Southeast Asia in the spring of 1941. Yumi would only see Shirō sporadically through the war years, but whenever he darkened their Tokyo doorway, she let him in, no questions asked. She had long since accepted that in taking up with Shirō, she bought into the whole package – warts and all.

  While Shirō the businessman was excited about the profits to be made in coming months and years, Shirō the old mercenary knew even before the war started that it bordered on the suicidal in terms of Japan’s chances for success (or lack thereof). Naoko-san remembers vividly the excited conversation around the Takadanobaba dinner table on December 14, 1941, during one of Shirō’s infrequent visits back to Japan from the mainland. Tokyo was still abuzz from the electrifying radio and newspaper reports of the Pearl Harbor raid a week earlier, and no one was more excited than Akio, who was at the house for his weekly Sunday evening visit after a quick subway hop from the IMA campus. Yumi and Naoko tittered with praise and approval as he spoke about how he was itching to run off and get in a few licks against the Yankees and Brits while he still could, seeing as how Japan’s victory could not be much longer in coming.

  “You don’t actually think we’re going to win, do you?” Shirō said.

  The pronouncement started a brief three-on-one argument that Shirō swatted down with facts and common sense his opponents did not want to believe, but were nevertheless unable to refute. The rest of the evening passed in a gloomy pall until Akio left to make it back to the IMA for lights-out.

  Exactly five months later, on the afternoon of April 14, 1942, dun-brown twin-engine American bombers skimming the rooftops of downtown Tokyo emphasized Shirō’s prophecies with the resounding thuds of five-hundred-pound high explosive bombs. A few days later, a cable arrived from Singapore – Shirō wanted Yumi and Naoko out of town ASAP, and he told them to put the Takadanobaba house up for sale immediately, charging a reasonable price so it would go fast. Yumi found a new place in the fishing and tangerine-farming village of Kōzu, a stingy strip of pebbly soil and sand dune pinched between mountains and the Pacific Ocean about thirty kilometers southwest of the capital.

  For lifelong big city girls like Yumi and Naoko, evacuation to a burg like Kōzu was a sentence to purgatory, and they hated it immediately. While the low cost of living in the area meant that Shirō’s cash went a lot farther than it did in downtown Tokyo, there was nothing to spend it on here. And although the women’s status as members of a VIP household (Shirō had moved his nail factory and metallurgy lab to Kōzu several years earlier, and was a respected businessman in the area) meant they never had to wait on line at the village marketplace, they were never made to feel at home. The locals were as roughhewn and unwelcoming as the landscape from which their tightly-knit community sprang.

  While the move to Kōzu put a serious cramp on social life opportunities for Yumi and Naoko, the town’s nearby location to the IMA’s new Zama campus meant that the weekly tradition of Akio’s Sunday evening dinner visits would be preserved, and no one was happier about this than the young cadet himself. But it was not for Yumi’s homemade cooking that Akio counted the hours between visits home – it was for Yumi’s stepdaughter.

  Akio had been madly in love with Naoko since Shirō moved in with Yumi in 1935. Yumi – who after all had never given much motherly attention even to her own stepdaughter – was of course too caught up in Shirō and her own scene to pay much mind to Akio, who had to look elsewhere for doting female attention. In his case, he turned to Naoko. Given Akio’s upbringing in a mental and physical landscape dominated by the void left by his largely absentee stepfather, perhaps it was only natural that he latched on to Naoko like he did. During the six years the foursome spent under the same roof, he had followed her around like a lovesick puppy.

  Naoko – six months her admirer’s senior – never minded the attention, and in addition to getting an ego-boost out of the adoration, found Akio cute, in a boyish kind of way. She remembers him as being tall, lanky and long-necked even as a twelve-year-old. Although highly intelligent, he was also very naïve, with a non-confrontational, introspective personality. Always intensely focused on his own projects – usually studying or building balsa and paper airplane models – he never joked and rarely smiled or laughed. Often, his gullibility proved too tempting for Naoko’s playful (and occasionally mean) sense of humor to pass up.

  Soon after Shirō and his stepson moved into Yumi’s house, Akio wrote a gushing love letter to Naoko and slipped it under her bedroom door. That night at dinner – much to Akio’s disbelief and horror – Naoko pulled the letter out of her kimono sleeve and began waving it around with a big, triumphant grin on her face before proceeding to read its contents. After only a few lines of Naoko’s recitation, Shirō turned beet red and bolted upright. Reaching over the table, he grabbed Akio by the collar and pulled him into the adjoining living room, slamming the sliding door shut behind them. Naoko and Yumi heard a shrieked command of “Spread your legs!”, followed by the sound of punches and slapped flesh as Shirō launched into a long lecture about young men who wanted to go to the IMA, and how they did not fritter away their time and energies daydreaming about women.

  “If you like the girl, tell her like a man and do something about it,” Shirō shouted between smacks. “Do you think I’ve gone through all of this trouble to get you into good schools so you can sit around writing love letters like a sissy? Is that what you are?! Is that the kind of boy I have raised?!”

/>   After ten minutes or so, the living room door flew open, and Naoko found herself looking down Shirō’s stabbing index finger.

  “And don’t think you’re getting off easy,” Shirō shouted. “If Akio doesn’t get into the Academy, I’m holding YOU responsible, too.”

  As she heard Akio getting thrashed that night, Naoko’s maternal instincts kicked into overdrive – no doubt fueled by a guilty conscience – and she swore to herself that she would take care of the boy. From then on, although she was never really able to reciprocate his romantic sentiments, she was more inclined to let him indulge these feelings, and she responded to his affection if not with equivalent ardor then at least with a comforting and protective tenderness. In return, Akio’s love for her only grew as the years passed. From his mid-teens, he often broached the subject of marriage. Naoko at first took this as some sort of joke, but the pledges of undying affection and gushing loveletters continued even after Akio’s acceptance to the IMA, and she gradually realized he was serious. One day during his graduation leave in 1944, Akio proposed to Naoko while the couple strolled by the Kōzu seaside. But this time, instead of laughing off the subject as she always did, she accepted.

  “He was going off to war,” Naoko-san tells me. “Under the circumstances, I thought sending him off happy and fulfilled was the least I could do. I felt sorry for him.”

  While Yumi was less than enthusiastic about her stepdaughter’s plans, Shirō was delighted, and immediately set things in motion after steamrolling his partner’s objections. Bringing about the marriage, however, was not simply a matter of giving parental consent and hauling the young couple down to City Hall to exchange vows. There were social complications involved, but these had nothing to do with the mercurial familial arrangement in the Kōzu household, which actually raised few eyebrows under the mores of the era. Rather, the problem was with Naoko, and the Army Ministry regulation that said Regular Army commissioned officers could not marry women with less than three years of junior high school or equivalent education.