Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

  In Naoko’s case, a three-year apprenticeship as a Nihonbashi dancing girl was not going to clear the army’s spousal qualification criteria. Moreover, she had barely cracked a book of any kind in years and had little or no math or science background, so any plan of action involving an entrance examination was doomed from the start. Of course, even in the outside chance that Naoko could pass an entrance exam, the idea of a twenty-year-old enrolling in junior high for a three-year-stint with prepubescent classmates was preposterous. But Shirō – ever the hustling inventor – was dogged in his pursuit of pragmatic alternatives. After some inquiries and spadework, he found a Ministry of Education-accredited sewing academy[251] near Kōzu that was willing – for a price – to slip Naoko into the next senior class so that she could graduate in March 1945. Shirō sealed the deal with a handshake and an elegant grandfather clock for the school auditorium. Naoko – at least on paper – was going to be a qualified seamstress.

  Naoko was by heart and trade a dancer, and knew and cared about as much for sewing as she did for integral calculus. But these motivational concerns became moot when the entire student body was mobilized along with most of the other young women in the Kōzu area for war volunteer work in a nearby naval provisions plant in the fall of 1944. Naoko got her seamstress license on schedule the following March while being unable to as much as darn a sock, but she had never bought into the pretense that these credentials were the goal of her “education” in the first place. She had a diploma and was thus now qualified to marry Akio. Mission accomplished. While waiting for Akio’s next visit home, Naoko worked seven days a week with her classmates and neighbors compressing and canning potato starch and rice for the navy.

  Akio, in the meantime, had undergone a topsy-turvy first year as a commissioned officer. Although he had originally branched aviation while at IMA, his biological mother – whom he had neither seen nor heard from for the better part of two decades – suddenly reappeared in his life during his second year at the academy and pulled strings to get him branched armor, a posting she evidently felt offered her son a more reassuring life-expectancy than an assignment as a fighter pilot[252]. Heartbroken, Akio nevertheless pushed on with his tank training, and was looking at a post-Armor Officer’s Basic Course assignment to Manchuria when the army announced a last-minute call to Class of ’44 IMA grads for aviation branch volunteers. Akio jumped at this chance to re-alter his destiny, and this go around, the timing left no opening for his mother to pull any more strings behind his back. He was going to be a pilot, and that was that.

  Akio was accepted into a special IMA grad-only Tokubetsu Sōjū Minarai Shikan (Tokusō) course in the fall of 1944, but by the time he had gotten his wings, virtually the only assignments left for newly army pilots were to tokkō units. In a bitter twist of irony, his mother’s interference in his career – resulting in the delay of his flight training – had virtually guaranteed such an assignment. If Akio had been branched as originally scheduled, he could have at least had an outside chance of being assigned to a regular unit, or even ending up on the same flight instructor early career track that saved the life of his IMA classmate Iwao Fukagawa.

  ****

  Kōzu was rainy and windy on the night of Tuesday, April 9, 1945. Shirō – now home permanently to mind the nail factory after losing all of his Southeast Asia properties to the shifting fortunes of war – was eating a late supper with Yumi and Naoko in the tatami-floored living room when the low, mournful moan of Kōzu’s air raid siren floated up from town. No aircraft engines could be heard, but blackout rules were blackout rules, so the lights were turned off and the curtains drawn. The meal was finished in a meditative silence by the light of a single candle. Shirō drank shōchu and smoked cigarettes in the flickering shadows while Yumi and Naoko cleared the dishes.

  Around ten o’clock, the threesome heard the crunch of heavy, tired footfalls outside on the gravel walkway leading to the house. Naoko assumed it was the old man who volunteered as the local air warden making his usual blackout rounds. A moment later, there was a knock at the entrance, followed by the rattling sound of the wood and glass door being slid open. Then there was a male voice – but instead of the old air warden giving his customary “All clear,” it was a young man’s voice saying “Tadaima.” (“I’m home”).

  Akio was back for the first time in many months, and the visit was utterly unexpected. But happy though the family members may have been, expressions of emotion were restrained, as is the Japanese custom in such occasions. There were no bear hugs and kissed cheeks, and if the women felt compelled to weep, this was kept to polite sniffles and a kimono sleeve dab or two to the eyes. Shirō may have allowed himself a slap on his stepson’s shoulder before sending him upstairs to change out of his wet uniform and into a nice dry yukata robe from the wardrobe closet.

  When Akio finished washing up and changing, he joined the rest of the family in the living room. Shirō growled for Yumi to break out the last of the good saké. After the “Welcome home” toast and a pregnant pause, Akio filled the family in on the particulars of his recent activities, speaking slowly and methodically in his soft, low voice. His monologue ended with the news that he had been given command of a tokkō Shinbu unit.

  The mood around the table took an understandable nosedive after this revelation. Conversation tapered off to a sporadic sprinkling of short utterance/response couplets, falling into long silences when everyone ran out of things to say. Again, there was no excessive expression of emotion here. Given the unspoken understanding that Akio had no choice but to follow his orders, the family could do nothing but accept his fate stoically. Tears or laments or anger at this point would have been in bad taste.

  During one of the longer lulls of uncomfortable silence, Akio excused himself, then tugged Naoko’s sleeve for her to follow him out of the room.

  “Akio told me that, given his tokkō assignment, he wasn’t going to hold me to my marriage promise any longer,” Naoko-san recalls of their conversation in the pitch black hallway that night. “But I said I wasn’t having any of that, and that a promise is a promise.”

  Akio made a show of standing his ground, but his resistance was half-hearted, and he folded after a brief, whispered argument in the shadows. The couple returned to the living room and announced their intentions to Shirō and Yumi.

  “Sonna baka na! (“That’s out of the question!”),” Yumi cried when the youngsters finished their pitch. She bolted from the room with muffled sobs and a slammed door.

  Shirō, however, nodded slowly, with weighty solemnity, and not without a hint of satisfied fatherly pride flickering around the corners of his mouth. He ordered Yumi to come back at once, and to bring a pair of lacquerware saucers. They were going to hold a wedding ceremony right here and now.

  The town air raid siren started up again as the saké was poured, providing an eerie accompaniment to Shirō’s recitation of the ancient Takasagoya – a nagauta traditionally performed a capella at Japanese weddings by fathers sending daughters off into marriage. Shirō held his notes long and loud, but his voice began to break with emotion in the last stanzas, and by the time he finished, all four people in the room were sobbing aloud. It was the first time Naoko had seen either of the men cry.

  The newlyweds drained their saucer cups, apologized to their respective parents for a lifetime of worries and troubles their upbringing had caused, then without further ado, retired for the evening to Naoko’s bedroom.

  The household was up at dawn the next day to make sure Akio had everything ready for his trip. Although everyone tried to keep up the appearance of normalcy, the mood around the breakfast table was tense. Toward the end of the meal, Akio – already dressed in his crisp khakis – tried to lighten things up.

  “We can’t fly if the weather is bad,” he said. “I’ll be back whenever it rains.”

  Everyone else nodded behind their raised teacups, avoiding eye contact, perhaps harboring some slim hope that this was true while doing their be
st to pretend it was.

  After the meal, Akio excused himself and walked out into the spacious backyard alone. As Yumi and Naoko cleared the table, Shirō stood at the kitchen window, watching his son pace back and forth, occasionally stopping to touch a flower or stare off into the hills behind the house.

  “He’s saying good-bye to the place,” Shirō muttered. “He knows he’s not coming back.”

  Akio continued his garden meditation for nearly an hour before coming back into the house and announcing his imminent departure. He shouldered his gear and made his final farewells to Shirō and Yumi while Naoko polished his shoes in the foyer.

  “Can I walk you to the station?” Naoko asked, looking up from her chore.

  “Ah,” Akio replied, addressing his wife with the bluntest possible affirmative in the Japanese lexicon – an utterance just this side of a grunt. If anyone doubted the legitimacy of the previous night’s nuptials, no one hearing the tone of voice Akio used towards his new bride would doubt it this morning. He was now a traditional Japanese husband, through and through.

  *****

  “It was the first word he said to me all morning,” Naoko remembers. “And one of the last. He made me walk three steps behind him all the way to the station. Just like a samurai wife in old days. He had nothing to say while we walked, either. A few times I thought I saw him getting ready to say something, but he never did. There were things I wanted to say, too, but couldn’t. The timing just didn’t feel right, and I was afraid of saying something I would regret…Now, of course, I regret having not said anything.”

  When they reached the station, Akio showed his high priority military orders to the clerk at the ticket window, paid for his fare, then hid the ticket with his hand so Naoko could not read the destination. Naoko asked anyway, but Akio refused to divulge any information about where he was going.

  “It’s none of your business,” Akio replied when Naoko pressed.

  Just as he had flatly refused any histrionics upon his welcome home the night before, he was not about to indulge in any this morning for his farewell. An eastbound train pulled into the station with a long whistle, and Akio stalked off toward the ticket gate with his back to Naoko.

  “Sayonara,” he said over his shoulder. “Now go home.”

  Akio got on the train and took a seat by the window. He kept his gaze fixed straight ahead as the train hissed to life again and clacked away in the direction of Tokyo.

  26 VisitorsFor the next two months, the Motokis kept their ears open for heavy footfalls on the gravel walkway, and stayed up until the last train pulled out of Kōzu Station every night. Even then, they left the gate and front door to the house open on the off-chance that Akio might come in at some wee hour of the morning. In line with Akio’s promise to come home when bad weather prevented flying, rain always brought on the most desperate expectations, with a single drop of precipitation never failing to send Yumi and Naoko scrambling to scrape together every morsel they could to put a decent welcome home meal on the table. But come rain or shine, night or day, there was no sign of Akio. Not even a letter or postcard.

  In addition to fretting over the unknown fate of her young husband, Naoko had a new major complication in her life. She missed her June period, which should have come the first week of the month. She had always been, in her own words, “as regular as clockwork,” and missing a cycle – or even being late – had never happened to her before. Another clue to the nature of her condition was that the steaming rice and starch smells at work were beginning to sour her stomach every morning, and that had never happened before, either.

  But was that possible, Naoko thought. In one night?

  Fumi was of little or no help in the way of constructive family planning consultation, having no experience herself in such matters. But the friendly middle-aged woman who ran the sewing academy dormitory had a prodigious brood of kids, and she was easy to approach for advice. After hearing a tactfully handled explanation of the details, the headmistress recommended seeing a doctor at once, suggesting a trip post haste to Odawara, the nearest town big enough to boast of an obstetrician. Yumi went along for the ride the next day, and the two returned to the Kōzu house/nail factory that afternoon with the news that Naoko was pregnant.

  Shirō was beside himself with joy, and he made no secret of his desire that the baby would be a male child, for such an eventuality would mean that the Motoki line would go on. Naoko had not seen Shirō this happy since Akio’s acceptance letter from the IMA arrived four years earlier. The happiness was infectious, and even Yumi – who had always been less than thrilled about her stepdaughter’s “marriage” – could not help but be caught up in the emotion of the moment. Shirō was on cloud nine, and Yumi was happy about seeing him like this, regardless of how she truly felt about the scheduled household member addition. In the meantime, no one thought to ask Naoko what she thought about it all, although much doting attention was devoted to her daily physical condition. The future of the House of Motoki, after all, was now riding on her narrow but sturdy shoulders.

  One particularly salient point of unpleasantness during this otherwise upbeat season was the frustrating inability of anyone in the house to contact Akio with the happy news. Any inquiry into his whereabouts brought on a maddening bureaucratic runaround – or just a slammed receiver on the other end of the phone line – from every army official they contacted. Even Shirō’s IMA credentials were not enough to cut through all the red tape. But despite the situation, no one in the house suspected – or at least voiced their suspicions – that there may have been reasons other than security concerns behind the army’s taciturnity. Alternative explanations, although more than merely plausible, were also utterly unthinkable.

  One steamy afternoon in mid-June, a slightly worse-for-wear, bushy-haired civilian in his late thirties visited the Kōzu house. He introduced himself as Toshirō Takagi – a Nichiei cameraman by trade. He had just come back to the Tokyo area from a town in Kyūshū named Chiran. In case the family had not read about it in the papers, it was a big tokkō base. Takagi had met Akio there, and Akio had given him some items to bring back to the house.

  “Here they are,” Takagi said, pulling a parcel wrapped in furōshiki batik-dyed cloth from his shoulder bag.

  Shirō had come into the house from the factory out back when he heard the visitor arrive, and now peered over Yumi’s and Naoko’s shoulders as the women accepted the parcel with deep bows of respectful gratitude.

  “Waza waza tōi tokoro kara…,” Yumi said, expressing her sincere – if mildly perturbed – thanks for Takagi to make the effort of journeying so long and from so far away to hand deliver the parcel. “Won’t you stay for tea?”

  “Please don’t go to the trouble,” Takagi said, graciously refusing the offer, as Japanese protocol demanded. “I’m just here to deliver the package, and if possible, to light an incense stick for your son.”

  Shirō, Yumi and Naoko froze to the spot, ashen-faced. Sixty years later, Naoko-san would recall of that moment that she experienced a sensation of falling – as if a fathomless chasm had suddenly appeared under her feet to send her plummeting through cold, black space.

  Taken aback by the abrupt emotional temperature drop in the foyer, Takagi looked up from the entranceway with a puzzled expression for a moment before a flash of horrified realization crossed his face.

  “Oh no,” he said. “What have I done?…You haven’t been told yet, have you? The army hasn’t contacted you. Please forgive me…”

  After a few moments of confusion, heartbreaking confirmations and overall excrutiating discomfort for all concerned, Takagi was welcomed into the house to a place of honor in the living room, where he proceeded to tell the family about Chiran, the 51st Shinbu and Akio’s last hours on earth. Akio’s furōshiki-bound package was unwrapped with loving care and its contents were passed around and examined: there was a small box containing clippings of Akio’s hair and fingernails, and another containing the epaulets and
collar tabs from his dress uniform. These items were to be used in lieu of his body for funerary purposes. The parcel also contained Akio’s isho[253] warrior’s farewell in flowery, formal language. This was addressed to Shirō.

  Takagi told everyone that he actually had several more letter-delivery stops to make in Kōzu and other northern Kanagawa Prefecture towns today. Many of the tokkō pilots at Chiran had given over their isho for him to hand-deliver instead of trusting the letters to army mail. As Takagi explained, it was a way to slip in more personal and frank sentiment that might otherwise fall victim to an army censor’s black fat-tipped pen. The higher-ups preferred the pilots’ letters to stick to hackneyed writing styles, and tended to savage – or even demand total rewrites – of anything that strayed from the narrow selection of approved formats.

  Almost as an afterthought, Takagi handed Naoko a note on simple stationery with her name written on the outside fold. She slipped the note into her kimono lapel and began planning an escape from the parlor to read it. She knew she would not be able to do so without breaking down and sobbing, for it was all she could do to keep her composure as things were. Shirō told Naoko often in recent months that, as an army wife, she was now forbidden to cry in front of other people. “If you have to cry, save it for when you’re home alone, out of sight,” he always said. Luckily, Takagi proved to be a thirsty guest, so this gave Naoko a chance to excuse herself and run back to the kitchen for a crying jag on the pretext of putting more water on to boil for another pot of tea. It was a tactic she would employ several times before the visit was over.

  Once in the privacy of the kitchen, Naoko opened the note. One thing she noticed immediately was that here Akio addressed her simply as “Naoko,” and not as “Naoko-dono,” the highly formal honorific he had always used when addressing her directly. Coming from an extremely formal Japanese gentleman like Akio, the dropped honorific implied a deep emotional intimacy it would have been entirely out-of-character for him to ever express to his bride – at least verbally –in person. Naoko was profoundly moved by the gesture, and hot tears rolled down her cheeks as she read the rest of the note: