Naoko,
It has been a month since that night we spent together. Tomorrow morning, I will cross the River Sanzu (Japanese Buddhist equivalent of River Styx into Hades - author) and take as many Yankees with me as I can. I am sorry for any trouble I have ever given you. Please forgive my selfishness. It breaks my heart to think of the long life you will live that I won’t be able to share with you. Be strong and virtuous for me. Please take care of Father when I’m gone.
Akio
Naoko tucked the note away again, dried her tears with her sleeve and brought a tray with more tea and rice crackers out to the guest.
Toward the end of what turned out to be a rather lengthy visit, Takagi pulled a manila envelope from his bag containing at least a roll’s worth of posed publicity shots he had taken of the 51st Shinbu members on the afternoon of May 10th, just after Akio arrived at Chiran and scant hours from the unit’s combat sortie to Okinawa the next morning. Takagi said that reports of the action, as in the case of so many tokkō missions, were spotty, but at least one plane from Akio’s flight was confirmed to have hit an American destroyer. The family could take some comfort in believing that it was Akio’s plane that had gotten through the fighters and anti-aircraft fire to barrel in for the strike. And in any case, whether or not Akio’s mission had been successful, the family had every reason to be proud of him, knowing that he had gone out as a hero.
After Takagi left, Naoko went back to her room for the rest of the night to sob into her pillow and mourn in private. Shirō and Yumi also retired to their own separate rooms to grieve. Grief was private – almost something to be ashamed of (as it still is, in Japanese social mores) – and the agony of loss was a hell that had to be endured alone. Naoko has never forgotten the door-rattling moans and anguished invocations of Akio’s name that emanated from the thin walls of Shirō’s room into the wee hours before the old soldier finally cried and drank himself to sleep.
It was a long, abominable night for everyone in the house.
*****
With Akio’s death now confirmed, Naoko’s status as the soon-to-be-bearer of his sole offspring received obsessive attention in the Kōzu household. Having just lost a son, Shirō was going to do everything he could to prevent another tragedy in the family, and he was intensely concerned about Naoko’s physical safety. Accordingly, he was vehemently opposed to her expressed desire to continue working at the naval cannery, even though she had assured him that there was nothing to worry about, and that she would quit as soon as she felt even the slightest bit put out by her developing condition.
When pleading her case, Naoko was especially careful not to mention anything about the target-of-opportunity attack by American fighters on the plant several weeks earlier, when Hellcats – apparently using up remaining ammunition on their way home after the morning’s missions in the Tokyo area – strafed the cannery for a few minutes, started some minor fires and even shot at some girls unlucky enough to have been caught out in the open riding their bicycles to work when the first planes buzzed over. Fortunately, the girls had been swift enough to ditch their bikes and take cover as soon as the first rounds began kicking up dust, so no one was hurt, but it had been close. If Shirō had heard about it, he would have hit the roof, and that would have been the end of Naoko’s contribution to the war effort.
In late June, Kōzu proper was hit by an intense early morning Hellcat raid. The carrier borne fighters had been pesky for several weeks now, shooting up anything with a decent-sized smokestack, or taking potshots at the occasional vehicle driven by someone stupid enough to be out on the road in the daytime. But this raid was the first time Kōzu itself seemed to have been the primary target. Shirō surmised that the Americans had run out of more worthwhile targets farther up toward the capital and had sunk everything there was to be sunk in the nearby Yokohama navy yards, so they were ranging farther out into the rural areas to destroy basic infrastructure. This morning, their apparent target was Kōzu’s fishing fleet, as they concentrated their fury on the town waterfront. But the planes did not limit themselves to the trawlers and scows afloat in the harbor – they also shot up other prominent structures in town, including the Motoki home. While no one in the house was hurt, the Motoki’s outhouse – fortunately unoccupied at the time – was not so lucky. It was blown away in a hail of .50 caliber bullets from a glossy dark blue plane that came shrieking in low enough to decapitate some of the trees in the garden and whip the morning’s laundry off the clotheslines as it passed over.
For Shirō, the outhouse strafing was the last straw. Naoko was going to be evacuated to a safer place whether she agreed to it or not. He made financial arrangements with an old couple who worked a sweet potato plot high up on the southwestern slopes of Mount Fuji to let her stay with them until further notice.
On the day of Naoko’s evacuation, Shirō and Naoko rode the train from Kōzu, changing at Numazu for a local branch line that would take them well up into Fuji’s foothills to Gotenba. The rest of the trip up to Fuji’s fifth station would have to be negotiated on foot. Naoko carried what she could manage in a roped bundle on her back, while Shirō pushed a wheelbarrow piled high with food provisions, blankets and other supplies.
The twosome was disappointed at the end of their sweaty hike. Naoko’s “shelter” turned out to be nothing more than a floppy old tatami mat or two tossed on the hay-strewn dirt floor of a horse stable. But Shirō was in a position neither to bargain nor to complain – at least not very vociferously. By June 1945, it was most definitely a sellers’ market for shelter space anywhere within fifty kilometers of Tokyo. The farmer had heard nothing about putting the girl up in the house proper, and was hearing nothing about it now. Shirō was told he could take the accommodations as-is, or look elsewhere, so he had no choice but to hold his nose and shell out his war scrip. Naoko would be spending her days and nights buttoned up in the barn with a flea-bitten old plowhorse.
Shirō helped Naoko unpack her supplies, then paused when he reached the last item – a small brocade sack – almost as if he were deciding what to do with it. After a long moment of contemplation, he handed it over to Naoko and told her to open it. She did so, and pulled a thirty-centimeter-long army officer’s lacquer-sheathed shortsword out of the pouch.
“That’s for the off chance that the Americans catch you and try to have their way with you,” Shirō said, now long-faced and somber. “I don’t think they’ll bother coming this far up the mountain, and there’s nothing of any military value up here, so you don’t have to worry too much about it. But still, you should be prepared.”
“Of course, you’re not a man, and I don’t expect you to be able to shove it into your belly like one,” Shirō continued. “I want you to listen very, very carefully to me. This is how pregnant noblewomen in olden times would do themselves in when their castles were being overrun by the enemy.”
Shirō pulled a grease pencil from his shirt pocket and drew a small black circle on Naoko’s kimono, directly over the left side of her womb.
“If you ever find yourself in a situation where…well, where you expect the worst is about to happen…put the tip of the dagger right here,” Shirō said, pointing at the circle he had just drawn. “Hold it in place and run into the door of the horse stall. You must make sure you keep the dagger exactly on that spot, so it will kill you and the baby as quickly as possible. I think it will be easier if you close your eyes while you do it, so you won’t flinch and lose your nerve at the last second. Do you understand?”
Naoko nodded. Shirō paused for a moment, stern-eyed, his lower lip jutting out the way it always did when he was deep in troubled thought.
“You know, if it were you alone up here,” he said, looking down at the haystrewn dirt to avoid Naoko’s gaze, “I would say just shut your eyes, turn your face to the wall, endure whatever you have to and try to stay alive. But it’s not just you. You’re also carrying Akio’s child…And the honor of the Motoki family. It would be unfitting for you to
be sullied by the Americans. And anyway, Akio would be happier if you and the baby joined him as soon as possible. Think of how lonely he must be right now. If you keep that in mind, I’m sure you’ll be able to do what you have to do when the time comes.”
Shirō left Naoko with that reassuring thought and a promise to return two weeks later with another wheelbarrow’s worth of supplies. Until that time, Naoko was to keep the stable door and windows shut at all times, day or night, even if the heat inside became intolerable. And any venture outside to bathe or attend to other bodily functions was to be kept as short and close by as possible. Evil and chaos would soon be on the loose. The times called for laying low and maintaining vigilance.
Naoko awakened after a long night of miserable off-and-on sleep to find her feet, legs and arms literally covered with stinging, bloodsucking fleas. She would never forget the fffttt, ffffttt sound it made as she brushed them off her exposed skin with her hands. It was a morning ritual she would have to get used to.
After that first harrowing “debugging” experience, she made a quick, fog-shrouded dawn foray out into her new environs, trying not to stray too far from the dilapidated stable she now called home. One pleasant find resulting from her exploration was a nearby stream fed by melting snow runoff from Mount Fuji. It made for frigid bathing but excellent drinking, and during that long, hot summer, Naoko would often find herself unable to resist violating Shirō’s curfew restrictions in order to indulge herself in the relative luxuries of this clear, cold water source.
Another point of interest and possible future use discovered during the morning reconnaissance was a cliff with a straight-down hundred meter drop a few minutes walk from the stable. It was almost an answer to Naoko’s prayers of the awful night before, during which she had spent long hours contemplating Shirō’s suicide instructions and how and if she would be able to comply with them. She had come to the conclusion that – officer’s wife or not – she just did not have the intestinal fortitude to use a blade on her own body, especially knowing now that there was a child in her womb. That was just not going to happen, no matter how threatened she felt.
Nor did she think that she would have it in her to rush her attackers with the blade, hoping for a quick death from gunshot. The cliff discovery, however, posed a considerably less gruesome solution than either of the other choices. If worse came to worse and Naoko heard murder and mayhem coming up the footpath from the farming hamlet below, she could be out of the shack at a flat out run, over the cliff, and dead on the boulders below within a minute. There was a sense of morbid relief in knowing that she now had this option. This knowledge would provide a stingy modicum of comfort during what would prove to be a seemingly interminable summer of solitude, grinding boredom, lingering grief, and depression over Akio’s death and the incessant physical torment of fleas, heat, and hunger.
*****
On August 15, Naoko – now showing noticeably under her dusty monpe workclothes – was walking down the road past her landlords’ fallow potato field on her way back to the stable after an afternoon of scrounging for food in the surrounding countryside. On this particular day, she was returning empty-handed and not feeling particularly chipper about her own or the world’s condition. Shirō had not calculated for the increase Naoko’s appetite as her fetus grew, and the last wheelbarrow shipment had run out sooner than expected, forcing Naoko to forage to supplement her dwindling supplies.
Rounding a bend in the road, she came upon a sight she had not seen since her arrival in Gotenba – her landlords actually doing some work in their field. Today, they were digging with shovels, but upon closer inspection, the activity turned out to have nothing to do with agriculture. The old farmer and his equally curmudgeonly wife were excavating strongboxes and sealed jars.
“Ojisan,”[254] Naoko called out. “What are you doing?”
“Never mind what we’re doing,” the farmer snapped. “Haven’t you heard the news?”
“What news?”
“The war is over. The Emperor announced it on the radio at noon.”
“You mean we’ve won?” Naoko asked, electrified with a sudden surge of elation.
The old couple stopped digging for a moment and looked at her, then at each other. In a different context, they might have started laughing, but this was evidently not a time for mirth.
“No,” the farmer said, openly exasperated. “Japan lost.”
Naoko remembers her knees giving out slightly as she absorbed the impact and import of this information. A sudden barrage of angry thoughts and panicked disbelief buzzed through her brain like shards of broken window glass: Why had the divine wind not blown? Had the gods turned their backs on Japan? How could the Americans have won when the tokkō had made such magnificent sacrifices? All of those thousands of young men dead…Akio…As the reality sank in, she experienced a falling sensation not unlike what she had felt when told of Akio’s death two months earlier. But the old farmer’s gravelly voice snapped her back to the here and now.
“My wife and I are leaving tonight,” he said. “Heading deeper inland, to stay with relatives. Too close to the coast here. The Americans are bound to pass through...If I were you, I wouldn’t try venturing out of the stable anymore like you’ve been doing recently. No telling what might happen…And keep those windows shut.”
For the next two weeks, Naoko followed the farmer’s advice to the letter, even after the last of her food ran out. But just as she was beginning to wonder when she would begin succumbing to hunger, a breathless Shirō arrived at the barn with an empty wheelbarrow on the evening of September 1. He told Naoko that the Americans were beginning to roll through the Tokyo area, and that there were no reports of atrocities. Using rusty but still serviceable mercenary’s pidgin left over from his Manchurian adventurer days, he had even talked to an advance party jeepload of Americans who had passed through Kōzu the previous day. They were uncouth and a bit cocky, he thought, but he also sensed that they were basically decent men – not the rape/pillage/burn type he was all too familiar with from his own soldiering days on the continent. There was nothing to worry about. All of those panicky warnings on the radio and in the papers had been nonsense. Things were beginning to settle down. It was safe to go home, and that was where he planned to take Naoko now.
Shirō packed Naoko’s baggage and bedrolls, and Naoko took a seat on top of the pile with her geta-shod feet hanging over the front edge of the wheelbarrow. It was hardly the most dignified mode of transportation for an officer’s widow, but it was functional. Without further ado, Shirō pushed his daughter-in-law down the mountain to Gotenba Station to return to what was left of their lives.
*****
Naoko gave birth to a baby boy on Christmas Day, 1945. They named him Yūkyū (“Eternal”), in honor of his father’s tokkō unit, the 51st Shinbu Yūkyūtai. The birth was a beacon of hope in a dark season, and over the next year, the Kōzu household was transformed into an entirely Yūkyū-centric universe. Shirō and Yumi became doting grandparents no one could have ever imagined them becoming in their freewheeling days as Tokyo boulevardiers. Naoko vowed and strove to raise a son of whom the spirit of her dead husband could be proud. Although the child had been born undersized and premature, everyone was certain that the proud Motoki blood in his veins would make him grow up to be a strong young man like his father someday.
Hopes were high for one happy year, but the falling leaves of late autumn portended another dark season in store for the family. One cold morning in December 1946, Yūkyū stopped breathing while being nursed. The cause of death was never determined. His ashes were buried with his father’s fingernail cutting and epaulets in the Motoki family grave.
After Yūkyū’s death, Naoko ran away from everything and everyone in Kōzu, heading back to the big city to try to get her dancing career back on track, but she could not land a wealthy sponsor, and the long arm of Shirō ended up reeling her back into orbit around his household. Under the sticky tangle of traditi
onal Japanese familial obligations, Naoko – as Akio’s widow – was now duty-bound to take care of Shirō for the rest of his natural life, regardless of the status of his relationship with Yumi.
Shirō and Yumi drifted apart after the war, although as is with all great loves, the flame of their own never quite died out completely. Shirō was a frequent if irregular resident in the rectory of the Rankanji in Asakusa, Tokyo, the Buddhist temple where Yumi lived out the last two decades of her life as the temple abbot. Yumi died in 1964 at the age of seventy-three – for most of her adult life, she had ignored the advice of nearly every doctor she had ever seen to cut down on her drinking. Naoko-san will always think that this was her final undoing.
Shirō lived to seventy-nine, hard-drinking and being cared for by different Tokyo women of wealth and taste to the last of his days. He died at the Rankanji in 1972 shortly after tape-recording his memoirs in a series of interviews with biographer Seigo Hayashi. People who knew him say that he never stopped grieving for Akio and Yūkyū.
Naoko ended up marrying another IMA man, Sadaharu Iguchi, in 1949, and raising two sons in a comfortable Tokyo home while her husband learned the ropes of the metallurgy business from Shirō. During the 1950s, the father and son-in-law team developed a heat-resistant alloy for railway car bogie springs and, for several fat decades, sold their product under an exclusive contract to the Japan National Railways System. Iguchi took over the family company when the old man began to slow down, and it was still going strong when Iguchi himself died of a stroke in 1979. Bad investments and a failure to diversify, however, meant that the virtually single-client company would not survive the double punch of the privatization of Japan National Railways in 1987 and the crash of the bubble economy a few years later.
Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze Page 37
