Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

  And yet the Motokis continue to survive – and thrive – in Tokyo. Naoko-san’s sons have successful careers, and her grandchildren have all graduated from top universities. There is yet plenty to live for.

  Although twice-widowed Naoko-san has been alone now for a quarter of a century, she refuses to let the body blows life has given her over the years get her down. She continued her buyō dancing well into her seventies, and now keeps herself occupied with other hobbies, a busy social life and frequent tokkō memorial activities. She cried herself out over Akio and Yūkyū long enough to put all of her attendant ghosts to rest. One important gesture toward this closure was burying Yūkyū’s ihai name tablet near the ruins of the old pilots’ barracks at Chiran with Reiko Akabane in 1974. Another was in 1976, when the Chiran Tokkō Heiwa Kaikan (“Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots”) museum opened.

  “The moment I walked into the hall and saw that huge mosaic of the ten’nyo angels cradling the dead tokkō pilot in their arms and lifting him to heaven[255], I just sobbed like a baby,” Naoko says, recalling her first visit to the Chiran shrine. “That was the moment I knew everything was all right with Akio. I know he’s happy – wherever he is – and that he is watching me and looking after me.”

  “Of course, I know my second husband is watching, too,” she adds with a conspiratorial smirk. “Sometimes I worry about how I’m going to handle the introductions when we all finally meet.”

  I ask Naoko if she hopes Akio’s plane was the one that hit the American destroyer on May 11, 1945. Ever the quick tactician, Naoko gives me a brief sidewise glance here, as if she is a bit wary that I may be laying a trap with the question. Then she tells me that nobody knows whose plane from the 51st Shinbu Yūkyūtai hit the American ship that day, but that yes, she hopes it was Akio’s. This is not, she is careful to stress, because it would mean Akio could get some licks in against the Americans – as he had always vowed to do – but because hitting a ship was what he was trying to do at the moment he drew his last breath. It was, literally, his death wish. Naoko-san says it is nice to think that Akio might rest easier having accomplished his mission, so whom would it hurt to believe that is the way it was?

  Although Naoko still mourns her dead, she does not dwell on them enough to make her miserable. She grieved long enough like that, and long enough turned out to be a lot of years.

  “Life is too short to spend being sad,” Naoko says. “Some people have never recovered from the war. Losing loved ones ruined the rest of their own lives. I don’t know how they’ve gone all this time like that. As for me, I want to be happy in the time I have left. And I know that’s the way Akio would have wanted it for me.”

  Section Seven: Doctor Hiroshima

  27 Setagaya Kan’nonThe weather on the afternoon of June 18, 2002 is typical for Tokyo’s rainy season – clammy, gray and wet. Despite the rain, hundreds of thousands of Tokyoites – mostly young people – are gathering in front of huge outdoor LED screens in parks and main thoroughfares throughout the city to watch the Japanese national team play Turkey in the semi-quarterfinals of the World Cup soccer tournament. Millions of others are about to watch the event on TVs in homes, classrooms or offices. But at a small Buddhist temple in the quiet Setagaya Ward neighborhood of Geba, a group of twenty or so people is gathering to participate in a decidedly more low-key affair.

  Located on the west end of Setagaya, Geba is a charming community of narrow, twisting, tree-lined streets, parks, low-rise luxury apartment buildings and impressive private homes – a verdant oasis in the midst of the hyperactive concrete sprawl of the metropolis. Not surprisingly for such desirable residential turf, the cost of living in the area does not come cheap. Even with the precipitous post-Bubble Economy drop in real estate values in this and other Tokyo districts, it is daunting to imagine the fiscal astringency necessary for a middle-class family to make ends meet here, and a passing perusal of BMWs and Jaguars in driveways indicates that unless retirees and people in company-sponsored dormitories count, the breed is rare in these parts. From all appearances, residence in the area is effectively closed to all but an eclectic mélange of wealthy professionals and old folks lucky enough to have staked a piece of ground here before land prices went into the stratosphere in the 1970s.

  Another neighborhood “resident” that timed its pre-real estate boom arrival well is the venue for today’s congregation. Setagaya Kan’non is a Buddhist temple established with a modest investment in 1951 that now sits on real estate worth about ten million dollars. The half-acre temple compound consists of a substantial and very ornately carved wooden archway, a few modestly sized one-room wooden chapels, a rectory for Abbot Kenshō Ōta and family, a community house, and a mini pagoda. Outside of the community house and rectory, the compound’s structures are built in a highly decorative, Chinese-influenced Kyoto style, and judging from the breathtaking craftsmanship and heavy elemental weathering of the buildings, a reasonable guess would date their construction to Shogunate days. But as we have noted in our earlier explorations of the Yasukuni facilities, exposure to the humid, polluted Tokyo climate makes natural building materials appear very old, very quickly. This mechanism has painted Setagaya Kan’non’s masonry with damp moss and soot streaks and bleached its woodwork to give the temple an antiquated dignity belying its mere fifty-odd years of existence.

  In addition to all the tastefully weathered stonework, there is also an abundance of decorative statuary here – roaring mythical beasts, stone snow lanterns, and presiding over the temple’s well-stocked carp pond with the languid poise of an Angkor Wat love goddess, a bronze statue of Kan’non-sama, the hermaphrodite Buddhist deity of mercy. The statue is a popular draw to the temple during entrance exam season, for it is said that test-taking hopefuls who pray before it can get into the school of their choice, even if their aim is a bit higher than their academic ability merits. The pond itself is also a perennial favorite, especially for the local children who come to feed or pester its captive creatures, secure in the common knowledge that nothing short of outright fish rustling will rouse a protest from the ever-convivial Abbot Ōta and his mild-mannered son.

  On the eighteenth of each month, Setagaya Kan’non has for the last half-century also been the destination of a very different variety of regular visitor: those who attend the monthly memorial services held in the temple’s Tokkō Chapel, a one-room tatami-floored structure built around a raised wooden platform on the northern edge of the compound. Built in 1952 (the year the American occupation ended), the chapel owes its existence in large part to the efforts of the late Lieutenant General Michio Sugawara (IMA ’10).

  Despite Sugawara’s selfless largesse, assessments of his legacy have not been exclusively favorable over the years. Beyond his postwar role as benefactor to Setagaya Kan’non, the general carved a larger slice of history for himself as the commander of the 6th Air Army and one of the chief architects of the Okinawa Ten-Gō tokkō campaign. The nature of this final command alone would have been enough to shadow his legacy with a certain measure of controversy, but it was the simple fact of his own survival that ended up causing him the most grief. While many of his general officer and flag-rank tokkō commander peers committed suicide at the end of the war, Sugawara refused to make such a gesture, thereby earning him the lasting enmity of many veterans and war-bereaved. He endured sporadic verbal assaults, published character assassinations,[256] and other forms of harassment for the last four decades of his long life.

  Even in death, Sugawara’s penance continues, attended to on this mortal plane by his children. Since the general’s passing in 1983 at the age of ninety-five, his sons Michiyoshi Fukabori (INA ’45)[257] and Michihiro Sugawara (IMA ’48)[258] have maintained the family tradition of tireless service to the Tokkō Zaidan organization their father helped to form and attendance at monthly services at the temple he helped build.

  After a soggy stroll from the nearby ramen shop where I have eaten my late lunch, I arrive at Setagaya Kan’non
and join a small queue of people climbing the short flight of wooden stairs to the Tokkō Chapel. At the top of the stairs, we remove our shoes before entering the close, incense-smoky confines of the chapel, where the abbot is straightening out folding chairs and seating cushions on the tatami. Sure enough, Michiyoshi Fukabori is here, and I exchange head nods and greetings with him, as well as with Naoko Motoki, Iwao Fukagawa, and other people I have met during the course of my research. After waiting on another short line to sign the guestbook, I take a seat next to Naoko-san, my usual memorial service neighbor.

  At two o’clock, Abbot Ōta rings a chime, and the congregation approaches a brocade-draped altar in pairs to sprinkle finely chipped sandalwood into an incense burner pot. When this is done, copies of prayer text are passed around, and with a long, climbing first syllable, the abbot begins chanting the customary tokkō sutra. The congregation catches up a syllable or two later, singing the praises of the brave pilots and their sacrifices against daunting odds in combating Western colonialism and thanking them for the peace and prosperity of modern day Japan. Most people here do not need the cheat sheets, having said the prayer hundreds or even thousands of times in their lives, but I cannot count myself among this in-group. I try to keep up with the archaic language used in the text – crossing my fingers in the part where it badmouths the West, of course – but even with Naoko-san frequently reaching over to point out what verse I should be on, I just get lost again a few lines later.

  Eventually I give up, and pass the rest of the service as I always do, people-watching and looking around at all the old bric-a-brac in the room: a painted statuette of an impossibly beautiful tokkō pilot in a glass case, like a male version of a hanayome ningyo; some journeyman artist’s oil paintings of flaming aerial combat; hand-brushed quotations of great men and solemn blood oaths in bold grasshand; age-yellowed photos of glorious dead along the walls. To the left of the altar, there is a blowup of one of Toshirō Takagi’s famous Chiran shots. In the picture, a long-necked Akio Motoki with a Mona Lisa smile and the countenance of a confident young Plains Indian chief is going over flight maps with his pilots before their sortie. On the other side of the room, a bull-necked Takijirō Ōnishi – looking ever the irritable electrician – glowers down at me with an unwelcoming stare from a dark alcove.

  With the end of services, everyone gathers in the congregation house on the south side of the compound. The comfortably homey tatami-floored wooden structure is usually used for religious lectures or various club meetings, as well as for accommodating mourners when funerals or memorial services are held at the temple. There is a sizeable kitchen facility in the building staffed by middle-aged and elderly neighborhood women and overseen by Abbot Ōta’s wife, and it can put together a decent spread for up to about one hundred people. But today, there will be no need for any big productions – just packets of snack food and a few bottles of beer for a light-drinking group of twenty.

  When everyone is seated, Abbot Ōta calls for a toast, after which the gathering spends the next hour or so discussing research projects, current activities of other memorial groups, verbal obituaries for recently deceased comrades and friends, personal news, and political developments in Tokyo. It is this last subject that inevitably brings on the heaviest exchanges, with right-leaning opinions generally lengthier and noisier than more tolerant views.

  Recent Chinese cheek and North Korean high jinks have been the biggest topics of late, with discussion characterized by collective laments over constitutional restraints on formal rearmament and openly expressed disgust with the limpwristedness of Japanese diplomacy and bureaucracy. Today we are discussing a recent incident in which Chinese police violated the territoriality of the Japanese consulate in Shenyang to arrest a group of asylum seekers while the consulate staff stood by without lifting a hand. Someone remarks that the Americans would never stand for the Chinese walking all over them like that.

  Suddenly, all eyes in the room are on me, but I field the enquiry with universal body language for “No comment” – a shrug and sideways tip of my head. I always feel uncomfortable when Japanese compare their country unfavorably with America in my presence – especially when other Japanese are within earshot. Nothing healthy and constructive can come out of it, and in any case, Americans have no need to swagger in this part of the world. Our footprints here are deep enough, and the Japanese – certainly the generation of the people in this room – are perfectly aware of what we are capable of in a confrontation.

  The topic is bounced around the table a bit longer, ending with the general consensus that something like the consulate incident never would have happened in the old days, and that nobody respects Japan anymore.

  In the lull that follows, I cannot help but think that some American responsibility has just been implied. But perhaps I am being paranoid. Nevertheless, I am relieved when conversation resumes to nibble on a new nut.

  The afternoon’s meeting ends on a peaceful note, with promises, as always, to meet again in a month. As the rest of the gathering disperses to go home, I remain behind on the tatami floor of the meeting hall, chatting with today’s interview subject, Doctor Fumitake Hiroshima.

  Although his name sounds more like a James Bond nemesis, Doctor Hiroshima is in actuality nothing more menacing than a kindly old Setagaya veterinarian, and his fireplug build and cheerful bear cub personality would be more at home in the cartoons of Hanna-Barbera than the pages of an Ian Fleming novel. He looks and sounds every bit of what he is – a man who has devoted his life to making others happy.

  At our first meeting six months ago, I can remember the personal warmth I immediately sensed from the doctor – the kind that makes you think I hope nothing bad ever happens to this person. It did not take too long, however, to catch on to the sadness playing foil to the smile in his eyes. As we spoke and the doctor’s story unfolded, I learned that despite a naturally happy disposition and a career that could have been screenwritten for a Robin Williams vehicle, this was a man who had also suffered some enormous losses in his day. But this knowledge did not make me feel sorry for him – it only increased my feelings of affinity for this gentle human being. After all, how could you not help but like a man who does volunteer work in his spare time driving a petting zoo-on-wheels for kindergartners?

  During the past half-year I have been let in on the rough outline of the doctor’s wartime experiences, but until now I have not pushed for too much detail. Today, however, I plan to be frank. I inform the doctor of my intentions, and he gives his consent. Best to get it all down while he still can, he says. His brother deserves the truth to be told.

  As the doctor and I settle down to begin our interview, he arranges some notes on the tabletop. Then he reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out something he never leaves home without – a laminated photo of his brother Tadao in the nineteenth summer of his life. Resplendent in his naval aviator flight suit and Rising Sun hachimaki, Tadao is the very image of a proud and resolute warrior in the picture, and minus sixty years of wear and tear, he has the same rawboned, salt-of-the-earth Kyūshū country boy face as his younger brother. For all their resemblance, the siblings could almost be identical twins.

  The doctor inevitably shows this picture whenever he meets someone new at Setagaya Kan’non. But the doctor and I are not meeting for the first time, he knows I have seen the photo before, and he is not taking it out now for my sake at all. Rather, its display is a form of what I am tempted to call, for lack of a better term, photographic transubstantiation. Anyone who has ever been to a Japanese wake has seen this concept at work when a photo of the deceased (serene facial expressions are favored) is positioned to look down at the mourners from on high, as if placed there to thank personally each person who approaches the casket to light an incense punk. Photos of the deceased are also often seen carried by family or trusted former employees to be paraded at building openings or ship christenings or other such commemorative events when the principals behind the original proj
ects have not lived long enough to see the fruit of their labor. Readers may recall Sydney Olympics 100kg judo champion Kōsei Inoue cradling his mother’s photo on the medal podium. Similar displays are sometimes even seen at the conclusion of murder trials, when family members of the victim will carry a large framed photo of the deceased into the courtroom to hear the judges’ verdict read.[259] In all of these cases, the deceased, through traces of phantasmal essence captured in the displayed photo,[260] is considered to be present and accounted for to participate in the proceedings.

  Likewise, when the doctor places his brother’s photo on the tabletop to face me, the meaning of the gesture is clear. Tadao will be joining our conversation today. Perhaps, I cannot help wondering, he is also here to look out for his kid brother Fumitake, just as he always did when they were boys.

  *****

  Fumitake Hiroshima was born in 1927 in Tsuyazaki, Fukuoka Prefecture, a small village on the Sea of Japan coastline of northwestern Kyūshū. He was the sixth of six children of Mankichi Hiroshima, a prosperous landowner and local government official. When not tending to his duties at the local municipal office, Mankichi raised rice and livestock with his wife Haruō to supplement his income from the saltbeds he operated on the beach behind his house. Previous generations of Hiroshimas had been prosperous salt makers in the region since the late Edo period before adding agriculture to the family business; the saltbeds they built are still there.

  “You can see them from the air,” Doctor Hiroshima says proudly. “Whenever I fly into Fukuoka I can always look down and see exactly where I grew up.”

  The doctor’s earliest memories are of that beach, because the locale was the backdrop of most of his childhood bonding with Tadao.