Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

  The Hiroshimas – like everyone else in Japan by this point – knew all too well what the word tokkō meant. If and when their son sortied, he would not be coming back.

  *****

  While Fumitake was shocked to hear of his brother’s situation in Kagoshima, he was able to take some comfort in the fact that Tadao had since written from his home base of Hyakurihara to report the end of this temporary “assignment.” When the surrender was announced on August 15, he hoped and prayed and waited along with everyone else in the family that seeing Tadao and his other brothers home safe and sound from the war would be only a matter of weeks. But as the long, hot summer began to cool down and the days became shorter, only Keijirō had thus far darkened the Hiroshimas’ doorway.

  With Junkō ostensibly still in Manchuria or northern China, it was reasonable to assume that his repatriation could take months. But as other neighborhood boys in uniform began trickling – then flooding – back home through the early autumn of 1945, Tadao’s absence became increasingly ominous and harder to explain without thinking the unthinkable. Fumitake, however, was having none of that, and he refused to contemplate any scenario that did not involve Tadao’s making it back alive. When fall semester at Miyazaki started up at the end of September, Fumitake was still waiting for his brother, and it was only with great reluctance that he eventually caved to his family’s demands that he return to school to resume his studies.

  One day in late October, Mankichi Hiroshima visited Fukuoka City on official prefectural business. Boarding a streetcar from the train station, he noticed a young man in a thrown-together getup of mixed civilian mufti and old navy issue items – a typical “uniform of defeat” look for the millions of ex-servicemen now wandering the country in search of livelihood and some semblance of pride. Both commodities were in dismally short supply for Japanese males in the autumn of 1945.

  Mr. Hiroshima gave his down-at-the-heels, straphanging neighbor a casual lookover, noting with interest that the young man was wearing the distinctive tan leather slip-on ankle boots of a naval aviator[266]. The wearer’s name and unit were written in black along the top edges of the boots, as per navy custom, and Mr. Hiroshima was just about to look away when he realized with a jolt that the unit assignment on the boots read 51st SQUADRON. With his heart in his throat, he tapped the young man on the shoulder and introduced himself as Tadao Hiroshima’s father.

  After a quick exchange of desperate queries and crushing confirmations, the young man bowed and offered his condolences. Mr. Hiroshima got off at the next stop, got on a streetcar headed in the opposite direction, and went home to let his family know that their worst fears had been realized. Tadao was gone.

  “My father’s black hair turned snow white almost overnight,” Doctor Hiroshima tells me. “My mother was never the same after hearing the news. It knocked all the joy of living out of her, and she never got it back.”

  The following November, a letter arrived at the Hiroshima home from the former commander of the 601st KKT, Captain Toshikazu Sugiyama, informing the family of Tadao’s death and expressing the captain’s sincerest condolences. The letter also gave the Hiroshimas the first hard information they had come across about Tadao’s final weeks – and most importantly – his final hours.

  As it was explained to them, the functional loss of Okinawa in mid-June 1945 had caused a considerable slowing in tokkō activity for most of the rest of the war. During the long summer lull, many units that had been deployed to Kyūshū to participate in the Okinawa campaign were sent back to their regular bases to re-equip, replace personnel and otherwise prepare to defend other possible American invasion points. The 601st KKT was included among these redeployed units, returning to Hyakurihara to help guard the northern approaches to the capital and await a new mission it seemed possible might never come during the long weeks of inactivity that followed.

  But activity in home waters picked up in the last week of July when a flotilla of American battleships and cruisers with carrier support began an intense shelling campaign against industrial plants along the Pacific coast of central Honshu, slowly working their way north from Hamamatsu in Shizuoka Prefecture.[267] By the beginning of the second week of August the enemy force – Task Group 38.3 under Rear Admiral Sherman – had reached far enough north to come within range of Hyakurihara’s tokkō planes, and on the morning of August 9, the 601st was given standby orders by new 3rd Air Fleet CO Rear Admiral Sadayoshi Yamada. Sortie orders were issued at 1400 hours for attacks against the main element of the force, which had been spotted east of the Kinkazan Island in Miyagi Prefecture. Tadao – riding alone in his two-seater[268] – took off in the third wave of three Suisei at 1425hrs, but soon had to turn back with engine trouble. The malfunction was quickly repaired, and Tadao was sent back out with a stragglers’ attack group of three planes at 1640hrs.

  According to the official 601st KKT combat report of the day’s action, Tadao’s three-plane flight was whittled down to a force of one by engine trouble and damage from enemy fighters. The malfunctioning planes eventually made successful emergency landings at nearby airfields, leaving Tadao’s plane to soldier on alone and unescorted through the CAP and AA toward Task Force 38.3. 601st recon elements tracking the action from a distance report that his plane “appeared to hit a cruiser at approximately 1815hrs”.[269] But US Navy records state that the only tokkō damage of the day (it also happened to be the last of the war) occurred at 1456hrs (local time), when a single attacker of indeterminate type hit the destroyer USS Borie, causing the loss of forty-eight killed or missing and sixty-six wounded.[270]

  As is the case with so many tokkō pilots, there is no way of determining with one hundred percent certainty what happened to Tadao, or whether or not his mission was successful. But similar to Naoko Motoki’s sentiments about her husband Akio’s final flight, Doctor Hiroshima wants to believe that Tadao’s plane got through. It was the mission his brother died trying to accomplish, and what his parents spent the remainder of their lives believing he had been able to do.

  Like most upstanding young Japanese men of his generation, Tadao grew up with the phrase oya kōkō never far from his lips. This was the Confucian concept of loyalty to one’s parents and the virtue of making them proud through one’s deeds and manner. Doctor Hiroshima has always wanted to believe that Tadao performed his duties as a tokkō pilot more out of this sentiment – that is, of wanting to protect his homeland and bring honor to the family name – than out of any “Long Live The Emperor” mentality. The doctor is extremely proud of having had a brother like this – a young man who had the courage to die for the things and people he loved.

  “Tadao was my hero,” the doctor says. “And he always will be.”

  I ask the doctor if the perspective of decades and distance has made him bitter about his brother’s death, or cynical about the government policies and strategies that caused it, especially given the fact that his brother was killed only six days before the end of the war.

  “No,” the doctor answers. “Those we were the times we lived in, and we were educated to be patriotic. Tadao had no choice but to do his duty. I don’t think young people in this country can understand that kind of thinking now.”

  Several days after Captain Sugiyama’s letter was delivered, official notification of Tadao’s death finally arrived from the Navy Ministry, expressing the Emperor’s and nation’s undying gratitude for the family’s sacrifices, and informing them of Tadao’s posthumous three-rank promotion to ensign.[271] Although there was scant comfort for Tadao’s parents in this final gesture from His Majesty’s Government, Fumitake was very proud of his brother becoming an officer.

  The following summer, an official memorial service was held in the auditorium of the local elementary school to honor Tadao and six other boys from Tsuyazaki who had died in the chaotic final weeks of the war. The ceremony was attended by most of the townsfolk, and after an eminently forgettable speech by the mayor, a big show was made of handing out t
he customary white-draped ossuary boxes to the bereaved families. Cradling their tragic treasure, the Hiroshimas returned home to open the box and find that there was nothing in it but Tadao’s name penned in business-like brush-written kanji on a slip of paper.

  Adding to the Hiroshima family’s grief was the continued mystery of Junkō‘s whereabouts. Now going on a year since war’s end, they had yet to hear any news at all from him, although reports of as many as half a million Japanese servicemen being captured in Manchuria and now held in Siberian gulags by their Soviet captors provided the most likely scenario of his fate.

  One day in the spring of 1947, a cable from Junkō arrived telling them that he had just landed at Maizuru port on the Sea of Japan coast of Kyoto Prefecture. Released by the Soviets because poor health precluded his usefulness in forced labor, he had come home on a POW repatriation boat and was now preparing to board a train for home.

  Hearing the news, Fumitake rushed back to Tsuyazaki for the homecoming, but he did not make it in time to greet his brother at the train station with the rest of the family. As the scene at the depot was later described to him, when the weakened, skeleton thin Junkō stepped down from his freedom train, he seemed to register a measure of mild shock at his father’s white hair. Then, after the expected emotional greetings with the other family members present, he asked about Tadao, anxious but hopeful: He was never posted overseas, right? Certainly he must be home by now? Everyone’s tears of happiness were quickly tinged with sorrow as Mankichi Hiroshima let his son in on sad news the rest of the family had already known for almost two years. What should have been a day of thanks and elation became something far less than happy.

  Junkō’s bittersweet return closed the last chapter of the Hiroshimas’ war. As they went about rebuilding their lives, Fumitake returned to his studies at Miyazaki University, getting his degree in 1948 before heading up to Tokyo to finish up his doctorate requirements. His first job in the big city was as a research assistant at the veterinary medicine department of Tokyo University, where he was in charge of the school’s famed horse stables. Subsequent experience in private sector veterinary medicine led the doctor to his start his own practice in Setagaya Ward, Tokyo in 1955. He has been a beloved fixture of the neighborhood ever since.

  28 Pilgrimage to ChiranIt is Saturday, October 25, 2002, and I am sitting in the coach section of a Japan Air Lines 767 on final approach to Kagoshima Airport. If all has proceeded according to plan, Doctor Hiroshima should be at the Arrivals Gate with a rented car. He came down to Kagoshima yesterday for the same reason he comes here every October – the annual reunion of his Miyazaki University veterinary department graduating class. But this year, he has an extra stop or two included on his usual itinerary. The previous August, during a meeting at Yasukuni to photocopy Tadao’s scrapbook in the shrine archives, the doctor broached the idea of my accompanying him for a tour of Kagoshima some time in the fall. “You cannot write a book about tokkō without seeing Kagoshima…Especially Chiran,” he said.

  Japan Air Lines puts me on the ground on time, and a smiling Doctor Hiroshima is right on schedule, too. It seems an auspicious beginning to our pilgrimage, and the weather is balmy and beautiful, matching my partner’s high-spirited eagerness. He does not get behind the wheel in wide open country as much as he would like to, he says, and he is really looking forward to today’s jaunt down the scenic mountain roadway to Chiran. It will be a nice challenging drive.

  The remark ties a quick, tight knot of nerves in my stomach, but this begins to unwind once we are on the open road and the doctor displays his cautious dexterity at the wheel. His rigorously careful driving and insistence on keeping the car a good twenty or thirty kilometers an hour below the speed limit gets us honked at a few times on the way, but given all of the hairpin turns and blind shoulders in the road, I am all in favor of his driving policy of erring on the side of caution. Besides, being able to relax a bit lets me enjoy the scenery.

  After an imposing eyeful of Sakurajima, the jagged brown semi-active volcano that dominates the upper reaches of Kagoshima Bay, we get on to the Ibusuki Skyline, a forlorn little turnpike of crumbly two-lane macadam that traverses a starkly beautiful landscape of lush foliage and rust – a Chinese scroll watercolor of bamboo-covered limestone cliffs graffittied over with brutal brown slashes of abandoned industrial plant. Dark green, steeply sloped mountains push up the horizon and crowd in the sky in every direction, but up close, the manmade scenery is strictly Gdansk-on-the-Yangtze – dead factories, forgotten stone quarries, red-brown skeletal remains of gantries and cranes, roadside restaurants with collapsed roofs and weeds pushing through broken bay windows.

  Strewn along the highway at irregular intervals are kitschy artifacts from happier days of a bygone era, when outsiders apparently showed more interest in this place. We drive by boarded over roadside stands; a faded Fiberglas Takamori Saigō sitting atop a storehouse, scowling at the passing traffic; flaking metal signboards for long-bankrupt tourist attractions. In one of these, half obscured by tall undergrowth, you can just make out a swinging couple of non-descript ethnicity looking like Speed Racer and his girlfriend in matching Botany 500 sportswear on a date at Expo ’70. They gaze off toward a minimalist rendering of a smoking Sakurajima wearing expressions that are somewhere between religious ecstasy and lower back pain.

  During the hour’s drive down the Satsuma Peninsula, we have passed maybe a dozen cars, at the most – and the Ibusuki Skyline is supposedly one of the area’s major arteries. None of those fabled Japanese traffic snarls to worry about here. As we approach our destination, we finally run into a little congestion when we stop at an intersection for a convoy of buses full of bright-eyed high schoolers to pass. A couple of them smile and wave at me from the windows.

  We pull in behind the kiddie caravan and trail it straight into Chiran. The Tomiya Inn is on the town’s meticulously pruned main drag, functionally joined at the hip with its next-door neighbor, the reconstructed Tomiya Shokudō. The latter establishment is no longer a cafeteria for airmen, but rather, a small museum and tokkō memorabilia gift/book shop. Unfortunately, we have little time to browse. We are running late for the next item on our itinerary – an appointment with Mayor Kampei Shimoide and Director of Social Welfare Shige’aki Yamamoto. These gentlemen have been kind enough to make time in their busy schedules to give us a tour of the town’s largest collection of tokkō exhibits – the unexpectedly upbeat Chiran Peace Museum For Kamikaze Pilots.

  On this particular Saturday afternoon, the atmosphere around the Peace Museum seems more bustling medieval fair than thoughtful war memorial. A drum corps is playing for a ballgame nearby, heard but unseen, and the museum grounds and its parking lot are flanked with merchants’ booths where reasonably priced souvenirs are sold. Hinomaru hachimaki go for five hundred yen (about $4.00US), tokkō-themed T-shirts for about a thousand. Key holders or Chinese Zippo knockoffs embossed with various models of Japanese navy and army aircraft are available for a little more. On an impulse, I plunk down fifteen hundred for a Shidenkai tie clip.

  Other stalls sell hot snack food or that most popular of Japanese road trip souvenirs – boxed confectionary. References to last year’s hit film Hotaru are in abundance, as is imagery of anime-esque, cherubic tokkō pilots as cute as any Hello Kitty character. A noodle restaurant doing brisk business near the entrance to the museum is named “Hayabusa Ramen.”

  I ask Yamamoto-san what he thinks of the tourist industry commercialization of the facilities here. He replies that it is good for Chiran’s economy. A more elegant and irrefutable answer I cannot imagine, and my mind goes back to the Setagaya Kan’non prayer in which the faithful profess their belief that modern Japan has the sacrifices of the tokkō pilots to thank for its peace and prosperity. Doctor Hiroshima and I have just driven through an hour’s worth of near-Appalachian desolation and this is the first place we have seen that is not rusted shut and overgrown with weeds. The presence of an oasis like this in the mids
t of a moonscape of thirty-year-long economic strangulation seems to border on the miraculous. Has some spiritual life force been imparted to this ground, I wonder – bled and wept into the soil – or are all the tourist buses just the result of smart marketing and nostalgia? Moot question. The mecca exists. It has been built, and they are coming.

  Mayor Shimoide leaves our party after we pay our respects at the museum memorial shrine[272] and ring its bronze Peace Bell, but Yamamoto-san stays to take us through the main exhibits. One of the more impressive of these is a three-quarter scale mock-up of the musty, catacomb-like interior of a sangakuheisha barracks, its dark wooden walls lined with helmets, canteens and crashed aircraft artifacts, thin bedding laid out on the sleeping shelves as if in expectation of a truckload of phantom tokkō pilots. The space is claustrophobic and every bit as somber as the Nadeshiko girls described it to me. After taking a few snapshots, I am late for the door.

  Yamamoto-san leads us into the high-ceilinged front lobby of the museum proper, a well-lit, clean space dominated by a thirteen square meter ceramic mural on the wall facing the entrance. The 1975 work, by local artist Katsuyoshi Nakaya, is entitled Chinkon no Mitsugi (“Heavensent Requiem”). It depicts a slumped tokkō pilot in an almost Christ-like crucifixion pose being extricated from his flaming Hayabusa in mid-air by six stunningly beautiful ten’nyo angels. Magically suspended against a marmalade sky, the deities show enticing flashes of golden midriff and supple thigh through their filmy white garments, their tender cradling of the pilot in this cheesecake Pieta toeing a provocatively fuzzy line between mother’s caress and lover’s embrace. Keeping the eroticism of the main composition from going into overdrive, a blossom-laden cherry branch – obviously suggesting the famous send-off gifts of the Nadeshiko Unit – is shown tumbling from the cockpit, blown back in the propwash of the doomed fighter plane.