Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

  In a dubious honor shared with its rocket-propelled cousin, the Kaiten had been responsible for more Japanese deaths than enemy fatalities. As opposed to less than two hundred American or other Allied casualties caused by Kaiten operations, over a thousand IJN personnel had lost their lives deploying the weapon. This tally included 810 crewmembers of subs sunk during Kaiten-ferrying missions, 148 sailors on transport ships carrying Kaitens to outlying bases, 118 killed in American air raids and other causes, and 89 Kaiten pilots killed in combat. A further 15 pilots were victims of training mishaps.[313]

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  It took several weeks for everything on Hachijōjima to be wrecked to the Americans’ satisfaction, and it was not until November 22 that Konada finally left the island. It was his first time off the base in nearly five months, during which time there had been an ominous lack of correspondence from his family in Kure. Adding to this anxiety was his knowledge that Kure had been heavily bombed, and that nearby Hiroshima had been destroyed in the closing days of the war with a weapon of unimaginable destructive power, supposedly killing tens or even hundreds of thousands in an eye-blink. He had no way of knowing whether or not anyone in his family was among the victims without going to Kure to see for himself. But as a Regular Navy officer, he would not be free to do this until he had officially resigned his commission at the still-functioning Navy Ministry in Tokyo. His resignation was tendered and accepted by the navy on November 25, and when twenty-one-year-old Toshiharu Konada walked out of the ministry building to make his way to Tokyo Station through the rubble-strewn, refugee-thronged streets of an alien city under foreign occupation, he did so as a civilian. His war was over.

  Konada arrived in Kure several days later to find that the worst of his fears about family and home had not come to pass. His own life, however, was a shambles, and it would be a long, hard road to pick up the pieces. But like six million other former comrades in arms, time, youth and energy were commodities he possessed in abundance, and the world would not keep Toshiharu Konada – or Japan – down for long. In 1947, after a year of rejections from other universities on account of his Etajima credentials, he was able to matriculate to the elite Kyoto University, which had the top natural science department in the country. Majoring in marine biology, he went on to a successful career in the maritime industry, retiring in 1990 as an executive with a large shipping concern.

  Unlike so many other tokkō survivors, Konada-san has never been ashamed of his wartime experiences, nor of his participation in Japan’s special attack corps. In 1962 he was instrumental in founding the first veterans’ group to openly acknowledge its former tokkō affiliations – the National Kaiten Pilots’ Association. He has served this organization with pride and distinction ever since. He now lives with his wife and eldest daughter in the Greater Tokyo area, where he remains active in conservative politics and history awareness programs for young people.

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  When Harumi Kawasaki’s war ended, he literally had no place to go. For the previous two years, the navy had been the first real home he had had since early childhood, and for the past year, his fellow Kaiten pilots had been the closest thing to family he had perhaps ever experienced in his life. But the surrender meant that all of that was suddenly gone, and the demobilization activity dominating the Susaki base over the next few weeks provided nothing better than an opportunity to get three squares a day while watching it all die a slow, anticlimactic death. Still, that was better than having to face the displaced persons stations and gruel lines back in the real world. Given the circumstances, it is not too difficult to understand why Kawasaki stayed in uniform as long as possible, which from his perspective, was not long enough. It seemed that he had no option now but to sit tight and wait to be told to leave.

  Orders to heave-ho and vacate the premises came down on August 25. Rumors of rebellion on other bases came and went with regularity, so the authorities were taking no chances, especially with ex-tokkō types, who were deemed capable of stirring up some serious trouble if kept together too long on the bases. When the departure date arrived however, one of the Japan’s biggest typhoons of the century was hot on its heels.[314] The demobe ships scheduled to take the men home were forced to cancel their stops at Susaki on account of the storm. Finally, after days had passed with no sign of the naval vessels, base authorities were forced to hire commercial ships to take the increasingly restless men home. Stops would be made at Osaka and Northern Kyūshū. The men were free to disembark at either location.

  Kawasaki, however, with no particular “home” to “go home” to, therefore had no reason to board a repatriation boat. With a small group of like-minded individuals, he petitioned the base commander for permission to set up a small logging company to work the heavily wooded local mountains. The idea was nixed, but Kawasaki’s separation from the IJN was given a stay of several months when he was hired to help with personnel outprocessing and equipment dismantling operations at the base.

  The temp work at Susaki continued until December, after which there could be no more reality-avoidance. With the base now gone, the IJN no more and no jobs to be had nearby, Kawasaki had no choice but to track down his older brother in Yamaguchi Prefecture and hope he would be allowed to hang his hat for a while until he could get his life together. He had made a rather uncomfortable visit to this married brother the previous July during his final pre-sortie leave (before posting to Susaki, that is – not before an actual attack mission, which Kawasaki obviously never made), so he was not expecting much of a welcome this time, either.

  Luckily for all concerned, the Yamaguchi sojourn was a short one. Kawasaki was able to get a slot on the crew of a repatriation ship making runs from Asia to Japan. The work lasted all the way to April 1947, after which Kawasaki experienced another brief period of drift before securing steadier work in a flour factory, where he would stay for twenty years and rise to union rep, all while attending night school for a Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting. Leaving the flour company in 1967, he moved on to a successful second career as an accountant in the women’s wear industry. Only recently retired as of the writing of this book, he now lives with his wife and son in Tokyo, and keeps himself busy with various veterans’ affairs, including membership in the National Kaiten Pilot’s Association.

  37 EpilogueFor the last topic in our talk at Kudan Kaikan, I ask Konada-san and Kawasaki-san something I always ask tokkō veterans at the end of an interview – “How would you like to see the tokkō program remembered by future generations of Japanese?”

  Kawasaki-san comments that his family has never shown any interest in his war stories, and he has never forced the issue at home. As almost any Japanese veteran will tell you, this is just the way things are now. The young people do not want to know, and the only people who seem to care are other vets.

  Konada-san echoes these sentiments, adding that it is unfortunate that more is not known about the Kaiten by the general public, and that he would like the truth about this unique naval organization recorded and preserved for the sake of future generations. In the meantime, while he still can, Konada-san is doing what he can to help teach people about the Kaiten, and on a more general level, to raise historical awareness about the war and Japanese heritage as a whole. However, he maintains, there are powerful forces trying to block his way. He believes that the Japanese education system was “destroyed by postwar policy reforms,” and that Nikkyōso – the leftist national teachers’ union that has lobbied for militantly liberal education policies since the early 1950s – has done tremendous damage to the moral fabric of the nation, especially for younger generations.

  “The Japanese were a strong and beautiful race before the war,” Konada-san laments. “But we have become selfish and weak.”

  The three of us sit on that comment without response for a little longer than I feel comfortable doing, and I finally break the silence by thanking my subjects for their time.

  After leaving Konada-san and Kawasaki-san at the
subway stop, I head back to the hotel to pay my tab. Entering the lobby, I find a squad of chipper young crew-cut judo team members with matching gym bags and blazers formed up in loose ranks in front of the gift shoppe. They are being given a quick pep-talk by someone I assume to be their coach – an equally chipper middle-aged man with cauliflower ears and the same harsh crew-cut as his charges. “Coach” ends his speech with an emphatic “Ganbare”, and the boys break ranks with a manly jock grunt that tapers off into a long, drawn out collective hiss, as if several bicycles have suddenly had their tires slashed simultaneously.

  Regarding the boys as they file out of the hotel, chins up and chests out, I find it is not much of a stretch to imagine them in khaki flight suits, trotting down to a flight line of gassed-up Zeros with running engines. The imagery is poignant for me not because of any fatalistic or romantic intimations, but because it emphasizes the rarity of brave, motivated young Japanese men these days. East Asia may have been won on the judo mats and kendo floors of Budōkan in a not so distant gloried past of Japanese masculinity, but are future battles, I wonder, now being won on weblogs and the game consoles of Nintendo?

  Whither the fabled Japanese fighting man? Extinct, or merely dormant? What if Japan were someday in danger again, caught in a situation where, for one reason or another, America was in no position to help – would the nation’s young men be up to the challenge, ready to risk their lives in their country’s defense?

  “Probably not” is the answer most middle-aged and elderly Japanese give to this hypothetical question. It is also the answer I hear from most young people.

  In talking with Japanese veterans about the reasons for such a situation coming to pass, most blame the general lack of fighting spirit and patriotism of the nation’s younger generations on lingering shame and loss of confidence from the 1945 defeat. Many go further to explain the awful staying power of this multi-generational malaise on long range educational policies imposed by the American occupation authorities after the war to “declaw” the Japanese race and ensure that it would never be politically, legally, or temperamentally capable of taking up arms again, leaving it eternally dependent on America for its protection.

  I have had many lively conversations on this topic with Japanese over the years, with perhaps the most memorable of these being a talk I had in March 2002 with Hisao Horiyama, an IMA classmate of Iwao Fukagawa and Toshio Yoshitake and also a tokkō survivor (194th Shinbu). Horiyama-san is a recently retired business executive with over fifty years experience in the chemical industry. He is also an accomplished tokkō researcher and has written an authoritative book on IJA tokkō operations titled Tatebayashi no Sora (“The Skies of Tatebayashi”).

  While discussing history education policy in Japanese schools, I shared an anecdote with Horiyama-san that I have heard many times from students during my years teaching college in Japan – the way Japanese history is currently taught in junior high and high schools, the semester or school year inevitably ends just before the curriculum must deal with post-Meiji Era material. In other words, as far as the vast majority of Japanese young people are concerned, the entire past century of their nation’s history is one big blank, and since this “controversial” period is also ignored in entrance exams, this stunning gap in their historical consciousness is left as is. The old Japanese proverb “When something stinks, put a lid on it” describes perfectly the institutional amnesia afflicting Japanese history education today. Even more disturbingly, the only people in this country who display any passion about addressing this problem are those on the Japanese Right, who would distort the history books to their own political and ideological ends.[315]

  “I think ignorance about our culture is going to destroy our country,” Horiyama said, echoing something Konada-san would say to me three months later. “Excuse my frankness, but I think this is exactly what America intended to happen when GHQ enforced new education regulations during the occupation.

  “The Japanese government and mass media have really been spineless since the defeat,” he continued. “Making things worse, the government put all of its efforts into rebuilding the economy after the war, and did not pay enough attention to educating the nation’s young about protecting their heritage. Today’s young people are the second consecutive generation of Japanese who have little or no sense of their own nationality. I worry that they will grow up to be ‘world citizens’ instead of Japanese. How can a people with poor knowledge of their own culture be taken seriously by other cultures? They can’t.

  “Now, I’m all for this so-called globalization stuff if it’s supposed to be all about bringing different peoples closer and fostering good will, but I think what America has done to Japan since the war is more along the lines of cultural invasion, destroying our heritage and trying to Westernize our societal values.”

  If there is any truth in Horiyama-san’s suspicions, it lends credibility to the theory – shared by most Japanese veterans as well as the late Richard M. Nixon – that a hastily acted upon desire on the part of war-weary victors to sow salt in the spiritual fields of a formidable foe was operant in the formulation of many of GHQ’s policies, including the outlining of educational policy and the framing of the modern Japanese constitution.[316] But still, I am more tempted to pin the larger share of blame for this weakening of the Japanese spirit on domestic rather than foreign pathogens. Weakening paternal roles in the modern Japanese family; the vapid, effeminate infantilism proselytized by Japanese popular culture; the failure of the education system to promote creative thinking and ambition in the nation’s young; a value system based on crass materialism for the last half century, now even further debased by more than a dozen years of seemingly terminal economic slump – all of these are factors contributing to the demise of Japanese pride and the once vaunted and feared Japanese fighting spirit.

  So, will warriors ever spring again from the rocky soil of this once brave land, now transformed by the wave of a wand and a sprinkling of pixie dust into a kingdom of pink kitsch and non-confrontational, cuddly feel-good? Understandably, there is a desperate need among the residents of these isles to believe that young men raised on Hello Kitty and Pokemon can defend the future of Japan. But most also find it necessary to bolster this hope with silent prayers that dear old Uncle Sam will always be nearby to keep the bogeymen away.

  Japan’s last samurai – an ever-dwindling population of war veterans like Hisao Horiyama and Iwao Fukagawa – are heartbroken by the moral, social and political direction the nation has taken since the end of the war. Yet with few exceptions, they are hesitant to make a public stand in warning or protest over these developments. As veterans of Japan’s only defeat, they feel unqualified – or rather, disqualified – to serve as mentors and guides for the nation’s soul. In a modern day variation on a bushidō creed that would have demanded their suicide in a more brutal era, they have shouldered the guilt of their lost war with contrition and humility, keeping their opinions about patriotism and national character amongst themselves, if expressed at all. Most do not even discuss such matters with their families. This is as true for this generation as eighty-year-old men as it was for them as twentysomethings clearing postwar rubble, as thirty- and fortysomethings forming the backbone and muscle of a nascent Japan, Inc., and as fifty- and sixtysomethings running a country second only to America in global economic influence. Through the decades, their silence has been their penance.

  In The Image Factory, a collection of essays on modern Japanese culture, Donald Richie writes that in defeat, Japan suffered “a trauma that might be compared to that of the…believer who suddenly finds himself an atheist…Japan lost its god, and the hole left by a vanished deity remains.”[317] Considering this sad (even if not wholly undeserved, given the 20th century track record of said “god”) fate, I can begin to understand the inconsolable feelings of the old men like Horiyama-san and others I have talked to who say that they actually envy their comrades who died in tokkō attacks, going out in
a blaze of glory for what they loved and believed in even as they knew their cause was doomed. Unlike survivors like Horiyama-san, they died as the last of a now extinct breed of Japanese who never had to know their country with the stain of defeat on the pages of its history.

  For the last half-century, the Japanese have been extraordinarily successful at accumulating material affluence, and have done almost as well at erasing the war from the collective conscience of younger generations. Most Japanese under sixty have never experienced poverty and have little interest and even less knowledge about World War II beyond a vague idea that Japan lost and that, for some reason – perhaps just plain old Anglo-Saxon meanness – the Americans saw fit to vaporize a lot of innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they supposedly already had the war in the bag. In a deft ideological sleight of hand, postwar generations of schoolchildren have been taught – when taught about the Pacific War at all, that is – that Japan’s fundamental experience in the conflict was one of pitiable victimization, not of suffering the logical consequences of ill-advised action. This position is an issue where Japanese of all political stripes can find common ground, and as far as they are concerned, it is a tribal matter not open to negotiation with outsiders.

  Japan’s collective memory of the war, as with so many other issues in its history, has a tendency toward selective amnesia. Memory, then, is also the crux of any dialogue about the legacy of the kamikaze, and it raises many questions: How will tokkō be remembered by future Japanese generations? Is there an option that will not see the tokkō war dead ghoulishly shanghaied as unwitting Nippon Über Alles poster boys on one hand, or as pitiable characters in a Greek chorus of masochistic national self-denial on the other? Should tokkō even be remembered at all? Might the Japanese – as so many of them seem to think – be happier forgetting about this painful topic? Only the Japanese themselves are entitled to make the final choice, but that does not mean that the rest of us cannot express a preference, and I will exercise that right by quoting something Iwao Fukagawa said to me at the conclusion of our first interview in February 2002, after I had just posed my standard wrap-up question: