Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (3 page)

If you can look past the lines of tour buses, souvenir stands and the uniformed rent-a-cop next to the altar, there is an almost Gothic air of masculine dignity about this place – a Japanese West Point or Notre Dame with white-robed Shinto attendants flitting about all the macho masonry and elegant woodwork. It seems a worthy final resting place for the souls of modern-era samurai, as well as a neat architectural metaphor for Japan’s Jekyll-and-Hyde cultural identity in the first half of the twentieth century – all bamboo flutes and battleships, tea ceremonies and around-the-clock assembly lines, brush calligraphy and long-range bombers. Although the aged tone of the wood used in the main ceremonial buildings makes them appear to be centuries old, they are actually of recent construction, and represent only the latest of several reincarnations of the shrine. Nevertheless, their breathtaking carpentry and decorative carvings nevertheless firmly places the aesthetic at work here in ancient Japanese tradition.

A quick look around at the rest of the facilities suggests that most of the place dates from the 1930s, built in the handsome stone and copper Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced Asian Art Deco style that was used in official Japanese buildings before that godawful postwar stucco-slathered steel-reinforced concrete look took over as the de rigueur architectural style for the nation’s public infrastructure. The thirty-meter high steel
torii
gate at the main entrance of the grounds accentuates the exotic early twentieth century atmosphere of industrialized military might crossed with “traditional” Japanese culture. Passing under this gate, the promenade continues around and past a columned statue of topknot-coiffed and kimono-clad Masujirō Ōmura, founding father of the Imperial Army, who was assassinated by counterrevolutionaries in 1869. Perhaps a hundred meters past this imposing piece of statuary, the entrance to the inner sanctum compound is guarded by ten-meter high glass-paneled limestone snow lanterns. The lanterns rest on stout pedestals with wraparound bronze bas-relief friezes depicting heroic scenes from the Russo-Japanese War and Chinese campaigns, naval scenes on the right side pedestal, army scenes on the left. 

After visitors walk past these and under a smaller bronze tori’i, they are now considered to be on hallowed ground. Before proceeding further into the compound, I must undertake a Shinto purification ritual at a large granite water-filled trough that looks almost like an Egyptian sarcophagus. It must weigh several tons. I walk under a copper roof resting on dark wood posts that covers the holy trough, and read a sign written only in Japanese that gives a step-by-step explanation of what I am to perform here. I follow the instructions, dipping a wood-handled tin ladle into the water, splashing it over my hands, ridding myself of the uncleanliness of the outside world. I dart glances at the Japanese people around me to make sure that I’m doing everything correctly. I watch a bespectacled corporate type in his early thirties take water into his mouth from his cupped left hand, swish the water around a bit, and spit it out in the stone gutter below the trough. Another glance at the sign confirms that this is what I’m supposed to do, so I mimic what I’ve just observed. There is a faint aftertaste of copper in the water.

Following the general flow of my fellow pilgrims, I walk through a handsome wooden gate about as tall as a three-story house. The hinged doors look almost battering-ram-proofed, like they could have been built for an old samurai castle, and are at least a handspan thick. They are emblazoned with large gold
kikunomon
crests, the sixteen-petal chrysanthemum device that has been the heraldic crest of the imperial family since medieval times.

A souvenir photo hawker who has set up shop next to the gate is also conducting a ritual of sorts, tossing chunks of bread that are snatched up in mid-air by half-tame starlings swooping down from the gate eaves. A small cluster of uniformed junior high school girls here on a class trip has stopped to watch the show. The girls squeal with delight each time a starling makes a successful bread catch. “
Sugoi! Moikkai!”
“Wow! Do it again!”

I stop directly in front of the main altar and bow in the direction of the inner sanctum, which is half-hidden behind purple and white
kikunomon
-patterned curtains. As I approach the altar, the rent-a-cop eyes me warily, perhaps weighing tactical options in the event that I’m some
gaijin
[8]
weirdo with a protest banner smuggled in my coat lining or a volley of red paintballs stashed in my attaché case. I smile at him and climb three steps to the altar, bow, and clap my hands to get the attention of the resident spirits (as if they aren’t already eyeballing me as intently as the security guy is). I toss my coin into the tithing box, bow once more and move on to get out of the way for the people behind me.

I walk by some smaller memorials tucked amongst the trees on the northern edge of the main promenade. One of them is done with an interesting sunken grotto effect – a covered reflecting pool surrounded with stepped layers like a miniature Greek amphitheater – but it has a neutered Sixties prefab energy out of place here, almost as if the architect had been too timid to incorporate more recognizably Japanese elements into the designs when work crews were still cleaning up B-29 raid rubble in the suburbs and the Socialist Party still made decent showings in elections. While this monument may have looked cutting edge when it was put up, it now looks like a soot-streaked, mold-mottled Omaha Beach gun emplacement designed by some failed Le Corbusier pupil – a sad reminder of how unflattering the humid Japanese climate is for steel-reinforced concrete, and how ungracefully the International Style has aged.

I walk back out onto the promenade and past a column of camera-toting old men led by a pennant-waving young female tour bus guide in a navy blue “Jackie O” ensemble, replete with pillbox hat and sensible pumps. Suddenly, bugle notes begin to echo throughout the compound. I’m not sure whether the music is coming from Yasukuni’s sound system or one of the right-wing militant groups’ loudspeaker trucks lined up in the parking lot, but the effect is goosebump-inducing nonetheless. The notes temporarily drown out the buzz of the soft drink vending machines and the giggling gaggles of schoolgirls taking a shortcut through the shrine to get to the subway stop across the street. For a moment, I can almost hear ghostly parade ground commands wafting through the trees, somber minor key army hymns in a pentatonic scale, the rhythmic crunch of ethereal army boots passing in review. The imagery is a tad spooky – both supernaturally and politically – but there are echoes of melancholy old glory in it as well, like those horns in the opening scenes of
Patton
.

The men in the tour group stir with smiles of recognition and approving sighs. A comment from one of them confirms my guess that what we are hearing is the old Japanese Army version of “Taps,” and I find myself wondering how many of these fellows used to drift off to sleep to these same bugle notes sixty-odd years ago. Is nostalgia for fading memories and the glory of past youth at least some small part of what has brought these men to Yasukuni this afternoon – what brings millions of others like them here year in and year out? As the last note of the haunting bugles echoes off of the office buildings ringing Yasukuni, I cannot help but feel that yes, just as Japan’s neighbors suspect, a certain degree of nostalgia is at work here. However, the overwhelming emotional dynamic I see in the faces of these old men – evident in the faces of almost every visitor I have seen today – is neither misplaced nostalgia nor healing grief, but rather, a melancholy lost cause desperation that hangs in the very air of this place like a smoky layer of funerary incense. It is the desperate hope that some lasting value can be found in the deaths of millions of young men in a crushing defeat, and an equally desperate denial of the intolerable, unspeakable and unthinkable possibility that friends and loved ones – that the best of an entire generation – may have died in vain.

This notion makes me feel a little self-conscious, suddenly aware of myself as a red-nosed six-foot-four gaijin galumphing about this hope-hallowed ground in size thirteen Bass Weejuns with a camera dangling from my red neck, wondering how many of these old folks look at me and hear air raid sirens in their heads.    

I check my watch and slowly head for the library building, which is about a hundred meters from the main altar. On the way, I pass a rest area occupied by another group of old men, many wearing matching baseball caps, who are sitting on benches covered with faded red vinyl patched in places with red duct tape. Most of the men huddle in tight, smoky powwows around ashtray stands. Gales of rattling coughs notwithstanding, the overall mood is mirth and camaraderie: I catch a funny anecdote and some laughter from a nearby group, then a complaint followed by a snarled retort somewhere else that brings on another round of hard laughs. In a quieter group, someone’s recent surgery is described in detail I’m sure everybody but the raconteur could do without, but the story is punctuated at appropriate intervals by rounds of sympathetic hemming and hawing echoed by the white pigeons clucking and fussing over birdseed and bread crumbs in the gravel underfoot.

I am still a bit early when I arrive at the library, but the door is open and I walk in. I am welcomed by the library curator, Shinsuke Daitō. He has a mild, hospitable manner – a Japanese Mister Rogers comes to mind as a possible destiny in an alternate universe – and I would imagine that most people are surprised to learn that he is a retired professional soldier. A member of the first graduating class (1953) of the National Defense Academy (combined postwar incarnation of the old Imperial military and naval service academies), Daitō-san retired from the Japan Ground Self-Defense Forces as a major general in 1992. For him, working at Yasukuni is not simply something to do in his retirement. It is a great honor, and he performs every task here with equal devotion, whether it is running the daily operations of this library and archiving its records, or helping the young Shinto acolytes with their morning duties, sweeping up around the main altar area and raking gravel in the atrium rock garden.

Daitō-san shows me to a table where I can have some privacy, then goes off into the stacks to retrieve some material he thinks will give me a good starting point for my research. He returns with an armload of yellowing newspaper clippings, attack rosters a
nd thick Japanese tomes. The selection makes me realize just how much I will have to read, learn and record during this project. Opening an age-browned tome, I get a pungent, meditative whiff of old-book-smell, and so with the turn of a page begins my time-travelling journey of exploration to a Japan where something like the kamikaze was once possible.

O
ctober 17, 1944 – Eight Days Before The St. Lo Is Sunk

Wood-paneled radios are tuned throughout Japan early on this crisp October morning. Pilot trainees line up outside their barracks at Akeno Army Airfield near Nagoya. Midshipmen stand at rigid attention in a mess hall at the Naval Academy in Hiroshima. A Tokyo banker in a neatly-pressed Mao suit skims the morning paper for business news at his elegant dining room table, only half listening to – and even less interested in – the radio his plump wife has switched on in the living room. Sendai homemakers in baggy work pajamas meet in front of their neighborhood block watch leader’s house to hear the broadcast. Buddhist monks sit in quiet repose in the anterooms of an ancient Kyoto temple.

In Shizuoka, a forty-five-year-old woman lights an incense stick for her son, killed a year and a half ago at Guadalcanal. She has four other sons in uniform, flung to the far reaches of the empire. If they are near radios right now, they are listening, too, linked with their mother and the rest of their countrymen in an electromagnetic telepathy relayed through the concrete canyons of Ginza, over slag heaps and terraced rice paddies, through crematorium smoke and shimmering bamboo groves to reach wood and paper houses packed wall to wall on every level patch of land in the archipelago; beamed by Army and Navy stations, the signal crosses staggering expanses of Asian landmass and thousands of leagues of ocean from the Siberian frontier to the jungles of Borneo to reach His Imperial Majesty’s resolute young soldiers and sailors. 

The somber yet stirring open notes of the patriotic dirge “Umi Yukaba” crackle from speakers across the empire. Everyone joins in with the radio chorus for the song’s only verse:

Though you lead me

To a watery grave,

Or to moulder in the grass

Of mountain dales

I will die for you, my lord,

With no regrets.

As the song fades out on a heroic note of brass and rumbling tympani, a theatrically virile voice cues in, fairly bursting with pride and barely contained excitement. There is thrilling news to report from the waters off Taiwan:

“The name of Vice Admiral Mitscher…together with the name Saipan, is indelibly stamped in the hearts of us, the one hundred million people of Japan, as a name to be remembered for vengeance. He was one of the planners of the Doolittle raid…participated in the Battle of Midway…was made air force commander in the Solomons. His ability was recognized, and he became commander of the jewel of the Pacific Fleet, Task Force 58, and invaded Saipan. The pitiful end of Task Force 58 must have been vividly witnessed by him from his watery grave.”
[9]

The broadcast ends, but most listeners remain tuned for the daily radio calisthenics program. The war can wait at least long enough for jumping jacks and backstretches before another day of maximum effort in fields, on factory floors, in office buildings. Exercise maintains fighting spirit, the people are told every morning. And only the morally degenerate complain about deep knee bends. After all, just think of what the boys at the front are going through.