Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (68 page)

[39]
This translation of the
Senjinkun
or Japanese Servicemen’s Code of Conduct is from Warner (pp.5-6).

[40]
This quote is in reference to the official philosophy of
Hakkō ichiu
(“eight corners of the earth in harmony under one roof” a metaphor for global control under Imperial rule) proselytized in Japanese propaganda since the 1930s to legitimize the nation’s expansionist policies. It was one of the founding principles of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. See Edwards (2003) for an explanation of this expansionist propaganda imagery, and the ancient mythology used to legitimize it.

[41]
Kaneko (2001), pp.47-48

[42]
The compound noun Shinpū is written with the Chinese
kanji
characters for “god” and “wind.” Many readers will note that the word
kamikaze
employs these exact ideograms. Shinpū uses an
on-yomi
reading/pronunciation for ideograms intended to simulate their reading in the original Chinese, while “kamikaze” is a
kun-yomi
reading/pronunciation in which Chinese characters are used for ideographic meaning only and applied to Japanese words –
kami
(god) and
kaze
(wind) – which have existed in the Japanese language since before the adoption of
kanji
in the Seventh Century A.D. The respective roles of
on-yomi
vocabulary items (usually compound nouns, verbs and adjectives of two to four kanji characters each, often accompanied by particles in the Japanese
kana
phonetic syllabary) and
kun-yomi
words (basic grammatical structure and simple nouns, verbs and adjectives) in the evolution of the modern Japanese language can be likened to the interplay of sophisticated Latin vocabulary and ancient Anglo-Saxon tribal tongues in the formation of modern English.
On-yomi
readings tend to imply erudition and sophistication on the part of the user, while
kun-yomi
readings imbue meaning with a homey, comfortable nuance harkening back to a rustic, idealized Japanese “good old days” era. To give a user-friendly example for the Western reader, imagine deciding to open a restaurant themed on the delicious bread you bake on the premises; whether you name your new establishment La Boulangerie or Granny’s Bread Oven might be the determining factor in whether you have either BMWs with Ivy League bumper stickers or pick-up trucks with shotgun racks in your parking lot on opening day. In using the characters for “god” and “wind” in the naming of the first tokkō unit, Ōnishi obviously wanted to evoke imagery of the fabled Mongol rousting “kamikaze” or “kami-no-kaze” of lore, but at the same time, give it a professional sharpness with the use of the
on-yomi
reading for the
kanji
. The actual use of the word “kamikaze” to refer to tokkō tactics and units was most likely either an Allied translator’s or a Western journalist’s mistaken reading of Shinpū. This misreading has stayed in the English vernacular ever since – and has subsequently entered the Japanese vernacular.

[43]
These names are taken from th
e lines of a famous poem by late eighteenth century proto-patriot and
kokugaku
“scholar” (I would translate his discipline as “inquiries into the nature of Japaneseness”) Norinaga Moto’ori extolling the virtues of Japanese culture and manhood. Both their origin and significance would have been familiar to any schoolboy in 1944 Japan. See Ogami (1996) and Befu (2001) for details on Moto’ori’s career and his ideological influence on Japanese nationalism a century later.

[44]
Kaneko (2001), p.62

[45]
Accounts of tokkō aircraft being given only enough fuel for a one-way trip to their targets are fallacious and probably have their origins in Allied propaganda or sensational wartime/early post-war journalism, perhaps concocted to impress upon both the American public and the vanquished Japanese a sense of Western cultural superiority by playing up on a spurious “callous Japanese disregard for human life” angle. While Japan was certainly strapped for fuel in late 1944, it was even more desperately strapped for pilots and aircraft. Fully-gassed flights that failed to find their targets would be able to return to base and be available for new missions, while planes fueled for only a one-way trip would be gone for good, mission accomplished or not. Additionally, there were combat effectiveness considerations: aviation gas remaining in fuel tanks gave a considerable boost to the killing and maiming capabilities of tokkō planes (basically turning them into giant Molotov cocktails) when they hit their targets, especially in the case of light fighter types like the Zero, which had a maximum bomb load of only 250kg.

[46]
See Mori (1995), p.494.

[47]
See “USS West Virginia (BB-48) Action Report: Leyte Gulf/Surigao Strait” http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/ships/logs/BB/bb48-Surigao.html

[48]
Not only did it spell the end of Nishimura and his force, but it also spelled the end of an era in naval warfare; the Battle of Surigao Strait was the last true ship-to-ship gun battery naval engagement in history. With the exception of mop-up operations against Nishimura’s battered stragglers hours after the main battle, there was no use of air power by either side during the engagement.

[49]
This unit was named for the emblem used as the family crest of Masashige Kusunoki, a medieval samurai with a presence in Japanese lore similar to that of Nathan Hale in American history. He died on the battlefield regretting that he did not have more than one life to give for the Emperor. See Turnbull (1996), p.46.

[50]
The
Yamazakura
,
Yamato
and
Asahi
flights had been sent to Cebu Island on the afternoon of October 20
,
, then on to Davao Base on Mindanao Island on October 23 in order to be nearer the main area of operations. The Kikusui Flight, one of the “expansion” units made possible by the open-ended wording of Ōnishi’s standing orders for the Shinpū program, was formed on the evening of October 22 and sent to join the other flights at Davao the next morning. See Mori (1995), pp516-519.

[51]
Mori (1995), pp501-505.

[52]
Nishizawa was most likely Japan’s leading ace of the war with 36 confirmed and 83 claimed aerial victories. Landing their Zeroes after the mission at Cebu Island, Nishizawa and the other surviving Shikishima escort pilots, Warrant Officers Honda and Baba, were killed the next day when the transport plane they were riding back to Mabalacat was shot down by Task Force 38 Hellcats. Nishizawa’s loss was an enormous blow to Japanese morale, both military and civilian, equivalent in weight and effect to the grief experienced by the German nation after Manfred von Richtofen’s combat death in April 1918.

[53]
By most Japanese estimates, these kills were numbers 102 and 103, respectively, in Nishizawa’s final official tally, although more than half of this total consists of unconfirmed scores. Sakaida (1998) cites Nishizawa’s confirmed score at 36.

[54]
Oide, p.78

[55]
A somewhat nebulous Japanese legal term loosely translated as “corporation,” but which is usually applied to NPOs, schools and political associations.

[56]
Understandably eager to separate Japan from the existence and deeds of wartime Nazi allies, defenders of Japan’s conduct in the war prefer this term, which both politically and etymologically treats the European theater of the conflict as a separate war. It also underscores rightist Japanese attempts to portray the conflict as a war of liberation fought by Japan on behalf of Asia against Western imperialism. See Buruma (1995), Orr (2001) and Nathan (2004) for analysis of modern permutations of this mindset.

[57]
See Chang (1997) for convincing evidence to the contrary.

[58]
These positions are clearly explained in bilingual displays at Yasukuni’s museum, which is open to the public, and in its English website at http://www.yasukuni.or.jp/english/.

[59]
The last class graduated in March 1945.

[60]
Skip-bombing was pioneered by U.S. Army Air Force units such as the 345
TH
BG “Air Apaches” in the Southwest Pacific in the early stages of the war as an effective – and extremely hazardous to the attacker – method of attacking weakly armored merchant and transport shipping. An expedient tactic for flyers lacking extensive training in naval warfare (e.g. unable to dive-bomb moving targets accurately), the technique involved flying at wave-top altitude and using a standard high explosive bomb like an above-water torpedo. Dropped close enough to ensure a hit but hopefully far enough away to give the plane a chance to zoom away safely before detonation, the bomb would skip over the water like a flat pebble to bound into the side of the target vessel and explode.

[61]
The
Hakkō
of the unit name refers to the first half of the “Japanese manifest destiny”
hakkō
slogan.

[62]
Under the old Japanese educational system, a “high school” was equivalent to a junior college today. Students would have been from eighteen to twenty years o
ld.

[63]
“The Loach Scooper” dance; the loach is an evolutionarily quirky fish/lizard/eel-like creature that lives in the soil of tidal mudflats in many areas of Japan, propelling itself through the muck using its fins like legs. Not exactly a culinary delight of haute cuisine, the loach nonetheless provided an important and free source of protein in rural Japan until the modern era. The Loach Scooper dance is supposed to pantomime the futile efforts of a hapless
hyottoko
bumpkin clown trying to chase his dinner down in slippery muck.

[64]
Later publicly humiliated after abandoning his post and fleeing to Taiwan as the Americans closed in at the end of the Philippines Campaign. His orders had been to stay and fight to the death. He survived the war. Hundreds of young army pilots he or
dered on tokkō missions in the Philippines, however, did not.

[65]
Fraternization between commissioned and noncom pilots in off-duty social situations was already a semi-officially recognized custom in tokkō units by this time, even in the rigidly stratified
army, although most units nevertheless kept a subtle and mutually agreed-upon separation between the two groups.

[66]
See Kawachiyama (1990) for details of this and other early IJA tokkō operations.

[67]
The Nakajima Hayabusa was the IJA’s mainstay fighter for most of the war, largely replaced in the last year of the conflict by the vastly superior Nakajima
Ki
-84 Hayate. See Bueschel (1997), Sakaida (1997) , Nohara and Mochizuki (2000).

[68]
See Hudson (1999), Edwards (2000) and http://www.pitt.edu/~annj/courses/notes/jomon_genes.html.

[69]
And it should be noted that intercepted and subsequently widely publicized American propaganda did nothing to dispel these fears – at least the last two. For a detailed discussion of this process and its effect on Japanese military and civilian morale, see Dower (1986), pp246-248.

[70]
The newest and most authoritative historical interpretations of Hirohito’s wartime experience suggest that he had a much more active – if not dominating – role in guiding the war’s conduct than had been previously believed. Readers interested in pursuing this topic are urged to read John Dower’s
Embracing Defeat
(1999) and Herbert Bix’s
Hirohito
(2000).

[71]
See Reischauer (1970) for an explanation of this process. See Suzuki (1959) for a detailed aesthetic analysis of the result.

[72]
This regional technological legacy in small motor production matched with a thriving local bicycle manufacturing industry led to a domination of global motorcycle production by these firms – joined by a postwar competitor, Honda – a mere twenty years later. The world headquarters of all three firms remain in the Hamamatsu area to this day. 

[73]
Lowered from twenty to nineteen in 1943, then to seventeen in 1944

[74]
Syllabary acronym for
Hikō
Yokaren
shūsei.

[75]
Akabane, personal correspondence.

[76]
This Japanese fairy tale character is traditionally depicted as an immaculately conceived (sprung from a peach – that was his name, after all) boy with supernatural abilities who rids his rustic community of marauding
auslander
demons and banishes them from Japan. See Dower (1986) pp.251-257 for accounts of how this fairy tale was “enlisted” into the Japanese war effort and used to legitimize expansionist aggression in Asia in the public eye. 

[77]
There were twenty Yokaren schools by the end of the war, each attached to a functioning regional naval air group at a campus bearing the base’s name. For example, the Tsuchiura Yokaren was attached to – and under the nominal authority of – the Tsuchiura Air Group (KKT).

[78]
Takei, personal correspondence.