Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (12 page)

*****

Toshio Yoshitake still has “the dream” sometimes – the one where he is back on the flight line of that bomb-cratered airstrip on Negros Island in the Philippines, sitting with the other army pilots under the palms in that same steel gray morning rain, waiting for the weather to clear and the order to climb into the planes. Sometimes he forgets that he is an eighty-year-old having a fifty-eight-year-old dream, and blames the déjà vu he always feels here on crossed signals in a fatigued twenty-two-year-old brain…

…but tired or not, none of the young pilots on the flight line this morning is thinking much about sleeping. Anticipation and nerves keep eyes open and mouths firmly shut, the electricity of the moment paralleled in the metallic razz of sap-fattened bugs and the green whisper of light rain on foliage. There are occasional clinks and snaps of cigarette lighter lids, always followed by sighed exhalations of smoke. One pilot is leaning back against the trunk of a palm, looking at photos he has pulled from his pocket. The pilot next to him chews the stem of a long blade of grass as he gazes off to the east toward the twin volcanoes of Mandalagan and Silay, misty blue in the rain, beyond which lie American ships and destiny. The others just stare at their hands, down at the ground, or off into space, figures in a muted earth tone tableau of young men quietly saying goodbye to the world.

Under the meditative weight of this somber lull, each lung-filling yawn or scratched cowlick is someone’s small celebration and savored affirmation of a life that will cease to be in an hour or two. Socialized from boyhood to respect silence, these middle class sons of rice farmers, schoolteachers, and small business owners share an unspoken understanding that this flight line downtime is probably the last chance in their mortal lives to be alone with their thoughts – to daydream, ruminate, fantasize, or just dwell on the white noise of rain-sizzle through palm fronds, the smell of wet grass, and the feel of warm sea air on their cheeks. There is no nervous banter. No pretentious blather or maudlin yammering. There has already been a send-off speech this morning, and there have been countless others in the past few weeks. No need for any more. “
Dulce et decorum
” lectures and pontifications on the meaning of it all are best left to the crickets in the grass.

Once in the cockpit, it will be all grim reality; the flight will be forty or fifty minutes of edgy boredom followed by a few seconds of screaming adrenaline rush through the American CAP and anti-aircraft barrage to go over – then into – the targets. But Yoshitake should be able to handle the challenges he will face this morning. He is a graduate – as are the other four pilots in his flight – of the elite Imperial Military Academy (IMA), Japan’s West Point. He has been superbly trained over the last three-and-a-half years to build up an impressive repertoire of combat flyer’s skills. A qualified recon/assault pilot, he can skip-bomb moving ships and strafe targets with impressive accuracy, fly by instruments alone at night or in pea soup fog, spot for devastating artillery barrages and coordinate the movement of ground forces from the air. But today, very few of these skills will be called upon, and all of the years of sweat and effort expended on acquiring them will have very little bearing on the outcome of today’s mission. Weather willing, he and the other pilots on the flight line this morning will turn over the engines of their bomb-laden, obsolete
Ki
-51 recon/assault planes and fly off into the sunrise to attack a supply convoy spotted heading for the main American landing area at Ormoc on the west coast of Leyte Island. And if all goes well, the fast-closing deck of one of these ships will be the last thing Toshio Yoshitake ever sees.

There is an irony, as in so many things about this miserable war, in Yoshitake being here today. A whole string of ironies, in fact – broken down engines, rough landings, rotten weather, overall bad timing and the fickle rubber stamps of personnel pencil pushers – have linked up in a cause and effect chain that has determined that he must die on December 12, 1944, in the closing weeks of a lost campaign, the final year of a lost war. But the original ripples in the fabric of space/time that have resulted in this young man’s being here go back much farther than the desk of an administrative officer in 4th Army Air Force headquarters. The cause-and-effect trail leads back to the ambitions of a successful small business owner in late Meiji Era Japan.

Toshio Yoshitake was born Toshio Yamazaki into a family of traditional plasterers in Yamaguchi, a city on the southwestern tip of the main Japanese island of Honshū. The Yamazakis had been plasterers since at least the late Edo Period. Grandfather Yamazaki had built the traditional family business into a thriving local construction firm in the years following the Meiji Restoration. He was a successful, self-made man – a living personification of the New Japanese Dream at work. He was also determined that his own children would be the last generation of Yamazakis ever to hold a mortarboard or mix a tub of plaster. When not attending to the demands of his business regimen, he devoted his energies to supervising the education of his grandsons, sparing no expense for tutors and textbooks, even when things got a little tight during the Great Depression.

His efforts paid off in spades. Nearing his dotage, Grandfather Yamazaki could boast of two grandsons who were already field grade naval officers. Another two grandsons were IMA graduates and career army officers. A fifth grandson, Toshio, was studying to take the IMA test in a year’s time to follow in his older brother Takeharu’s footsteps and fulfill his dream of being an army pilot.

For a boy growing up in early Shōwa Era Japan, the idea of being an army or navy pilot was better than being a movie star, a baseball player and the Prime Minister all rolled up into one. Pilots got to fly around in fast planes and do death-defying stunts. They killed dastardly Bolsheviks and Chinamen and got medals from the Emperor and their names in the papers so their parents and teachers could be proud of them. They wore sharp uniforms. They had movies made about them.

Toshio and his classmates had plenty of opportunities to see such movies. Throughout their elementary and middle school days, they had been marched down to the local theater by their teachers on a regular basis to watch films recommended for children’s viewing by the Ministry of Education. The films were usually boring “yellow man’s burden” harangues about the Japanese race’s divinely ordained responsibility to enlighten and administer to the needs of its less fortunate Asian neighbors. These weren’t good for much more than sleeping through, provided the teacher did not catch you.

If the films were crackling good combat yarns of the “handsome fighter pilot” genre, though, the whole theater went positively electric. Row after row of black-uniformed schoolboys with shiny pant seats and worn down
geta
soles would be sitting ramrod straight in their seats, as if their bodies were straining to join in the action on the screen, nodding along in unison with the stern exhortations of the narrator, tight little fists pounding on the arm rests during the dogfight scenes, secure in the knowledge that the Emperor’s young war eagles – and thus Japan itself – were invincible.

All the boys dreamed of flying, but Toshio had an edge up on everyone. He had already flown. Not only had he flown – and he was careful whom he told about this, so as not to make his friends jealous – but he had actually held the control stick when the plane was in flight.

When he was twelve-years-old, his parents took him to Komagaya Airfield in Osaka, where his older brother Takeharu was stationed as a flight instructor. With the tacit approval of the base commander, Takeharu took his younger brother up in a bright cadmium orange Akatonbo biplane trainer to buzz the environs and fly a few loop-the-loops and other aerobatic maneuvers over the field, much to his parents’ horror. The experience had almost been intense enough for Toshio to require an underwear change after the plane set down, but it was also life-course determining; from that day on, he had his mind set on becoming an army pilot just like his older brother.

Toshio began the long and arduous process of securing an appointment to the IMA when he began the last year of middle school. There would be no opportunities for interviews to ace or influence won with admissions officers as a legacy candidate – everything would be decided by the same grueling battery of physical and academic exams every other applicant would take. The acceptance rate for applicants averaged about five percent every year, but Toshio, his grandfather and his teachers at school had no doubts that he had the right stuff. An entire year would be dedicated to cramming for the admissions exams. Toshio was driven to succeed, and studied with unwavering determination and self-discipline. While his childhood friends frittered away their last year of irresponsible adolescence having fun or apprenticing for dead-end jobs, Toshio hit the books with his eyes on the skies.

In the midst of Toshio’s studies, there was a development in his domestic situation that may seem unusual to Western readers, but which was quite normal for a middle class family in pre-war Japan. Some years earlier, Toshio’s older sister had married into the Yoshitake household, a family of Buddhist monks who administered a temple in Yamaguchi City. The marriage was childless, so it was a perfectly reasonable request when, in Toshio’s eighteenth year and right before his admissions tests for the academy were scheduled to begin, the Yoshitake family formally approached the Yamazakis to ask if they might adopt him as a son. Toshio had no intention of taking up a career in religion, but he would not have to worry about any monastic obligations – the Yoshitakes’ childless son would take care of those, for the time being. Rather, the motive behind Toshio’s adoption was so he could sire the next generation of Yoshitake heirs who would take over the temple and care for the old folks some day. Toshio would marry after his commissioning in the army, most likely with some girl of the Yoshitake’s choosing, then leave her in the temple compound with his adoptive family and be free to gallivant about the Empire pursuing his military career for as long as he wanted. In the meanwhile, he would be expected to come home regularly on furloughs to attend to his child-producing duties.

Although the Yoshitakes were quite wealthy, as Japanese Buddhist monks generally are, life in their temple was austere and quiet. It suited Toshio’s purpose at hand – the environment was perfect for the kind of rote memorization studying he had to do for the IMA entrance exam. In February 1941, the peace and quiet and diligence paid off with a letter of acceptance from the IMA.

Toshio began his studies at the IMA in April 1941. He had an easier transition to the rigors of cadet life than most of his classmates. The time he had spent in the temple during his last months as a civilian prepared him well for the discipline he would need to endure the next three years. Moreover, his patient, sanguine, but not overly sensitive or emotional personality was also well suited for the harsh and often abusive environment at the IMA. His temperament enabled him to duck the blows he could avoid and bend with the blows he could not. He adopted a general policy of lying as low as possible, but when he or another squadmate screwed up and got caught, he took the group beatings his entire squad would be subject to without a whimper or a complaint. Overall, he was a model cadet. Outside of occasional weekend forays off campus with his squadmates to go down by the riverside and drink a little contraband wine from their canteens, he stuck to the straight and narrow. He kept his mind on his studies and off girls. He worked hard.

Three years later, on a bright, sunny spring day in March 1944, Toshio graduated from the IMA as Officer Candidate Yoshitake, assigned to Aviation Reconnaissance. Official commissioning as a Second Lieutenant would come later, after successful completion of the first portion of Recon Basic with thirty-nine other IMA classmates at Shimoshizu Airfield in Chiba Prefecture on the eastern edge of the Tokyo megalopolis.

Three days after the start of this training, Yoshitake was introduced to the Mitsubishi
Ki
-51 Type 99 Assault Plane. The
Ki
-51 was a fixed landing gear two-seater design dating from the China conflict and was already woefully obsolete by this stage of the Pacific War. But to Yoshitake and his classmates, its 900 horsepower Mitsubishi Ha-26-II powerplant sounded like rolling thunder compared to the 350 horsepower lawnmower engines that pulled their Akatonbos around in Basic Flight School. The plane’s bark, however, was worse than its bite. Like many prewar Japanese designs, the
Ki
-51’s maneuverability was excellent, especially at low altitude and speed, but it was poorly armed and its maximum speed was no match for the American planes it now met in combat. Nevertheless, the plane was relatively easy to fly and forgiving in inexperienced hands.

Training on the
Ki-
51s at Shimoshizu was administered by a top notch, combat experienced faculty with excellent facilities at their disposal. The Marianas debacle had not yet seriously compromised Japan’s petroleum supply, so aviation gas was still relatively plentiful. Subsequently, the trainees grabbed every minute of stick time that they could.

Instruction during the initial phase consisted mainly of aerial and ground tactics, signal and communication (both radio and visual), aerial photography, basic meteorology and leadership. After this orientation period, the trainees were divided up into specialty groups. Yoshitake and fifteen other student pilots were assigned to Ground Liaison/Artillery Spotter pilot training. It was a good group – consisting entirely of IMA ’44 classmates – and there were no slackers. The training was fulfilling and challenging, but these challenges often exacted a steep cost. During the following months, numerous accidents maimed and killed both students and faculty.