Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (20 page)

Dying was a topic that
Tokurō and his classmates were understandably reluctant to spend much too much time dwelling on, despite the
pro Mikado et patria mori
message barrage of songs, movies, and rah-rah speeches Japanese boys of their generation had been exposed to from the crib up. But given the fact that they were now members of His Majesty’s armed forces serving in the middle of the most savage war the nation had yet faced, the notion of death claiming many of them before they reached their sixteenth birthdays was not beyond the realm of possibility. While such a fate was horrifying to contemplate for boys whose chins had yet to know a razor and whose lips might never feel the brush of a girl’s sigh, most embraced the notion that there was something glorious and romantic about their imminent destruction as long as they were making this sacrifice for a cause that would ultimately prevail.

While this “cause” had somehow metamorphosed from Pan-Asian hegemony to a simple matter of national survival while everybody was too busy thinking about other things, this considerably more modest but infinitely more crucial military goal still seemed entirely within the reach of the Japanese fighting man. The Yokaren boys believed this in their hearts, and everything they read in the papers, were told by the radio and saw in the newsreels reassured them that there was no reason to think otherwise. Taking the Japanese media accounts at face value, the Americans were reeling under blow after blow from the Emperor’s young war eagles, and would never be allowed to set foot on the Japanese home islands. The war might very well go on for years and years still to come, but Japan would not and could not lose. Defeat was unthinkable.

During a downtime bull session between training sessions one morning in early 1944, Tokurō Takei and his squadmates were let in on news that landed like a bombshell on their fragile eggshell minds. The instructor that morning was an NCO who was an object of intense hero-worship by the cadets. A dashing combat veteran pilot in his mid-twenties, he was one of the few laid-back members of the faculty at Matsuyama, and not surprisingly, the boys loved him and hung on every word he ever said. The conversation that morning had started with an innocuous enough query to the pilot from one of the boys along the lines of “What is it like to be in combat?” The answer that followed was the first honest assessment of Japan’s war record and present situation that the boys had ever heard.

“We’re losing the war,” the pilot had blurted, instantaneously wiping away his charges’ admiring smiles.

Avoiding the cadets’ eyes as he continued, the pilot explained the reason why there were now so many Yokaren campuses around the country, and so many more cadets. It was not because naval aviation was getting bigger, as everyone was being told. It was because they were losing so many pilots
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. The situation was bad, had been headed south since the Battle of Midway almost two years earlier, and was only getting worse.

Battle of Midway? The boys had heard about it, but only in the context of a decisive rout of dastardly American aggression.

The NCO went on to describe the grim realities. Four carriers had gone down in the battle, he said. Hundreds of irreplaceable aviators were lost. He knew all about this, because he had been there, and seen it with his own eyes. And in terms of sheer numbers, what had happened in the meat grinder of the Southwest Pacific during the previous year had been even worse.

While this news was bad enough, the realization of how mas
sively the public was being deceived by the authorities about the progress of the war was somehow even worse. Tokurō never really believed anything about the war he read in the papers, heard on the radio or saw in the Nichiei newsreels after that. It was a devastating blow, and from that day on, his worldview took on a decidedly grayer hue.

O
n May 25, 1944, modest graduation ceremonies were held for the cadets of Yokaren Cycle Kō
-
13, Matsuyama Naval Air Station Campus. Out of 3,275 boys who had entered the Matsuyama program some eight months earlier, 1,180 were graduating as pilot candidates, and 1,610 as aircrew candidates. The other 485 boys who originally entered with the cycle had since fallen by the wayside through sickness, injury or failure
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to otherwise meet graduation requirements.

Tokurō’s training company of 170 new pilot candidates, now officially designated as members of Flight Basic Training Cycle 38, shipped out the same day on chartered train cars for Ōmura Naval Air Station in Nagasaki Prefecture. At last, the boys were going
to get that chance at the stick of an Akatonbo biplane trainer they had all been dreaming about for so long. They were going to be naval aviators. Headed for flight school!

However enthusiastic the cadets may have been about the start of their new careers as heroic aviators, they found out soon after arriving at their destination that it may have been a bit hasty to break out the white scarves and start growing handlebar mustaches. Although they had graduated from Yokaren, they had yet to graduate from ha
zing like “Human Seabag” and “The Paddle.” New rank as Petty Officers 3
rd
Class notwithstanding, Tokurō and his classmates were about to begin another seven months of dreary same-old-same-old – haymakers to the unsuspecting and headgames as usual for everyone. One significant difference between here and Yokaren, of course, was that this time the drudgery would be broken up into digestible chunks, with the exhilaration of stick time in the Akatonbos to look forward to in between.

The Akatonbos certainly lived up to the cadets’ expectations as far as excitement went. There was never a dull moment in the two-seater biplane trainers – especially when sitting in the observer seat with a nervous classmate soloing
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for the first time in the rear pilot’s seat – and the danger the pilot candidates now faced daily was no longer just the NCO variety that put dental work, seating comfort and young egos in jeopardy. There were flying accidents with alarming regularity, many of them fatal. One of the more horrific, which several Cycle 38 cadets witnessed from the ground, occurred when a pilot trainee was soloing with a classmate in the forward observer seat.

After a few circuits around the airfield, the bright orange trainer had climbed high in an Immelman turn. Onlookers from below saw a black object fall from the now-inverted plane at the top of the turn, and there were shouts and gasps when everyone realized that the falling object was the plane’s observer, flailing his arms as if some vestigial avian instinct was telling him to flap phantom wings. Whether through sheer panic or mere lack of time, the observer failed to deploy his parachute, and was dead before people on the ground reached his shattered body. When the understandably shaken cadet at the stick brought the Akatonbo down, he told his superiors that he had merely wanted to surprise his passenger with some aerobatics, but in his enthusiasm, he had failed to notice that his passenger was not strapped in to the cockpit.

*****

As flight school entered its final weeks at
Ōmura in late 1944, cadets of Cycle 38 had to start thinking about the post-graduation assignments they would formally request. Paradoxically, given this relatively advanced post-Marianas stage in the war, Japanese naval aviation offered a more bountiful variety of potential aircraft-type specialties for its fledgling pilots than ever before: there were medium bombers like the Isshiki Rikkō
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(“Betty”) and the venerable China War veteran Mitsubishi Type 96; many new types of high performance attack planes, with the best examples being the Tenzan and Ryūsei torpedo bombers and the Suisei dive bomber; single-engined seaplanes like the Kyōfu and giant flying boats like the Kawanishi Type 2; the high-tech, radar-equipped Gekkō nightfighters; hot new recon planes like the Saiun – said to be able to outrun a Hellcat in level flight; and last but not least, the mounts of the navy’s formerly hemisphere-dominating fighter branch, the legendary Zero and its superlative up-and-coming successor, the Kawanishi Shidenkai
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. But despite this cornucopia of jobs and machines to choose from, the choice was a no-brainer for Tokurō and his classmates. They had not come this far to puddle-jump around the backwaters of the dwindling Empire in seaplanes, or to languish in landlocked torpedo and dive bomber units with the nation’s carrier fleet now turning into extremely expensive coral reef at the bottom of the Pacific. As for an assignment to heavy bombers, well, that was about as exciting as being asked to drive buses. And who wanted to fly into combat with ineffective escort in large, slow targets whose only contribution to the war these days was to fatten American kill tallies? With B-29s now beginning to grind the nation’s population centers into bone meal, there was only one kind of airplane that mattered anymore – the fighter.

Anticipating the overwhelming popularity of fighters as the most hotly sought-after assignment with the Cycle 38 cadets, the Ōmura faculty made every effort to ensure that sufficient numbers of candidates al
so opted for the less glamorous assignments. These units, after all, were suffering just as many casualties as the fighter jocks, and were thus just as desperate for replacements. While the administration of course had the authority to assign personnel as the service’s needs dictated, common sense and experience said that it was better from a morale standpoint for the cadets to get assigned to their first choices whenever possible. In light of this consideration, something had to be done to lessen the appeal of the fighter branch for all but the most dauntless and motivated cadets.

Toward the end of Yokaren half a year earlier, the
Kō-
13 cadets had begun to overhear the expressions tokkō and taiatari at Matsuyama with increasing frequency. While the boys had a general idea that the tactics involved extreme danger, no one at their security clearance level in May 1944 was aware that they inevitably called for self-immolation. But the media blitz about Lieutenant Seki and the Shikishima Flight at Leyte Gulf six months later finally brought all the dropped hints and snippets of scuttlebutt together, and what were formerly vague theoretical concepts and rumors now had a palpably grisly immediacy.

On the day in January 1945 when the cadets of
Ōmura Cycle 38 were to submit their formal requests for assignment, the flight school commandant told the candidates that it was virtually guaranteed that anyone who volunteered for fighters was going to go “into tokkō units from which there is a zero percent chance of returning home alive.”
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But threats or not, nothing was going to change Tokurō’s mind, and sixty out of his 170 classmates shared his convictions. The personnel office staff, shaking their heads with equal parts exasperation at the boys’ stubbornness and admiration for their courage, eliminated first sons
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and only children from the batch, whittling the original sixty down to thirty-eight. On January 11, after a short graduation speech by the Ōmura commandant, the fighter group boys bade farewell to their other classmates, gathered their gear, and spent most of the rest of the day going through tiresome outprocessing procedures like cleaning and returning gear to the quartermaster, and filling in combat insurance forms and next-of-kin notification cards with the HQ pencil pushers. That night, they rode flatbed trucks to Ōmura Station. The boys were told nothing about their destination when they arrived, and still nothing when they boarded specially reserved passenger cars on an eastbound express train that night.

Once seated on the train, Tokurō nodded off quickly. When he opened his eyes again, it was morning and the train was just passing through Hamamatsu. The buildings were as drably industrial as always, but to Tokurō at that moment, savoring the scenery through the condensation-misted window glass, they were as brea
thtaking as a snowcapped Mount Fuji bathed in dawn sunlight. Realizing that he was probably looking at his hometown for the last time in his young life, he wished that the train would at least slow down enough to give him a longer look. But he was on an express, hurtling for points east. He craned his neck out the window to get as long a look as he could at Hamamatsu, getting small and sinking away into the crossties.    

The train pulled into Tokyo Station about three o’clock that afternoon. The new pilots were marched with their gear to the main gates of the Imperial Palace, stopped to bow in greeting, then moved on to pay their respects at Yasukuni Shrine, where they were reassured that they would “soon be resting for all eternity.”
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The march then continued through a couple of kilometers of downtown Tokyo to Meiji Shrine in Harajuku, where there was another group prayer at the Shinto altar there.

As
Tokurō had not grown up in a religious household, he was not particularly comforted by this detour pilgrimage, which smacked as much of self-administered funerary rites as it did of the invocation of divine providence. The ritual was the first of its kind he had experienced in his sixteen months of naval service, and the notion that the people in charge thought it important enough to take time out of a busy transportation schedule did not seem to forebode well for the unknown assignment that awaited the newly graduated pilots of Ōmura Cycle 38.

After a comfortable night’s sleep on fluffy civilian futon mattresses in a Tokyo inn – perhaps the last time in their lives they would enjoy such luxurious sleeping arrangements – the boy petty officers were given a few hours of leave to si
ghtsee in Tokyo. They were then marched back to Tokyo Station, where they boarded a train that took them to Sawara, a nondescript burg in Ibaragi Prefecture about fifty kilometers from the eastern edge of the Tokyo metropolis. From Sawara, navy flatbeds drove them deeper into the boondocks, where civilization’s only toehold was a string of anonymous fishing villages dotting the Pacific coastline. As night fell, the small convoy negotiated unpaved dirt roads through an unappealing landscape of sand flats and scrub pines. If the navy had decided to build a secret base here for security measures, they couldn’t have picked many places in Central Japan more remote than this.