Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (30 page)

Classes at the kindergarten were taught in fluent but heavily accented Japanese by an old maid German missionary named Frau Winter, who laced her lessons with a healthy dose of Lutheran dogma that never really caught on with the children or their families, the Fukagawas included. But religious affiliations or not, everyone became a believer at Christmas time, when
die Frau
would organize her charges into a chorus to sing carols and perform pageants in phonetically memorized German. Iwao enjoyed her Christmas productions so much that he continued participating in them well into his elementary school years, although this stopped after neighborhood boys clued him in on the inherent sissiness of candlelight handbell recitals and singing “O Tannenbaum” in an elf costume. Convinced of this wisdom, Iwao stuck to less masculinity-threatening activities like baseball and marbles from then on.

Playing “war” with friends was another favorite activity for Iwao, and it was encouraged by teachers at school and other adult figures in the community, including his own father. Like many other self-made Japanese men of his generation, Yonekichi Fukagawa saw a military career as a quick, honorable and surefire way for his sons to elevate not only their own but the collective family social status as well. Putting his sons through either the naval or military academy would do the trick nicely, propelling them up and out of Ogi-machi and as far away from the family sawmill as they could get. Yonekichi made no secret of his ambitions for his boys, and often d
iscussed with his oldest son Tadao the merits of attending the army’s IMA prep school
Yōnen Gakkō
(literally “Army Youth School”) program. Yōnen graduates were guaranteed automatic acceptance to the IMA after their three-year courses of study, and a Yōnen pedigree was generally considered to be a necessary ticket on the fast track to general’s stars. Family hopes were high when Tadao sat for entrance examinations to the program in early 1933.

Iwao never forgot the shame and disappointment in the Fukagawa household when Tadao failed his exams, and he vowed to avenge the family honor when his own turn came by succeeding where his brother had failed. The nail-biting drama of cramming and test batteries was repeated five years later during Iwao’s fifteenth sprin
g, but this time, the family’s hopes were realized. Iwao passed his exams and matriculated to the Yōnen Gakkō Hiroshima campus in April 1938. It was a heady honor for a sawmill operator’s son.

While Iwao’s social background as a craftsman’s son would have
made his entry into Japan’s warrior elite difficult even forty or fifty years earlier – and outright impossible another thirty years before that – it was very much representative of the “new” samurai being produced in Japan’s naval and army service academies in the early decades of the twentieth century. This was especially true of the IMA, which was an organizationally rigid but much more socially egalitarian institution than its naval counterpart at Etajima. Since the closing years of the Meiji Period, IMA graduating classes were increasingly dominated by sons of Japan’s provincial petit bourgeois – a nascent social stratum that had proved early on – as in most other nineteenth century experiments in nationalism – to be the most loyal and patriotic in its support of the Japanese
nouveau regime
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. While all but three out of 158 members of the first IMA class in 1877 were of samurai descent – with the class dominated by cadets from landed elite families with large estates in the old Satsuma and Chōshū clan bastions of western Japan – samurai descendants made up only 15 percent of the class of 1931, when the majority of the academy’s cadets were from middle class origins and hailed from far-flung regional urban centers and agricultural areas.
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This demographic shift in the makeup of the officer corps was encouraged by the army, which saw a wide home region and social class distribution for its membership as a factor that, working in tandem with the burgeoning Army Reservist Association (
Zaigō Gunjindan
), would help the service consolidate its popular power base and political influence. Moreover, as intellectual dallyings in socialism and democratic movements centered in the Tokyo area became particularly conspicuous in the post-World War I years, the army – whose ideology was increasingly influenced by a German-inspired school of thought known as Japanese Romanticism – saw boys from outer-lying regional areas as being more wholesome and “purely Japanese” potential officer material than their more cosmopolitan Tokyo counterparts, who were traditionally suspect to squandering their energies on the capital’s pleasures and clouding their minds with subversive Western thought. Bright-eyed boys from the provinces like Iwao Fukagawa attracted to military careers in Japan’s interwar years were seen as fit, pure-hearted, fiercely patriotic, and expected – when the time came – to be unflinchingly prepared to die for what they believed in.

These long-term social and regional shifts in army junior leadership development paid off in unexpected ways, eventually producing a faction of officers who were unfettered by old clan loyalties and who tended to regard the army as the supreme arbiter of the national and Imperial will in most political matters. They would go on to assume a Praetorian Guard-like influence in the capital during the tumultuous Twenties and Thirties, when their senior ranks engineered the nation’s swing toward militarism and a cabal of hotheads from their younger ranks very nearly toppled the parliamentary government with a coup d’etat attempt in February 1936. During the war that resulted in large part from this militaristic adventurism, the last generation of torchbearers – Iwao and other 1940s IMA graduates – would end up bearing the brunt
of cleaning up the mess, with many making the ultimate sacrifice as tokkō pilots in the final months of fighting.

Of course, the fury and destruction of war Iwao would face was still years away when he began his military career as a fifteen-year-old cadet
in 1938. Even though the China war was already going on at the time, few Japanese felt that it had much bearing on their lives, and in the case of the Fukagawa family, no one was particularly worried that Iwao – despite his chosen career path – might have to be involved in this or any other war someday. Iwao gave the possibility even less thought. Even as a teenager, he had a pragmatic work-the-problem approach to life, and he tended to concentrate his efforts on the tasks at hand. Whatever was going to happen in the future would happen, and could be dealt with when the time came. It did little good to worry about what might be when there was work to be done
now
, and for the time being, Iwao had that work cut out for him as a new cadet in the Imperial Japanese Army.

Like future IMA classmate Toshio Yoshitake, Iwao was also temperamentally well suited to survive and thrive in this environment of extreme regimentation and frequent hardship, but for different reasons. Where Yoshitake was highly adaptive, good at bending with the breeze and adept at ducking punches, Iwao was more of a Ulysses Grant type – a bullheaded hardcharger who always took his punches squarely on the chin. He banged away one hundred percent at everything he did, whether it was academic work, military training, or the school’s daily P.E. regimen of kend
ō fencing, judo and gymnastics.

The young cadet’s martial spirit and fighting vigor did not escape the attentions of his instructors, and Iwao was often chosen to give kendō exhibition matches for VIPs visiting the Hiroshima Yōnen campus, such as the dele
gation of Hitler Youth members and Nazi officials who toured the facilities during the summer of 1939. His greatest honor, however, was when he was tapped for a bout to be held for the ultimate visiting VIP – none other than Emperor Hirohito himself.

“I was very nervous,” Fukagawa-san remembers some sixty-five years later. “But it was quite a thrill when I won. His Majesty watched very carefully, commenting when someone made a good move or parried a blow skillfully. You could tell that he knew something ab
out kendō…That he knew what to look for.”

After an exemplary Yōnen Gakkō career, Iwao matriculated without incident and on schedule in April 1941 to the IMA main campus at Ichigaya, Tokyo
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, where he would pursue a fourteen-month core curriculum academic course before being sent to his appropriate service branch school to finish up his cadet training. Like so many of his classmates, Iwao had his heart set on aviation. These ambitions came crashing to earth, however, when he was diagnosed with high blood pressure at his flight physical and sent to the infantry instead. Although bitterly disappointed, Iwao – true to character – shrugged off the setback and put his efforts into succeeding at being an exemplary infantry cadet, just as he had succeeded in everything else the army had thrown at him so far.

After graduating from the core curriculum course in June 1942, Iwao and his classmates were sent out on a three-month Cadet Troop Leadership Training
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program to serve with actual line units as apprentice officers. In Iwao’s case, he was assigned to the 210
th
Infantry Regiment, a Chinese Expeditionary Force unit that was composed mostly of conscripts from Kofu City, Yamanashi Prefecture and the Yokohama metropolitan area.
[159]
As Iwao and his other classmates assigned to summer duty with the unit soon found out after their arrival at the unit’s Northern China base camp, 210
th
’s area of responsibility happened to be in a combat zone. The cadets were given a first-hand reminder of this fact when they came under fire from Chinese troops during a visit to the front line one day to observe an assault on a Kuomintang base.
[160]

Outside of the shooting incident, Iwao enjoyed his temporary duty in China, and even got to do some sightseeing in the nearby town with classmates on days off. While there was plenty of guerrilla activity in the area, this was mostly limited to sabotage and nighttime skirmishes in the countryside. The Japanese had firm control over urban concentrations and major roads, and as long as Iwao and his friends stuck to these areas, the only danger they faced was the unwelcoming stares of the locals.

The children were friendly, though, and Iwao always carried a big bag of sweets for the inevitable kiddie crowd that would mob him, begging for candy, whenever he ventured off-post. Iwao enjoyed this attention, and never experienced with the local children the halfheartedly guilty sense of “invader consciousness”
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he usually felt when he was around Chinese adults. The children also kept him from dwelling too much on a strategic situation that even a nineteen-year-old cadet could see was hopeless.

“I always felt that high command didn’t really know what we were supposed to be doing there,” Fukagawa-san rues. “The place was too big for a nation of Japan’s limited resources to occupy. We committed troops to China without a clear goal and, most crucially, without a victory scenario plotted out. It was a no-win situation. Like Vietnam for the Americans.”

Cadet Fukagawa returned to the Zama campus in September 1942 a bit more wizened and worldly for his efforts, but he wasted no time settling in to begin classwork for the Infantry Officer’s Course. Although he now had a much more realistic mental grasp of the realities of the war, he nevertheless still believed that Japan’s cause to protect Asia from Western encroachment was just, and that she would prevail in the end. Thus, he thought nothing particularly untoward about the announcement in late fall of that year that cadets previously disqualified for aviation for medical or physical reasons would be given another opportunity to apply for a branch change. Unfettered by any particular loyalty toward the infantry, Fukagawa jumped at the chance, and was overjoyed when told that he had made the cut this go around. He transferred to the IMA aviation branch campus in Toyo’oka, Saitama Prefecture in January 1943.   

Fukagawa and his fellow transfer cadets assumed that their good fortune was due to dramatic increases in the size and importance of aviation in the army’s battlefield role, and they interpreted this as an exciting and promising development in terms of the nation’s striking power. They had barely more information about the combat then raging on Guadalcanal and throughout the Solomons than the average newspaper-reading civilian, and were blissfully unaware of the horrific attrition of army pilots in these battles that was in fact most responsible for them being able to make it over the now considerably lowered bar to qualify for flight training. 

The cadre officers at Toyo’oka did not talk much to their charges about the progress of the war. Obviously, morale issues dictated that troubling news – an increasing supply of which was available as 1943 progressed – be carefully screened for cadet consumption. However, it would be unfair to imply that any failure to keep the cadets informed with constantly updated reports on the nation’s military fortunes was entirely due to some campaign of misinformation or deception on the part of the administration. More than anything, ignorance of the news was probably a matter of simply being too busy. With a crushingly tight schedule otherwise exclusively dedicated to learning basic piloting skills in the Akatonbo and aeronautical theory in the classrooms, the cadets had little energy and even less time to worry about much else than their studies and training, let alone combing newspapers and scuttlebutt for niblets of truth about the world beyond the academy gates.

As the March graduation date approached for the Class of ’44, it was time for its members to select their aviation specialty branches. At the unchallenged bottom of the list were Recon, Liaison and Ground Attack, which were the most common destinations for those not lucky enough to get picked for one of the two perennial favorites, Fighters and Heavy Bombers. These last two specialties each had their own reputation among the cadets, with fighters generally seen as being best suited for the individualistic jock crowd – boys long on guts but not brains – while bombers were seen as appealing to a more plodding, exacting and intellectual variety of pilot.