Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (35 page)

Today, there are special visitors in the barracks. Lieutenant Fukagawa’s parents and younger sister have come from very far away to see him and his pilots.

“We rushed to get here as soon as we got the letter from our son telling us that he had been selected to be a tokkō flight leader,” says the proud father of this Divine Eagle, understandably at a loss for fitting words as he regards the fine, gallant young man his son has become.

“Eat, eat,” says Lieutenant Fukagawa’s mother, passing around the red and white Abek
awa rice cake confectionary she has made for the pilots and brought all the way from home.

Watching this scene, I cannot help but feel that all that is noble and strong in Japan is right here before my eyes.

In the barracks next door, Nogami’s unit has begun its night navigation seminar. The lieutenant is holding a model airplane and explaining some point of tactics to a rapt audience whose young eyes burn with determination, following the model airplane’s every move and turn with the piercing gaze of hawks. The young men know that they will have only one chance at the enemy, and thus every precious second of their training counts.

Second Lieutenant X, a graduate of the elite Fukuoka Business High School,
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informs me that he has left a sister behind on Okinawa.

“Even if it means not sleeping for three or four days straight, I want us to finish up our training and sortie as soon as possible,” says the lieutenant. “It we tarry and miss our chance to contribute to the battle, how could I ever make it up to my sister, who is fighting so bravely on Okinawa, even as we speak?”

“I am filled with pride and joy to be able to be a warrior who will get to die such a glorious death,” says Lieutenant X, who also attended graduate school at Aoyama Gakuin in Tokyo. “I will not fail to sink an enemy ship. The other day when I was getting my hair cut, the barber said ‘A tokkō unit is more than just a
hisshi
(willing to risk lives in performance of duty) unit…it’s a
kesshi
(resigned to dying in the performance of duty) unit, isn’t it?’ That was the first time since becoming a tokkō pilot that I really thought about the significance in the difference between the two terms.”

Just shy of twenty years old, Corporal X is another Shōnen Hikōhei graduate.

“I felt so proud of myself when our tokkō orders came through. I thought ‘Now I can finally hold my head up when I see my old Shōnen Hikōhei classmates.”

No doubt the other young Divine Eagles can identify with the corporal’s heartfelt but humble expression of pride.

(Mainichi Shinbun, June 11, 1945)

That evening, Fukagawa called on his parents and sister at their room in the Yamada Ryokan, a nearby inn. The foursome sat on the tatami matting around a small table, with the men drinking saké and smoking and the women making thin tea and well-intentioned but half-hearted attempts at small talk about Saga and absent family members. Tsuma and Teruko did a decent job of appearing cheerful, but Yonekichi was having none of it. Uncharacteristically moody and quiet, he only became more so as the night dragged on and the women’s attempts at “normal” conversation inevitably died quick and merciful deaths under the surreal pall that hung in the air. Try as they might, no one around the table in the little hotel room could banish for more than a few moments at a stretch the thought that they were gathered as a group for what would probably be the last time. In a few more weeks – possibly even a few more days – Iwao would be nothing but a memory and a
butsudan
photo.

At blackout curfew, Tsuma drew the curtains to the room as per regulations. The single electric bulb hanging from the ceiling was shrouded with black cloth that let a forlorn beam of dim light trickle down onto the table and tatami matting in the middle of the room. Somebody yawned, and Yonekichi – in one of his few utterances of the entire evening – suggested that they all go to bed. Then, in the next breath, he said something that Fukagawa had not heard since he was a preschooler.

“Iwao,” Yonekichi said, too shy to look his son in the eyes but still with a strong father’s authority in his voice. “I want you to sleep next to me tonight.”

There was an embarrassed silence for a moment as Fukagawa, his mother and sister exchanged looks in the low light, stealing glances at Yonekichi, now a slightly hunched silhouette raising and lowering the red glowing cherry of a lit cigarette in a corner of the room. Fukagawa broke the spell of the moment with a comment along the lines of his being a grown man now who did not have to sleep with his parents to keep away the hobgoblins at night. As he chuckled alone at his own attempt at levity, his mother stood with surprising alacrity and tugged him by his uniform sleeve out of the room and into the inn corridor.

“Iwao-chan,” Tsuma said in an urgent whisper, sliding the room door shut after one last glance inside to check on her husband. “You know what kind of man your father is, and how hard it is for him to express tender feelings. And I know you’re the same way. But can’t you see what he is trying to say? Can’t you understand what he must be feeling right now?”

“I’ll tell you some things that happened on the way up here to see you,” she continued. “Before we left for the train, your sister picked a bunch of beautiful blue azaleas for you in our garden. But when your father saw them, he flew into a rage, and screamed ‘Azaleas are for funerals! Your brother’s not dead yet! Throw those damn funeral flowers away!’ Of course, Teruko cried. It was a wretched scene, but I could say nothing, and your father was still fuming and stiff-lipped when we got on the train.”

“Hours into our journey, your father still had not said a single word. When I asked him what was the matter, he said ‘I have loved and worked hard for my boy all his life. Now they’re going to make him disappear like a puff of smoke’. He said it loud enough for everyone sitting near us to hear. People looked at us strangely. Luckily, there were no policemen on the car, or who knows what might have happened?”

“Iwao-chan, now you know how your father feels. Can you find it in yourself to show your father some affection in return? Just for tonight – forget that you are a big, strong soldier. Be his little boy one last time.”

That night, for the first time in many, many years and the last time in his life, Iwao Fukagawa fell asleep holding his father’s hand.

I
t is November 2002, and Fukagawa-san and I are staying in a municipal community center in Yokohama for an overnight study session to catalog the contents of his wartime photo albums and scrapbooks. While time-consuming, the work is not as daunting as it sounds – I have already scanned the photographic materials and old newspaper clippings into my laptop, and cataloguing the material is a simple matter of clicking through the images with the IC recorder on and Fukagawa-san giving the play-by-play. My elderly friend is obviously delighted with all of this “high tech,” and we keep a brisk pace as he tries to find the words for the torrent of memories brought on by all these pictures of old comrades long dead, family scenes, children, Hayabusas and Hayates, smiling young men with sunglasses on their heads and samurai swords on their belts.

I click the right arrow key on my laptop, and suddenly, we are looking at the famous shot taken by the Mainichi Shinbun reporter when the Fukagawas came to visit their son at Kita Ise. Fukagawa-san tells me to pause for moment, and is suddenly pensive.

“My mother didn’t know how much food we already had,” Fukagawa says, pointing at the table spread in the picture, “and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she needn’t have gone to all the trouble of bringing those rice cakes for us all the way from Kyūshū, especially when I knew they were already running low on food themselves. The other pilots and I were enormously touched by their gesture, and we gave them a big bundle of canned goods, candy and cigarettes when they left. Of course, they insisted that they didn’t need it, but we insisted that they take it. Finally, they did.”

“My father did not have it in him to come see me again,” Fukagawa-san continues. “It was just too painful. Look at the picture. You can see he’s the only one in the group not smiling. This picture really says a lot, doesn’t it?”

“Did anyone else come to see you?” I ask.

“My mother and Teruko came up one more time, a couple of weeks later, to bring up a
senninbari
they stitched for me.”

The senninbari (literally “stitches by a thousand people”) was a talisman belt worn by most Japanese servicemen in the nation’s wars since the Meiji Era. Generally a plain cotton muslin waist sash decorated with a checkerboard pattern of dot-like stitches sometimes arranged in a connect-the-dots picture of a tiger
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, it also usually featured auspicious and/or otherwise symbolic kanji characters to protect and bring glory upon its wearer in battle. The custom began as a housewives’ superstition during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, but had spread nationwide by the time of the Russo-Japanese War ten years later. By the Second World War – like so many Japanese folk customs and new “traditions” – the belts had assumed semi-religious iconic status. Collecting stitches on street corners from female passersby became a major daily occupation for Women’s Patriotic League and Defense Women’s Association members and mothers, wives and sisters of servicemen about to be sent off to war. The activity was a common sight on street corners throughout the country from the late 1930s until the last days of World War II.

The requirement that the belts bear stitch-dots by a thousand different women was representative of the tradition of powerful supernatural femininity/mother/fertility iconography – common among other animist agricultural cultures, as well – that was the backdrop for superficially hyper-masculine Shintoism. Covering the wearer’s navel, the senninbari was symbolically a placenta or umbilical cord remnant – a manifestation of motherlove in fabric. It was a spiritual tie between mother and son, and thus, collaterally, a magical link between female nurture and male strength.

As their magical effect was supposed to be imparted through female touch, the belts were never washed, which in less than sterile combat conditions often meant that the sennin-bari became terrariums for various unwelcome flora and fauna.
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Nevertheless, Japanese servicemen were extremely proud of the belts, although they jealously guarded them at all times from the eyes of other men.
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This was due not only to the inappropriateness from a warrior machismo standpoint of expressing open sentimentality for a female – even for the sacrosanct mother figure Japanese men were normally encouraged to worship – but because it was thought that the very glances of other males could drain or sully the female magic in the belts, rendering them ineffective.

Given that the major function of the senninba
ri was, ostensibly, to bring its wearer home from war safe and sound, there would seem to be a degree of contradiction involved in giving such a talisman to a tokkō pilot. Tsuma and Teruko were aware of this as they collected their one thousand stitches on Saga street corners, but they rationalized the gesture by telling Fukagawa that the belt was meant to bring him home safe and sound anyway – if only in spirit.

When asked if he has preserved this treasure, Fukagawa-san tells me that he has, and that it is now on permanent display with other items of his wartime personal kit in a Japanese cultural museum near Budapest, Hungary. His katana sword, however, is too important to trust to anyone outside of the family. And although he did not have any sons, the sword will someday pass on to his oldest grandson.

As a visit to the busily and happily cluttered study in his Yokohama home will confirm, Fukagawa-san is an inveterate hoarder. In addition to the above-mentioned items, he has an enormous and historically significant collection of other military/wartime mementoes. All of his pictures and newspaper clippings, his flight suit, his cadet cap from the IMA, even his parachute harness – he has saved almost everything from his warrior days, with the sole exception of something he has regretted losing for the last six decades: the
hanayome ningyo
(“bride doll”) his mother and sister handmade for him and also brought up on their second and last visit to Kita Ise.

The giving of hanayome ningyo to sons and brothers in
uniform was very popular among mothers and sisters of Japanese servicemen during the war, especially for families of tokkō pilots. The sentiment behind the gesture was rooted in the expectation that many boys were going to die before they had a chance to marry human brides (or
all
boys, in the case of tokkō). In giving them doll brides, it was felt that a mother could experience at least some of the joy of seeing her son married off. More supernatural variations on the theme also afforded roles to the dolls as afterlife companions for dead servicemen, almost like Egyptian tomb figure or Chinese terra cotta warriors.

Fukagawa-san recalls seeing some pilots around the Kita Ise tokkō barracks displaying bride dolls from home at the head of their bunks and sayin
g goodnight to the figures when turning in after Lights-Out. But the young Fukagawa thought this sort of behavior spectacularly wimpy and maudlin – not to mention morbid – and he was having none of it. When his mother and sister presented him with the doll, he was grateful for the gesture, but also nothing short of mortified with embarrassment. Ten minutes after seeing his family members off at Kameyama Station, he gave the doll to the daughters of a local innkeeper and never saw it again. He would soon regret this.