Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (36 page)

“After I got back to the barracks and read the letter my mother had also given me, I realized that she had intended for me to take the doll with me on my tokkō sortie. Of course, I wasn’t about to return to the inn and take the doll back from the
children I had given it too. But I sure did regret that. I’ve regretted it ever since.”

“Do you still have the letter from your mother?” I ask.

“Yes,” Fukagawa-san says. “But it’s in another scrapbook I haven’t seen for years. I’ll try to find it for you.”

We continue clicking through the photo scans, which are arranged in rough chronological order. At one point in the series, Fukagawa starts appearing in civilian clothes. Fukagawa-san tells me to stop and back up one frame, to a shot showing himself in full flight gear next to an adolescent boy in army cadet uniform.

“That was taken with my little brother Nobuo in my backyard the day I arrived home after the war,” Fukagawa-san says. “My father said he wanted one last picture of us in uniform. I’m in my flight suit, and Nobuo is in Hiroshima Yōnen Gakkō uniform. He has a
hibakusha techō
(“Atom Bomb Victim’s I.D. Card”), you know. He was in Hiroshima the day after the bomb was dropped, returning to school after summer leave. When he arrived at Hiroshima, though, there was nothing left of his school. They sent him straight home again. Luckily, he never had any side effects from exposure to the radiation.”

We come to a picture of a smiling, strapping, twentysomething Fukagawa in a dapper straw fedora.

“Those are the clothes I rode the train home from Kita Ise in,” Fukagawa-san says. “The tokkō pilots were given priority for demobilization, because the authorities were afraid we might do something rash, so we got to go home pretty early. In fact, I was home even before the Americans started arriving.

“That soon after the surrender, no o
ne…especially officers…wanted to be seen in public in uniform. I traveled in a civilian shirt and wore that hat, but my pants and boots were military. When the train slowed down to pull into Saga Station, I took my uniform tunic and hat out of my suitcase and changed right there on the train car so I could arrive home looking like a soldier.”

When Fukagawa rounded the corner of his home street that late August morning, he caused quite a commotion in the old neighborhood. Everyone knew he had been assigned t
o tokkō, so his sudden appearance was almost like seeing a ghost walking down the street. After this initial shock, however, neighbors began to call out to him in welcome. As for his family, they already knew from an earlier letter that he had survived and was on his way home, but this did not mean that there was no joy in the Fukagawa household when he darkened the doorway.

“Most people talk about what dark, sad times the postwar was for them,” Fukagawa-san says. “But that wasn’t true in our house. My parents had three sons in uniform and all of us survived. The night I came home, all of the family members were together for dinner for the first time in many years. And I’m not ashamed to say that we all wept with happiness, man and woman alike. Lost war or not, that was one of the happiest moments of my life.”

The conversation turns to the postwar era, when Japan’s economy was in shambles and a way of life and value system were gone forever. 

“My first job after the war was working in a displaced persons relocation center in a storefront near Saga Station,” Fukagawa-san says. “That was very therapeutic. I felt like I was helping Japan get back on its feet. I did this for about six months, then helped a childhood friend with a small trading company for a few years after that. After a while, though, I started to feel like I was just spinning my wheels. I needed to move on.

“I remembered something they taught us at Fighter Basic…When you find yourself in a chaotic situation, climb for altitude. With altitude, you can get a better take on what’s going on around you, then pick the exact spot and timing for your return to the battle. Well, I applied this thinking to my own situation in postwar Japan, which was certainly chaotic. I was already in my mid-twenties, and still had my most productive years ahead of me, but I didn’t have all the time in the world, and I felt like I didn’t know where I was going as long as I stayed in Kyūshū. So, just like my instructor at fighter school always told me to do, I climbed for altitude. In my case, this meant heading for Tokyo.”

Fukagawa packed up and headed for the big city in 1948, never looking back. But his struggles were only beginning. GHQ demilitarization policies meant that his once-elite IMA credentials were not worth the sheepskin they were printed on. At least officially – on paper – he had finished only an elementary school level education. But Fukagawa, always the fighter, pushed on, got qualified for university entrance exams by going to night school, and eventuall
y graduated from the well-regarded Chūo University in 1952. He has lived in the Tokyo/Yokohama metropolis ever since, marrying a Kyūshū girl nine years his junior in 1953. He now has a daughter and three grandchildren – two boys and a girl.

Fukagawa-san recently retired from a nearly fifty-year-long business executive career, and fills most of his days pursuing hobbies with his delightful and lovely wife. The rest of his time is taken up with the various IMA and Akeno Fighter School alumni, Kaikōsha, and v
eterans’ group activities he has been involved in since the 1980s. He has spent two-thirds of his long life in a land of peace and prosperity, but has never forgotten about all of the friends and comrades he left behind – who did not get to enjoy the peaceful and prosperous Japan he has been able to call home for the past half-century.

The direction the conversation is taking reminds me of something I have heard in a prayer at the Setagaya Kan’non Buddhist temple, which has a chapel devoted to the memory o
f army and navy tokkō pilots. It is the venue for monthly meetings of the
Tokkōtai Senbotsusha Irei Heiwa Kinen Kyōkai
or, as this is usually abbreviated,
Tokkō Zaidan
. It is a memorial-
cum
-historical association whose members consist mainly of tokkō veterans, surviving family members of tokkō pilots who died in the war, and the odd American expatriate Japan scholar. In the prayer in question – which is chanted at the beginning of each monthly memorial gathering – there is a reference to the sacrifices of the tokkō pilots as being largely to thank for the rest of us being able to live in “this peaceful and prosperous Japan.”
[183]
While it would of course be unrealistic – not to mention culturally uncouth – to expect people to gather in a downtown Tokyo temple once a month for the last fifty years to sing the praises of Douglas MacArthur, GHQ reforms and massive postwar American aid packages, I have long found this “it’s all thanks to the tokkō” line baffling. But the operant logic here, as Fukagawa-san explains it, is all about the surviving postwar generation’s psychological need to pay back the tokkō pilots’ sacrifices the only way they could without a shooting war going on any more. They had to sacrifice their own lives to rebuild Japan from the ashes of defeat and make sure that a disaster like World War II never befell the nation again.

Fukagawa-san – now with a bit of stridency in his voice – goes on to explain that he feels that the dead tokkō pilots also saved Japan in that they were able to preserve some
of Japan’s pride in defeat.

“A race without pride forfeits its right to exist,” he says.

He believes that the pilots were fighting for this at the end, when everyone knew the war was lost but flew their sorties anyway, and that in this sense, their missions were successful. The pilots were the epitome of integrity, purity of spirit, and courage – the finest young men the country has ever produced.

“Any great nation is made and sustained by such young men. This is a universal given.”

I ask him if he thinks this spirit is still alive in Japan – if the nation still has such human resources at its disposal.

“Yes, that spirit is still here, just hidden now. These qualities are in our genetic makeup, even though the people in charge of educational policy in Japan seem to be doing everything they can to destroy them.” 

*****

Fukagawa-san calls me in March 2003 to tell me that he has something very important to show me. After a long search, he has finally found his mother’s wartime farewell letter (written, obviously, without knowing that she would go on to spend another thirty-five years knowing that her son was alive, happy and healthy). The item is too important to trust to the mail system, so he wants to hand it over in person.

We meet a few weeks later at the Shinkansen waiting lounge at Hamamatsu Station. Fukagawa-san is passing through Hamamatsu on his way home from an overnight excursion to a hot springs resort with some old IMA friends. The drinking and laughing last night went far past his normal bedtime of nine o’clock, so he is a bit road weary. 

We order some coffee and while we wait for it to arrive, Fukagawa-san rummages through his blue Naugahyde overnighter and customary collection of plastic shopping bags before coming up with a crumbling black leather bound scrapbook.

“I hadn’t seen this in nearly forty years until the other day, when I dug this out of my closet. I don’t think I had seen it since I built my house, and that was in the Sixties.”

I thumb through the scrapbook, and it is indeed a
treasure trove of wartime newspaper clippings. There are a couple of pieces about the Sekichō Unit – classmate Toshio Yoshitake’s old outfit – and one of the articles even has a picture of the dolls the pilots flew into battle with hanging from their canopy latches.

There are pictures snipped from magazines and propaganda leaflets. Letters and postcards from home. But the real treasure in the book – what Fukagawa-san has called me here to hand over – is his mother’s letter. It is written in a beautiful and accomplished grasshand calligraphy on a long strip of letter scroll, a form of stationery that is almost never seen any more in Japan. The letter is crumbling along its edges and folds. Most of the damage is due to the effects of time and paper acidity, but physical wear and tear is also a factor. As Fukagawa-san explains, he kept it in the breastpocket of his flight suit during many a sweaty training session, and planned to carry it there – over his heart – when he made his final sortie.

The letter seems imbued with an energy that tingles my fingertips as I handle it. Declaring my inability to make my way through all the elegant and almost Arabic swirls of the grasshand, I hand it back to Fukagawa-san so that he can read it for me:

Looks like rainy season is upon us again.

It certainly sounds like you are training very hard. We were all shocked speechless to hear about Corporal Makiuchi’s death. He sounded like such a nice young man. But you can take comfort in knowing that he has now joined the gods protecting our country. He is an angel watching over the Seiki Unit.

Every morning since coming home from our last visit to your base, I have gone down to the river behind our house and ritually bathed before going to the local shrine to pray for the Seiki Unit’s success in battle. I pray that the gods give each one of you boys the chance to sink an enemy aircraft carrier. It will be a fine and glorious death.

Whenever I visit the shrine, though, I can’t help but remember how you also used to go there so faithfully as a boy, praying to be accepted into the Military Academy. When I think of that, and all of the other things you have done to make me so proud of you, hot tears never fail to come to my eyes.

It is hard to believe it has already been twenty-two years since we welcomed you into the world, Iwao. You have always been a source of pride for our family – always so diligent and hardworking, never accepting failure without a fight, studying from early morning until late at night everyday. Remember the alarm clock we bought for you to put on your desk when you were studying so hard to get into the Yōnen Gakkō? Maybe you didn’t know it, but I was awake every hour that you were, and many times when you weren’t. Sometimes I would find you fast asleep at your desk, and I would leave a little treat in your desk drawer for you to find when you woke up.

I could never get over how cheerful you seemed as you worked and studied, but never so serious that we couldn’t share a laugh or a light moment once in a while, like the time we stood in front of the window looking out at the rain and sang the “Rainy Day” nursery rhyme you used to like so much as a toddler.

Oh Iwao, what a joy you were for us. You can’t imagine how we felt when your letter arrived from the base telling us that that cute, precious little boy we once knew is now a tokkō flight leader. Our emotions were even more complex and intense when we got to meet you at the base – so sad on one hand that we will be losing our son, yet so proud of the fine young man you have become. There were so many things I wanted to say to you but didn’t because I know that what you are doing is for the good of the country. It took so much effort for me to smile in front of you and your men as I said “Go off and do your best.” I couldn’t say what I really felt, and it was all I could do to stop myself from shouting out “Iwao-chan,” calling you like I used to when you were a little boy.

As the proud Japanese mother of a Divine Eagle, I could not show you my tears when I gave you the hanayome ningyo. All of us in the family poured our hearts and prayers into that doll as we made her, and I held her in my arms like a baby when I took her to the shrine to be blessed by a priest. We want you to carry her into battle with you. Don’t think of her as just a doll. Think of her as your real bride, and know that your father and I have asked her to watch over you and take care of you, and to give you strength in your moment of truth, making sure that you sink an enemy carrier. She will follow you into death, and accompany you on your journey to eternity. As I held her in my arms at the shrine, I thought she was so precious and adorable, but my heart became strong and proud when I gave her to you, because at that moment I realized that you are not my cute little boy anymore, but a man with a mission that will be known around the world. When you make your attack, you will show the enemy of what stuff Japanese men are made. Even as a child, you used to say “I’m going to put the name Fukagawa in the history books.” Well, now you are really going to do that after all.