Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (38 page)

This decidedly melancholy wartime history has made the Tomiya Shokudō one of the most famous structures in this region of Japan. The building – now a museum-cum-tokkō memorial – has been the subject of numerous books and articles in recent years, as well as a movie,
Hotaru
, which is based on a conglomerate of various wartime legends and anecdotes set at the inn. Starring the legendary Ken Takakura – Japan’s Clint Eastwood – the film was released in 2002 to considerable box office success, a development that resulted in an exponential increase in “tokkō tourism” to Chiran.

Frequent tokkō survivor reunions and other tokkō-oriented media events held at the Tomiya Shokudō keep the 72-year-old Akabane constantly shuttling back and forth between her two Tokyo area Kagoshima-themed restaurants and Chiran. Further c
omplicating this hectic lifestyle is the never-ending stream of interview requests she must field from reporters, writers and scholars. With her unique personal background, matronly handsome daughter-of-Satsuma looks, and ever-colorful candor, she is a popular interview subject for TV and print journalists, and the history she witnessed and participated in as an adolescent is of incalculable value to historians researching both the tokkō program and home front conditions in wartime rural Japan. 

In addition to her personal attributes and qualifications, the harsh reality of demographics probably comprises another factor in Mrs. Akabane’s media appeal. In a phenomenon simila
r to one currently being experienced in post-
Private Ryan
America, Japan is rapidly running out of WW2 combat veterans just as renewed interest in the war is becoming evident among younger media audiences. As America has suffered in recent years the loss of such fighter pilot legends as Francis “Gabby” Gabreski and Joe Foss, old age is also ravaging the ranks of Japan’s aces and other wartime headline makers, and it has all but wiped out the generation old enough to have held influential policy-making and major command positions during the war. In the not too distant future, relative “youngsters” like Reiko Akabane will be the only surviving witnesses of Japan’s wartime experience left to tell war stories in the first person.

And in the meantime, Mrs. Akabane is getting plenty of practice for this torchbearer role.

Aging and simple arithmetic means that the next decade will see exponential increases in the rate of the youngest combat veterans – men who were in their high teens and early twenties during the war – answering that final roll call in the sky. Whenever I talk to these old warriors, I am immensely proud that they have deemed me worthy of their precious time, but I never quite shake what I can only call a sense of melancholy urgency in knowing that every day, hour and minute they are willing to spare for me counts. Like Dustin Hoffman’s bedside interviewer in
Little Big Man
, I hang on every word, constantly checking to make sure my recorder is still running, always careful not to breathe too close to the microphone, ever aware that I am in the process of recording history about as pure and unadulterated as it comes and that I cannot afford to let a single word of it get away.

However, I do not experience this awestruck melancholy, if you will, when I talk with Reiko Akabane, who is after all only ten years older than my mother (and Mom is eternally dark-haired and thirtysomething in my mind’s eye). Reiko-san – as she likes to be called – had barely begun puberty by the end of the war, and although she is no spring chicken, she is no frail crone, either. Her vitality allows me to have a more relaxed, unhurried feeling when we speak, and I take great comfort in the fact that this is a woman who keeps up a work and traveling schedule that would lay low Colin Powell or Bill Gates. From all appearances and evidence, Reiko-san will no doubt be just as busy and healthy as she is now for many years to come. She is fit, mobile, charismatic, and in possession of a spectacularly detailed memory. An interviewer lucky enough to get an audience squeezed into Reiko’s busy schedule could hardly ask for a more ideal subject.

No matter how busy Reiko-san may be with her business activities and historical research cooperation, there is one personal event she always manages to make time for – the monthly Tokyo meeting of the
Chiran Nadeshiko Kai
(“Chiran Nadeshiko Association”). The members of this informal group are childhood friends and schoolmates from Chiran who, like Reiko, have lived in the Tokyo metropolitan area since the postwar era or, at the latest, the nascence of Japan’s economic takeoff in the late 1950s. These get-togethers are extremely important for the women, not merely because of the bond of seven decades of friendship and memories, but because of shared wartime experiences that, in their own way, were every bit as harrowing, dangerous and magnificently courageous as those of any frontline infantryman or combat airman.
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During the last year of the war, the girls performed grueling and often hazardous duties under enemy fire in the service of their country, and if William Shakespeare and Stephen Ambrose can speak of combat camaraderie as forming a “band of brothers,” then the Chiran Nadeshiko Kai can certainly be called a “band of sisters,” as its members are war veterans in every sense of the word.

The bond of loyalty and friendship the women share has stood the test of time to last, in Reiko-san’s words, “through thick and thin.” Most of the veterans’ associations mentioned in this book cannot boast of group histories even half as long as that of the Chiran Nadeshiko-Kai. The political atmosphere during the greater part of the postwar period was not conducive to organized public activities by Japanese war veterans, especially by members of a long-stigmatized group like ex-tok
kō personnel. As a result, most of these groups have realized robust membership levels only within the last decade or so, as survivor’s guilt, the lingering shame of defeat and unwelcome memories lose their emotional tug-of-war with nostalgia and remembered camaraderie.

In sharp contrast to the social dynamic that muzzled male Japanese veterans for so long, the six members of the Tokyo branch of the Chiran Nadeshiko-kai have been meeting on the last Friday of each month for nearly fifty years. For their sessions, the women gather at one of the members’ homes to have some tea and cake, laugh at their memories of each other as gawky teenagers, tell the same stories over and over to inevitably laugh and cry in the same places, then go home to their families in the evening with the same warm glow of camaraderie they knew as naïve and pure-hearted country girls in 1945. Over the span of half a century of living in the great Tokyo urban sprawl, these Kagoshima expatriates have tended to their ritual of loyalty and friendship with unflagging devotion to watch one another grow up, then watch one another’s children grow up, and now cluck and coo over pictures of one another’s grandchildren.

In May 2002, I was invited to one of these reunions to conduct a group interview and collect photographs, documents and other material.

*****

May 31, 2002 is unseasonably hot, even for central Japan. When I step off the train at Saitama City station in Tokyo’s northern suburbs, an electronic news billboard thermometer reads 28 degrees Celsius (82.4 degrees Fahrenheit). The humidity is not intolerable – yet – but it is getting there, and the combination of bright sunshine, middle-aged metabolism, and a heavy shoulder bag full of camera equipment and notebooks has me mentally congratulating myself on opting for an aloha shirt this morning instead of the button-down and necktie deal I had originally planned to wear.

This month’s meeting of the Chiran Nadeshiko-Kai is being held at the home of Shōko Nagasaki (nee Maeda). After a white-knuckled pedal-to-the-metal ride through twisting backstreets in the passenger seat of her son’s car, I arrive at the venue. I am early, but Shōko-san does not seem to mind, and graciously accepts the gift of eel cookies
[193]
I have brought from Hamamatsu.

“Ah,
Unagi Pai,” she says. “These are famous. Everyone will be delighted to have some of these today.”

The Nagasaki home is a classic sixties Japanese mixture of traditional and Western elements. A funky green-tiled entranceway leads to an interior dominated by warm wood and dark earth tones, which gives the
space a mellow, meditative atmosphere I would imagine Shōko-san’s husband Kazunori finds very conducive to his writing. A bookcase in the living room is filled end to end with his collected published works. Nagasaki-sensei is Japan’s foremost authority on persuasive public speaking and the author of thirty-five books on the subject, several of them bestsellers. I inquire about the man-of-the-house, and am not particularly surprised to be told that he is busy in his study writing book #36.

The tatami-floored main parlor of the Nagasaki’s home opens out onto a charming Japanese garden about as big as the room it faces. A row of opened cat food tins in one corner of the garden explains the faint ambient soundtrack of meowing and mewling I have been aware of si
nce entering the house. A line of questioning posed as tactfully as possible reveals that Shōko-san, evidently, is the neighborhood “cat lady,” and she informs me with not a small measure of pride that in addition to keeping two housecats, she is at present attending to the dietary needs of upwards of a dozen regular feline visitors who are free to come and go, loaf, frolic and leave calling cards in her well-tended garden as they please.

“My husband used to complain a lot,” Shōko-san says, with a sly smir
k. “But I refused to give in. The cats stayed, and now I think my husband likes them. Of course, he would never admit that.”

Shōko-san is about as physically and temperamentally different from Reiko-san as two best friends from the same hometown can get.
Vellum-skinned, articulate and rabbit-like, she is a diminutive Katherine Hepburn to Reiko-san’s hard laughing and occasionally pushy Anna Magnani mama bear. As the other members begin to arrive and I get a chance to observe the pecking order a bit, I also realize that Shōko-san is the big intellectual in the room. She is not in anyone’s face with it, but the authority is there nonetheless, and while Reiko-san is unquestionably in control of the conversational flow and speaking order, all eyes turn to Shōko-san when information is in doubt or somebody wants confirmation of the accuracy of an anecdote. Most tellingly, when she speaks, the others inevitably stop talking and listen.

Another obvious but unassuming authority presence in the room is the tall and regal Kayoko Mori. When I ask who the leader of the group was when the girls were growing up, everyone points to her.

“She was the class president five or six times running,” Shōko-san says as the others nod.

“But I was always the class secretary,” Reiko-san interjects, with a note of stridency that brings on a round of laughter.

Someone makes a quick comment in Kagoshima dialect that I cannot understand. A rapid-fire exchange of more of the same leaves me even further behind in the dust. Reiko-san – ever the attentive emcee – picks up on my predicament immediately.

“You know,” she says, “we’re doing our best today to speak standard Japanese for your sake. If we were talking the way we usually do to each other, you wouldn’t be able to understand us at all. Even our own children can’t follow when we really get rolling.”

The group belly-laugh that follows this remark is explosive and tinged with reed and metal, just this side of cackling.

As I watch and listen, I find myself charmed by the warmth of the women’s smiles, the melody in their lilting Kagoshima intonations and their constant banter of jibes and laughter as they fuss over the lunch preparations. Although the women are old enough to be my aunts, it takes no effort or stretch of the imagination at all to see them in a Chinese cultural revolution poster girl milieu as flush-cheeked fourteen-year-olds in pigtails, patched cotton
monpe
trousers and rumpled middy blouses, cheerfully singing as they fill in bomb-cratered runways or camouflage airplane revetments. There is, of course, some sadness and even a measure of banality in that imagery, but there is undeniable beauty in it, too, as there always is in naïve, innocent bravery. This aspect, I believe, is shared with the tokkō mystique, and I think that getting a monthly recharge shot of that stalwart yet innocent glow – or at least a sufficiently stimulating recollection of it – is part of why the Nadeshiko Kai exists.

Watching the women like this, I cannot help but pond
er the breakneck pace and staggering enormity of the changes they have seen and experienced in their lifetimes. They huddled in air raid shelters and scrounged for food as teenagers, and never tasted butter or wore anything on their feet other than wooden geta until they were almost twenty. In their thirties and forties, they bought their first cars and televisions and refrigerators. Now they live with cell phones and broadband Internet service. They use credit cards on overseas vacations with their families. They splurge for their grandchildren’s Nintendo software and treat them to take-out pizza. In a sense, the Chiran Nadeshiko girls are personifications of Japan’s journey over the last sixty years – human time capsules living in the twenty-first century but still carrying memories and even physical legacies from an era so different from our own it could have happened on another planet.

*****

Reiko Torihama, Shōko Maeda, Kayoko Mori, Fusako Mori, Mutsuko Miyake and Yuri Kuwashiro were born when Japan was still reeling with the initial shock of the worldwide Great Depression. Joblessness, foreclosures and deflation hit rural areas like southern Kyūshū especially hard. On the national level, burgeoning militarism was beginning to apply a heavy-handed influence in politics, education and many other aspects of Japanese society. Army adventurism and profiteering on the Asian continent had flared up into open combat in Manchuria, and as a result, Japan was becoming increasingly isolated on the international stage. In two more years, it would quit the League of Nations to complete its isolation and seal its fate, dooming Reiko-san and her classmates to a life without peace until they were in their teens, and to Third World living standards until they were pushing thirty.