Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (43 page)

On the evening of June 5, Miyakawa vis
ited the Tomiya Shokudō for what would be – literally and figuratively – his last supper. The day also happened to be his twentieth birthday. After his meal, Miyakawa took a short stroll with Tome, her daughters, and a squadmate named Takimoto by the river that ran past the inn. The night was starless, and blackout regulations had the entire town under an inky pall. The only light visible was from a small swarm of fireflies meandering in the cool air over the riverbank. Somebody remarked at how pretty they were. After a short silence, Miyakawa cleared his throat.

“
Obachan
,” he started, using the diminutive, familiar term a young man uses when addressing an older woman for whom he feels something akin to a son’s affection toward a mother. “I don’t want to leave with any regrets, but I have to say this. After I’m dead, I really want to come back and see you again…Is that OK?”

“Of course,” Tome answered. “Come back anytime you want.”

Just then, one of the fireflies broke from the swarm and flew over to hover over Miyakawa’s head.

“That’s it,” the sergeant said. “That’s me. I’m going to come back as that firefly tomorrow night…Two of us will come back. Right Takimoto?”

“Uhh…Right,” Takimoto answered.

“And don’t let anyone chase those fireflies off,” Miyakawa co
ntinued. “Because it will be us. Promise you’ll sing
Dōki no Sakura
for us.”

“We will,” Tome said.

“It’s nine o’clock now,” Miyakawa said, looking at his glowing watch dial. “We’ll be back here this time tomorrow night. Make sure to leave the front door open for us.”

The weather the next day was cloudy in the morning, turning to light rain by evening. Around seven that night, there was a knock on the front door of the blacked-out Tomiya Shokudō. The door slid open. It was a long-faced, soaking wet Takimo
to. He had been forced to turn back with engine trouble on the way to Okinawa. Sergeant Miyakawa’s engine, however, had apparently functioned perfectly, as had every other engine in the 104
th
Shinbu Unit’s planes. Takimoto was now orphaned, waiting for assignment to another unit, and trying to convince himself that people at the
sangakuheisha
were not looking at him askance. He was visibly miserable with his situation.

For the next few hours, Tome, Reiko and Takimoto sat in the blacked out restaurant listening to the radio and drinking tea. When the 9 o’clock news broadcast started, Reiko remembered Miyakawa’s promise to return. No sooner had she opened the door only a few centimeters than a big firefly came buzzing into the room, almost as if it had been waiting outside to be let in. It made a few circuits of the room, lighting up the darkened space with urgent phosphorescent flashes before stopping on a crossbeam in the middle of the ceiling, where it began a steady rhythm of flashing.

The humans in the room stared at the insect in disbelief for a few moments before Tome blurted what everyone else was already thinking.

“It’s Sabu-chan!”
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“Let’s sing,” the sergeant said, slowly rising to his feet.

The threesome stood together and began singing
Dōki no Sakura
. It was not long before they were all holding one another by the shoulders as big, hot tears rolled down their cheeks. When the song was finished, the firefly flashed once more, then flew back out the open door and into the night. It never came back.
[218]

*****

Sergeant Takimoto was not the only tokkō pilot to sortie from Chiran who had to turn around and limp back to base with engine trouble. Through May and June, as the Okinawa campaign reached its crescendo, the number of planes sent forth from Kyūshū in subsequent Kikusui waves increased exponentially. So, too, did the number of tokkō pilots aborting missions due to reported mechanical problems, with engine trouble, faulty instrumentation and landing gear failing to retract being the most common complaints. Usually, inspection of the aircraft in question confirmed the malfunctions to be genuine, but instances of “imagined” problems or even pilot-induced vandalism/sabotage were also increasing. For Chiran Airbase HQ and the local kempeitai detachment, this was a very disturbing trend that would have to be dealt with before it spread through the ranks and – perhaps even more distressingly – had adverse effects on the careers of certain professional military officers when and if rumors began to go around that there was a potential cowards’ mutiny simmering in southern Kagoshima.

To the credit of the tokkō corps (though a tragic credit that is), this trickle of passive resistance to self-immolation orders never became a flood. But even a trickle of poor discipline or
nonconformity was beyond the level of acceptability for the Imperial Japanese Army. Pilots suspected of any untoward motivation behind their decisions to turn back to base during sorties were duly made examples of by the Chiran administration. Beatings, public humiliation and ostracism were the usual penalties for most first-time offenders, who were nonetheless given another chance to redeem themselves through subsequent sortie reassignment. For pilots considered the most hopeless and pathetic cases, however, waited the most dreaded punishment of all – orders for a solo, unescorted tokkō flight. A pilot given such an order was being doomed to almost certain interception by American CAP before ever getting anywhere near a target. Flying without escort, his lonely, meaningless death would go unwitnessed, uncredited and unrecorded. It would mean nothing less than a consignment to oblivion not only in body but in soul and honor as well. 

The Chiran sojourn of Second Lieutenant Wataru Kawasaki of the 51
st
Shinbu illustrates well what could happen when a tokkō pilot began to have doubts about his mission. On the morning of May 2, the nine Hayabusas of the 51
st
Shinbu left Akeno Airbase in Mie Prefecture bound for Chiran, where they were scheduled to do a one-night layover before their sortie for Okinawa at dawn the next day.
[219]
Led by their commander, Second Lieutenant Akio Motoki (IMA ’44), the formation was flying in the vicinity of Bofu in Yamaguchi Prefecture when Motoki’s plane suffered total engine failure and was forced to ditch in the Inland Sea. The rest of the 51
st
flew on to Chiran, where Air Ops decided that it would be best to wait for their commander to arrive in a new plane so that the unit could sortie together. However, it took considerably longer for Motoki to get a replacement aircraft than anyone at first expected. Hours of waiting soon turned to days, and days soon began pushing a week.

During their virtually unprecedented eight-day layover at Chiran, the pilots of the 51
st
became regulars at the Tomiya Shokudō. One famous anecdote with its origins in this patronage is the story of Second Lieutenant Fumihiro Mitsuyama, who on the night of May 10 revealed to the astonishment of the Torihamas and his squadmates alike that his real name was Tak Kyong Hyong,
[220]
and that he was an ethnic Korean. He then proceeded to emphasize his point by regaling his gape-mouthed audience with an impromptu solo recital of Korean folksongs. This is yet another Tomiya Shokudō vignette that has entered the pantheon of modern day Japanese legend by being worked into the semi-fictional plotline of
Hotaru
.

For Wataru Kawasaki, the most crucial development during this Chiran interlude was considerably more personal. At age thirty, Kawasaki was not only the granddaddy of the 51
st
Shinbu, he was in fact one of the oldest pilots ever assigned to tokkō. A teaching professional with nearly eight years of classroom experience after graduating from Nihon University Teacher’s College, he was also recently married. His outlook on life was considerably different from that of his high-teen and low-twentysomething fellow pilots, and worlds apart from his IMA grad unit commander. It had been obvious from the earliest days after the formation of the 51
st
that he was its least gung-ho member.

What finally – and fatally – cemented his mutual
ly recognized status as the black sheep of the unit was the unannounced appearance of his wife Tsuneko at the Tomiya Shokudō on the afternoon of May 8.
[221]
With Tome’s thoughtful assistance, Tsuneko Kawasaki was able to find lodging at a local inn, where she made an open-ended booking for a room, intending to stay until her husband’s sortie. However, she may have been just as surprised as Lieutenant Kawasaki’s squadmates were when her husband exercised his choice of billets privileges as a commissioned officer and opted to spend his nights at the inn with his wife instead of at the
sangakuheisha
compound with his comrades. The sleeping arrangements raised eyebrows both inside and outside of the base gates.

After three nights of what must have been a surreal emotional mélange of newlywed bliss and wrenching grief, the couple’s moment of truth arrived in the wee hours of May 11, when the pilots of the 51
st
headed toward the flight line through a gauntlet of Chiran ground staff, pilots’ family members, a white aproned official send-off detachment from the Defense Women’s Association headed by Tome Torihama, and, most conspicuously, a loudly weeping Tsuneko Kawasaki.
[222]
The subsequent send-off was one of the most cathartic anyone at the base could remember witnessing, climaxing with Mrs. Kawasaki’s fainting on the flight line as her husband’s plane took off. Tome caught her before she could hit the ground, and escorted her back to town.

In no emotional state to endure a grueling day of train rides and interminable waiting, Mrs. Kawasaki decided to stay one more day to compose herself and gather the strength she would need for her return journey. As things turned out, she could have gone ahead and booked the room for the rest of the month, because that was how long she would end up staying in it. Her husband showed up at her room that evening with a hangdog look, mumbling something about engine trouble. The scene would be repeated twice more before the lieutenant – apparently no longer able to bear the stress of the abuse he was suffering at the base every day, his own family’s rejection of his new bride and, perhaps most critically, the shame of being unable to face death on a
tokkō mission – crashed his Hayabusa into a railroad embankment a stone’s throw from his family’s Kagoshima home during a “test flight” his superiors at the base had insisted he make before being sent out on his unprecedented fourth sortie attempt.

Although Wataru Kawasaki’s case was notorious, it was not isolated. Army Ministry memoranda at the time pointed out the dangers of demoralization and loss of willingness to die posed by the ready availability of worldly pleasures for tokkō
pilots in the final days before their sorties.
[223]
And as instances of aborted tokkō sorties from the local airbase due to purported aircraft malfunctions increased, so did the tenacity and frequency of insidious rumors beginning to make the rounds in Chiran claiming to explain this rash of tokkō aircraft “malfunctions” as a matter of youthful indiscretions and overactive hormones. The head of the local kempeitai detachment shared these suspicions, and was eager to find out whether or not a sudden reaffirmation of the physical joys of living on the part of some of the tokkō boys might be responsible for all these “engine failures” and “landing gear troubles” that planes out of Chiran were having of late. He was well abreast of reports of rampant and improper fraternization – singing, game-playing and the like – between the pilots and the Nadeshiko Unit when the girls were helping around the sangakuheisha. And of course, he was fully aware of the constant stream of tokkō pilots back and forth from Tomiya Shokudō every night, and that the owner’s daughter Reiko Torihama had been one of the Nadeshiko Unit volunteers. In fact, she and another girl had been harrassed by the kempeitai before over suspicions of excessive fraternization with the tokkō pilots.
[224]
Who knew what was going on at the Tomiya Shokudō, other than pilots being fed past nine PM in violation of army regulations?

Harassing teenage schoolgirls was bad enough, but when the kempeitai
arrested Tome Torihama to get to the bottom of things once and for all, they crossed a line they should not have. Busting Tome in 1945 Chiran was about as appreciated a move as mugging Rosa Parks or Mother Theresa would be in a more contemporary context. When Reiko ran back to the Tomiya Shokudō and threw open the front door to announce what had happened to her mother to a room full of tokkō pilots, the young fliers immediately formed a posse and swaggered down to the kempeitai HQ. Tome was successfully rescued, but not before suffering a few haymakers to the jaw at the hands of her secret police tormentors and getting her face stomped into the floor by their knee-high riding boots. The scars on her head were a lifelong reminder of that night’s ordeal, but they were also a source of great personal pride for her. In her twilight years, she referred to them as her “badge of honor.”
[225]

Tome’s beating at the hands of the military police was a bad beginning for a summer that only got worse as a slew of pestilence and privations was visited upon the town. The fall of Okinawa in late June eliminated the relevance of tokkō sorties from Chiran and the last one was flown on July 19.
[226]
Even so, the air raids did not let up, and periodic drops of American propaganda leaflets started rumors that an invasion was scheduled for the area. Reiko-san still has one the pamphlets, which was dropped in early August over the nursing school in Kawanabe she was attending with most of the other Nadeshiko Unit girls. Bearing the enigmatic slogan “An Emotionally Moving Handshake” (
kandō suru akushu
) it shows an American soldier and a Russian counterpart as looming, grinning colossi, shaking hands from opposite sides of the globe directly over an insignificantly small Japan.
[227]
On the back of the sheet is a verbose but rather amateurishly written surrender plea and a promise of fair treatment after the occupation. An explosively ominous coda to the innocuous pamphlets was added a few days later when a daylight raid by about thirty B-29s destroyed houses and killed residents on the outskirts of Chiran on August 12.
[228]
Yet again, the airbase failed to put up a single interceptor to try to stop the Americans.