Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (44 page)

How confident these Americans are
, Reiko-san recalls thinking at the time.
The fighting is not even over but they are already making plans for what to do after they win…
While she had to admit that the Americans probably had every reason to be confident, she still could neither come to terms with the notion that Japan was going to lose nor give up on the hope that Japan would somehow win in the end. She continued to believe that if things got rough, a miracle would save the day. Reiko and her classmates had been taught to believe in the invincibility of Japan practically since toddler age, and the myth died hard.

“Our teachers told us that the Kami-Kaze would blow, just like in olden times,” Fusako Mori says. “It would flip over the enemies’ ships and sweep them away.”

By mid-August,
[229]
living in Chiran without losing one’s sanity required the patience of Job. Concurrent with the invasion panic gripping its residents, an epidemic of dysentery hit the town during rainy season in late June and early July, then lingered throughout the rest of the summer. Originating on the base, the sickness soon laid low so many army personnel that the base infirmary could not handle the volume of patients anymore and its doctors had to requisition floor space at the local elementary school to use as a makeshift hospital ward. The situation was exacerbated by the army doctors’ refusal to diagnose the disease as dysentery – perhaps out of shame that it had originated on their watch at the base – instead insisting on calling it “intestinal catarrh.”
[230]
Less than vigorous hygiene standards spread contamination through soiled blankets and the hands of local volunteer nurses hand-spooning gruel and water to the afflicted. As the rainy season in Chiran is also rice-planting time, the traditional use of untreated human waste as paddy fertilizer no doubt accelerated the spread of the disease amongst the townspeople. 

At noon on August 15, when the voluntary nurse corps trainees at Kawanabe were formed up into platoons in front of the administration office to listen to “a special radio broadcast,” many of the girls were either in the early or recovering stages of the disease and could barely stand. The Emperor was going to address the nation on a matter of great importance. Most of the girls – as well as most of the other millions of Japanese formed up in front of radios around the empire at this very moment – expected to hear exhortations from His Majesty to fight on to the end.

At the strike of twelve, a radio was placed in the window of the administration office and cranked to full volume while the girls stood at as rigid a position of attention as they could manage. The Emperor’s high, warbling voice was barely audible through the terrible static of the broadcast, and the ancient formal court Japanese he used made the message even more cryptic. Somehow, though, almost by a chain-reaction osmosis of whispers and exchanged glances, the gist of the message spread through the formation. As the reality of what they were hearing sunk in, another chain-reaction swept through the company and the girls began crying. Some did so with dignity, heads lowered and pigtails bobbing as they quietly wept and wiped their eyes, but other girls fell prostrate on the ground, sobbing loudly and pounding the dust with their fists.

After the long spell of wailing in the dust subsided to sniffles, the girls were marched back to their barracks by the widely despised Miss Ueno, their teacher and chaperone from Chiran Girls’ HS during the nurse training course. Before being dismissed, the girls were told to prepare their luggage for their return home. They were still sniffling and packing their bags by their bunkbeds a few minutes later when Miss Ueno poked her head in the doorway.

“Listen carefully,” she said in her characteristic crow-like squawk. “I want you to go home in pairs, and stay off the main roads, because the Americans might be landing paratroopers at Chiran Airfield any minute now. If you meet any Americans on your way home, make sure you kill yourselves by biting your tongues off before the soldiers have a chance to rape and murder you.”

As Miss Ueno slammed the door and stomped off to go about her business, the barracks went berserk. What had been quiet sniffling a moment before was now hysterical, loud screaming. Many of the girls hugged each other, shivering in fear. Others, like Reiko, began pounding and kicking the walls and bunks, lashing out at anything but each other in their panic and rage. Some windowpanes were broken in the pandemonium.

When they had gathered enough wits among themselves to halfway function again, Reiko and other friends from Chiran began their long walk home, using old farmer footpaths through mountain forests as much as possible to avoid the main roads. The girls arrived to find the town’s residents making panicked preparations to follow their primordial peasant instincts by literally heading for the hills.

Her own family was no different, and with a couple of other neighboring families, they loaded up a push cart with provisions and blankets and went up into the mountains bordering the northeast edge of town to hide in a farmer friend’s shed. The party of twenty or so townspeople spent interminably long days in their mountain hideaway keeping their eyes peeled on the horizon for vehicle movement from the south while the menfolk, including Reiko’s father Shigekazu, made occasional foraging forays into the ghost town by nightfall. Along with whatever meager foodstuffs they could scrounge, the men brought back with them the latest scuttlebutt from the diehard holdouts still in Chiran proper, and each whopper was more outrageous than the next: “American paratroopers have occupied the airfield” – “The mayor has committed suicide” – “The Emperor has committed
harakiri
.” Rumor and fear mongering ran rife without anyone having laid so much as an eye on any Americans. In fact, no one had even seen or heard any planes overhead. Eventually, terrified anticipation downgraded to bored waiting, and after a week of eating nuts and berries in the hills and scaring one another half out of their wits, the families finally decided it was safe to go home.

Despite the privations and pain of the war, there had been great disappointment and sadness for the townspeople when the surrender was broadcast. If anyone had experienced a sense of relief over the news, any expression of this emotion was either withheld out of respect for the recent dead or lost in the immediate post-broadcast pandemonium. As the bad drunk of the days after August 15 subsided into the hangover of a defeated morning-after Japan, the residents of Chiran came down off the mountains.

With some semblance of a community functioning in town again, new waves of rumors started making the rounds. The more pessimistic told of coming famine and pestilence, or even genocidal fogs of poison gas dropped from the skies. Not everyone bought into this doom-and-gloom, but few doubted that at the very least the townspeople would have to endure witch hunts at the hands of American occupiers looking for wartime authority figures and, most likely, civilian collaborators with the tokkō program. Of course, if this last fear turned out to be legitimate, then nobody had more reason to fear retribution from Yanks bent on revenge than the Torihama family. Reiko and others became convinced that Tome would be executed for all she had done for the boy-pilots from the airbase during the war. There were some sincere and thoughtful suggestions by friends and neighbors that Tome make a run for it and come back when everything had blown over, but she ignored them, determined to hold her ground and take whatever she had coming. In the meantime, she planned to do whatever she could to get back some kind of a life, and she suggested that everyone else get about doing the same.

A
s show-stopping an entrance as it would have been, the Americans never got around to parachuting into Chiran. Rumors about what was in store for the town, however, continued unabated for months. These reached a peak in late November when prefectural authorities advised the township that a special unit of American marines – veterans of Saipan and Okinawa and probably to-the-bone Jap-haters – were coming to dismantle the army airbase facilities in a few weeks. The people of Chiran had worshipped the tokkō pilots as young gods, and extended every possible courtesy and cooperation to their efforts and those of the army air corps authorities. Thus, the thinking went, it was entirely reasonable to expect that the Americans, having suffered considerably under the attacks, would be coming to Chiran with revenge and mayhem as second and third agenda items during their cleanup mission.

In the final days before the American arrival, the rumor mill went into overdrive – and the worst offenders were to be found in town hall, from whence an official advisory was issued suggesting that all the nubile young women in the village cut their hair to look like boys and do everything short of irreparable disfigurement to make themselves as physically unattractive as possible. As many households prepared baggage for yet another evacuation, the majority of the town’s young women and girls chose to follow the advisory, chopping their hair in gender-bending bobs and dirtying their clothes and faces with charcoal dust – anything to avert the eyes (and thus, it was hoped, the lust) of the feared Americans.
[231]
Reiko, taking measures one step further, hid in the attic of the Tomiya Shokudō for two weeks until her mother assured her that it was safe to return to civilization.

The town got its first look at their fearsome American occupiers on a foggy morning in December 1945, when a squad-sized detachment of Marines an
d technicians commanded by First Lieutenant Michael A. Bilandic – future half-term mayor of Chicago (1977-79) – arrived in Chiran in a small convoy of jeeps. During their six-week stay, the Marines disproved every ugly rumor the wartime authorities had spread about Americans, and they formed close friendships with many of the townspeople, especially with the local children. The Nadeshiko girls have fond memories of this time, and still remember some of their favorite Marines by name. At the top of everyone’s list as the town favorite was the kindly, fatherly Sergeant Harry Parshall, who always had pockets full of chocolate and hard candies and was never averse to going along with a joke or trying to teach the kids happy-sounding but incomprehensible nursery rhymes in English. Another favorite was the blond, blue-eyed “Jacket-san”, who played jacks and hopscotch with the girls and cried when his unit shipped out in January. There was only one really scary soldier in the detachment, and that was a battle-fatigued Georgia introvert named “Hoskins,” who had the unsettling habit of firing his .45 into the air – and on one memorable occasion, into the ceiling of the Tomiya Shokudō – during his frequent and mean saké benders. But even he was not completely immune to the charms of the town, and was never disqualified from the mothering care and attentions of Tome Torihama, drunk or sober.

Some of the Nadeshiko girls still have dreams about their wartime experiences, but all of them have memories, and these can broadsi
de them out of the blue from time to time. The other day, Shōko-san saw some blue-eyed grass flowering in a corner of her garden, and it whisked her right back to April 1946, when she, Reiko and some other girls from the village made an unauthorized visit to the old
sangakuheisha
and saw that the grounds were covered in the white blossoms of this wildflower. Neither she nor the other girls will ever forget that first return to the barracks compound. They saw a tree where a pilot had carved his name the morning of his final flight. Another tree still carried the stubs of branches a lieutenant pilot had chopped with his katana one day during some down time, after one of the girls had asked him if the swords the officer pilots carried were real.  

Reiko and ot
hers continued this annual April sangakuheisha ritual for years afterwards, bringing some flowers to put in the corner of the concrete pit that is all that remains of the barracks, sitting on the ledge singing martial songs from the war like “Dōki no sakura” and “Gōchin, gōchin”.
[232]

“The faces of all of the pilots are still clear in my memory,” Reiko-san says. “I can still see them, smiling as they said goodbye to us, patting us on the shoulder and telling us not to cry.”

“These stories aren’t just for Japanese people,” Reiko-san continues. “They belong to the world. Nothing like (tokkō) can ever be allowed to happen again. We saw it. We know what we’re talking about. There is nothing that can possibly be gained from wars except to kill people.”

The other Nadeshiko girls sitting around Shōko Nagasaki’s coffee table nod vigorously and in unison. But Reiko-san is not finished saying her piece. Perhaps she will never be finished. 

“It was such a waste for those boys to have to die, with their whole lives ahead o
f them,” she says. “It’s just inconceivable. What kind of men could give orders like that? If those brave boys had been allowed to live instead, just imagine how much better off Japan would be now.”

On the train ride home, Reiko’s hypothetical questions linger in my mind. No one will ever be able to answer them, I think, but the world – and most importantly the Japanese themselves – must never stop asking them.

I
t is a balmy morning in March 2002, and Yasukuni’s cherries are in unseasonably early full bloom. I have arrived at the shrine about twenty minutes early for today’s interview, so I decide to duck into a building here I have not visited yet – a low, long, L-angled wooden structure that seems to function as a spiritual frontier post between the outside world and the elevated boardwalk leading to the Holy of Holies in the main shrine’s inner sanctum. The interior of the hall is all nicotine-browned bare wood and big, heavy roof beams – the cafeteria lodge of an Adirondack vacation resort for chainsmokers. Along the back wall, there is the ubiquitous souvenir concession stand, where various Yasukuni-themed bean cakes, sembei crackers and trinkets are sold. An impromptu AV center has been set up in the middle of the room, consisting of about five rows of folding chairs arranged before a large screen TV. This morning, the chairs are spottily occupied by an anonymous group of older visitors watching a video of various wartime documentary clips of kamikaze crashes. A masculine narration over the grainy combat footage poses the rhetorical question of whether or not today’s Japanese young people understand the meaning of the sacrifices of their forefathers.