Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (47 page)

One night in late 1935, soon after her rapprochement with
Naoko, Yumi was invited to a party at the Nakazu restaurant of her best friend O-Koi, a bright star in the Nihonbashi night sky who enjoyed the stupendously generous patronage of none other than Mitsuru Tōyama himself. Tonight Tōyama was the host, and as usual for one of The Old Man’s parties, the whole place was rented out for the evening. Presiding over the festivities in the place of honor at the head table of the tatami room, Tōyama was a bespectacled octogenarian grandfather with a snowy storybook beard that reached to the middle of his chest. He was dressed in his trademark black formal kimono. Hulking bodyguards sat along the wall behind him within arm’s reach.

The guest list was the standard mixture of Kokuryūkai oddballs – walking stereotypes out of a Japanese version of
Casablanca
: shifty-eyed slicksters in shiny double-breasted suits using tortoiseshell cigarette holders; expressionless, Brylcreemed torpedoes who never took off their sunglasses and kept one hand in their coat pockets; ramrod-backed army generals whose mouths moved like hinged nutcracker jaws behind preposterous Kaiser Wilhelm mustaches. Interspersed strategically amongst these honorable guests, a bevy of Nihonbashi professionals in stunning kimonos kept the mood stoked with happy off-color banter, copious male ego-stroking and a never-ending flow of saké.   

Y
umi’s partner for the evening was introduced as Shirō Motoki, an IMA graduate and Tōyama protégé obviously in good standing with The Old Man, judging by his place in the seating arrangement. Hearing some details about Motoki’s background explained the relationship: after an interesting ten-year career in China as a mercenary and the bodyguard detachment commander of Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin
[245]
, Motoki had come back to Japan and made a fortune off of manufacturing carpentry nails, of all things. Now he was a generous Kokuryūkai benefactor. Yumi thought making nails sounded like a funny way to get rich, and that the samurai-descendant Shirō did not look at all like someone you would expect to be in the hardware business.
[246]
Rather, with his shaved head, big chin, jutting lower lip and weighty taciturnity, he seemed more like…well, more like the kind of men you always saw in Tōyama-sensei’s inner circle, once you got past the elliptically orbiting buffer layers of thugs and ranters. He was sharp and cocksure, with a dangerous testosterone whiff of the rake about him – exactly the type Yumi had a serious weakness for. She was attracted to him immediately, and the sentiment was evidently mutual. By the end of the evening, the two were head over heels.

Yumi
disappeared for several days after the party. At one point, Grandmother Kaneko and Naoko even contemplated marching down to the corner police box and filling out a missing persons report on her. When she finally came home, floating on air and with nary an explanation for her absence, it was obvious to all that late spring had arrived for Yumi Kaneko.

*****

Shirō Motoki was thirty-eight, balding, penniless and burning with an idea for a new type of carpentry nail when he returned to Japan in 1932. He could feel it in his bones – the nail idea was going to make him rich. Being the inventive and energetic go-getter that he was, poverty was no obstacle and he landed on his feet as usual, making rounds to the Tokyo Patent Office within days of his arrival, running around town scrounging up old contacts – above board or not. A lot of very important people in the city owed him favors from his Manchurian days, and Shirō called in every single one of them he could think of to get together some start-up cash. In the meantime, he supported himself with odd jobs, borrowed money, and found a ramshackle old
machi kōjo
studio
[247]
where he could set up a small workshop to fine tune his design and manufacture samples.

The design he was working on was for a cross-sectionally triangular nail that would twist itself into wood as it was hammered. The concept was simple, logical, and – most fortunately for
Shirō – original. A quick demonstration with a couple of short pieces of two-by-four was usually all a potential investor needed to be sold on the idea. By 1933, Shirō’s factory was up and running. A year later, every house carpenter in Japan was using the nails, and Shirō was rolling.

Late in 1934,
Shirō felt secure enough to support his adopted son Akio
[248]
, who at the age of ten was approaching the all-important entrance examination years that would in large part determine his path and status as an adult in Japanese society. Leaving operations at the nail factory in the hands of subordinates for a week, Shirō made a quick trip to Beijing to fetch Akio from the uncaring hands of his estranged wife Kiyoto, who was all too happy to wish the boy good riddance. She had her own life in the Chinese capital, comfortably set up as a self-proclaimed authority on
haute
Japanese culture for the expat community there, and had better things to do with her time than to look after a separated husband’s adopted nephew. The only tears shed for Akio’s departure were by the wrinkled old Chinese amahs and wet nurse hangers-on who had raised the child since he was a toddler.

Safely back in Tokyo,
Shirō and Akio now had the closest thing to a real family either had ever had, and establishing a relationship was unsure going for both of them. A live-in maid took care of the hands-on functions of running the house, but the emotional bonding that makes a house a household was slow in coming, if it can be said to have ever really come at all.

“Watching father and son together, you got the impression that
Shirō was not really sure how to treat the boy,” Naoko recalls. “So I guess he just fell back on what was natural for him. He treated him like a soldier.”

Likewise, the adjustment was difficult for
Akio as well. Making the transition from pampered Beijing luxury to Shirō’s simulated IJA boot camp regimen must have been a rude awakening for the gentle and introverted boy. Shirō laid out a detailed “chip off the old block” life plan for his nephew with no consideration whatsoever for the boy’s promising artistic and literary talents (which had attained a prodigious flowering during his long years in Beijing) or for his temperament, which was the antithesis of Shirō’s charismatic narcissism and merciless competitiveness. Nevertheless, there was never the slightest hint of rebellion on Akio’s part against his stepfather. The boy made it his purpose in life from then on to do everything he could to make his guardian proud of him, and he never looked back.

The first step in
Shirō’s master plan for Akio’s climb to success was for the boy to win acceptance to Seijō Gakuen Junior High School
[249]
, a Tokyo prep school catering to children of the capital’s elite. After completing a course of studies geared toward helping students pass rigorous college entrance examinations, its graduates usually went on to attend the top schools in the country, universities like Tokyo, Kyoto, Waseda or Keiō. A considerable number of boys also opted for the service academies. Either track – civilian or military – virtually guaranteed a lifetime of power and status, and the network of friends and personal connections that a Seijō graduate formed during his time at the school would serve him well at every stage of a career that inevitably led to the halls of Japanese political, military or financial power.

The next step called for
Akio to attend the IMA. Shirō would not let his stepson end up hustling around the fringes of power with the Kokuryūkai, rich one day, living hand-to-mouth and dodging creditors the next. Akio was going to stay the straight and skinny, burn up the course and shoot into the highest stratum of the nation’s military-industrial complex to accomplish all the things Shirō should have done with his life but did not. It was too late for Shirō to ever hope to bask in his own glory, but there was still plenty of time to ensure that he would someday bask in Akio’s.

*****

The year 1935 saw a great deal of changes for the two-member family of Shirō and Akio Motoki. After a rigorous and expensive preparatory course of study with private tutors, Akio passed the entrance exam to Seijō Gakuen, matriculating in the spring of that year. He was doing well in his studies, his art and literary talents had taken a favorable turn toward model warplane building and fantasies of military glory, and he was also turning out to be a fine athlete – his sprouting, lanky height helping him to make a valuable contribution to the Seijō basketball team. Shirō couldn’t have been more pleased with his nephew’s development, nor with the progress of his business venture. The nail factory was chugging along nicely, and as icing on that financial cake, licensed production by big manufacturers was bringing in royalties hand over fist. Shirō was not just doing well – he was flush.

He was not, however, completely free and clear of obligations. The Kwantung Army and Manchurian
rōnin
[250]
connections he had called upon to help set up his business worked both ways. Now that Shirō was liquid, it was payback time, and he was beginning to attract hangers-on and moochers like a shark attracts scrap feeders. His house was always busy with various shady visitors and shakedown artists – characters in long capes on the lam from the cops or hitmen from other gangs; scarfaced scowlers who wore leather trenchcoats year round and always walked away from their meetings with attaché cases full of Shirō’s cash. Like it or not, Shirō had no choice but to pay up and shut up, because all of this activity was tied in with his most important obligation, i.e., his connection to
rōnin
patron saint Mitsuru Tōyama. The men who came around for handouts were, like Shirō himself, tied up somehow with Tōyama’s power and influence, and thus they could not be refused. The godfather’s beneficence, after all, was responsible for much of Shirō’s business success, and while Shirō may have been worthy of a few unsavory titles, he was not an ingrate.

In late 1935, Tōyama invited
Shirō to a fund-raiser at a high-class restaurant in Nakazu, Tokyo. During the party, he was seated next to a beautiful and slightly older woman, a wealthy and famous Nihonbashi restaurateur named Yumi Kaneko. By the end of the evening, he was so taken with her that he couldn’t think straight (the saké, of course, may have been accomplice to this condition). They left the party together, and during an incendiary romantic interlude of several days, they managed to squeeze in enough time to discuss several salient points regarding their relationship: firstly, they were madly, hopeless in love; secondly, it would be best for everyone concerned if Shirō and his stepson moved in to the Hamachō house; and last but not least, Lieutenant General Chojirō Onodera’s patronage had to come to an end.

I
n February 1939, Yumi sold the Hamachō house and restaurant and went fifty-fifty with Shirō on a new house in Takadanobaba, a quiet Tokyo residential district far from Nihonbashi. As Takadanobaba real estate was much cheaper than Nihonbashi land, the sale of the Hamachō property left them with a sizable profit – in modern era American terms, probably something along the lines of several hundred thousand dollars. The couple promptly donated half of this windfall to the government. This was not a tax payment, but an actual out-and-out cash donation to a “patriotic” fundraising drive being conducted by the Army Ministry at the time. Given the strong pragmatic streak in each of their characters, Shirō and Yumi’s gesture would seem baffling if it were not for a series of seemingly unconnected developments that unfolded in the immediate wake of this generous endowment: the endless parade of grifters and shakedown artists that had marched through Shirō’s doorway for years stopped as suddenly as if a switch had been thrown. Moreover, there was no more of the low-key kempeitai harassment that had hounded Shirō since his return to Japan from Manchuria. At last, Shirō was out from under the cloud of government suspicion that had followed him since the Zhang Zuolin assassination in 1928.

For
Yumi, the move from Hamachō was much more than a simple change of address – it was a farewell to the
karyūkai
that had been her home and performing stage since birth. Giving up the restaurant meant giving up her last toehold in The Life and all the decades she had invested in creating her persona as a stellar fixture in the Nihonbashi scene. But now in her mid-forties, Yumi beginning to find it harder and harder to wake up every morning – well, sometimes afternoon now – after her nightly routine at the restaurant. And as painful as it was for her to admit, all she had to do was to stand in front of a mirror to see that there had been exterior changes as well. While she was too busy having fun to notice, someone or something had sneaked up on her to put lines on her brow and a reed in her laugh, and the willowy teenage beauty and toast of the town was suddenly just another good-looking but hustle-wearied middle aged woman working the capital’s kicks and power game to keep her kimono collection up to date and the creditors paid off. There were hundreds of such women in Tokyo.

Although her prodigious alcohol consumption would hardly be slowed by her retirement,
Yumi would never dance or pour a drink for another paying customer again. It was time to put all of that behind her and get on with her new life. Time to molt. Thirty years in the limelight were over, but she could learn to live with that. She had money and relative security, she was in love, and she had pulled off what was generally considered an impossible dream for an old Nihonbashi girl – a free and clear break from her past.