Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (50 page)

Once in the privacy of the kitchen,
Naoko opened the note. One thing she noticed immediately was that here Akio addressed her simply as “Naoko,” and not as “Naoko-dono,” the highly formal honorific he had always used when addressing her directly. Coming from an extremely formal Japanese gentleman like Akio, the dropped honorific implied a deep emotional intimacy it would have been entirely out-of-character for him to ever express to his bride – at least verbally –in person. Naoko was profoundly moved by the gesture, and hot tears rolled down her cheeks as she read the rest of the note:

Naoko,

It has been a month since that night we spent together. Tomorrow morning, I will cross the River Sanzu (Japanese Buddhist equivalent of River Styx into Hades - author) and take as many Yankees with me as I can. I am sorry for any trouble I have ever given you. Please forgive my selfishness. It breaks my heart to think of the long life you will live that I won’t be able to share with you. Be strong and virtuous for me. Please take care of Father when I’m gone.

                                      Akio

Naoko tucked the note away again, dried her tears with her sleeve and brought a tray with more tea and rice crackers out to the guest.

Toward the end of what turned out to be a rather lengthy visit, Takagi pulled a manila envelope from his bag containing at least a roll’s worth of posed publicity shots he had taken of the 51
st
Shinbu members on the afternoon of May 10
th
, just after Akio arrived at Chiran and scant hours from the unit’s combat sortie to Okinawa the next morning. Takagi said that reports of the action, as in the case of so many tokkō missions, were spotty, but at least one plane from Akio’s flight was confirmed to have hit an American destroyer. The family could take some comfort in believing that it was Akio’s plane that had gotten through the fighters and anti-aircraft fire to barrel in for the strike. And in any case, whether or not Akio’s mission had been successful, the family had every reason to be proud of him, knowing that he had gone out as a hero.

After Takagi left,
Naoko went back to her room for the rest of the night to sob into her pillow and mourn in private. Shirō and Yumi also retired to their own separate rooms to grieve. Grief was private – almost something to be ashamed of (as it still is, in Japanese social mores) – and the agony of loss was a hell that had to be endured alone. Naoko has never forgotten the door-rattling moans and anguished invocations of Akio’s name that emanated from the thin walls of Shirō’s room into the wee hours before the old soldier finally cried and drank himself to sleep.

It was a long, abominable night for everyone in the house
.

*****

With Akio’s death now confirmed, Naoko’s status as the soon-to-be-bearer of his sole offspring received obsessive attention in the Kōzu household. Having just lost a son, Shirō was going to do everything he could to prevent another tragedy in the family, and he was intensely concerned about Naoko’s physical safety. Accordingly, he was vehemently opposed to her expressed desire to continue working at the naval cannery, even though she had assured him that there was nothing to worry about, and that she would quit as soon as she felt even the slightest bit put out by her developing condition.

When pleading her case,
Naoko was especially careful not to mention anything about the target-of-opportunity attack by American fighters on the plant several weeks earlier, when Hellcats – apparently using up remaining ammunition on their way home after the morning’s missions in the Tokyo area – strafed the cannery for a few minutes, started some minor fires and even shot at some girls unlucky enough to have been caught out in the open riding their bicycles to work when the first planes buzzed over. Fortunately, the girls had been swift enough to ditch their bikes and take cover as soon as the first rounds began kicking up dust, so no one was hurt, but it had been close. If Shirō had heard about it, he would have hit the roof, and that would have been the end of Naoko’s contribution to the war effort.  

In late June, Kōzu proper was hit by an intense early morning Hellcat raid. The carrier borne fighters had been pesky for several weeks now, shooting up anything with a decent-sized smokestack, or taking potshots at the occasional vehicle driven by someone stupid enough to be out on the road in the daytime. But this raid was the first time Kōzu itself seemed to have b
een the primary target. Shirō surmised that the Americans had run out of more worthwhile targets farther up toward the capital and had sunk everything there was to be sunk in the nearby Yokohama navy yards, so they were ranging farther out into the rural areas to destroy basic infrastructure. This morning, their apparent target was Kōzu’s fishing fleet, as they concentrated their fury on the town waterfront. But the planes did not limit themselves to the trawlers and scows afloat in the harbor – they also shot up other prominent structures in town, including the Motoki home. While no one in the house was hurt, the Motoki’s outhouse – fortunately unoccupied at the time – was not so lucky. It was blown away in a hail of .50 caliber bullets from a glossy dark blue plane that came shrieking in low enough to decapitate some of the trees in the garden and whip the morning’s laundry off the clotheslines as it passed over.

For
Shirō, the outhouse strafing was the last straw. Naoko was going to be evacuated to a safer place whether she agreed to it or not. He made financial arrangements with an old couple who worked a sweet potato plot high up on the southwestern slopes of Mount Fuji to let her stay with them until further notice.

On the day of
Naoko’s evacuation, Shirō and Naoko rode the train from Kōzu, changing at Numazu for a local branch line that would take them well up into Fuji’s foothills to Gotenba. The rest of the trip up to Fuji’s fifth station would have to be negotiated on foot. Naoko carried what she could manage in a roped bundle on her back, while Shirō pushed a wheelbarrow piled high with food provisions, blankets and other supplies.

The twosome was disappointed
at the end of their sweaty hike. Naoko’s “shelter” turned out to be nothing more than a floppy old tatami mat or two tossed on the hay-strewn dirt floor of a horse stable. But Shirō was in a position neither to bargain nor to complain – at least not very vociferously. By June 1945, it was most definitely a sellers’ market for shelter space anywhere within fifty kilometers of Tokyo. The farmer had heard nothing about putting the girl up in the house proper, and was hearing nothing about it now. Shirō was told he could take the accommodations as-is, or look elsewhere, so he had no choice but to hold his nose and shell out his war scrip. Naoko would be spending her days and nights buttoned up in the barn with a flea-bitten old plowhorse.

Shi
rō helped Naoko unpack her supplies, then paused when he reached the last item – a small brocade sack – almost as if he were deciding what to do with it. After a long moment of contemplation, he handed it over to Naoko and told her to open it. She did so, and pulled a thirty-centimeter-long army officer’s lacquer-sheathed shortsword out of the pouch. 

“That’s for the off chance that the Americans catch you and try to have their way with you,”
Shirō said, now long-faced and somber. “I don’t think they’ll bother coming this far up the mountain, and there’s nothing of any military value up here, so you don’t have to worry too much about it. But still, you should be prepared.”

“Of course, you’re no
t a man, and I don’t expect you to be able to shove it into your belly like one,” Shirō continued. “I want you to listen very, very carefully to me. This is how pregnant noblewomen in olden times would do themselves in when their castles were being overrun by the enemy.”

Shi
rō pulled a grease pencil from his shirt pocket and drew a small black circle on Naoko’s kimono, directly over the left side of her womb.

“If you ever find yourself in a situation where…well, where you expect the worst is about to happen
…put the tip of the dagger right here,” Shirō said, pointing at the circle he had just drawn. “Hold it in place and run into the door of the horse stall. You must make sure you keep the dagger exactly on that spot, so it will kill you and the baby as quickly as possible. I think it will be easier if you close your eyes while you do it, so you won’t flinch and lose your nerve at the last second. Do you understand?”

Naoko
nodded. Shirō paused for a moment, stern-eyed, his lower lip jutting out the way it always did when he was deep in troubled thought.

“You know, if it were you alone up here,” he said, looking down at the haystrewn dirt to avoid
Naoko’s gaze, “I would say just shut your eyes, turn your face to the wall, endure whatever you have to and try to stay alive. But it’s not just you. You’re also carrying Akio’s child…And the honor of the Motoki family. It would be unfitting for you to be sullied by the Americans. And anyway, Akio would be happier if you and the baby joined him as soon as possible. Think of how lonely he must be right now. If you keep that in mind, I’m sure you’ll be able to do what you have to do when the time comes.”

Shi
rō left Naoko with that reassuring thought and a promise to return two weeks later with another wheelbarrow’s worth of supplies. Until that time, Naoko was to keep the stable door and windows shut at all times, day or night, even if the heat inside became intolerable. And any venture outside to bathe or attend to other bodily functions was to be kept as short and close by as possible. Evil and chaos would soon be on the loose. The times called for laying low and maintaining vigilance.  

Naoko
awakened after a long night of miserable off-and-on sleep to find her feet, legs and arms literally covered with stinging, bloodsucking fleas. She would never forget the
fffttt, ffffttt
sound it made as she brushed them off her exposed skin with her hands. It was a morning ritual she would have to get used to.

After that first harrowing “debugging” experience, she made a quick, fog-shrouded dawn foray out into her new environs, trying not to stray too far from the dilapidated stable she now called home. One pleasant find resulting from her exploration was a nearby stream fed by melting snow runoff from Mount Fuji. It made for frigi
d bathing but excellent drinking, and during that long, hot summer, Naoko would often find herself unable to resist violating Shirō’s curfew restrictions in order to indulge herself in the relative luxuries of this clear, cold water source.

Another point
of interest and possible future use discovered during the morning reconnaissance was a cliff with a straight-down hundred meter drop a few minutes walk from the stable. It was almost an answer to Naoko’s prayers of the awful night before, during which she had spent long hours contemplating Shirō’s suicide instructions and how and if she would be able to comply with them. She had come to the conclusion that – officer’s wife or not – she just did not have the intestinal fortitude to use a blade on her own body, especially knowing now that there was a child in her womb. That was just not going to happen, no matter how threatened she felt.

Nor did she think that she would have it in her to rush her attackers with the blade, hoping for a quick death from gunshot. The cliff discovery, however, posed a considerably less gruesome solution than either of the other choices. If worse came to worse and
Naoko heard murder and mayhem coming up the footpath from the farming hamlet below, she could be out of the shack at a flat out run, over the cliff, and dead on the boulders below within a minute. There was a sense of morbid relief in knowing that she now had this option. This knowledge would provide a stingy modicum of comfort during what would prove to be a seemingly interminable summer of solitude, grinding boredom, lingering grief, and depression over Akio’s death and the incessant physical torment of fleas, heat, and hunger.

*****

On August 15, Naoko – now showing noticeably under her dusty
monpe
workclothes – was walking down the road past her landlords’ fallow potato field on her way back to the stable after an afternoon of scrounging for food in the surrounding countryside. On this particular day, she was returning empty-handed and not feeling particularly chipper about her own or the world’s condition. Shirō had not calculated for the increase Naoko’s appetite as her fetus grew, and the last wheelbarrow shipment had run out sooner than expected, forcing Naoko to forage to supplement her dwindling supplies.

Rounding a bend in the road, she came upon a sig
ht she had not seen since her arrival in Gotenba – her landlords actually doing some work in their field. Today, they were digging with shovels, but upon closer inspection, the activity turned out to have nothing to do with agriculture. The old farmer and his equally curmudgeonly wife were excavating strongboxes and sealed jars.

“
Ojisan
,”
[254]
Naoko called out. “What are you doing?”

“Never mind what we’re doing,” the farmer snapped. “Haven’t you heard the news?”

“What news?”

“The war is over. The Emperor announced it on the radio at noon.”

“You mean we’ve won?” Naoko asked, electrified with a sudden surge of elation.

The old couple stopped digging for a moment and looked at her, then at each other. In a different context, they might have started laughing, but this was evidently not a time for mirth.