Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (55 page)

The remark ties a quick, tight knot of nerves in my stomach, but this begins to unwind once we are on the open road and the doctor displays his cautious dexterity at the wheel. His rigorously careful driving and insistence on keeping the car a good twenty or thirty kilometers an hour below the speed limit gets us honked at a few times on the way, but given all of the hairpin turns and blind shoulders in the road, I am all in favor of his driving policy of erring on the side of caution. Besides, being able to relax a bit lets me enjoy the scenery.

After an imposing eyeful of Sakurajima, the jagged brown semi-active volcano that dominates the upper reaches of Kagoshima Bay, we get on to the Ibusuki Skyline, a forlorn little turnpike of crumbly two-lane macadam that traverses a starkly beautiful landscape of lush foliage and rust – a Chinese scroll watercolor of bamboo-covered limestone cliffs graffittied over with brutal brown slashes of abandoned industrial plant. Dark green, steeply sloped mountains push up the horizon and crowd in the sky in every direction, but up close, the manmade scenery is strictly Gdansk-on-the-Yangtze – dead factories, forgotten stone quarries, red-brown skeletal remains of gantries and cranes, roadside restaurants with collapsed roofs and weeds pushing through broken bay windows.

Strewn along the highway at irregular intervals are kitschy artifacts from happier days of a bygone era, when outsiders apparently showed more interest in this place.
We drive by boarded over roadside stands; a faded Fiberglas Takamori Saigō sitting atop a storehouse, scowling at the passing traffic; flaking metal signboards for long-bankrupt tourist attractions. In one of these, half obscured by tall undergrowth, you can just make out a swinging couple of non-descript ethnicity looking like Speed Racer and his girlfriend in matching Botany 500 sportswear on a date at Expo ’70. They gaze off toward a minimalist rendering of a smoking Sakurajima wearing expressions that are somewhere between religious ecstasy and lower back pain.

During the hour’s
drive down the Satsuma Peninsula, we have passed maybe a dozen cars, at the most – and the Ibusuki Skyline is supposedly one of the area’s major arteries. None of those fabled Japanese traffic snarls to worry about here. As we approach our destination, we finally run into a little congestion when we stop at an intersection for a convoy of buses full of bright-eyed high schoolers to pass. A couple of them smile and wave at me from the windows.

We pull in behind the kiddie caravan and
trail it straight into Chiran. The Tomiya Inn is on the town’s meticulously pruned main drag, functionally joined at the hip with its next-door neighbor, the reconstructed Tomiya Shokudō. The latter establishment is no longer a cafeteria for airmen, but rather, a small museum and tokkō memorabilia gift/book shop. Unfortunately, we have little time to browse. We are running late for the next item on our itinerary – an appointment with Mayor Kampei Shimoide and Director of Social Welfare Shige’aki Yamamoto. These gentlemen have been kind enough to make time in their busy schedules to give us a tour of the town’s largest collection of tokkō exhibits – the unexpectedly upbeat Chiran Peace Museum For Kamikaze Pilots.     

On this particular Saturday afternoon, t
he atmosphere around the Peace Museum seems more bustling medieval fair than thoughtful war memorial. A drum corps is playing for a ballgame nearby, heard but unseen, and the museum grounds and its parking lot are flanked with merchants’ booths where reasonably priced souvenirs are sold. Hinomaru hachimaki go for five hundred yen (about $4.00US), tokkō-themed T-shirts for about a thousand. Key holders or Chinese Zippo knockoffs embossed with various models of Japanese navy and army aircraft are available for a little more. On an impulse, I plunk down fifteen hundred for a Shidenkai tie clip.

Other stalls sell hot snack food or that most popular of Japanese road trip souvenirs – boxed confectionary. References to last year’s hit film
Hotaru
are in abundance, as is imagery of
anime
-esque, cherubic tokkō pilots as cute as any Hello Kitty character. A noodle restaurant doing brisk business near the entrance to the museum is named “Hayabusa Ramen.”

I ask Yamamoto-san what he thinks of the tourist industry commercialization of the faci
lities here. He replies that it is good for Chiran’s economy. A more elegant and irrefutable answer I cannot imagine, and my mind goes back to the Setagaya Kan’non prayer in which the faithful profess their belief that modern Japan has the sacrifices of the tokkō pilots to thank for its peace and prosperity. Doctor Hiroshima and I have just driven through an hour’s worth of near-Appalachian desolation and this is the first place we have seen that is not rusted shut and overgrown with weeds. The presence of an oasis like this in the midst of a moonscape of thirty-year-long economic strangulation seems to border on the miraculous. Has some spiritual life force been imparted to this ground, I wonder – bled and wept into the soil – or are all the tourist buses just the result of smart marketing and nostalgia? Moot question. The mecca exists. It has been built, and they are coming.

Mayor Shimoide leaves our party after we pay our respects at the museum memorial shrine
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and ring its bronze Peace Bell, but Yamamoto-san stays to take us through the main exhibits. One of the more impressive of these is a three-quarter scale mock-up of the musty, catacomb-like interior of a sangakuheisha
barracks, its dark wooden walls lined with helmets, canteens and crashed aircraft artifacts, thin bedding laid out on the sleeping shelves as if in expectation of a truckload of phantom tokkō pilots. The space is claustrophobic and every bit as somber as the Nadeshiko girls described it to me. After taking a few snapshots, I am late for the door.

Yamamoto-san leads us into the high-ceilinged front lobby of the museum proper, a well-lit, clean space dominated by a thirteen square meter ceramic mural on the wall facing the entrance. The 1975 work, by local artist Katsuyoshi Nakaya, is entitled
Chinkon no Mitsugi
(“Heavensent Requiem”). It depicts a slumped tokkō pilot in an almost Christ-like crucifixion pose being extricated from his flaming Hayabusa in mid-air by six stunningly beautiful ten’nyo angels. Magically suspended against a marmalade sky, the deities show enticing flashes of golden midriff and supple thigh through their filmy white garments, their tender cradling of the pilot in this cheesecake
Pieta
toeing a provocatively fuzzy line between mother’s caress and lover’s embrace. Keeping the eroticism of the main composition from going into overdrive, a blossom-laden cherry branch – obviously suggesting the famous send-off gifts of the Nadeshiko Unit – is shown tumbling from the cockpit, blown back in the propwash of the doomed fighter plane. 

This, of course, is the artwork that
Naoko Motoki talked about in our interview, claiming that it put to rest forever her concerns for her first husband’s posthumous fate. Watching the reactions of other visitors as they enter the museum foyer and see the work, it seems that most are extremely moved, a few even to tears. While I would hesitate to agree with Naoko-san’s assessment of the work as “wonderful,” or in the opposite direction, with Ian Buruma’s verdict of “ghastly,”
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the mural is certainly dramatic – in all semantic permutations of the word – and no one can deny the comfort to be found in the thought that, for a young man in his physical prime, there could be worse afterlife scenarios than being embraced by gorgeous angels for all eternity.

After the fantasy of “Heavensent Requiem,” the museum’s main exhibition hall is a hard cheek slap of reality –
four long walls lined with photographs of young men who burned themselves up for their country. To me, at least, their sepia-toned stares seem to ask
What did my death achieve?
As a father of sons – and even just as a human being – I find it impossible to stand here without experiencing a confluent rush of grief for the loss of all this youth and potential, and a slow boiling rage for the obstinate, middle-aged brutes who willed its destruction.

I look around at my fellow visitors for signs of kindred spirits, but most of the people here seem to walk through the exhibit with expressions akin to religious awe – as if to even dare to think that the deaths of these boys were a tragic waste of life might bring a bolt from the blue down upon their heads. There is no anger. They are in the presence of young war gods, not the slaughtered innocent. This is the Alamo for Texans, Kosovo for Slavs, the Tomb of Ali for Shi’ites. Although not as stridently posed as at Yasukuni, there is an agenda at work here – a somber celebration of Japaneseness. The party line holds fast.

Yamamoto-san leads us through the rest of the exhibits. There are several aircraft on display here: a beautifully restored Hayate; a glossy refurbishment of a Hien inline engine fighter; a three-quarter scale airworthy Hayabusa; and most poignantly, the barnacle and seawater-eroded wreckage of a Zero salvaged from nearby waters in 1980.
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Of course, there are also the prerequisite purple-prosed
isho
farewell letters. But after reading hundreds of these over the last year, I have become oddly inured to their highly stylized sentiment, and I find that there is far more raw emotional impact in the displays of everyday personal items – cigarette holders, sweaters, notebooks, razorblades, postcards, even toys. It is these common, recognizable objects that humanize and render most painfully immediate the loss being honored and mourned here.

When we finish with the museum, Yamamoto-san is kind enough to take the wheel of our rented car and drive us around to some of the more notable spots in the environs of the old air base. Our first stop is the ruins of the original sangakuheisha compound. At the bottom of the hill, sweet potatoes are growing in the basin of an old half-sunken airplane revetment. We climb the dirt and log stairs up to the compound proper. Someone has placed a bouquet of fresh wildflowers on top of the simple stone monument that sits here amidst the crumbling concrete foundations of the barracks.    This, of course, is the exact spot where
Akio Motoki spent his last night – where Reiko, Shōko, and the other Nadeshiko girls once played Jacob’s ladder and sang nursery rhymes with teenaged tokkō pilots. Six decades later, the same gently rustling boughs of pine the girls described to me still form a cool green roof over the space.

Our last stop is the grounds of the old airbase itself – now a giant expanse of flowers and more sweet potato patches. Yamamoto-san explains that we are standing on the exact site of the Chiran Airbase flight ops building. He indicates the direction of takeoff when southerly winds prevailed, pointing toward the ultramarine, steeply sloping silhouette of Mount Kaimondake on the southeastern horizon. The mountain – sometimes called “the Satsuma Fuji-san” for its close resemblance to
its larger Honshū cousin – is the second half of the pair of imposing and still rumbling volcanoes that dominate lower Kagoshima Prefecture. It is said that pilots flying out of Chiran on their final missions would salute the mountain as they flew past it, knowing that it was the last of their homeland that they would ever set eyes upon. For those given a life extension by engine failures – whether real or feigned – the mountain was a landmark to follow back to base after lonely, cheerless journeys home over the East China Sea.

At the end of our tour, we thank Yamamoto-san for his kindness and return to the Tomiya Inn, where the doctor and I enjoy a leisurely dinner before calling it a night and retiring to our separate rooms. The combination of a Kirin beer nightcap and Arnold Schwarzeneggar dubbed in Japanese proves to have amazingly sleep-inducing qualities, and I am soon out like a light. But my sleep is not peaceful for long, and I am awakened about three in the morning by the tell-tale sounds of old man insomnia emanating from Doctor Hiroshima’s room – coughs and luggage-fussing heard loud and clear through the thin walls, backed with a murmuring ambience of radio talk shows and folk song programs. It is nothing intolerable, though, and after a while I am able to drift off again.

The next sleep interruption, however, is not so easy to shrug off. It is a siren at deafening volume, echoing through the streets and off of the surrounding mountains. As a longtime resident of this archipelago, I immediate react with
Oh shit!
Earthquake!
, but this unwelcome predawn adrenaline rush is soon replaced by annoyed resignation when a stomach-turningly chipper female voice launches into an announcement reminding town residents to vote in the upcoming elections. A long program of announcements follows, including what sounds like – as far as my sleep-deprived, early morning Japanese ability can ascertain – agricultural reports. I have a sudden image of one wall of my room turning into a Big Brother TV screen –
Sheftall! 6079 Sheftall, M.G..! Yes, you! Bend lower…Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes!
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Like almost all of the Japanese countryside, the entire township is wired for sound, and the powers-that-be in this burg – in their paternal and caring wisdom – have determined that no one within earshot of their loudspeaker system has any business sleeping past dawn, Sunday or not. Surely, if anyone in town was sound asleep a moment ago, they are wide-awake now
.

I check my watch. It is six AM.

This cannot be happening.

But it is, and all metaphysical questions aside, the reality is that there will be no more sleep for me this morning. I smoke Cuban cigarillos and read Reiko Akabane’s wartime memoirs by dawn’s early light until it is time for breakfast.