Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (58 page)

In twelve-year-old Harumi’s case, however, his own
kuchiberashi
experience was self-imposed – the noblest type, of course, from the Confucian standpoint of filial piety. Recognizing the burden of his continued presence in his grandfather’s home, he left as soon as it was legally permissible and never looked back.

Kawasaki-san is understandably reluctant to go into a lot of detail about a Dickensian adolescence spent in menial labor and harsh living conditions, but he does tell me that he made allowances of time and money to pursue an education on his own over the next six or seven years of his life, even as he had to scrape by to survive. The investment initially paid off when he came across a Yokaren recruiting notice on a bulletin board at a night school he was attending for his junior high school equivalency diploma. 

By the late fall of 1943, Harumi had already been eligible for the draft for several months since the lowering of the minimum conscription age to nineteen earlier that summer. As he figured his prospects, there was little doubt that he would be wearing someone’s uniform sooner or later – either army or navy – but if he had a choice in the matter, he would prefer not to do it in brown khaki with a rifle on his shoulder and eating dust all day. The cockpit of an airplane seemed a much more dignified – not to mention more comfortable – way to go to war. Without further ado, he applied for a Yokaren slot, passed his exams and entered His Majesty’s Navy as an enlisted flight cadet with the
Kō-
13 class in December 1943.
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Kawasaki underwent his Yokaren training at the new Nara campus, which was located in the middle of a densely populated civilian residential district.
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The Nara Yokaren operated out of massive religious retreat facilities appropriated by the navy from Tenrikyo, a folk religion founded by a charismatic farmer’s daughter in the early nineteenth century. While the Japanese government had originally attempted to suppress the faith, Tenrikyo had since become one of Japan’s most successful “new religions,” a status acquired in large part through the cult’s expressed patriotism and political cooperation with the Japanese state since late Meiji times
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. The clout the cult had amassed over the years was clearly evident in the sheer scope of its Nara lodging facilities, originally built to accommodate thousands of worshipers at a time when mass pilgrimages would descend on Nara from around the country or even from Japanese expatriate communities in Brazil and Peru. After the facilities’ appropriation by the navy, they were easily able to accommodate the twelve-thousand-odd cadets on the Nara Yokaren roster
.
　

The Tenri compound itself was comprised of fifty or so two-story long wooden dormitories, each capable of lodging 250 people. The layout of the factory-lik
e structures was uniform: at both ends of the second floor, there were communal day areas for gatherings, feedback on training, relaxation, etc. The rest of the interior space on both floors was taken up by tatami-floored rooms on either side of a long corridor that ran from one end of the building to the other.

Living conditions were cramped, but perhaps more in a psychological than a physical sense. To facilitate the snooping eyes of inspecting NCOs patrolling the corridors at night, the sliding paper
shōji
doors had been removed from all rooms, so there was no privacy whatsoever. Seven or eight boys slept to a each eight-tatami-sized room, right on the floormats. In the winter, when the interior of the unheated, drafty buildings differed little from the temperature outside, the boys would sleep in two groups of four under their piled up government issue blankets, lined up like spoons in a pantry drawer to share body warmth.  

For most of the nine months they spent in the Nara compound, Kawasaki and his classmates went through their Yokaren course with dreams of glorious aerial combat lightening all of the privation and slog they knew they had to endure on their way to winning naval aviator’s wings. But things did not quite work out as they expected. Les
s than one month from graduation for the Nara
Kō-
13 class, the cadets were told that due to the dwindling number of aircraft now available for training and a nationwide surplus of new Yokaren graduates, it was unlikely that more than a handful of them would ever see flight school.

Given no time to absorb the bombshell of having just been told that all of their blood, sweat and tears of the previous nine months was basically for naught, the cadets were next told that volunteers for a “Special Weapons Project” were needed. Kawasaki wrote his name down when the the paper slips were handed out, and after graduation on September 1, 1944, he and a group of about 650 other boys were marched to Nara Station and put on an official navy train. Nothing was said about the westbound train’s destination, but when they passed Kobe without stopping, rumors began circulating through the passenger cars that they were all headed for Submarine School at Kure.

When the group arrived at Kure, the boys were ordered to get off the train and form up on the platform. Here, 250 cadets were called out of ranks – including Kawasaki – and told to stay put on the platform while the remaining four hundred new petty officers were marched off to another platform for a train to Ōtake. Kawasaki learned after the war that this latter group was trained at the Enlisted Submariner’s School there as Kairyū two-man and Kōryū five-man midget sub crewmen.

In the meantime, Kawasaki and his group were marched from Kure Station to tempo
rary barracks in the Kure naval complex, where they were told that they would soon be shipping out to an installation with the mysterious designation of “Q-base.” No one was told where Q-base was, or given any details about its function.

I
n the years following the First World War, Japanese naval strategists began planning in earnest for the possibility – if not probability – of an all-out naval clash with the United States, by then Japan’s premier strategic rival in the Western Pacific. Chillingly prescient wargame simulations included scenarios for fleet-sized “decisive engagements” in the waters off Midway or Saipan, as well as surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor, all decades before the pasteboard gaming models and dice throws became burning ships and casualties.

The salient problem facing the IJN’s war planners was the superior strategic strength of their hypothetical (if likely) foe. America’s overwhelming industrial capacity, coupled with naval arms limitations treaties that favored American interests at Japan’s expense, meant that at least for the foreseeable future, no matter how the wargaming dice rolled, the fact of that superiority was inescapable. The IJN always conceded this disadvantage in their simulations, and formulated strategic and tactical doctrine accordingly.

The keystone of IJN doctrine was the concept of whittling down piecemeal a U.S. fleet barreling westward across the Pacific through a long range running attrition campaign of hit-and-run engagements, then taking on the weakened American force in a final toe-to-toe winner-take-all brawl to be fought on more favorable terms closer to Japanese home waters. The Japanese had understandably fond memories of a similar engagement in 1905, when Czar Nicholas II’s journey-wearied and storm-battered Baltic Fleet was trounced at Tsushima, effectively ending the Russo-Japanese War.

The best minds in the IJN agreed that in order to win a similarly decisive victory against the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the prerequisite attrition campaign would require superior surface and submarine-launched torpedo tactics.
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During the interwar years, the IJN put maximum effort into developing and/or otherwise acquiring the new weapons technology necessary to support their new tactical portfolio, paying special attention to large diameter ship-launched torpedoes with unprecedented range and one hit/one kill stopping power. Following the classic Japanese technological learning curve, the navy copied and adopted what it could from the West – in this case, the innovations of industry leading Italian naval munitions firm Whitehead of Fiume
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– then tweaked and improved on the design to meet its own specific needs. By 1933, IJN technicians were putting the finishing touches on what would be the finest ship-launched torpedo in the world until the end of World War II: the Type 93 “Long Lance.”
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Although Japan was already embroiled in open warfare on the Asian continent by the time the Type 93 was ready for deployment, the lack of significant naval engagements against their Chinese foe meant that the Japanese were unable to demonstrate their new ship-killer to the world for the next eight years. But with the opening salvos of World War II, the Allied naval forces in the Pacific theater got more demonstration of the capabilities of the Japanese torpedo than they needed. The Long Lance wreaked havoc on American, Dutch, British and Australian warships in the early stages of the war, most notably at the Battle of the Java Sea and at Savo and the other drubbings the IJN handed the Allies in a series of infamous battles in and around the Guadalcanal “Slot” in late 1942 and early 1943.

Changes in Japan’s war fortunes and in the nature of Pacific naval combat, however, meant that the Long Lance’s reign of terror was – at least from the Allied perspective – mercifully brief. Even as munitions manufacturers worked around the clock to keep up production of the peerless torpedo, the warships necessary to deploy it were becoming an increasingly endangered species as Japan’s war rapidly deteriorated into a grim defensive struggle. Moreover, the mid-war paradigm shift in Pacific theater naval tactics brought about by the coming-of-age of carrier-based airpower also greatly diminished the weapon’s relevance. Most naval combat was now conducted without surface forces seeing any more of their opponent than green blips on a radar screen – if even that much – and the ship-killers of choice had become bombs and torpedoes dropped from aircraft. Even for the Americans – with near complete air supremacy everywhere they went – the main contribution of their battleships, cruisers and destroyers had been relegated to the roles of beachhead prep and ground support fire for amphibious operations, anti-submarine warfare and as floating flak towers to protect the now all-important carriers. The days when the outcomes of naval engagements were determined by battlewagon salvos and torpedo spreads launched by squadrons of swift destroyers were all but over.

With Japan’s war prospects heading south at flank speed, the IJN was becoming increasingly desperate and frustrated by a logistical situation in which it had vast warehouses full of technologically superlative but now tactically redundant torpedoes. As is so often true in the decision-making processes of large organizations, the best
              thinking regarding the conundrum came from the lower ranks. In late 1943, two junior officers stationed at Ōtsushima, a top-secret island sub pen in Japan’s Inland Sea, were discussing possibilities for the Type 93 when they hit on a revolutionary idea: the effectiveness of the torpedo could be increased exponentially if it was given a larger warhead, modified to accommodate a human pilot and capable of being launched in stealth, underwater, from a submarine mother ship.

Lieutenant Hiroshi Kuroki and Ensign Sekio Nishina had just conceived Japan’s first tokkō weapon.

Both officers had sound eng
ineering backgrounds, Kuroki a graduate of the prestigious Naval Engineering College at Maizuru
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, Nishina a Class of ’42 Etajima man.
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Working the nuts and bolts problems of their concept in their free time – often at the expense of sleep – they had drawings and numbers good enough to write up in a formal proposal to send up the chain of command by December 1943. On the twenty-eighth of that month, the paperwork reached the Ministry of the Navy.
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Tokyo’s response to the manned torpedo proposal was a firm but nonetheless appreciative “No.” The admirals admired the fighting spirit and patriotism of the young sub officers and praised the ingenuity of their engineering work, but neither the service nor the nation was ready to accept the concept of organized taiatari tactics – at least not yet. The officers were thanked for their efforts and told to continue having these good thoughts, but to consider the matter of human torpedoes closed.

But Kuroki and Nishina were not to be deterred. According to IJN legend, the young submariners wrote up a second appeal – this time inked in their own blood. Neither the display’s militant determination nor the possible morale damage of rejecting such an obviously sincere request were lost on the brass hats in Tokyo. This time, whether out of appreciative sentimentality, political considerations, pragmatic assessments of a deteriorating tactical situation or some combination of the three trains of thought, the Navy Ministry gave the nod to the human torpedo project with the cosmetic codicil that provisions for pilot survival would at least be considered.
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On February 28, 1944, memoranda were issued for R+D to begin at Kure Arsenal for a project to be given the metaphysically intriguing name of
Kaiten
.

Kaiten
– which can be inelegantly but adequately translated as “heavens rearranger” or “fate reverser” – was a mildly blasphemous metaphor from a strict Buddhist standpoint, implying as it did the notion that something wrought by mere mortals could alter divinely preordained destiny. From a morale standpoint, however, the naming was brilliant, expressing both in its dash and desperation the hope that the new superweapon was going to reverse the nation’s star-crossed war fortunes by rearranging with boldness and high explosive the very firmament itself if necessary. Fate would be cheated. Japan’s bad luck stopped here.