Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (59 page)

T
he day before the scheduled September 5 start of their instruction at Submarine School in Ōtake, Ensign Toshiharu Konada and six other INA ’43 classmates were told that there had been a sudden change in their orders, and that effective immediately, they were all assigned to a unit called “
Dai’ichi Tokubetsu Kichitai
” (“Special Base Unit One”). No further explanation was given about what “Special Base Unit One” was or even where it was located. The assignment change was in the form of an order, not a request for volunteers, and as INA graduates, Konada and his classmates were not in a position to ask questions for clarification – just to get their gear together and prepare to ship out immediately.

  The next morning, Konada and his group found themselves on a fast motor launch headed for Kurahashijima, an island in Kure Bay. The passengers spent the thirty-minute trip in relative silence, no doubt mulling over possible scenarios for whatever it was that awaited them at their destination. Watching the rocky shore of Kurahashijima get larger on the horizon, Konada recalled a snippet of conversation between officers he had heard while still aboard the
Ashigara
some weeks before, when the cruiser was passing this very spot. One of the officers had said something about a top secret and incredibly powerful “nation-saving weapon” being developed on the island, then confessed to knowing nothing more than that it was code named “
Maruroku Kanamono
” (“Metal Fixture #6”). “Top secret” and “incredibly powerful” were certainly promising descriptions for a superweapon, but what about “Metal Fixture #6”? Could something that sounded like a column entry in a quartermaster’s manifest of plumbing supplies really save the country?

After the launch moored at the island base, Konada and the others were escorted to the officers’ billets. There, the group met up with an INA ’43 classmate who had finished the sub course at Kure some months earlier, and was now stationed here on Kurahashijima. While the old friends were catching up on what they had been doing over the past year, someone mentioned the assignment to “Special Base Unit One,” assuming that the base and Kurahashijima were one and the same entity.

“This is Special Base Unit One,” the Kurahashijima officer said, his expression suddenly serious. “But you fellows are going to the annex base at Ōtsushima. And you know what they’re doing out there, right?…They’re getting taiatari weapons ready…The human torpedoes.”

Sixty years later, Konada-san describes the combination of surprise,
pride and elation he felt when he first heard the phrase “human torpedo.”

“Of course such a weapon seemed desperate and drastic to me, but I could accept that, because it was already apparent by this point in the war that nothing less than drastic measures were going to save Japan,” he says. “I was not afraid, as I knew that the very survival of the Japanese race itself was at stake. My own life seemed unimportant compared with a duty of that magnitude. If, by giving up my life, I could fulfill my duty and help save the country, that act would make me happier than anything I could accomplish living. Everyone else in my group felt the same way, too…We were so excited by what we had just heard that we spent all of that night talking about it.”

*****

The Kura
hashima sojourn was a short one. The next morning, the group boarded an oceangoing tugboat for Ōtsushima, an island off the coast of Yamaguchi Prefecture about seventy kilometers to the west. After threading the innumerable islets and myriad channels of the Inland Sea, the tugboat arrived at its destination to enter a cliff-ringed, beachless lagoon with no level shoreline to speak of beyond a stone quay and concrete piers crammed with gear and wooden sheds. The rest of the base was arrayed up and down the densely foliated rockface, like a habitat for maritime cliff-dwellers. From the looks of it, a stiff breeze could send the whole place crashing into the sea.

On the cramped and busy waterfront, sailors in summer khaki workclothes operated cranes and assembl
ed machinery right on the docks. Others manhandled hand trolleys carrying what appeared to be swollen Type 93 torpedoes, one of which was being lowered down into the water at the end of a chain from a swing-armed gantry.

Special Base Unit One’s Ōtsushima
annex had inherited a base perfectly suited to their mission, with infrastructure designed specifically for torpedo work already in place from the days when the facility had been used in the development of the Type 93 in the 1930s. Gantries and cranes lined the quay, torpedo and sub pens were built right out over the water, and the surrounding cliffsides were honeycombed with new deep storage tunnels that were virtually impregnable to shelling or bombardment. A James Bond fan twenty or thirty years later would recognize the milieu immediately – it was Blofeld’s island lair being built with 1940s technology.

Konada’s group was met by an orderly at the quay, and led up a winding footpath carved into the cliff face that led to the top of the promontory, where the large clapboard HQ building was located. After signing in on the duty roster and offering formal greetings to the base CO, legendary sub captain Lieutenant Commander Mitsuma Itakura, the ensigns were escorted to their new communal home in the island’s officers’ billets, which were located on a level outcropping about halfway back down the cliff face path to the waterfront. The slapped-together plywood and corrugated tin accommodations were crude but adequate. They had Western style beds, and the tatami flooring in the sleeping quarters was a nice touch of hygienic, homey comfort much appreciated after the steel decks of the
Ashigara
, which had been microbial breeding grounds for the itchy miseries of athlete’s foot and impetigo.

The trip-weary ensigns had barely put their seabags down and begun field-testing their new bunks when an out-of-breath orderly flew through the front door of the billets.

“
Shitsurei shimasu
!” the clerk yelled between gasps, using the stock Japanese apology for intruding on a superior’s territory. “Lieutenant Higuchi and Lieutenant Kuroki have been in an accident. All personnel are to report to the quay immediately to form search parties.”  

There was a rush for the door as everyone followed the haggard orderly down to the waterfront at a full run. When the ensigns reached the quay, they were sent out into the training area of the lagoon with every other able body on the island in launches, patrol boats, rowboats, rafts and anything else that could float. “We’re looking for the Maruroku prototype…Looks like a big black torpedo,” they were told, and they followed this standing order as long as daylight allowed. As afternoon became evening, flashlights were distributed so the search could continue through the night.

“We even tried using a trawler to dredge the bottom of the lagoon, but that didn’t work, either,” Konada-san says. “Then around dawn, someone spotted bubbles and the divers went down to look.”

A salvage boat arrived at the scene, and tow cables were sent down with the divers to raise what had been found. Konada watched as whining salvage cranes brought a long black craft to the surface. A hatch in its manhole-sized conning tower was opened with an insistent hiss of escaping bad air, revealing two slumped bodies in the crew compartment.

“It was then that I finally had the honor of meeting Lieutenant Kuroki,” Konada-san says in utmost sincerity, using the formal
keigo
language the Japanese reserve for occasions of deepest solemnity. “
Meet”?!
I think.
Surely Konada-san must be speaking figuratively or sarcastically
. I pause for a moment, studying his bronze statue face for some trace of irony. But I find none, and the qualifying follow-up remark I wait for does not come. In my peripheral vision, I sense Kawasaki-san checking out my reaction. When I return his glance he replies by closing his eyes, raising his eyebrows and giving the slightest, barely perceptible shrug.

In a clear if somewhat monotone basso profundo, Konada-san retrieves the conversational ball and continues with his account of September 6, 1944, telling me that after the salvaged craft was brought back to the base, an inspection of its interior shed some light on the circumstances of the accident. While Kuroki and Higuchi slowly asphyxiated in a craft hopeless mired in muck at the bottom of the lagoon, they kept copious instrumentation notes as well as detailed physiological descriptions of the effects of the ordeal on their own bodies and mental capacities. Their last log entries – written in a shaky, obviously oxygen-starved hand – were recorded some fourteen hours after their first. In the agony of their final moments, they had even managed to scrawl farewell notes to their mothers.

The officers’ deaths were mourned, but even though they had not died in the kind of glorious combat mission they had worked so long and hard for, everyone on the island agreed that their deaths had been honorable. There was not a man on Ōtsushima who did not share the sentiment that the accident and its consequences were more than anything a proud affirmation of the young officers’ bravery and dedication, for the notes Kuroki and Higuchi had kept in the last hours of their lives provided invaluable data on the capabilities and limitations of Japan’s new superweapon. The officers were duly enshrined both in the Shinto altars and in the collective memory of Special Base Unit One, becoming something akin to patron saints for the human torpedo corps for the rest of the war.

From Konada’s perspective, the incident provided exemplary role models in the deceased persons of Kuroki and Higuchi, but it also whispered sobering intimations of the hazards his new duties were going to entail. Training on Metal Fixture Number Six, he thought, was going to be just as dangerous as being a test pilot on experimental aircraft. Perhaps his new job would be even more dangerous, for at least a test pilot had a chance to bail out in the event of catastrophe. A submariner trapped fathoms beneath the surface in a floundering craft had no such option.

*****

Once the commotion in the wake of the accident subsided, Konada and his classmates were taken to a sub hangar for their belated orientation briefing. A senior officer began his presentation with a rundown of the general concept and construction of something he called
Kaiten
. The weapon had been developed, he explained, by bisecting a Type 93 torpedo, connecting the sixty-centimeter-wide halves with a one-meter-wide one-man crew compartment, then widening the front half of the weapon with a one-meter-wide “sleeve” to compensate for the width of the crew compartment and to carry additional fuel and oxygen tanks. The most crucial function of the forward area, of course, was that it would also house the weapon’s whopping 1,550kg warhead. With more than three times the explosive charge of a standard Type 93, the ensigns were told, the Kaiten would be able to break the back of anything afloat with a single hit.

In addition to overwhelming destructive power, the Kaiten’s stealth, maneuverability, speed and range were also going to be crucial elements in its performance portfolio once the weapon went operational. Inheriting the Type 93’s gasoline/pressurized liquid oxygen propulsion system meant that the Kaiten – like its technological parent – would be wakeless (i.e. no tell-tale bubble stream left in its wake as it ran underwater) and relatively quiet. Piggybacked on the top deck of a mother sub and connected to the same by releasable bolts and a tubular access hatchway, the weapon would be ferried to the objective and released far enough away to escape early detection yet close enough to keep targets within operational range. At a submerged cruising speed of twelve knots, this range was about eighty kilometers. At flank speed of thirty knots, the Kaiten could turn on a dime as new targets presented themselves, and run circles around pursuers while still providing a range of over twenty kilometers. Most of the Kaiten’s navigation would be done by stopwatch and compass reckoning, with a periscope provided for quick pop-ups to assess the surface situation and to allow the pilot to steer the Kaiten into the target on the final attack run.   

At the end of the briefing, the officer gave an order, the doors of a storage shed opened, and a fifteen-meter-long black Kaiten was rolled out on dollies by a team of sailors. Konada and his classmates were floored by what they saw, and let out gasps of admiration when they were allowed to examine the machine up close.

“I thought
This is it! This is the weapon that will save Japan!
” Konada-san recalls of the experience.

In the book
Gyokusaisen To Tokubetsukōgekitai
(“Gyokusai {No Surrender}Warfare and Special Attack Units”) Konada-san describes his thoughts and feelings that day sixty years ago:

(The Kaiten)
was the first bright light on the horizon for Japan that any of us had seen in a long time…In my mind’s eye, I envisaged a hundred Kaiten’s sneaking into the enemy’s anchorage, laying waste his entire fleet…Even before the war started, Japanese newspapers carried articles about how the Americans boasted that, if hostilities ever began, they would burn our cities of wood and paper to cinders. We knew that this was a foe we could not afford to let anywhere near our homeland…American ostracism of and prejudice toward Japanese were truly awful in the prewar era. When they fought, their attitude toward us was just the same as their attitude toward Indians that you can see in any Western shoot’em-up: wholesale butchery…The only option left to us to prevent the invasion of our homeland by this enemy was to transform ourselves into human bombs. At the time, this was the reasoned, objective thought of almost all young Japanese men. We saw this as the most effective use of the sacrifice of our individual lives. Given the war situation at the time, this was a completely logical conclusion…’One life for one enemy ship’ – it did not get any more effective than that…Self-preservation is a primal instinct of any living organism…but anyone who qualifies as a human being is capable of sacrificing himself to save the lives of others or to protect loved ones in danger. It is just the same as jumping into a river to save a drowning child. That is human nature.
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