No Surrender (4 page)

On March 5, 1944, when I was out on maneuvers, a message came telling me to return to the base on the double to see a visitor. I ran all the way back; the visitor turned out to be Tadao. When he saw me, he said, “What happened to you?”

“Why?” I asked.

“You look like a real man now,” came the reply.

My brother had been attached for temporary duty to a division command in Korea and had been in Pyongyang for a while, but as of March 1, he had been ordered to Twenty-third Army Headquarters in Kwangtung. He was to take a
plane from Hakata in a day or two, but he had found time to come to see me. We talked for a while, then just as he started to leave, he looked me straight in the eye and said, “Be strong! It won't be long before you're going to need all the strength you have.”

I said firmly, “Don't worry, I'll die like a man.”

“Well,” said my brother, “there is no point in rushing off to get killed. But you'd better be prepared to die in case your turn comes.”

I walked with Tadao to the front gate, and just before we got there, he turned to me and asked in a low voice, “Have you ever had a woman?”

I just smiled at him without answering. Our eyes met, and he said heartily, “Well, this is it. Take care of yourself!”

He started to walk away, but at just that point I mustered up the courage to say, “Give me fifty yen to remember you by.”

I suppose he had been expecting a touch, because he good-naturedly took out his wallet and started riffling through it. Grumbling that he had no small money, he handed me a hundred-yen note and said with a grin, “I don't suppose it would do any good to ask for my change.”

I thought to myself that this was probably our last good-bye. Once more he told me to take care of myself, and then he marched off with great strides, his spit-polished boots glistening in the sun.

In August I finished officers' training and became an apprentice officer. I would have to remain in this status another four months before my commission as a second lieutenant became official. The usual procedure was for apprentice officers to go back to their former units. As it happened, the war situation in the Pacific was so serious by this time that half of the men who
had come from China were to be reassigned to units of the Western Army in Kyushu. Since I was not included in that group, I was looking forward to going back to China. I was joking with the others about how great it would be to be filling up on that wonderful Chinese food again when suddenly I was called to headquarters.

There the message was, “You are hereby ordered to the Thirty-third Squadron in the Eastern Sector.” This was a unit I had never heard of, so I asked the officer, “What does the squadron do?”

“I can't tell you.”

“Where is it stationed?”

“At a place called Futamata, north of Hamamatsu.”

That was all I could get out of him, but I could tell I was going to some sort of special unit.

After our graduation ceremony on August 13, some of us went to say good-bye to Captain Shigetomi, who told us all, for the last time, to be good officers. He was almost tearful as he patted each of us on the back and wished us well.

When I arrived at Futamata on August 16, I was told that training would not begin until September 1. I was directed to take a two-week leave in the meantime.

I went to Tokyo, partly because I wanted to get a company officer's sword belt from my oldest brother, who had been promoted to the rank of major and was now entitled to wear a field officer's sword belt. My brother had been transferred to the Army Medical Administration in Tokyo and was living in Nakano, which was then on the outskirts of the city. He asked me about the outfit I was being assigned to; I told him the name of the squadron, adding that I had no idea what it did.

My brother looked startled. “It's this,” he said. He first
stuck out the index and middle fingers of his right hand and then made a motion like that of pouring water into a teapot. I assumed he was being secretive because his wife was present. I merely nodded my understanding.

Not that I understood completely. The pointed fingers meant a karate thrust into an opponent's eyes, and the gesture of pouring tea suggested giving someone a dose—of poison. I took this to mean that I was to be engaged in some sort of spying, but I was not sure what sort. The idea that I might be assigned to intelligence work was not particularly surprising to me, because back in Nan-ch'ang Lieutenant Ōno had once said to me, “We are short of good people for the pacification squads. With your Chinese, when you finish officers' training school, you ought to be given a job in that field.”

“Pacification squad” was the current term for units that infiltrated behind enemy lines and tried to break down defenses from within. They corresponded in many ways to what the Americans called “commando squadrons.”

The next day my brother gave me the sword belt, and after I had gone to pay my respects before the imperial palace, Yasukuni Shrine and Meiji Shrine, I went to Wakayama to see the rest of my family.

The training center I went to was properly called the Futamata Branch of the Nakano Military School, but the sign over the gate said only Futamata Army Training Squadron. It was no more than a small collection of decrepit army barracks, located a little more than a mile from Futamata railway station. The school was not far from a place on the Tenryū River that had once been used by the Third Engineer Corps from Nagoya as a practice area for army bridge builders.

My group was the branch school's first class, and on September 1 there was an opening ceremony. The commandant,
Lieutenant Colonel Mamoru Kumagawa, addressed our class of 230 officers with words to the following effect: “The purpose of this branch school is to train you in secret warfare. For that reason, the real name of the school is to be kept absolutely secret. Furthermore, you yourselves are to discard any ideas you may have had of achieving military honors.”

This came as no shock to me, because my brother had warned me in Tokyo, but the others looked at each other in amazement and anxiety. The anxiety only increased when one of the instructors, Lieutenant Sawayama, stood up and started shooting questions at us.

“When you gentlemen arrived in Futamata, what impression did it make on you?” he asked. Then, without waiting for answers:

“If there were troops stationed here, how many battalions do you think there would be?

“What is the principal industry here?

“Just what kind of a town is this?

“How much food do you think the town could provide for army troops?

“What is the average frontage of the houses here?”

Of course none of us had the foggiest idea of the answers. We were stupefied!

Then he continued, “I am trying to show you what we mean by the word
intelligence
. To make the maps necessary for military movements, we must have information—intelligence, that is—from many different quarters. My job is to teach you how to acquire intelligence as it relates to military needs. You will have to learn to notice everything around you and evaluate it from the viewpoint of military intelligence.”

I had foreseen something like this, but I could not suppress the feeling that I had wandered into a rat's nest. I was not the only one by far.

Somebody said, “I don't have enough brains for this.”

Another moaned, “Does this mean that on top of officers' training I have to become a spy?”

That evening several of them went to see Lieutenant Sawayama, and their spokesman told him, “We have all thought since we came into the army that one day we would lead a platoon into battle. That's why we worked so hard at officers' training school. And what we learned there was how to be effective leaders in battle. We don't know anything about secret warfare, and we are not at all sure of our ability to learn. We would like to be returned to our former units.”

The next morning Lieutenant Sawayama called us together and addressed us: “You're quite right in thinking that the training here will be difficult, but the very fact that you understand this merely on the basis of what I said yesterday shows that you have good minds. I intend to cram into your heads eveything you need to know, so don't worry. And don't come to me a second time with your bellyaching!”

I, for one, was at least happy to be told that I had a good brain. I cannot say that all my fears had been dispelled, but I made up my mind to try to learn everything there was to learn at Futamata.

It was certainly different from the officers' training school. Military forms and procedures were observed, but without excessive emphasis on regulations. On the contrary, the instructors kept stressing to us that in our new role as commando trainees, we should learn that so long as we kept the military spirit and remained determined to serve our country, the regulations were of little importance. At the same time, they tried to impress upon us that the more underhanded techniques that we were learning, such as wiretapping, were to be used against the enemy, not for our own personal benefit. They urged us to express our opinions concerning the quality of the instruction and to make complaints if we felt like it.

We had four hours of training in the morning and four in
the afternoon. Classes lasted two hours each, with fifteen-minute breaks in midmorning and midafternoon. When the time for a break came, everybody piled out of the classroom windows into the yard to have a smoke. There were 230 of us, packed like sardines into one small barracks, and the break was not long enough for all of us to leave and return in orderly fashion via the door. At officers' training school if anyone had dared leave by the window, the punishment would have been swift and severe. At Futamata it was routine.

The classroom was terribly cramped. We were not only literally shoulder to shoulder but almost completely pinned in front and back by desks. The instructor lectured from a tiny platform, occasionally squeezing his way into one of the few narrow aisles. Despite the uncomfortable conditions, the lecturers displayed much enthusiasm, even fervor, in propounding the essentials of guerrilla warfare.

At the main school in Nakano, the course had at first consisted of one year of language training and one year of guerrilla and ideological training. As the war situation grew more serious, the language training was eliminated, and the remainder of the course was reduced to six months. By the time we came along, the six-month course was being jammed into three months. The pace was fierce for both instructors and trainees.