Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (17 page)

Once they had regained their composure, Yoshitake’s rescuers identified themselves as navy personnel. He was at a small naval airstrip on Mactan Island. He was pretty banged up, but the injuries were not life threatening. 

After recuperating in the first aid shack on Mactan, he was sent back to Pollock Airfield, where he spent the next two months witnessing the military and moral meltdown of the Japanese occupation forces there and on the rest of Luzon Island. Riding on one of the last Japanese aircraft to leave Luzon, he spent the remainder of the war in Taiwan awaiting new tokkō orders that never came. He was repatriated in February 1946 after serving as a “volunteer” medic’s assistant in the Taiwan countryside at the behest of local Kuomintang and Allied authorities.

So, did his traumatic experience over the Camotes Sea in late 1944 give him a lifelong fear of flying? Not a chance. He joined the Japanese Air Self Defense Force as soon as that organization was established, serving his country again as a military pilot and flight instructor for the next thirty years. After retirement, he started a successful aerial photography and mapping company, and continued pleasure flying in his spare time. His logged his last flight hours in 1993.

Yoshitake wishes he could still fly, but admits that his eyesight and reflexes aren’t what they used to be anymore. He flies only in his dreams now. Usually, these are pleasant – soaring over the troubles and trivia of the earthbound world, high and free in the great blue. Sometimes, though – perhaps a few times a month for the last fifty-eight years, more when he’s under stress – the dreams are not so good, and he is back on the flight line at Bacolod waiting for the order to get in the planes or flying toward those black flak clouds on the horizon. In the worst dreams, he is not flying at all, but running through the jungles of northern Luzon during a B-24 carpet-bombing raid over his position that kills half of the men in his new unit in seconds. But always – good dream or nightmare – he gets to meet once again with the best friends he ever had: Captain Takaishi and his IMA classmates in the Sekichō Unit. And along with the bittersweet joy of these regular nocturnal reunions invariably comes a feeling that maybe he was supposed to have died with his squadron mates. Maybe he had just cheated fate to survive that crash and last all these years to start a family, work in a fulfilling career, pursue hobbies, enjoy retirement, play with his grandchildren, watch sunsets. He has never really shaken this nagging survivor’s guilt all this long half-century, but he manages to cope with it one day at a time. One way to do this is to look at his life since that fateful day in 1944 not as something stolen but as a gift. It is a sentiment I will hear often in interviews with other tokkō survivors in coming months.

“I have lived twice,” Yoshitake says. “I died in that plane crash, and was born again when I was pulle
d from the wreck. I’m not a religious man, but I have to think that something or someone decided to give me this time for a reason, and there is never a day that I do not feel grateful for it. Perhaps I have been living not only for myself all this time, but also to make up in some way for the long lives my comrades missed.”

Yoshitake leans back in his chair to fire up another of the creosote-smelling Shinsei cigarettes he has been smoking throughout the interview. There is a faraway look in his eyes now, but there is a twinkle in them, too, like he is in on a secret that I, not present on his particular St. Crispin’s Day, cannot be let in on until I have paid some more dues. It is a look you often see in the eyes of older men whose hearts, in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s metaphor, were touched with fire in their youth. God and favorable defense treaties willing, Yoshitake and his seventy- and eightysomething former comrades-in-arms will be the last generation of Japanese ever to have it. 

“I’ll tell you what war is,” Yoshitake says, almost as if he has been reading my mind. “It’s a situation in which a person has absolutely no control over their own destiny. Everything is out of your hands. You can’t stay alive when you want to, but you can’t die when you want to, either.”

I
t is April 2002, and I am visiting Tokurō Takei’s comfortably sunlit Japanese/Western-style home in Hamamatsu, Japan for the first time. His wife meets me at the door with a deep bow, which I return with one of my own before handing over a gift-wrapped box of rice crackers and offering a stock Japanese apology for imposing myself like this. Mrs. Takei receives my gift with another bow and, as etiquette dictates, politely refuses to acknowledge my need to apologize. I remove my shoes in the ground- level foyer, and step up on to the raised floor of the house in my stocking feet. Mrs. Takei offers me the customary house slippers a visitor to a Japanese house will typically wear. I decline the offer on the valid grounds that my feet are too big for the slippers, and we share a quick if bashful laugh over this footwear conundrum while she shows me to the living room sofa.

I would guess that Mrs. Takei is in her late sixties or early seventies. She has the doe-eyed, rich caramel brown variety of Japanese face that is often seen in her hometown of Okitsu and the other fishing villages squeezed between mountains and the Pacific Ocean on the coast of eastern Shizuoka Prefecture. It is a warm, sunny visage that conjures up forebears from milder climes than the tough Yayoi culture rice
farmers who sailed from the Korean peninsula two millennia ago to wrest control of the archipelago from the aboriginal Jōmon culture and leave the deepest footprints in the genetic makeup of modern Japanese.
[68]

Any vestigial memory Mrs. Takei may have of her ancestors’ multicultural experience is obviously not kicking in to help her to deal with welcoming a foreigner into her home. When not in motion plying me with green tea and cookies while we wait for her husband to come to the living room, she stands a few steps behind the sofa and just out of my field of vision. I can sense her nervousness, and am not sure if her taciturnity stems from fear and shyness or from her assuming that a language barrier will make any attempts at meaningful conversation a mutually embarrassing exercise in frustration. Accordingly, neither of us says anything. I sit on the Takeis’ sofa looking at naval citations on the wall and plastic models of Zeros lined up on the bookshelves while Mrs. Takei maintains her vigil safely out of sight.

The cultural dynamic of silence at work here – which I have encountered thousands of times during my Japanese sojourn – is not particularly uncomfortable for me (although it may be for Takei-san, uninitiated as she is to visits from international men of mystery). Over the years, I have lost my quintessentially American fear of conversational lulls longer than a few seconds, so this particular silence does not faze me. Nevertheless, I am beginning to feel a tad guilty over Takei-san’s obvious discomfort, so I decide to try to put my hostess at ease with a little demonstration of Japanese language ability. Etiquette gives me an in here – it will not be untoward for me to apologize once again for my rude intrusion (under the rules of Japanese etiquette you can never truly apologize too much for anything). The tit-for-tat torrent of stock platitudes my apology will trigger can be found virtually word for word in any basic Japanese conversation textbook, but then again, sometimes clichés can be reassuring, and I suppose this has as good a chance of breaking some ice as anything else.

“Please excuse my rudeness at imposing on your hospitality like this,” I say. “And on a weekend, at that.”

“
Iie, iie
,” Mrs. Takei says, fanning a hand in front of her nose in a Japanese gesture of denial often misinterpreted by Westerners as a reaction to some foul odor. “I’m the one who should be apologizing for our cramped house.”

“No, no. It’s not cramped at all. It’s lovely. And your tea is delicious.”

“I’m sorry about its poor quality.”

“These cookies are good, too.”

“It’s just some local confectionery. Nothing special.”

“You really didn’t have to go to the bother of buying them just for me.”

“Oh, no trouble at all.” 

Running out of things to say, we exchange a quick series of head nods – like bows from the neck up – just as Mr. Takei enters the room and rescues us from having to commit to another round of head-bobbing niceties.

Takei-san is a short, lean, and fit man of seventy-three, and although his hair is white, he still has most of it. His facial expression is dignified and a bit distant, not what I would call extremely emotive. But it does have one – or rather two – striking features. As we shake hands, I am taken aback by Takei-san’s steel gray eyes, which are as limpid and cool as puddles in a tin rain gutter under a cloudy sky. As eye color other than an oily ebony or a rich mahogany brown is extremely rare in Japanese, the Siberian seawater in Takei’s eyes has my mind on the migrations of ancient peoples again.

However interested I am in this topic, though, I have not visited Takei-san today to discuss Japanese anthropology – well, at least not any more than it pertains to the mindset of young men deliberately crashing their aircraft into things. But we must establish trust before we can reach a stage comfortable enough to attend to such meaty matters. And as the only man sitting on this sofa now who has not flown a warplane, or seen his friends killed in front of his eyes, or publicly repeated a vow to die for his country and meant every word of it, the burden of establishing this trust clearly falls squarely upon my shoulders.

It is apparent that Takei-san, at least at this point, does not quite seem to know what to make of me, and in his own masculine way, he is just as shy as his wife. As we go through our opening banter, he comes across as cautious, and, of course, he has every right to be so. Most tokkō veterans have had the experience of dealing with unscrupulous writers or researchers or journalists looking for juicy stories and conspiracy angles at one time or another, and many of these former warriors have been burned come publication time because they were duped into giving trust where it was not warranted. For my own interview to work, I have to prove myself worthy of the information I seek.

A skeptical war veteran interview subject will ask in so many words – and squarely within rights – “Why should I let you in on this?” It is not so much a matter of “What am I going to get out of giving you this information?” as it is “Why should I trust
you
with interpreting my experiences accurately, on something this important?” I have been able to answer this question to most of my interview subjects’ satisfaction during field research for this project, but I can never afford to be complacent, because no two approaches are the same, and each requires caution and tact. Some subjects want the questions fast and frank, while others take umbrage and clam right up under such a barrage, preferring their questions spoon-fed and gift-wrapped. But at either end of that continuum and everywhere else in between, the best way of steering an interview into a mood of candid comfort hinges on finding commonalities. Obviously, this is not always easily done when the parties involved are a seventy- or eightysomething Japanese combat veteran and a forty-year-old American who has heard shots fired in anger only in the Bronx.

I have often found that my ex-West Point cadet credentials can grease the hinges a bit with even the crustiest and most irascible of these old fellows. Admittedly, they are the only real military qualifications I can claim, but the brand name value of the Academy as the alma mater of His Royal Highness Douglas MacArthur still carries enormous weight with older Japanese, and it has opened more than one door for me during my career here. My stories about cadet life – especially plebe year hazing – find an interested and even nostalgic ear with men of Takei’s generation, and help establish those above-mentioned and elusive commonality bonds.

Another link, sadly, is that my being an ex-pat New Yorker with family members and friends living on the island of Manhattan in our post-9/11 world also gives us a bond of pain, for I now share with my elderly Japanese counterparts the experience of watching from afar – unable to help – as my home was attacked from the skies.

Takei-san and I talk about 9/11 for a while. In all of the discussions I have had with Japanese veterans on this topic, I have not picked up on the slightest shred of any “So, how did
you
like being on the receiving end for a change?”
schadenfreude
in their comments, and toward the American people they have expressed only feelings of sympathy, shared outrage and solidarity. If Takei-san and his former comrades-in-arms harbor any negative feelings toward America in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, it is resentment against the American mass media for its culturally insensitive and historically ignorant likening of the mind-set and methods of Al-Qaeda with the Japanese tokkō program of sixty years ago. While an argument can perhaps be made for parallels between the pathological mindset of a Bin Laden and that of the more fanatic policymakers in Japan circa 1944-1945 by replacing fire and brimstone Wahhabist pipe dreams of global theocracy with the Japanese militarists’ racial mysticism and revenge fantasies against Western hegemony, I believe the basic motives and worldviews of the actual suicide bombers for these respective causes are fundamentally different. What the Japanese tokkō personnel themselves did – at least at the rank-and-file level of the men at the control sticks of the aircraft – was done out of a misguided but sincere belief that their actions were saving home and family, under irresistible institutional and sociocultural pressure. These motivations could not be more different from the theological distortions, nihilistic glorylust and
ressentiment-
fueled rage that motivate Al Qaeda’s minions.