Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (18 page)

In late 1944, American fleets were closing an iron stranglehold on Japan. By 1945, these forces had been marshaled into invasion fleets, and Takei, his comrades and the entire population of Japan were told over and over through every information dissemination organ at the disposal of the state that the men on those ships were hell-bent on rape, destruction, and nothing short of genocide
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. It was only natural that young men with a strong duty concept, deep love of country and family and insufficient worldly cynicism to doubt the shpiel from on high would want to do everything within their ability to stop such an enemy force in its tracks.

An armada of racist, murderous rapists is closing in on your homes! They’ll rape and slaughter your mothers, sisters, and daughters in front of your eyes before your own slow, agonizing death unless you follow our instructions to the letter!

For a panicked population that was incapable of doubting the integrity of their authority figures, who needed stronger exhortation to resort to extreme measures than that? The rank-and-file cannot be blamed for falling over each other in the rush to line up for tokkō. And if anyone should ever doubt that a campaign of misinformation for propaganda purposes was going on, consider that if the authorities had really believed that the American invasion force was going to be a million man-strong
Einsatzgruppen
of racist, bloodthirsty sex maniacs, then Emperor Hirohito would have never ordered the surrender, nuclear-bombed cities or not.
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Under such circumstances, an imperial order for the nation to fight on to the last man, woman, and child would have been entirely justified.

But the Emperor did not issue such an order, because at the bottom of his heart, he knew the Americans could be trusted, and I am sure he knew that if it ever came down to it, working with Democrats and Republicans would be a considerably more pleasant day at the office than cutting lumber in a Siberian gulag for commissars. Personally, I think he knew that all along. That he did not act earlier on his convictions and save millions of his countrymen in the process is something for which he can now be held accountable only to
history.

Of course, the emperor’s instincts turned out to be right. Concurrent with Germany’s and Italy’s postwar experiences, the American-led occupation of Japan that followed Hirohito’s surrender proclamation was without parallel the most benign and
(at least economically) beneficial for a vanquished nation in the history of warfare. The Japanese people today owe their lives to the wisdom of the emperor’s decision, but they owe their freedom and prosperity to the unprecedented patience and generosity of former enemies. There can be no more damning argument against the racial pride mumbo-jumbo Japan’s wartime leadership put over on an entire nation while cheering it on to the brink of self-extermination in the last year of World War II.

Takei-san nods throughout my monologue, but the gesture may be more Japanese politeness than wholehearted support. I am not sure if he agrees with me, but I do believe that I have at least convinced him that I have given these matters a lot of thought, and that gives us enough momentum to leave current events and historical theory behind us, and to begin talking about
his
war.

“Ev
eryone likes to think that the tokkō pilots were happy to die for their country, but I don’t think most of us were really like that,” Takei-san says, when asked about his mindset circa 1944-1945. “We did not want to die – at least not like that (i.e., in tokkō tactics). We were not afraid to fight, but we wanted to come home to our families alive after the fighting was over. And nobody except for admirals and generals believed all that “die for the emperor” business. We were fighting to protect our homeland and, most of all, our families.”

“Do you ever feel that your life was deliberately spared for some reason?” I ask, recalling Yoshitake-san’s almost theological explanation for his own survival. 

“No, no,” Takei-san says, mirroring the hand gesture of denial his wife made a few minutes ago. “I never really went in too much for that destiny stuff. I think I was just lucky, that’s all.”

Obviously, Takei-san is not someone most people would be tempted to call a very religious man, at least not in terms of religion having a significant presence in his daily life. Nevertheless, every New Year’s Day he visits the local Shinto shrine with grandchildren in tow to pray for his family’s health and well-being over the next twelve months. Shinto rites were also observed for his daughters’ weddings, and in groundbreaking ceremonies for every office building, shopping mall, and hospital he helped put up during a lifetime in the construction business. As is the case with most of his countrymen, these rites are perhaps more reassuring affirmation of cultural identity and subtle reminders of the impermanence of worldly things than acts of religious devotion. However, when the transition to be marked is someone’s passage to the afterlife, Takei-san’s normal mode of healthy agnosticism is cloaked in the smoky incense and ornate mantle of Japanese Buddhism, and the prayers he will chant at a funeral along with the presiding monk and the other mourners are ostensibly offered in hopes that the soul of the dear departed will reincarnate on a higher plane than the one it has just left. Like most Japanese in similar situations, Takei-san may not believe – or even completely understand – everything he is repeating, but vague theology and incomprehensible ritual have never been problems with the variety of Buddhism practiced on these shores.

Buddhism’s spread throughout Japan during the Sixth century A.D. is a quintessentially Japanese story of cultural absorption and subsequent adaptation to local needs and tastes. Assuming a major nation-building role soon after its arrival, the religion served as a conduit for political philosophy, high culture, technology and the
kanji
writing system imported from the Asian continent
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. In its Japanese permutation, it has proved over the subsequent millennium and a half to be as jealous of its turf as it is flexible in its doctrine, withstanding the sands of time and several centuries worth of Christian missionary activities without relinquishing hold on the professed faith of more than 1 or 2 percent of the Japanese population since Francis Xavier’s frustrating tour of Jesuit duty in the country in the sixteenth century.

Buddhism’s tenacious survival at the top has been made possible by the wind-sensitive political savvy of its prelates at key points in history, and their ability to shove the knife when confronted with rivals. The theological flexibility the religion demonstrated in its co-opting of native Shinto animist beliefs and the ease with which it lends itself to spinoff cults and faiths has been another secret of its durability. But certainly its main tenet of
saisei
reincarnation has been the greatest part of Japanese Buddhism’s appeal over the centuries for the hearts and minds of a rice-growing culture ill at ease with linear interpretations of time and more at home with cyclical concepts of life and death, sunrises and sunsets, the carousel of the seasons and the sensual distinctions each brings, everyone snug and comfortable in the knowledge that this is a world without major surprises or abrupt end, amen. For a farming culture, it is not the possibility of right or wrong pathways to ultimate destinations, but rather this assurance of predictable repetition that is most comforting.

Similar to the doctrine of other Asian creeds in the Mahayana tradition, strict interpretation of the Japanese Buddhist cycle of reincarnation is karmic (although few Japanese believe this now), and the afterlife destination of a human soul is determined largely by what it did with the last corporeal vehicle of flesh and bones it was given a chance to jump into and take out for a test drive. At one end of the spectrum, for those rare souls patient and virtuous enough while alive to have achieved
satori
enlightenment – the Buddhist equivalent of a winning Powerball ticket – escape velocity from this plane of material illusion can be reached for an afterlife launch straight to truth and godhead. Thought along these lines has been coopted into the modern Shinto tradition holding that the souls of dead servicemen dwell for eternity in their heaven-on-earth amidst the cherry boughs at Yasukuni Shrine.

At the other end, for souls whose previous incarnations incurred insurmountable bad karma by living particularly greedy, spiteful or uncharitable lives, waits an indeterminate period of lonesome purgatory and earthbound wandering as
gaki
or
o-bake
, the hideous but relatively innocuous phantoms and hobgoblins with which late nineteenth century proto-Japanologist Lafcadio Hearn was so fascinated, and which continue to play starring roles in the popular ghost stories of Japanese young and old. But the majority of us regular folks and run-of-the-mill lustful materialists are sentenced to run the eternal karmic hamster wheel for untold aeons, shunting back and forth in constant transmigration between life and death, and will continue to do so until karma allows us to get off the ride once and for all.

A transmigrating soul slated for a return to this mortal coil could have drawn a cushier re-entry point slot on the time/space conti
nuum than an impoverished Japanese day laborer’s home on the outskirts of a gritty regional industrial town in the first year of the Great Depression, but that was the hand dealt to the soul that became Tokurō Takei on February 10, 1929, in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture. Tokurō was born the third child and third son in a string of Takei children that was soon to include a daughter and a fourth son. His parents were wise enough to have learned the importance of a good education after finding out firsthand what it was like trying to succeed in the world without one, and though the family finances hung perennially on a frayed shoestring, school tuition always got paid in full and on time. If the Takei children ever had reason to doubt the wisdom of occasionally having to go without new clothes at the start of the school year because their mother thought it better to spend the money on textbooks, all they had to do was look at the cracked calluses on their father’s gnarled hands after a day of swinging an ax on a logging site or sorting leaves at a tea factory to appreciate their mother’s sense of priorities.

When Tokurō graduated from elementary school in March 1941, most of his other classmates from the neighborhood opted – either from disinterest, impatience
or domestic financial straits – to close their textbooks once and for all after their successful completion of what Japanese law determined to be a sufficient compulsory education. Many of these boys had life tracks already plotted out as helpers and eventual heads of family businesses or as apprentices to craftsmen. Others secured employment right out of grade school with tiny but well-paying local manufacturing firms like Suzuki or Yamaha Motors, whose workers were putting in overtime to fill military contracts for small gasoline-burning motors used in field generators by signals and communication units with the army in the Chinese campaign
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. With hostilities in China already four years old, and conflict with America and Britain looming on the horizon, Japan’s wartime economy was gearing up into full swing, and Hamamatsu was enjoying a ride right up near the crest of this boom.

With work aplenty to be had, the temptation was great for
Tokurō to grab up a plant job like so many of his friends and start putting some food on the family table. However, his parents would have none of this. Tokurō was going to make something of himself, and this future did not include pulling a drill press handle on a factory floor sixty hours a week or swinging a pickax in the hot sun all day for a living. After passing a moderately difficult entrance exam, Tokurō was enrolled in a five-year private vocational school to study engineering, a field his math and science ability seemed to indicate he might have a successful future in. In the meantime, the family would scrimp and save to scrape together the entrance and tuition fees.

Never forgetting his obligation to his parents for sending him to school, and always keenly aware of the sacrifices they had to make to keep him there,
Tokurō was a diligent student for the next two and a half years. But as the war with America dragged on, rumors about the impending cancellation of student draft deferments increased, and more and more young men from the old neighborhood started coming home from the war fronts in white ossuary boxes, Tokurō began to see less and less reason to stay in school. Although he was still at least five years below draft age
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, it seemed likely that the war would still be raging when the inevitable
akagami
(“red letter” = draft notice) from the local draft board finally arrived some time in 1948. In his adolescent logic, it did not make any sense for him to continue his studies and be a further drain on the family’s finances when he was only going to end up getting drafted and killed in the war a couple of years later. There were also Tokurō’s two younger siblings to consider. They might want an education, too, and his sister would need money when she got married someday. Thinking of their well-being was the clincher, and there was no longer any doubt in Tokurō’s mind about what he should do. Without consulting his parents, he began discreetly looking into enlistment options.

Tokurō soon found out that, as a fourteen-year-old, his options were pretty limited. In fact, the only games in town were for pilot training programs that carried h
eavy service commitments after graduation. The army’s
Shōnen Hikōhei
(“Youth Pilot”) program could earn him wings as an army corporal pilot by sixteen, but it also carried a hefty fifteen-year service commitment. Tokurō had also heard rumors about the brutality of army NCOs toward trainees, which was another prudent reason to take pause and weigh options. The navy, which everyone knew as the gentleman’s branch of service, had a similar Yokaren
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(“Preparatory Aviation Training”) program that could land him what was then the most glamorous office-with-a-view in Japan: the cockpit of a Zero fighter. The decision may have taken Tokurō all of several minutes to make. Yokaren it was, and if he did not get in, he would just stay at school and wait for the draft notice to come in a few more years.