Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (23 page)

After several days of geisha-carousing and hot spring-steaming in Atami on the navy dime, the officers returned to Kōnoike satiated and refreshed. Outside of the immediate improvement in junior officer morale, the Atami junket had the long-term beneficial effect of establishing precedent in the Jinrai organization for weekend leave, which Captain Okamura subsequently decided to limit to officer personnel on twenty-four-hour passes good from Saturday to Sunday afternoon. Ever painfully aware of the true nature of their mission, despite the plentiful creature comforts on base, a lot of the pilots made every effort they could to hit the pleasure quarters of Tokyo on weekends and satisfy biological urges that, under the circumstances, were perfectly understandable.

While the young man ultimately to thank for everyone elses’ pleasure-seeking opportunities was himself certainly not immune to their allure, being within eight or nine hours rail travel from home proved to be the greater temptation for Hideo Suzuki. The ensign’s priority was getting boodle from the
lavishly stocked Kōnoike PX to his family in Atami, who like civilians everywhere in Japan, were seriously hurting for foodstuffs by early ’45. Suzuki would try to get out every weekend he could with a big suitcase packed to bursting with bean jam cakes, preserves, whiskey, chocolate, cigarettes, and other luxuries. He would spend all but a few hours of the twenty-four-hour passes riding on crowded trains or making the interminable series of tiresome connections at stations to and from Atami, but he always thought it was worth the trouble to see his family’s smiling faces every time he arrived home with his bag of goodies and, more importantly, with himself still in one piece. Playing out that scene again and again, as many times as he could get away with it, was something Suzuki never tired, just as he never tired of trying to stretch every hour at home into a small eternity.

*****

It is November 9, 2002. Hideo Suzuki is sitting across from me at a banquet table. He is lean and long-faced for a Japanese of his generation, with large eyes deep-set and intense behind a high-bridged nose. His is almost a Levantine face, and it would not be incongruous on a man named Irving or Sal sitting on a park bench in Brooklyn, chomping on a green cigar while he bragged about his grandchildren and complained about his gall bladder. His shiny eighty-year-old head is fringed with snowy white hair, and this imbues him with an aura of Ebenezer Scrooge at first glance, but his surface crustiness is confirmed as benign by the deep smile creases in his cheeks and the laughter he lets out frequently. It is not the nervous laughter Japanese often display to smokescreen uncomfortable situations, but sincere and straight from the belly. He refuses to suffer fools gladly and will not hesitate to speak his mind when he thinks someone is out of line. It is clear that he is at the point in his life – which must be wonderfully liberating for this former warrior of the rigid Japanese corporate culture – when he is no longer obligated to camouflage his feelings for appearance’s sake. He seems breezily contented with this state of being.

We are in the rear dining room of a large, multistory restaurant in Yokohama’s Chinatown, venue of the annual Jinrai reunion that has ended about an hour ago. Some of the decorations from the event are still up, and the backdrop for our table is a large imperial navy battle jack – the Rising Sun radiant with sunbeams – nearly as big as a garrison flag, taking up almost an entire wall. We are joined at our table by other Jinrai veterans, including another Waseda alumnus, Tokuji Naitō, who was also Suzuki’s flight school classmate and one of the second group of naval reserve ensign pilots who arrived at Kōnoike in December 1944. Naitō-san was a lit major at Waseda, and the bookish orientation suits his mien. His bald pate, narrow eyes and enigmatic smile give him the countenance of a Buddhist abbot. If we were in a one-on-one situation, I might halfexpect him to hit me up with a few Zen riddles. He is an introspective, intellectual type, meticulous in speech and manner. I imagine these traits must have served him well in his career as a Tokyo municipal bureaucrat.

A decidedly Falstaffian and incandescent Akinori Asano is also here, emitting high-amplitude wavelengths from the far-red end of the spectrum. He has just finished his “the time I rode the marudai trainer” account in a performance well seasoned with appropriate sound effects and hand and body gestures. The story garnered some chuckles and remarks in a “Can you believe they put us in those things?” vein from the other old men at the table.

“How many drops did you make?” I ask naïvely.

Evidently, I have triggered some kind of stock sequence about to be played out here, because everyone at the table suddenly looks at Asano-san, expectantly.

Asano-san assumes an expression of exaggerated umbrage, his head weaving slightly side to side. In an instantaneous and somewhat surreal mental connection, I recognize what I am seeing as Ralph Kramden a nanosecond away from threatening Alice with the moon.

“You only had to do it once,” Asano-san huffs, and several men join in to complete the couplet, almost on cue. “
And once was enough!
”

The table breaks out into loud guffaws now, and I feel my ears turn red. A middle-aged waitress cle
aring dishes from another table steals a look at us. I sense that she wants us to leave. But she is going to have to endure a few more war stories before that happens. 

Naitō-san is the only person at the table not laughing.

“I almost crashed on my own drop,” he says, oddly dispassionate, perhaps trying to rescue me from my temporary embarrassment. “I went into the rough at the end of the runway. Luckily, I missed the trees.”

The conversation takes a turn through time and landscapes, war and peace. The mood at the
table becomes somber. Faces and places are recalled, and Suzuki and Naitō muse on the losses that ravaged the ranks of the Ōka reserve ensigns.

“You know, we came
this
close to getting completely wiped out,” Suzuki-san says.

“Just as promised,” he adds w
ith a tired chuckle.

Suzuki-san chuckles alone, though, and I wonder if the semantic significance of his remark is responsible for the slightly uncomfortable silence that sits over the table now. He has not claimed, as many Japanese veterans are wont to do, that it was “the war” or “the Americans” or “the times” that should be held responsible for the death of his comrades. Instead, what has just been suggested – or at least this is what my non-native speaker’s ears have picked up – is that it was the onus of obligation implied in the “promise” that had done the killing.
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Without the nod of an expectant benefit receiver – without agreement from the second party – a “promise” is still merely a proposal. If the pilots assumed some portion of the responsibility for their self-immolation upon rising to the tokkō battle cry, then the rest of the responsibility was shouldered by everyone else who agreed with the idea – who expressed gracious thanks and sent the boys off with speeches and fanfare, never thinking to lift a finger to stop what was happening or even wonder aloud if there were reasonable alternatives to this slaughter. 

In the case of the Ōkas, none of the young men who drew circles on their ballot papers for tokkō slots at their training bases really knew what they were getting into until they took a walk down to the flight line at Kōnoike and saw the winged torpedoes for the first time. And by that point, it was too late and they were too proud to turn back. They were young and brave and wanted to help win the war – or at least turn back the Ameri
can onslaught and “win the peace” – any way they could. The code of loyalty socialized and drilled into them from childhood demanded that they leave the details of how that could best be accomplished up to their superiors. The Japanese state in those days was blessed with millions upon millions of young Japanese men like this to draw upon. Tokurō Takei, Akinori Asano, Hideo Suzuki and Tokuji Naitō were four of them, and at one point in their lives, they felt the best way to serve this state was by agreeing to become human bombs.

I
n September 1943, Hideo Suzuki was only a few weeks away from his war-accelerated graduation
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from Waseda when his attention was drawn to a Navy Ministry notice posted on a campus bulletin board. Recruiters scheduled to visit the college were looking for naval aviator officer candidates. Like many of his classmates, Suzuki was facing imminent and somewhat less-than-welcome conscription into the army upon the completion of his studies.
[107]
Understandably, he was quite receptive to options at this time, and the course outlined on the navy poster seemed to offer him a much more glamorous and considerably more comfortable way of serving his country than tending to Mongolian ponies as a buck private on the Manchurian border, colder than a welldigger’s ass nine months out of the year, scorched and fly-plagued the other three.

Suzuki made it safely to the navy recruiter’s desk and had his name on the dotted line before the army could get its hooks into him. Joined now by his classmate Tokuji
Naitō, the Waseda men passed their flight physicals and paper exams for the program with flying colors. They were in naval uniform before the month was out, reporting for duty as cadets in the thirteenth cycle of the
Kaigun Hikōka Senshū Yobigakusei
(“Naval Aviation Specialized Training Reserve Student Course”) at Mie Naval Air Station near Nagoya on September 30, 1943. The “Yobigakusei” course – as it was called in abbreviated form – was like a Yokaren for officer candidates,
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combining the basic training needed to turn soft college boys into fearless warriors with the accelerated, intensive instruction in basic aviation subjects necessary to get the cadets ready for Flight School. Cadets were commissioned as naval ensigns upon successfully meeting graduation requirements at the end of an eleven month-long training cycle.

After finishing Yobigakusei in July 1944, Suzuki and Naitō went to Flight School at Tainan NAS on the southern tip of Taiwan. When mid-term branch destinations were handed down, Suzuki was assigned to carrier attack planes, which meant that he would be expected to handle either the big Ryusei torpedo planes or the equally bulky Suisei dive-bombers the navy was now using. Naitō, on the other hand, had been lucky enough to win a slot in fighte
rs. After getting his wings in October, he could look forward to a job in the front office of a Zero or, even better, of a snappy new Kawanishi Shidenkai armed with four devastating 20mm cannons, powered by a humongous 1,800 horsepower engine and purportedly superior to the Hellcat in speed, climb and roll rates and maneuverability. He would be able to knock some Americans down in such a mount. In the meantime, while preparing for future battlefield glories, the aviator candidates put in the prerequisite Akatonbo stick time together and struggled to survive endure being parboiled in the sun and steam of a Taiwan summer and eaten alive by carnivorous mosquitoes.

One night in August, an unscheduled assembly was called after evening mess. The cadets and faculty proceeded to the base
budōjō
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, where they found Lieutenant Commander Shunsaku Takahashi (INA ’18), waiting to address them. At forty-nine, Takahashi was perhaps a bit long in the tooth to still be languishing at his present rank, especially for an Etajima man, but he seemed to have enjoyed a rewarding career nonetheless. In addition to being the Tainan Flight School commandant, he was also a published poet and the lyricist of Polydor Japan’s wildly popular 1940 propaganda hit
Getsu, Getsu, Ka, Sui, Moku, Kin, Kin
(“Five Day Work Week In The Navy: Monday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Friday”), a kitsch masterpiece about the joys and wholesome rigors of naval life that had since entered the national pantheon of perennial pop favorites.
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If Takahashi’s naval career itself had been something less than stellar, he could certainly take pride in having achieved immortality as a lyricist in his lifetime.

Normally a peppy, fire’em’up super-motivated type, Takahashi was not his usual self on this particular evening. He was sober-faced and somber-toned. His eyes were red, as if he had just finished having himself a good long cry in private before splashing some water on his face to compose himself. Whatever it was he had called everyone to talk about, it was obvious that he was dreading it.

After the assembly was formed, Takahashi suddenly ordered all only children, first sons and fathers to leave the premises, instantly reducing the ranks by about thirty per cent. The other pilots and trainees waited in silence until the excused personnel were all gone. When the door closed behind the last man out, Takahashi stood up on a calisthenics leader podium and began talking about the exceedingly sorry state of the war situation.

“As we speak a secret super weapon that could turn the tide of the war is in the final stage of development. Just one of these will be powerful enough to sink a capital ship. We need volunteers to
put their lives on the line
and operate these weapons.”
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There were raised eyebrows among the cadets as the euphemisms flew fast and furious but the grim message gradually sank in.

“Everyone already knew by that point that ‘put your life on the line’ meant ‘sacrifice your life’,” Suzuki-san says. “There wasn’t a lot of subtle nuance involved there.”

“The enemy is closing in,” Takahashi had continued. “We must defend the home islands and turn back the Allies. High Command believes that these secret weapons are the only way to do this. The weapons are now in the final stage of development. Those who pilot them will lose their lives. Nevertheless, the navy needs volunteers for this program. This is strictly voluntary. But keep in mind that in volunteering, you could help turn the tide of the war.”