Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (24 page)

The assembly was dismissed and the pilots filed out of the martial arts hall. But where they would have normally been BS’ing and laughing as they made their way back to the barracks, tonight they were meditative and silent.

Suzuki did not even make it back to the barracks to think things out. He sat down right outside the entrance to the gym, stared up at the night sky and tried to sort out what he was going to do about what he had just heard. Back in his quarters for the Lights-Out headcount, he still had not made up his mind.

Takahashi had told the pilots they had three days to respond, and Suzuki ended up taking nearly every last minute of that time to think it over. In the end, though, the idea that his country was losing – and losing badly – was decisive. Adding to this determination was the element of panic thrown into the equation by the imagery of a senior officer like Takahashi having to come to the men like that and ask – almost plead – for volunteers instead of just giving orders. An act so incongruous with navy tradition could only foreshadow pain ahead. Things had to be really, really bad if they had come down to something like this.

Suzuki thought about the oath of loyalty to Emperor and country (which were supposed to be one and the same entity, really) he had taken when he entered the Yobigakusei program, and once again when he accepted his commission as an ensign in His Majesty’s Navy. He figured that he and his comrades had sworn away any right or claim to their own lives the moment they put on a navy uniform. Their lives belonged to Japan now, and if fulfilling their duties to the best of their abilities meant dying for the country, then so be it. 

At the time, Suzuki and the other Tainan flight school trainees were still raw and green and many hundreds of flying hours away from achieving proficiency as pilots in the highly specialized tactics of their respective conventional aviation branches. Under such circumstances, Suzuki desperately needed to believe that the new wonder weapon – whatever it turned out to be – offered an honorable alternative way for him to keep his promise to the country and make the most significant contribution to the war effort possible given his limited capabilities. One man’s sacrifice to take out a fleet carrier or a battleship? Magnificent. Thinking things through this far, he seemed to have no other choice but to volunteer. He handed in his circled chit to Lieutenant Commander Takahashi.

Suzuki had always hated to think of his family constantly worrying about him. Maybe it would be better for all concerned to just end things quickly. That way his family’s suffering – and his own – would be lessened. He figured he was probably going to die, one way or another, before the war was finished. Why settle for that death being on someone else’s terms? Why leave it to fate – perhaps even dying without knowing it was going to happen, like in an accident, or getting caught in a sudden air raid, or shot down by Americans on a conventional mission? Whatever this “super weapon” was, if it was as good as promised, it was a golden ticket to being able to go out in a blaze of glory. Suzuki signed up for the “special attack” program with a clear conscience, confident that he would bring great honor to his family and, most importantly, make his mother proud.

Eighty-year-old Suzuki-san laughs somewhat forlornly here – a slow
huh-huh-huh
with some Eeyore in it – as he recalls the naïveté of an idealistic young man who took it for granted that his mother would share in his heroic sentiments.

“Of course, I don’t think there’s a mother in Japan now who would think such a thing, but back then, things were different.” he says, still with some forlorn chuckle in his voice. “A mother, at least with the face she wore in public, was obliged to appear happy and grateful to the Emperor and country for giving her son such a fine way to die. Of course, even back then, I’m sure that in their hearts, all mothers wanted their sons to come home alive. But they couldn’t express such things to anyone outside the family. It would be considered defeatist, and unpatriotic.”

While mothers at the time may have secretly prayed for their sons’ safe return home, they were publicly encouraged to pray for their honorable death in battle. Citizens’ committees, Army Reservist Association branches (
Zaigō Gunjindan
)
[112]
, school boards and other local propaganda organs urged families in their communities to prepare
kamidana
or
butsudan
[113]
in their homes, and honor their
living
sons in uniform as they would a deceased family member. The message was clear: Your son is gone forever. Live with it. A grateful nation shares in your pride.

Under a constant audiovisual bombardment of such imagery and messages through cinema, music, newsprint, posters, and communal agit-prop, the populace seemed to fall sway to this mass psychology. It was not uncommon for mothers in urban areas – where there were always neighbors within earshot – to send their boys off to war saying “Don’t let me be the only mother on the block to not to have a son in Yasukuni.”
[114]
Neither was this nihilism limited to civilians. Sentiments like “Don’t worry, I’ll be home safe and sound” were rarely heard from servicemen sons leaving for war. The salutation “Please think of me as already dead”
[115]
was a common one in the strictly censored letters they sent home after arriving at the front.

Iwao Fu
kagawa, a former IJA tokkō pilot, suggests that the mechanism at work behind such expressions was rooted in the smothering bonds of motherlove that dominate the psyche of Japanese children – especially sons – for their entire lives
[116]
. Worried that the emotional restraints of wanting to stay alive for mommy’s sake would hamper her son’s devotion to duty when the bullets started to fly, a Japanese soldier’s mother was liberating her child – as well as herself – from this pressure when she exhorted him to come home from the war as a pile of ashes in an ossuary box.
[117]
This thinking possessed a certain merciful if convoluted patriotic logic on the level of individuals, but moved into the realm of stark banality when institutionalized for mass consumption as the war dragged on and Japan’s prospects became irreversibly bleak. Patriotism was gradually morphing into the chrysalis of a national death cult, and by late summer 1944, as the government and media thumped the post-Saipan “honorable death of the 100 million” drum with ever-increasing ardor, this cocoon was beginning to split open and show mesmerizing flashes of dun wing.

*****

Hideo Suzuki’s career path detour from the School of Business of the elite Waseda University man to human glider bomb was fairly representative of the first group of seventeen Naval Reserve ensigns selected for the Jinrai program back in early autumn of 1944. At a Waseda reunion many years later, Suzuki heard an interesting anecdote from a former classmate who had worked during the war as a clerk in the Navy Ministry’s Public Affairs Office in Tokyo. One day in late summer of 1944, the clerk was delivering the day’s OUT box contents to the Ministry Message Center. Although he was not really supposed to even glance at the documents he handled, he had a bad habit of doing just that, and on this particular day, an asterisked name on a long personnel list caught his eye. The line read: “Suzuki, Hideo; Naval Reserve Officer Aviation Class 13; Waseda University Class of 1943; Hometown Atami, Shizuoka.”

The clerk’s eyes ran down to the bottom of the sheet to find the asterisk notation, which read: “DEEMED SUITABLE FOR SPECIAL ATTACK PROGRAM AND SUBSEQUENT GUNSHIN STATUS.” Gunshin?! Why use that phrase when nobody on the list is dead yet? And what in the world did “special attack” mean, anyway? As far as anyone in the Navy PAO knew, that was just a phrase used in lurid propaganda copy for press releases about phantom news events, but there it was now on a Personnel Department memorandum, being used to refer to actual operations. His curiosity now piqued, the clerk stole a look at a memorandum paperclipped to the list. It read:

“TO PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICE, SELECT SEVENTEEN CANDIDATES FROM THIS LIST YOUR OFFICE DEEMS MOST SUITABLE FOR GUNSHIN STATUS – AFTER THOROUGH PERSONAL BACKGROUND CHECKS – FROM THE STANDPOINT OF PROPAGANDA VALUE. PREFERENCE SHOULD BE GIVEN TO INDIVIDUALS FROM ELITE UNIVERSITIES AND/OR SONS OF SOCIALLY PROMINENT FAMILIES. BY ORDER OF THE MINISTER OF THE NAVY.”
[118]

The clerk went back over the list of candidates, and sure enough, all of the asterisked names were of graduates of Waseda, Keiō, Meiji, Rikkyō, and other elite private universities or public teachers colleges. Gunshin designation meant that the navy either expected or intended for all these young brains and rich kids to die. And why an odd number like seventeen? The clerk passed the sheaf of documents on to the Message Center with his questions unanswered, filed the event away in his memory under “anomalous PAO memorandum,” then promptly forgot about it for the next thirty years.

He remembered these strange documents only when he met Hideo Suzuki – alive and thus spectacularly unqualified for gunshin status – at their college reunion in the mid-1970s. His thirty-year-old questions were answered when he found out that: Suzuki had been in the Jinrai, and
Ōka suicide bombs were what the term “special attack” had referred to on those documents. Also, the odd number of seventeen gunshin candidates was rounded out to twenty on the first Jinrai pilot roster by the inclusion of three INA graduates. Ironically, although fourteen of the seventeen reserve ensigns in the original group went on to die in Ōkas
[119]
, there were so many other aviators and other personnel dying in tokkō missions in other branches by the time they finally went on their own that they never received their gunshin recognition, and, in fact, died never having known that they had once been considered for the honor.

In late August 1944, Suzuki and sixteen fellow gunshin candidates graduated from Tainan Flight School blissfully unaware that the committee meetings and rubber stamp thumpings of bureaucrats and P.R. specialists in the Navy Ministry were deciding their collective and individual fates. They had no idea that the nature of their service would be any different from those of their other Tainan classmates, and just like everyone else, their shooting war would begin as soon as they arrived at line units for advanced on-the-job training in their respective aviation branch specialties. In fact, things would get so hot and heavy from the get-go that Suzuki even forgot – as hard as that is to believe –
about his volunteering for tokkō in the first place.

The hard facts of the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June meant that large numbers of carrier pilots suddenly had no carriers to operate from, and the few flight decks that were left could not be given
over to training newbies. Even though Suzuki had signed on for carrierborne attack planes, the logistical realities of the times resulted in the navy assigning him after graduation to a land-locked Nakajima B5N2 torpedo bomber
[120]
unit attached to the 953
rd
KKT, an anti-submarine flying boat outfit on an anonymous rock in the Pescadores, a small archipelago in the straits between Taiwan and mainland China. Sub contacts were rare, the natives were friendly, and the days long and languid. Had Suzuki been a dedicated slacker, the posting might have seemed a perfect place to sit out the rest of the war in relative peace and quiet. It might have, that is, until six weeks later on October 12, when Halsey ordered Task Force 38 to begin pounding Taiwan and the islands around it with the combined air strike capability of an armada of seventeen fleet carriers.
[121]
Suzuki’s war had suddenly become very real and noisy indeed, descending into a chaos of frantic antisub patrolling, dodging American fighters, and hunkering down in bunkers and slit trenches when air strikes hit the base.

The worst of the American storm blew over in a few days, but sporadic harassment continued for weeks. On November 3, a “five-minute warning” siren sounded in the 953
rd
KKT base. Personnel ran out to the jetties and flight line to hustle the unit’s torpedo bombers and seaplanes into camouflaged revetments before the Hellcats arrived on the scene. Standard operating procedure was for the pilots or senior groundcrew people to get in the cockpits and steer with the rudder pedals while others pushed the planes (or in the case of the flying boats, pulled them with rope towlines) into their respective revetments. Suzuki was just climbing into the cockpit of his plane when one of his noncoms ran up, pulled him out by the shoulder, and told him to seek cover while he took care of the plane.

A few seconds later, the air was filled with snarling radial engines as machine gun rounds started tearing through the area, sending up geysers of spray, runway gravel, splintering wooden planks and pilings, holing the airframes of the seaplanes lined along the quay. The Hellcats had come out of nowhere, and a hell of a lot quicker than five minutes since the siren warning. It had been more like one minute, tops.

Suzuki’s plane was hit and went up in flames. The noncom scrambled out of the cockpit but was cut down in another hail of .50 cal rounds from a strafing Hellcat while most of the unit watched from an air raid slit trench, helplessly screaming for their comrade. Suzuki started to get out and help, but others in the trench pulled him back in. Flames were now sweeping through the area, fueled on aviation gas, ammo and pier wood, engulfing the planes at the docks and on the runway flight line. There was nothing anybody could do.

After the fire had subsided enough to get through to what was left of the squadron’s aircraft, Suzuki and others found the noncom still alive but badly burned. With a bullet hole in his back and a massive exit wound that had blown out most of his abdomen, he managed to hold out for five agonizing hours in the base infirmary before slipping away. The bodies of three other groundcrew members were pulled from the wreckage burned beyond recognition.