Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (25 page)

This experience scarred Suzuki (who continues to have nightmares about it to this day), yet it also gave him even greater determination to die well when his time came. He was filled with gratitude for the noncom who had died in his place trying to save the seaplane. But in another sense, owing such an obligation to another human being was unwelcome and unbearable. How was he supposed to live with that kind of baggage on his soul?

That evening, after the noncom’s death in the infirmary, Suzuki was summoned to the base command post and handed orders that had just come in from Taiwan Seaplane Operations HQ. Suzuki opened the envelope and realized that Taiwan HQ had not issued the orders – they had merely passed them on from higher up. He swallowed hard when he opened up the cablegram and found out just how high “higher up” meant. The orders read: 

NAVY MINISTRY                             12 OCTOBER 1944

ENSIGN HIDEO SUZUKI, 953
RD
KKT, WILL REPORT TO HYAKURI NAVAL AIR STATION, IBARAGI PREFECTURE, NLT 2000HRS 15 OCTOBER 1944 FOR SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT.

BY ORDER OF THE MINISTER OF THE NAVY,

ADMIRAL MITSUMASA YONAI
[122]

Special assignment? What the hell was that?

Suzuki got a high-wattage surge down his spine and an instantaneous misting of forehead sweat when he suddenly remembered the volunteer paper he had handed in two months earlier at Tainan. Special Assignment? That could only mean Special Attack! Tokkō! It did not seem possible, but he had actually forgotten about all of that business. Had not thought of it in weeks, probably not since the air raids started.

Suzu
ki looked at the orders again and got another jolt. They said he was supposed to be at Hyakuri – wherever the hell in Ibaragi Prefecture that was – on October 15
th
. That was almost three weeks ago! There was bound to be a serious shitstorm waiting for him at the end of all this.

“What happened with these orders?,” he asked the HQ orderly. “Why did they take so long to get here?”

“Look at the date, sir. They came in the day the raids started. I guess they got misplaced in all the excitement.”

“Think they’ll buy that at my court-martial?”

“Don’t worry about it, sir. I’m sure Taiwan will square it away for you.”

As Suzuki packed his seabag back in the barracks, he rationalized to himself that at least the orders would get him back home to Japan one last time, even if it was only to face administrative punishment. Given all the horror he had seen and emotional baggage he had taken on today, that did not seem too big a price to pay for the privilege of getting out of here. Perhaps the orders could not have arrived with better timing.

After finishing outprocessing the next morning, he reported one last time to pay his respects at unit HQ, and was sent off by the base CO with a hearty “Good luck” and a slap on the back, glad to be leaving and even happier about going home.

As Suzuki’s orders were already three weeks old, the attached official rail itinerary was now useless. This meant that he would have to make it all the way to Hyakuri by wit and guile alone. With the dust hardly settled from the American raids and now the Philippines about to go all to hell, there was no telling how long it would take him to make his trip. He figured that when he finally arrived at Hyakuri, he could be as much as a month late. 

Getting back to Taiwan was as easy as hopping a liaison flight to Tainan. The real problem was how to get from there to Japan. Someone at Tainan said he knew of a destroyer about to leave for Japan, but even a sea voyage of a couple days was too long with the kind of orders he had hanging over his head. Only a plane would do, so he decided to wait, but once the destroyer was gone, so were his other transport options. He ended up spending nearly a week at Tainan trying to bum a ride until finally chancing upon a plane with an empty seat for him. It was a big Type 2 flying boat packed stem to stern with ossuary boxes carrying the remains of recently cremated naval personnel – mostly air raid casualties being sent back to their homes in Japan.

Suzuki spent the five-hour flight up in the cockpit with the pilot, who by happy coincidence was a hometown junior high school buddy, and tried not to dwell too much on the other “passengers” in the back. But he could not help but think of them as the plane pulled into its final approach at Ibusuki, Kagoshima Prefecture, flying past the stately, Fuji-like slopes of Mount
Kaimondake and over the pine-fringed white beaches of the Kyūshū coastline. Although the boys in the white boxes were also making their final trip home, they had been cheated out of getting to see its beauty one last time.

At Ibusuki, Suzuki boarded a tr
ain to start the final rail leg of his journey to Hyakuri. His worries about rail accommodations were unfounded, and the orders in his pocket greased every potential choke point in the journey, jumping him straight to the head of every railroad station ticket line that got in his way. But even with smooth connections, it still took him two days just to get off of Kyūshū and make some decent headway up Honshū. Sleep did not come easily – if at all – in the long hours of racket and jostling on the crowded trains, but there was plenty of time to think about what lay ahead. Too much time, maybe.

Headed north on the Tokaidō line and still a few hours out of Tokyo, the train slowed down to make a stop in Atami. It proved to be too much for Suzuki to resist. Figuring that
he was already almost a month late and that a few more days could not get him into much more trouble than he was already in, he grabbed his seabag and squeezed his way off the car, which was already starting to fill up with more passengers. Of course, what he was doing was wildly impulsive, irresponsible, and unprofessional – not to mention illegal – but really, what were his superiors going to do about it? Put him in a plane and make him crash it into a ship? He was a tokkō pilot visiting home for the first time in thirteen months and probably the last time in his life. If anyone was going to dare to give him crap about that, well, they could just go to hell.

When Suzuki rounded the last corner on the wa
lk home from the station, he saw his mother dressed in earth-toned
monpe
work pajamas, bent over a dusty truck garden in the front yard of the family inn, weeding and pulling sad little tubers from the sandy soil. Suzuki stood at the front gate in silence for a few seconds, soaking in the details of this scene for future memory reference, remembering days when his mother would dress in a gorgeous kimono to entertain guests and VIPs in this same garden among carefully tended flowers and bonsai plants.

“Mother,” Suzuki said, self-conscious of the frog in his throat. “I’m home.”

*****

Suzuki ended up staying for two days. His family did not pester him about the details of the last thirteen months of his life, and he saw no need in telling them about the nature of his next assignment or about the technically illegal nature of his visit. When not welcoming visitors at home or paying respects to neighborhood notables, he passed the hours stretched out on the tatami of his living room with his family members’ voices and the smells of home in the air, trying not to imagine what this room would look like when they held his funeral in it in a few more months.

Leaving on the morning of the fourteenth, Suzuki did a good job of keeping his composure as he said his goodbyes, vowing to himself to get home at least a few more times. After all, it was not like Ibaragi was on the other side of the planet. Just eight or nine hours by train, tops. If he could get off on a couple of weekend passes before his sortie, there was no reason this had to be his last visit home. As he boarded the train at Atami, he tried very hard to hold on to these happy thoughts.

Getting to Hyakuri was another exercise in hours of lugging a seabag through maddening crowds, and adding insult to injury, he was told upon his arrival that the “Special Attack” people had moved on to a new base deeper into the countryside two weeks earlier. He hung around to wait for a liaison car that would be making a run out to the base –
some place called Kōnoike – in a few hours.

After a spooky nighttime drive through pine barrens and magnificent desolation to reach Kōnoike, Suzuki was spooked even more when he saw the sign over the main gate of the base.

“It was a big sign, in beautiful, professionally done calligraphy,” Suzuki-san recalls sixty years later. “But when I read what was written on it – Jinrai – I thought ‘Divine Thunder? What kind of kooky outfit have I gotten myself involved with here?’”

What he saw when he reported in to the Officer-on-Duty only confirmed his suspicions. When he entered the HQ shack, there was some kind of ceremony going on in a back room. The astringently sweet, meditative smell of funerary incense filled the air, and he could hear Buddhist chanting.

“What’s going on?” Suzuki asked.

“Lieutenant Kariya – one of the Ōka flight leaders – died in an accident yesterday,” the OD answered. “That’s his wake.”

“Ōka?”

“Yeah.
Ōka
.
Sakura no hana
. Cherry Blossom.”

“An airplane?”

“You’ll find out soon enough, Ensign. Welcome to the Jinrai. Now pick up your gear and go report to the CO,” The OD said. He pointed at the date on the Suzuki’s orders. “And you’ve got some explaining to do about this.”

Suzuki walked down the hall, pausing briefly to bow toward the stranger’s wake before knocking on the door of the CO’s office. When a voice inside told him to enter, he opened the door to find a rather small, thinly mustachioed captain in his late forties at a desk covered with paperwork. The captain received and returned Suzuki’s salute, then told the ensign to stand at ease.

“Who the hell are you?” the captain asked.

“Ensign Suzuki, sir. Reporting for duty.”

“Ah yes…The AWOL fellow.”

“Sir? I was told that Taiwan would contact you with…”

“We haven’t heard a damn thing from Taiwan,” the captain said, cutting Suzuki off. “Would you mind telling me what took you so long getting here?”

Suzuki began to go through an accurate accounting of the massive disruption caused by the American raids and about his actions and movements over the last month, conveniently leaving out the small detail about the two days of unscheduled home leave.

“Quite a journey,” the captain said, gesturing for Suzuki to stop before the explanation was finished. “Thanks for making such an effort to get here.”

The captain stood up from his desk.

“Welcome to the Jinrai,” he said, pumping the ensign’s hand. “I’m Captain Okamura, the CO here. Hope you are a quick study. You have some catching up to do.”

Suzuki made his way to the reserve officers’ billets, which like the rest of the buildings on post, were quickly slapped together plywood structures so new they still smelled of lumberyard and wood stain. When he stepped inside, he realized that all of the other ensigns inside were faces from Tainan, including one
of his best friends from Flight School, Saburō Dohi. It was a happy surprise, one of his first in a while.

Saburō Dohi was a reserve ensign out of a public teacher’s college in Wakayama Prefecture. Before answering the same navy recruiting poster message that had lured Suzuki and Naitō into the “gentleman’s service,” he had been training to become an elementary school teacher. Like so many others before and since who have been paradoxically attracted to a profession that requires standing in front of a ro
om full of people and talking all day long, Dohi was a painfully shy introvert – what these days would be called a “nerd.” However, as nerds can often be, he was an intriguingly profound thinker who, in a one-on-one situation, could be an engaging conversationalist with someone who had invested the time to become his friend, especially if the topic was something he could get passionate about, like literature or philosophy. Suzuki had spent many hours talking with Dohi in Taiwan, so he was the first person he approached to start filling him in on details about the Kōnoike ropes.

The next morning, on his way to report to Commander Nonaka, flight ops boss of the Jinrai, he walked by the flight line and caught his first glimpse of an Ōka. His reaction was similar to that of Tokurō Takei two months later – and of virtually every new pilot who laid eyes on the craft for the first time.

“I couldn’t believe they actually expected us to fly in
that
,” Suzuki-san remembers. “To me, it just looked like a torpedo with wings stuck on the side and a cockpit dug out of the middle.”

Unlike enlisted pilots, Suzuki’s officer rank afforded him the luxury of voicing his concern about his new mount.

“That looks like a bomb, for crying out loud,” he yelled at one of the enlisted technicians servicing the bright orange craft.

“Well, sir,” the technician answered, “probably because that’s exactly what it is.”

*****

For the rest of the day, Suzuki familiarized himself with his new environment and found out what he could about the gli
der bomb he was being asked to fly. Scuttlebutt had it that the design kinks in the craft had yet to be ironed out. Until the technical people could figure out what was wrong with the Ōka’s flight characteristics – other than the unfixable flaw of having the descent rate of a dropped brick – there would be no more test drops, and no more new pilots getting checked out anytime soon. The lowdown was that nobody was really sure if the Ōka worked or not, as Kariya’s spectacular accident in front of visiting Navy Ministry dignitaries the day before had demonstrated so dramatically.