Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (34 page)

When army authorities asked for volunteer host families, farming households with children tended to be approached first, not only because their dwellings were usually large enough to accommodate multiple guests at a time, but also because they were thought to provide a more wholesome spiritual environment. The main purpose of the program, after all, was to solace the pilots in their last weeks or months of life and give them something more tangible and immediate than wrinkled letters from home and wallet photos to remind them of what – or whom – they were supposed to be dying for. What better iconography for this purpose than a friendly farm family with a brood of cute kids?

This billeting was also intended to heighten patriotic awareness of the war effort on the part of the host families, which would hopefully spread from there to the local community as a whole. The host families knew perfectly well what their guests’ job title implied, and they were always careful to avoid any household conversational topic that might inadvertently stumble into talk about death of personal plans for the future. And while the families extended to the pilots all of the warm hospitality they could manage, there was always a certain amount of emotional distancing between host and guest that, for obvious reasons, was in the best interests of both parties to maintain. But the presence of young women in host households often had a way of skewing this delicate arrangement.

Once he knew he was going tokkō back in November of ‘44, Fukagaw
a told himself that he would never fall in love, and more importantly, never let anyone fall in love with him. It would not be fair for the girl, and moreover, a pure-hearted warrior had no business fooling around with women. Nevertheless, during the late spring of 1945 he allowed himself – in spite of his conscience – to became somewhat more than just friendly with the daughter of a host family. Photos and love letters were exchanged.

One summer Sunday when he was walking off-post, he saw the local Defens
e Women’s Association
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practicing bamboo spear defense tactics in a local park
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. He noticed his girlfriend among the trainees, chanting and spear-thrusting in unison with the group. Right then it hit him all at once – the whole reason for tokkō, and why it had to succeed. The nation’s warriors had to die to the last man if necessary to keep things from coming to the point where those plucky but helpless little housewives and schoolgirls would be running down to the beaches to try to hold off American landing craft with those bamboo spears. Such a scenario could not be allowed to come to pass, and it was this awful fate for the nation that the tokkō would fight to prevent. At that moment, Fukagawa lost any lingering doubts he might have had about the necessity of tokkō. And although he eventually outgrew his infatuation with the host family’s daughter, he never forgot that scene in the park, and the resolve it gave him to go all the way when his time came. The nation expected nothing less of its fighting men.

Fukagawa was not the only tokkō pilot at Kita Ise getting loveletters. As the war entered its final grim months, the tokkō community was fairly inundated with the attentions of what would today be referred to as groupies – in this case, womenfolk of a surprisingly wide age spectrum who tried to befriend and/or enter into romantic relationships
with the pilots, harboring for the doomed young flyers an intoxicating mixture of romantic infatuation, patriotic gratitude and maternal instinct-fueled pity. Those too far from the bases for actual visits sent articles of clothing like embroidered flying scarves or handkerchiefs, photos of themselves in frilly dresses or knockout kimonos. The most popular items by far, however, were the sackfuls of gushing loveletters and poems that arrived at the barracks addressed To Whom It May Concern, these literary efforts often written in – or otherwise daubed and decorated with – the authors’ blood.

A very, very small number of pilots more mired in the muck of worldly desires than their more stalwart comrades were not beyond taking advantage of this female attention.
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But the vast majority of the flyers were either too naïve and inexperienced with the opposite sex or too proud of their constantly reinforced status as Japanese Galahads to give much – if any – attention to girls. Moreover, Fukagawa-san recalls that there was a popular superstition among tokkō personnel at Kita Ise that pilots involved with women had training accidents, the rationale being that the female Shinto
ten’nyo
angels who were scheduled to be the pilots’ eternal companions after their tokkō dives would look down from the heavens, get jealous of the human girls and cause the pilots to crash in order to keep the objects of their divine affections out of the meaty clutches of mere mortal competition.
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A more practical viewpoint on the issue held by many of the base personnel was that it was probably psychologically undesirable to socialize with women – or even close family members – because such distractions could cause potentially disastrous lapses in concentration when pilots were in the air.

As at any airbase running constant training flights, the danger of such disastrous lapses was always present at Kita Ise. On the morning of June 1, 1945, Corporals Bando and Makiuchi were practicing touch-and-gos on the runway while Fukagawa sat at the small flight ops tent referred to as the
pisuto
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with binoculars and a notebook, watching the proceedings and critiquing his pilots’ performance. Although attentive to what was going on in the air, Fukagawa did not feel any particular apprehensiveness as he watched the planes fly their clockwise, lozenge-shaped circuit around the field, lining up for landing approaches, lightly touching down on the airstrip, then throttling back up and returning to the pattern. It was a standard drill reinforcing elementary landing, take-off and banking techniques that even a pilot straight out of flight basic should have been able to handle in his sleep, and the monotonous consistency of the corporals’ performance threatened the observers in the
pisuto
with a rather boring morning. Fukagawa was kicking back in his canvas director’s chair and enjoying a warm breeze on his face when he saw one of the planes suddenly stagger and side-slip as it pulled into a turn with its landing gear and flaps down.

“THROTTLE!” Fukagawa screamed to no one, raising his binoculars to his eyes as he bolted up from his chair.

If the plane had been a little higher, the pilot might have been able to pull off a recovery, but it was not to be. With a heartbreaking lurch, the Hayate stalled, dropped like a rock, then disappeared in a blossom of orange flame and billowing black smoke. An eye blink later, a loud boom rent the air and hit Fukagawa like a punch to the solar plexus. Instinctively, he dropped everything he was holding and started running toward the smoke column as recovery vehicles whipped by him, spewing dust and dirt. By the time he reached the crash site, the charred body of nineteen-year-old Kazuhiro Makiuchi had already been pulled from what was left of the Hayate.

“Losing Makiuchi like that was by far the worst thing that happened to me in the army, and I still have nightmares about it.” Fukagawa-san tells me. “After the war, I tracked down his family in Wakayama Prefecture to apologize for the accident and pay my respects. But when I got there, I found out that only his older brother had survived the war. Of course, I think the brother had every right to tell me to go to hell, but he didn’t. In fact, we still keep up correspondence to this day, exchanging New Year’s cards and at least one long letter a year.”

But despite whatever emotional closure he might have gained from his Wakayama pilgrimage, the accident has haunted Fukagawa-san for the last six decades in waking moments as well as his dreams.

“I don’t know how many times I have run that crash through my mind, trying to figure out what went wrong,” Fukagawa says. “Of course, no one will ever know for sure, but after all of these years the best theory I have been able to come up with is that Makiuchi may have forgotten for a second that he w
as at the stick of a Hayate, and not one of the light Hayabusas he had been training on all those years in the Shōnen Hikōhei program. The Hayate was a very heavy-framed aircraft…the whole airframe was built around that big engine…and it had a much higher stall speed than the Hayabusa. But if Makiuchi had been in a Hayabusa, he would have made that last turn no problem.”

Minutes after Makiuchi crashed and burned, however, Major Kanezawa had suspected other factors at work in the accident. After cracking Fukagawa in the jaw for losing a man and an aircraft, the major – suddenly businesslike – asked if Makiuchi had received any visits from family members of late. Fukagawa replied that he had not.

“You know, sentimentality makes you lose concentration,” the major said matter-of-factly. “There have been army studies on this…Other cases where family visits can be directly traced as the cause of poor pilot concentration, which in turn resulted in fatal accidents. Keep your men’s minds on their jobs, Lieutenant. And that goes for yourself, too.”

*****

By early June, the Battle of Okinawa was entering its endgame phase. But tokkō operations were still pouring men and machines into the conflagration, and the 197
th
Shinbu had been expecting sortie orders any hour of every day for nearly a month. Although the unit’s morale had been high throughout this period, the waiting was helping no one’s nerves, especially in the wake of Makiuchi’s death. One way the pilots prevented flagging spirits was to write home regularly.

As soon as Yonekichi and Tsuma Fukagawa received the letter from their son telling them that he had been named the commander of a
tokkō flight, they decided to get to Kita Ise any way they could. But deciding to go somewhere in Japan beyond the range of one’s own two feet and actually being able to go there were entirely different matters in June 1945. Even with sufficient funds, domestic travel by this point in the war was an extremely iffy business, especially by rail, and tickets were nearly impossible to get without connections and/or official orders. Regardless of the difficulties they knew they faced, the Fukagawas marched down to the Saga City stationmaster’s office with youngest daughter Teruko in tow Iwao’s letter in their hands. Touched by the appeal and honored to help the family of a tokkō pilot, the stationmaster produced the desired tickets. The Fukagawas reached Kita Ise twenty-four hours later on the rainy afternoon of Saturday, June 9, 1945.

Fukagawa and his pilots received the visitors in the unit’s dayroom. A Mainichi Shimbun r
eporter looking for human interest stories at Kita Ise on this particular day wrote up his observations of the Fukagawa family’s visit and other activities on the base for national publication. The article is translated and reproduced here in its entirety:

“Warm And Happy Families Of The Divine Eagles” (pt.2 of a two-part series)

by Army Correspondent Yanoi

(PHOTO CAPTION) “Surrounded by visiting family members, brave tokkō pilots enjoy homemade Abekawa-style rice cake confectionary [Photo by Special Correspondent Kunimoto]
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June X, 1945, OXOX Airbase: There is nothing tokkō pilots hate more than bad weather, and you can see that in the rain-soaked faces of the boys clambering on the truck that will take them from the flight line back to their barracks.

“Dammit, another day late for Okinawa,” says unit commander Second Lieutenant Nogami
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, with only a towel bandana to keep his head dry.

The imagery of the grumbling, rain-soaked lieutenant boarding the truck proves to be too much for recent
Shōnen Hikōhei graduate Corporal Nakane, who jibes “So says Prisoner Number One as he boards the truck back to his cell…”

This gets a hearty laugh from the other pilots, but Lieutenant Nogami stubbornly refuses to share in the mirth. This is out of charac
ter, actually, as the lieutenant is almost always bright and cheerful as he leads his men through their training, not wanting to delay even for a minute their sortie orders, when they will at long last spread their wings in Okinawan skies. It is merely the knowledge that this rain puts off that glorious moment one more day that gives the lieutenant a gloomy and pensive expression.

Suddenly, Lieutenant Nogami addresses this rain-soaked reporter.

“1945 is the year all of the heroes die, isn’t it? It has seen Mussolini and Hitler go out, and the end of the European War. So whose turn do you think is next?”

Waiting for my answer, the lieutenant stares at me with an intense gleam in his eye.

“Chiang Kai Shek?” one of the young corporals ventures naively but sincerely, temporarily derailing the lieutenant’s spell.

“No, dummy,” Lieutenant Nogami shouts. “You! Me! All of us! Japan’s numberless, nameless young heroes, that’s who! But you know what? This will also be the year of Japan’s final victory. Isn’t that right, Mr. War Correspondent?”

I nod vigorously, but in silence.

Lieutenant Nogami now faces his men.

“Listen up. We will have classes in night navigation after mess. Got it?”

While the pilots are at mess, I walk around the barracks area, visiting the quarters of various units. The barracks entrance of Second Lieutenant Fukagawa’s unit features a picture of Momo
tarō the Peach Boy, and below that, written in a broad, masculine hand, is the unit’s fitting name – Seiki Tai. The unit’s pilots are just as young and dashing as their hero, eagerly awaiting the moment when they will bravely and resolutely sally forth into battle.