Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (39 page)

The Nadeshiko-Kai girls grew up with institutionalized militarism and simmering Asian conflict as accepted facts of daily life. Of course, the adults in their childhood landscape talked about what was going on in China – especially when all-out warfare erupted after the Marco Polo Bridge incident in 1937 – but it was always in the context of something read in the newspapers, happening f
araway. Shōko-san remembers a flagwaving train depot send-off for a male cousin going off to fight in China, but cannot recall anyone ever mentioning what happened to the boy after that. Occasional word-of-mouth news about the son of some family in town getting killed was enough to remind everybody that there was a fighting going on, but it was not the stuff of posters and songs and food rationing.

The residents of Chiran got their first discernible inklings that big changes in their lives were on the way when it was announced that the Imperial Japanese Army wanted to construct an annex airbase for the
Shōnen Hikōhei program on the outskirts of town in early 1941. Unlike the Japan of today, where citizen action committees can delay public or private construction projects for years or even decades with protests and haggling, opposition to a governmental policy decision was not something that was tolerated by the authorities in early Shōwa Japan. In Chiran’s case, the army people arrived to survey the plot they wanted, came up with what they thought was a fair price, tracked down all of the affected landholders and made them an offer they could not refuse.
[194]
By fall, there were orange Akatonbo army trainers constantly buzzing overhead, and on Sunday afternoons, the streets of town were thick with freshfaced fifteen- and sixteen-year-old flight cadets who had big smiles for all the girls and pockets full of spending money to throw around like there was no tomorrow.

The new base brought undeniable benefits to the local economy, and Reiko-san’s mother Tome Torihama certainly welcomed the boost in patronage that
the Tomiya Shokudō was enjoying as a result. But like many other town residents, she found unsettling the simple fact that the army had determined it necessary to build an airstrip in a remote burg like Chiran. Were there not enough big military bases on the coastline and around big cities already? Why disrupt life in a peaceful little farming village unless the army was so desperate for more bases it had run out of better places to build them?

“We knew a major war was in the works from around that time,” Reiko-san recalls.

If anyone doubted this by late 1941, all they had to do was pick up a paper to be convinced otherwise. Although no one the girls knew had a radio, newsprint was available everywhere, and throughout the summer and fall of that year hundred-point headlines using phrases like “strategic materials,” “oil embargo” and “A-B-C-D encirclement”
[195]
played up unfamiliar new bogeyman roles for America and Britain, countries that were still supposed to be allies the last time most people in Chiran had checked. At school, the girls were told by their teachers that trouble was on the way, but that it was nothing the Emperor’s army and navy could not dispose of with one hand behind their backs. Thus there was more excitement than surprise when news of the Pearl Harbor raid was announced. The nation was assured that the Emperor’s war eagles had sent the American fleet to the bottom of the Pacific. Most people assumed that the war was already won.

What the Chiran girls remember most from this heady time was the teacher-orchestrated euphoria at school over the news that one of the “Nine Gunshin” midget sub pilots from the raid – LT Masaharu Yokoyama – was from Kagoshima.
[196]
Schools across the prefecture were ordered by the Board of Education to have students write commemorative
tanka
poems for Yokoyama and submit them for a contest.
[197]
An official commemorative song was later written for Yokoyama and sung regularly at assemblies in Kagoshima schools.

“He was so dashing,” Nadeshiko Fusako Mori recalls, as someone hums a bar or two of his song in the background. “Like a movie star.”

Despite Chiran’s holiday mood in December 1941, things were a little more sober in Shōko Maeda’s household, where her grandfather – who had spent seventeen years in Seattle as a young businessman – was livid about what he saw as the government’s insane decision to go to war with America.

“Do those people in Tokyo realize what they’ve go
tten us into?” he had thundered. “How are we going to win a war against a huge, affluent nation with limitless resources?”

When Shōko-san noticed posters like “Luxury Is The Enemy” and “A Drop Of Gasoline Is A Drop Of Blood” going up around town soon afte
r the war started, she began to think that her grandfather might be right, after all. But doubts or not, she followed the example of her friends and neighbors in doing her work, avoiding objective comments about the war and trying to at least give the impression that she believed everything she was told.

Shōko, although gifted with a precocious intelligence, was nonetheless still a child of eleven or twelve. The idea that she might have been the only person in the community other than her grandfather with the political savvy to pick up on occasional glimpses of frightening reality like this is of course preposterous. There were others who knew things were not quite as peachy as the papers would have them believe. But like Shōko-san, these skeptics also knew well enough to keep their mouths shut about their
doubts, and were careful to keep up the appearance of believing that there was nothing to worry about and that Japan was going to win the war. The times behooved taciturnity, for to speak one’s mind in public when one’s opinion conflicted with the official line was to risk social ostracism at the least, if not arrest for sedition after being reported to the police by neighborhood informants, who were only too eager to drop a name to get on the good side of the local authorities.
[198]

Most Chiran residents, however, did not lose much sleep over doubts about the war. They slept the sleep of the innocent, secure in their belief that what the authorities told them about the war was gospel. But they cannot be completely faulted for buying the government line at face value. Their optimism was as much a matter of lack of information as lack of cynicism. Unlike city-dwellers, who had greater access to alternative (and thus illegal) news sources, citizens in remote areas were completely dependent on official organs for the dissemination of war news.

In wartime Japan, war news through official channels passed through three layers of filters before being made public: the top layer consisted of Imperial GHQ and public relations officers at the Army and Navy Ministries, who made the initial choices about what the public should or should not be told about, and concocted official whoppers where appropriate. The second layer consisted of cautious editorial staff and line-toeing journalists well seasoned in self-censorship who phrased this filtered information as patriotically – or vaguely, if the circumstances called for smokescreening – as possible. The third and last line of information defense was manned by the thousands of government censors at print and broadcast media facilities around the nation who gave the remnants of fact in these news releases one last picking over with magnifying glasses and tweezers before the word went out to the public.

Chiran’s schoolteachers did their part by keeping the discussion of war developments vague and to a minimum, seeing their duty as educators more constructively performed in organizing scrap metal drives
[199]
and putting their charges through a healthy daily regimen of close-order drill and group singing of patriotic songs. The students memorized books full of anthems about hot young blood and sacrifice, and might be forced to sing them at any time during the day. The musical activity the Chiran girls remember most clearly – and with the most distaste – was the constant singing of “Umi Yukaba.” Starting rather early in the war and continuing right up to the bitter end, children and teachers alike stood at rigid attention to sing it at the top of their lungs every day at outdoor morning assembly and any other time the student body was gathered for an event.

“Any occasion they could possibly think of, the teachers made us sing that song,” Reiko-san recalls. “Oh, how we hated it.”

I ask if this was because the girls understood the barely veiled suicidal message in the song’s lyrics.

“Not at a
ll,” Reiko-san says. “We had no idea what we were singing, but we knew that we were sick and tired of it, whatever it was.”

The other women nod emphatically.

“Whenever I hear that song now it brings back so many bad memories,” Shōko-san adds to another round of nodding.

A
s the singing and scrap metal drives dragged on, signs that no one could miss or ignore anymore began to appear in the community suggesting that the war situation was not necessarily developing to Japan’s advantage. One obvious indicator was that the number of funerals for young servicemen from the town increased dramatically. Another message was purely lexical, but telling nevertheless: the language in the papers and slogans in the posters became more strident and tinged with desperation. The change had been so gradual as to be barely noticeable at first, but by late 1943, as the food situation got tight and rationing became stricter, few people could have missed the significance of there now being a preponderance of flowery death euphemisms and more talk about “sacrifice” and “resisting to the end” in the media than about “winning the war” and “Asia for Asians.”

In March 1944, a harbinger of bad tidings on the home front came along that not even the thickest-skinned optimist could misinterpret. In that month, the Ministry of Education announced in a national emergency decree that regular academic lessons at junior high and high schools across the country were hereby cancelled for the duration of hostilities to free up adolescent labor resources for the war effort.

Chiran Girls’ School was not exempt from the wartime requirements of the state. When its students began the new school year in April, they were informed that they would be organized into a “volunteer” work detail unit. In honor of the blossom featured on the school crest and in hopes that the girls would live up to their honor as maidens of Kagoshima, their group was named the Nadeshiko Unit.
[200]
The sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds of the upper three class grades were packed up and sent off to Nagasaki, where they would spend the next seventeen months working at the big Mitsubishi Heiki Seisakusho torpedo factory. The lower three grades, which included Reiko and Shōko’s new third-year class, were deemed too young and vulnerable to be separated from maternal supervision, and were instead put to work in or close enough to town to be home for a bath and bedtime every night. With all of the local boys twelve or older committed to the war industry or military service, and schoolgirls, small children, housewives, old people and war invalids the only other potential workforce groups available in any kind of numbers, the local military authorities came to depend on Chiran’s pool of able-bodied twelve-to-fifteen-year-old girls as the prime source of volunteer labor in town.

For the next year, the girls did little else but dig. During harvest season, this meant pulling spuds, radishes and tubers from the ground in the sort of agricultural drudgery the farm girls were well accustomed to, but the rest of the time, they were excavating roomy and well-furnished bunkers and air raid shelters for the army in the local countryside.
[201]
These high-ceilinged spaces were dug underground or into chalky hillsides, and the work was dangerous, exhausting, and above all filthy. The girls dug for months with little rest, and wearing no protective gear other than “bōsai-zukin” padded hoods (not much more than floor cushions tied over the head). Luckily, there were no cave-ins, and other than calloused hands and sore shoulders, the worst indignities the girls suffered was the dirt that constantly fell into their faces, eyes, mouths, and clothes as they dug.

“I swear, some of those bunkers we dug out were big enough to put a house into,” Reiko says.

“And when we finished digging,” Kayoko-san adds, “they’d make us cart in sand and foliage to camouflage the shelter entrances.”

The shelters – and the residents of Chiran – got their baptism of fire on March 18, 1945, when the airfield and environs were shot up by American carrier fighter-bombers.
[202]
These attackers were not the first enemy planes the townspeople had seen – B-29 formations had been passing overhead at altitude on the way to Kagoshima City and other industrial centers like Yahata, Kurume and Nagasaki farther to the north since the previous summer – but it was the first time that Chiran was the Americans’ intended target, and the Hellcats hit it hard.

“Some villagers were killed hiding in their slit trench bomb shelter during that first raid,” Reiko says. “But even with an airbase there, we didn’t get a single airplane up to defend against the raiders. This was when I really knew that things were not going our way.”

Shortly after dawn on March 27, the girls arrived at school for work detail in their usual
monpe
work clothes. Principal Utō and one of their young teachers, Miss Chosa, had the students form up as they always did before marching out to the day’s worksite. On this day, however, Mr. Yamaguchi – the head of the local Board of Education, Army Reservist Association bigshot and town hall
heijikakari
military liaison chief – was there, too. It was the first time since the formation ceremony for the Nadeshiko Unit almost a year ago that their activities had been graced by the presence of such a VIP.