Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (42 page)

Obviously, the media treatment of the Nadeshiko Unit story completely negated the girls’ original orders not to tell their families about the nature of their work at the airbase. With the big splash in the papers, the cat was out of the bag. Many of the girls’ now clued-in mothers were furious that the authorities had been callous enough to put their daughters through the emotional clotheswringer of such duty and to expose them to the constant danger posed by American raids on the airfield. But even these furious mothers were wise enough to vent their anger quietly or in the privacy of their own homes, and none of them were bold, headstrong or concerned enough to request that their daughters be withdrawn from the Nadeshiko Unit.

As proprietress of the sole army-certified restaurant in town, Tome Torihama had known all along what the girls were doing at the base. For one thing, her daughter Reiko – who was the same inveterate chatterbox at fourteen that she is at seventy-two – ignored the army’s gag order and told her mother everything the first night she came home from a workday of barracks duties. Tome was also able to glean a lot of information by piecing together overheard snippets of conversation from her uniformed customers, and knew that Chiran’s mothers had every right to be concerned about their daughters’ emotional and physical safety.

Tome worried, too. Every evening at dusk, she would stand by the window of the Tomiya Shokudō and listen for the truck that brought the Nadeshiko Unit members back to their homes after work (they had to wait until cover of nightfall to avoid getting strafed). Grimy and exhausted after yet another day at the base, the girls would sit in back of the flatbed and sing patriotic songs at the top of their lungs (but never, ever, “Umi Yukaba”). Only when Tome heard the girls’ singing and the sound of the army truck changing gears as it came up the main street could she feel safe about her daughter again – at least for the night – before the whole process started again the following morning.

*****

During early and mid-April 1945, there were two interrelated developments in the Okinawan campaign raging 500 kilometers south of Chiran that would conspire to end the Nadeshiko Unit’s airbase duties far earlier than the girls had originally expected. One of these factors was the very effectiveness of the tokkō sorties themselves. As losses in personnel and material mounted daily, American command put the highest priority on trying to knock out as much capacity at the mainland tokkō bases as possible before the Japanese planes could take to the air. Obviously, Chiran was high on the target list.

The second development
was the Americans’ rapid capture of Yontan and Kadena airfields on Okinawa. When USAAF B-25 Mitchell, P-51 Mustang, and P-38 squadrons were flown in from the Philippines to begin operating from these bases, it meant that TF 58’s Hellcats and Corsairs could concentrate on fleet CAP for inbound tokkō interception and on tactical air support for the soldiers and Marines on the ground, relegating more of their secondarily important mission load of interdiction and harassment raids on Kyūshū tokkō bases to the army tactical air units, who were more than up to the task. Superbly trained and experienced in ground attack from the long Philippine campaign, eager for payback against the “Jap suiciders” mauling fellow American servicemen at Okinawa and plenty fired up at having the long-dreamed-of opportunity to strafe and bomb the Japanese “where they lived,” they took to their new combat role with a gusto.

During one mid-April raid on Chiran, a considerable number of bombs were dropped on the airfield. After the attack – with the drone of the American engines and choking, cordite-stinking smoke still lingering in the air – a vehicle was heard screeching to a stop at the bottom of the sangakuheisha compound knoll. There were shouted orders for two girl volunteers, and
before they knew what was happening, Shōko and Reiko were being led to a staff car with a big hole ripped through the windshield and roof. A visibly shaken officer – who turned out to be none other than the base commander himself, Major Musashi Hashiguchi – grumbled for the girls to get in.

The car pulled to a stop at the southern end of the airfield. The girls were ordered out of the car and given five minutes to count the number of bomb craters on the runway. Of course, it was impossible for the girls to cover nearly fifteen hundred meters in only five minutes – especially trying to negotiate rubble-strewn ground in wooden geta – but they gave it their best shot, and counted as best they could, ever mindful of the staff car putt-putting at a crawl behind them. The faint sound of American engines flying away was another matter of concern, as it was always possible that the planes would suddenly double back to give the airfield one more good drilling in the hopes of catching personnel and vehicles out in the open. It was a trick the Americans had used before.

Breathless from smoke, nerves and fatigue, the girls finally reached the north end of the runway. Shōko had spotted eighteen craters, while Reiko reported seeing only seventeen. The officer was angry about the discrepancy in the count and threatened the girls with making them go back and do it again. Luckily, he did not back up this threat, but neither was he finished with the girls quite yet. Before rolling up his window and telling the driver to move on, he ordered them to go back to the compound and organize a work detail to start repairing the runway damage. The Nadeshiko Unit spent the rest of the day with shovels in their hands filling in bomb craters.

On April 18, as Reiko, Sh
ōko, and the other girls were hanging freshly washed socks and fundoshi on the clotheslines at the sangakuheisha compound. There had been no flight line send-off on this day, so spirits were more chipper than usual, and the girls chatted and laughed with each other and a few of the barracks residents as they worked. The sun was bright, the sky blue and the birds were singing in the pine boughs. Vigilance was the last thing on anyones’ mind, but even in the off chance that there was an air raid this morning, the sirens would give everyone plenty of warning. They always had in the past. Besides that, the sangakuheisha were well-camouflaged, and the compound was apparently invisible from the air – even with clotheslines full of off-white underwear flapping in the breeze – as it had yet to be hit by the Americans.

Suddenly, the barracks compound’s mid-morning rhapsody was rent asunder by the distinctive roar of American engines overhead and crisscrossing chains of machine gun bullets stitching the pine needle forest floor. There were hoarse masculine shouts for everyone to take cover, barely audible over the din of aircraft, weapons fire, and shrill female screaming. The girls tripped and fell down in their ungainly wooden sandals as they scrambled to jump into s
unken barracks entranceways and slit trenches with the pilots and other army personnel.

While everyone around her ran for cover, the ever-introspective Shōko watched in a stunned daze as an evil-looking, twin-boomed, shiny aluminum-skinned plane banked hi
gh over the treetops before leveling out and heading straight for her. Immobilized by deer-in-headlights paralysis, she seemed to watch from somewhere outside of her body as parallel trails of dirt puffs drilled the ground and raced toward her. Something – a friend’s scream, perhaps – snapped her out of it and she jumped out of the way at the last second as the bullets cracked the air around her and the plane buzzed over with an angry snarl.

Now huddling in a slit trench with some of the
other girls, Shōko was being alternately hugged and berated by her sheltermates when the sight of the sparkling white collars on her friends’ middy blouses snapped her back to reality for the first time in twenty or thirty very long seconds. 

“Our collar
s!” she shouted out. “They can see our collars! Tuck them in!”

The girls hurriedly did as Shōko said while trying to stay as small and low as possible. Whether or not the color of their uniforms was a factor in their being spotted from the air can never be
known with certainty, but it seems probable that another general lapse in vigilance had some part in their predicament. As the girls huddled together in their trench, someone pointed out the dried-out leaves and branches on the roofs of the sangakuheisha. The girls had forgotten to change the camouflage covering on the barracks, and the foliage had dried out quicker than anyone had expected it to in the fine weather they had been enjoying of late. Instead of masking the compound, the bright yellow, desiccated foliage – contrasted against the deep green of the rest of the forest – must have been as conspicuous as a pattern of landing lights at night.

As the girls rued their camouflage carelessness, the twin-engine planes continued to rake the compound with machine-gun fire while others started dropping bombs on the air base runway. The Americans seemed neither anxious to leave anytime soon, nor particularly perturbed by the paltry AA fire from the base. And as usual, there was no Japanese opposition in the air to try to stop them.

“The Americans flew so low you could see their pink faces and blue eyes and those big, square, white-framed goggles they wore,” Reiko recalls. “We hated to admit it, but we admired their cockiness, flying in so low like that. I’m still not sure if they were either very brave or just thought so little of us that there was nothing to be afraid of.”

Apparently, Japanese masculinity did not share the same objective admiration for this impudent display of American panache. One of the support troops ran out from a trench spitting mad, cursing and trying to throw rocks at the planes before a comrade scrambled out to pull him back in. A spray of machine gun fire for good measure riddled the spot they had been standing in an eye-blink before.

This was not the first time the girls had been strafed, nor would it be the last. It was, however, the last time they would undergo the experience at Chiran airbase. In fact, it was also the last time they would set foot on the base for the rest of the war. Major Hashiguchi was forced to admit that the morning’s air raid – and with a barracks full of media people witnessing the whole thing, at that – had been too close for comfort. While the imagery of stalwart little
yamato
nadeshiko
serving tea and giving flowers to brave tokkō pilots was about as good as it got in terms of propaganda material, the country did not need to hear about fourteen-year-old girls dodging bullets on a Japanese military installation with no Japanese planes in the air trying to protect them, and it certainly did not need to hear about one of these girls stopping some of those bullets. It was not beyond the pale of imagination that one of the sappy hacks in the media barracks would write up something embarrassing in the event of a Nadeshiko Unit casualty that would somehow slip through the censorship cracks and make the papers. This was not going to happen on Major Hashiguchi’s watch.

The historical record is not clear on the role of parental pressure in this matter, but the very next day, Major Hashiguchi made a rare personal appearance at the Nadeshiko Unit’s morning formation. He personally thanked the girls for their services to date, then in the next breath told them that they did not have to bother coming anymore. For the next two months, until a combat nurse training program was started up for local girls in the neighboring town of Kawanabe, the Nadeshiko Unit was collectively out of a job.

But Chiran’s involvement with the tokkō activities on base did not end there. The local Defense Women’s Association, endeavoring to pick up the slack left by the cancellation of the Nadeshiko Unit work program, was eager to show the authorities that the town was still willing to help with the war effort. While most of the league’s members were housewives, and thus too busy caring for their own families to wait hand and foot on the residents of the
sangakuheisha
compound, they were genuinely eager to help out in other areas. Tome Torihama was instrumental in guiding their efforts, and personally organized official send-off detachments and unofficial support facilities for tokkō family members visiting Chiran.

No one who knew Tome could have been very surprised that she rose to the forefront in such activities. Concern for the well being of ot
hers came naturally to her. These qualities were in her blood, and selfless service was the dominant theme of every facet of her life, both professional and personal. The Chiran air base authorities had chosen wisely in deciding to designate the Tomiya Shokudō as the only army-approved rest and relaxation center in town, and Tome made good use of her establishment’s exemption as such from food and alcohol rationing to make sure there was always plenty on hand for the boys to eat and drink. When the cupboard began to run low and regular supply lines petered out, she would scour the countryside for every morsel or drop of saké or
shōchu
potato liquor she could get her hands on.
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After all, she often remarked, how could you skimp on a meal for a young man that might be his last?

From the earliest days of Chiran’s special attack sorties until her death at the age of ninety in 1992, Tome was known by the pilots themselves, townspeople, veterans, journalists and eventually even national statesmen as
tokkō no haha
or “Mother of the tokkō boys” for the love and care she gave to the lonely, homesick pilots. Tome became a legend in her own lifetime, and has been afforded something close to sainthood now that she is gone. In the last years of her life, the author, right-wing pundit and current Tokyo governor Shintarō Ishihara famously remarked that Tome was “the closest person to a living Buddha I have ever met.”
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The anecdote on which the film
Hotaru
(“Firefly”) is loosely based is probably the most famous legend involving Tome and the Tomiya Shokudō. Reiko-san, now the only surviving witness to the episode, insists that it is true. The story concerns an enlisted pilot named Saburō Miyakawa of the 104
th
Shinbu Unit who was in Chiran awaiting tokkō sortie orders as the Okinawan campaign was winding to a close. During his inclement weather-extended stay in Chiran, Miyakawa formed an especially close bond with Tome and her daughters, and his patronage of their establishment was frequent and enthusiastic. But as is the fate of all good things, the relationship had to come to an end – clearing skies and sortie orders for the morning of June 6 brought the curtain down on the sergeant’s rustic idyll with his surrogate family-away-from-home.