Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (45 page)

The spiritual epicenter of this space is a section of the north wall of the room, which is covered with a bank of shoebox-sized glass cases, each containing exquisitely detailed little hanayome ningyo dolls in kimonos, like hundreds of ghost Barbies, or female homunculi in cryogenic freeze. Each case also contains a playing card-sized wooden plaque on which is written the name, rank, and date of death of a Japanese serviceman killed in battle. I stop a young female attendant in red and white robes, and ask her about the dolls. She explains that they are supposed to be brides for the souls of heroes enshrined at Yasukuni who died as bachelors.

“This is the season when they all come back, isn’t it?,” I ask.

The acolyte blinks once or twice, mystified.

“The cherry trees outside,” I say, pointing toward the entrance. “All of the spirits of the servicemen are back now.”

“
So- desu ne
(Yes, I suppose that’s right),” she replies, indulging me with the briefest of non-committal smiles before fluttering away in a busy whisking, bustle of robe cloth. 

I head back outside to enjoy the cherry trees some more. Their pink and white blossom-laden boughs form towering archways of ethereal strawberry ice cream over the main promenade and other walkways of the shrine. I walk around for a while, snapping shots of flowers, old men and white pigeons before parking myself on a bench in the main rest area. 

A few minutes later, an elegant woman rounds the corner at the far end of the cherry tree-lined path bordering the red benches and ashtrays. The woman’s posture is ramrod straight, and her stride is purposeful but feminine as she walks toward me. From here, she looks to be in her mid- to late-fifties. She is wearing rose-tinted glasses and is dressed in a camelhair coat. An Hermés scarf about her neck is tied off with casual élan.

I blink a few times in mild disbelief as the woman gets closer because I now realize that she is not some middle-aged stranger, after all. She is
Naoko Motoki, my interview subject.
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And although from ten or twenty paces she may look like a woman in her fifties, she is in reality almost eighty.

After greetings and de rigeur comments about the cherries, we enter the Yasukuni library, where the curator, Sh
insuke Daitō, greets us in the main reading room. I begin to make introductions, but soon find this is not necessary. Anyone who has anything to do with tokkō research in Japan knows Motoki-san, and Daitō-san is no exception. Always the gentleman, he escorts us to a quiet spot in the library offices where we can conduct our interview, then takes leave in his usual unobtrusive manner.

Sitting across from
Motoki-san, I am again struck by how physically attractive she is for a woman her age. A lifetime of traditional dance study and a healthy dollop of pride have given her the lithesome grace and presence of a lioness. But then again, perhaps she is too finely sculpted and physically delicate for scorching savanna imagery to be appropriate. A better metaphor would be something avian.

The Japanese have been likening individuals to different types of animal for purposes of physical description or mental cataloging in both folklore and daily life since time immemorial. This practice may have roots in Japan’s animist/shamanistic spiritual heritage, or it may simply have started out for the more practical reason of being handy in a society where almost everyone is born with black hair and brown eyes. Whatever the case, I have unconsciously picked up on the practice during my stay here, and watching
Motoki-san’s mannerisms and facial expressions as we go through our opening small talk routine, my Japanicized metaphor banks kick in with bird-of-prey imagery. Instead of a lioness, I see a female peregrine falcon, sharp-angled and exquisitely feathered, poised yet a bit wary, simultaneously delicate and formidable.

There is as much of the huntress in
Motoki-san’s attitude as there is in her appearance. She has the pride and simmering charisma that only a mature woman who has been fawned upon by men for most of her life can possess. She is good, knows it, and knows I know it, and she is not beyond using that knowledge tactically. In a situation like this, where most Japanese women – regardless of age – would be fidgety and uncomfortable talking one-on-one with a male stranger (especially a
gaijin
), she is calmly collected, looking me straight in the eye as she asks questions about my personal and family background, sizing me up, no doubt, for the right slot in the intricate and all-encompassing mental processing mechanism of social hierarchies and protocols that Japanese of her generation carry in their heads from cradle to grave to gauge their own and others’ relative positions in The Big Picture. Whatever decision she reaches about me in the next few moments will determine where I fit in this mental catalogue, and thus determine not only what she chooses to tell me today, but even how she will say it. The very vocabulary, inflections and grammatical forms she uses when addressing me will soon tell me whether or not she thinks I am worthy of her time, and whether or not I will be welcome to contact her again. I keep this in mind because I like her and want very much for her to approve of me, so I am careful to watch my manners and try to use respectful verb endings.

Apparently, I have passed muster, as my subject gradually begins to slip colloquialisms and familiar inflections into her speech. The formal
Motoki-san transforms into the winsome Naoko-san, and the IC Recorder is running.

*****

Tokyo is a bustling, vibrant metropolis of 3 million people on the morning of September 1, 1923. Modern office buildings and mammoth department stores dominate the city’s business and retail districts, and the downtown skyline is slashed at abrupt angles by towering cranes and scaffolding at the construction sites of even bigger buildings on their way up. Streetcars run everywhere under a riot of telephone poles and aboveground power lines, abundant flags and banners and colorful advertising balloons. Aircraft are becoming a common sight in Tokyo skies – at least common enough not to stop traffic or have people leaning out of windows anymore every time one flies overhead. License-built Model Ts clog the roadways at rush hour. Plans for subway lines that will soon honeycomb the earth under the city’s streets are in their final stages, and land development along these proposed lines will sprout suburbs to house millions of workers for new offices and factories.

Tokyo likes to play as hard as it works, and boasts what is probably the most exciting and cosmopolitan nightlife east of Berlin. The city’s better-heeled male residents seek nocturnal diversion in the carnal pleasure grottos of Yoshiwara or the astringent chic of Nihonbashi teahouses
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, but also, increasingly, under the neon buzz of newer entertainment districts like Ginza and Asakusa, where café patrons dance the foxtrot and Charleston with bob-haired flapper waitresses to jazz music blared from Edison phonographs
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. In Chiyoda, just a stone’s throw from the Imperial Palace, gleamingly pomaded guests in tuxedos and Erté evening gowns arrive nightly by Rolls Royce and Duesenberg for swanky soirees at a new hotel recently built by Frank Lloyd Wright. In neighborhoods around the city’s great universities, students in straw boaters and plus fours practice French inhales on imported cigarettes while discussing Kant and Marx and the painterly merits of Picasso’s Blue Period.

Tokyo’s pleasures are a reflection of the freewheeling nature of the times, an era when campaigns for labor rights and universal male suffrage are blasting holes in the last ramparts of old class distinctions stratified for centuries. Media freedom fosters unprecedented public political dialogue among an urban middle class constituency enjoying the closest thing to true representative democracy in East Asia. These social and political experiments flourish under the reign of a mostly hands-off monarch night and day different from Emperor Meiji, his charismatic and autocratic fathe
r
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. His Majesty the Emperor Taishō has been virtually hidden from public view for almost his entire reign, and there are whispered rumors of poor health and congenital mental infirmity on his part, but no one pries and few really care. Moreover, the people have nothing but admiration and high hopes for the Emperor’s very visible son Hirohito, the sober, bookwormish Crown Prince patiently waiting his turn to ascend to the Chrysanthemum Throne. Very few Japanese citizens outside of Diet or Imperial Household circles pay much attention to – or are even aware of – the snarling pit bull of militaristic fanaticism lurking in the young prince’s shadow, despising all these treasonous new freedoms and perverse Western ways, licking its chops and waiting for the opening that a changing of the political guard will provide with Taishō’s death and the crown prince’s succession.

From the point of view of the man in the streets, all is right with His Majesty’s Domain. With the exception of the military hardliners and civili
an ultranationalists on the right, and of a vociferous but closely monitored Socialist intellectual clique on the left, the Emperor’s loyal subjects seem to approve for the most part of the direction the nation is taking and they voice few complaints about its governance publicly. Japan is at peace and her economy is growing, despite a manageable post-World War I recession. The trains are running on time, the employment rate is high, infant mortality is plummeting, and the standard of living of the middle class household is improving in leaps and bounds.

While the proletariat of most other industrialized nations around the world seethe in post-World War I socialist upheaval, the Japanese urban working class and disenfranchised regional peasantry still lack the political savvy to know that they are being exploited by the very capitalist social order they have made possible with their own sweat and sacrifice. They are more intent on making their own lives a little more comfortable than on challenging the system itself, and there is little trouble from them.

And to help make sure it stays this way, for the last four years the Home Ministry has been carrying out a very successful populist social education campaign to imbue in the working classes the notion that tireless, uncomplaining toil, selfless sacrifice and the homespun wisdom of “knowing one’s place” are innate and sterling attributes of the Japanese race. Meshing beautifully with a recent groundswell nativist agrarian movement in Japanese literature, philosophy and social sciences that will help form a crystallization point for populist fascism over the next decade, the notion that the framework for the nation’s social harmony and economic strength was etched into the Japanese racial memory in some misty, distant rice paddy Camelot past appeals across the entire social spectrum of a citizenry whose collective identity as a unified nation is still barely two generations old
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.

There is no precedent for popular revolution in the Japanese political experience, and despite the occasional headline-grabbing misbehavior of left-wing “activists” of late, few Japanese in 1923 pay serious attention to these highbrow troublemakers and consider the possibility of any bona fide social upheaval remote. There is no reason for anyone to think that Japan’s political institutions, like the capital’s awe-inspiring edifices, are anything but rock-steady and secure.

As 11:57AM becomes 11:58AM on September 1, 1923, Aki Kaneko – the woman who will become Naoko’s mother nine weeks from now – is sweating in the lingering Tokyo summer blast furnace heat, lugging a baby-heavy tummy around as she prepares lunch for her family. Like a million other housewives in a million other Tokyo homes at this moment, she is boiling rice over an open flame in the woodburning
hibachi
kitchen hearth. Her daughter is helping to keep the fire fed and stoked, while her son, too young to be anything but underfoot at meal times, is playing with pressed tin toy soldiers on the tatami in the next room.

While
she cooks, Aki is having a conversation with her husband Kikutarō through the open door of his storefront workshop. The couple is discussing their yet unborn baby’s future and wondering how they are going to support another mouth to feed on an ivory carver’s income already stretched thin by the cost of maintaining a household and storefront in downtown Tokyo. Kikutarō’s unmarried younger sister Yumi has recently stated her desire to adopt the baby in the event that a girl is born. The custom of
kuchiberashi
(literally “reducing the number of mouths to feed”) is a perfectly acceptable instrument of family fiscal policy among Japanese commoners since time immemorial, and the sharing or parceling out of offspring to childless siblings – even in-laws
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– has been practiced among all classes of Japanese society for just as long. There will be no shame at all involved on the family’s part in acceding to Yumi’s wishes, and moreover, the move makes sound economic sense. Yumi – in her early thirties – is famous, beautiful and wealthy, and she will be able to provide a comfortable life for the child.

Kikutarō is trying to explain the merits of this family planning option to his wife when the Pacific and Eurasian continental plates collide with 8.0 Richter force somewhere
under the Kanto region of Central Japan.

The Kanekos and their children come to their senses dazed but miraculously alive as the dust is still settling. Extricating themselves from the heap of smashed timbers and roof tiles that was their home a moment before, they emerge into a dun gray wasteland of wreckage that stretches to the horizon in all directions. Plumes of fire spew from shattered gas pipes. Sparks leap from tangled snakes of fallen power lines hissing and popping in pools forming around broken water mains. Flames are already beginning to lick at the piles of rubble, and they will soon merge to form sweeping tides of ten, twenty, thirty-meter-high walls of fire that fan across the ruins of the metropolis devouring everything in their path in the most destructive urban conflagration the world will see until the manmade firestorms of World War II.