Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (48 page)

*****

By early 1941, Shirō and Yumi had been under the same roof for over five years, with Naoko tossed into the complicated arrangement as a full-time member of this common law “family” since the end of her buyō apprenticeship two years earlier. Akio, however, was now out of the house, having been accepted at the IMA in fulfillment of the last major phase of Shirō’s master plan for the course of his life. Shirō could not have been happier about this, and was walking on air for weeks after the acceptance letter came through.

Shirō
had other reasons to believe that things were looking up. He was still doing well with his hardware enterprise, and he was fully aware of the opportunity implied in the warclouds that were beginning to gather on the eastern horizon. He could not help but be excited by the prospects of wild profits for a businessman savvy and bold enough to grab up his share of the lucrative military and naval contracts in the works. After hearing from friends in the Navy Ministry grapevine that there was going to be a need for extensive naval dry-dock and other anchorage facilities in the Borneo/Lingga Roads area in the Southwest Pacific “before the year was out,” Shirō planned a trip to the region to scout out potential investment opportunities. One look at a map was enough to know that, with its proximity to oil and other strategic material-rich British and Dutch colonial holdings in Singapore and Indonesia, the area was sure to be a major naval thoroughfare once the shooting started. If Shirō played his cards right, he could make a fortune, but his financial portfolio – impressive as it was – was still not enough to provide the kind of pump-priming scratch such major heavy industrial investments would require.

Shirō
’s solution to his wherewithal conundrum was to find himself a well-off silent partner, pick up stakes and move to Southeast Asia in the spring of 1941. Yumi would only see Shirō sporadically through the war years, but whenever he darkened their Tokyo doorway, she let him in, no questions asked. She had long since accepted that in taking up with Shirō, she bought into the whole package – warts and all.

While
Shirō the businessman was excited about the profits to be made in coming months and years, Shirō the old mercenary knew even before the war started that it bordered on the suicidal in terms of Japan’s chances for success (or lack thereof). Naoko-san remembers vividly the excited conversation around the Takadanobaba dinner table on December 14, 1941, during one of Shirō’s infrequent visits back to Japan from the mainland. Tokyo was still abuzz from the electrifying radio and newspaper reports of the Pearl Harbor raid a week earlier, and no one was more excited than Akio, who was at the house for his weekly Sunday evening visit after a quick subway hop from the IMA campus. Yumi and Naoko tittered with praise and approval as he spoke about how he was itching to run off and get in a few licks against the Yankees and Brits while he still could, seeing as how Japan’s victory could not be much longer in coming.

“You don’t actually think we’re going to win, do you?”
Shirō said.   

The pronouncement started a brief three-on-one argument that
Shirō swatted down with facts and common sense his opponents did not want to believe, but were nevertheless unable to refute. The rest of the evening passed in a gloomy pall until Akio left to make it back to the IMA for lights-out.

Exactly five months later, on the afternoon of April 14, 1942, dun-brown twin-engine American bombers skimming the rooftops of downtown Tokyo emphasized
Shirō’s prophecies with the resounding thuds of five-hundred-pound high explosive bombs. A few days later, a cable arrived from Singapore – Shirō wanted Yumi and Naoko out of town ASAP, and he told them to put the Takadanobaba house up for sale immediately, charging a reasonable price so it would go fast. Yumi found a new place in the fishing and tangerine-farming village of Kōzu, a stingy strip of pebbly soil and sand dune pinched between mountains and the Pacific Ocean about thirty kilometers southwest of the capital.

For lifelong big city girls like
Yumi and Naoko, evacuation to a burg like Kōzu was a sentence to purgatory, and they hated it immediately. While the low cost of living in the area meant that Shirō’s cash went a lot farther than it did in downtown Tokyo, there was nothing to spend it on here. And although the women’s status as members of a VIP household (Shirō had moved his nail factory and metallurgy lab to Kōzu several years earlier, and was a respected businessman in the area) meant they never had to wait on line at the village marketplace, they were never made to feel at home. The locals were as roughhewn and unwelcoming as the landscape from which their tightly-knit community sprang.

While the move to Kōzu put a serious cramp on social life opportunities for
Yumi and Naoko, the town’s nearby location to the IMA’s new Zama campus meant that the weekly tradition of Akio’s Sunday evening dinner visits would be preserved, and no one was happier about this than the young cadet himself. But it was not for Yumi’s homemade cooking that Akio counted the hours between visits home – it was for Yumi’s stepdaughter.

Akio
had been madly in love with Naoko since Shirō moved in with Yumi in 1935. Yumi – who after all had never given much motherly attention even to her own stepdaughter – was of course too caught up in Shirō and her own scene to pay much mind to Akio, who had to look elsewhere for doting female attention. In his case, he turned to Naoko. Given Akio’s upbringing in a mental and physical landscape dominated by the void left by his largely absentee stepfather, perhaps it was only natural that he latched on to Naoko like he did. During the six years the foursome spent under the same roof, he had followed her around like a lovesick puppy.

Naoko
– six months her admirer’s senior – never minded the attention, and in addition to getting an ego-boost out of the adoration, found Akio cute, in a boyish kind of way. She remembers him as being tall, lanky and long-necked even as a twelve-year-old. Although highly intelligent, he was also very naïve, with a non-confrontational, introspective personality. Always intensely focused on his own projects – usually studying or building balsa and paper airplane models – he never joked and rarely smiled or laughed. Often, his gullibility proved too tempting for Naoko’s playful (and occasionally mean) sense of humor to pass up.

Soon after
Shirō and his stepson moved into Yumi’s house, Akio wrote a gushing love letter to Naoko and slipped it under her bedroom door. That night at dinner – much to Akio’s disbelief and horror – Naoko pulled the letter out of her kimono sleeve and began waving it around with a big, triumphant grin on her face before proceeding to read its contents. After only a few lines of Naoko’s recitation, Shirō turned beet red and bolted upright. Reaching over the table, he grabbed Akio by the collar and pulled him into the adjoining living room, slamming the sliding door shut behind them. Naoko and Yumi heard a shrieked command of “Spread your legs!”, followed by the sound of punches and slapped flesh as Shirō launched into a long lecture about young men who wanted to go to the IMA, and how they did not fritter away their time and energies daydreaming about women.

“If you like the girl, tell her like a man and do something about it,”
Shirō shouted between smacks. “Do you think I’ve gone through all of this trouble to get you into good schools so you can sit around writing love letters like a sissy? Is that what you are?! Is that the kind of boy I have raised?!”

After ten minutes or so, the living room door flew open, and
Naoko found herself looking down Shirō’s stabbing index finger.

“And don’t think you’re getting off easy,”
Shirō shouted. “If Akio doesn’t get into the Academy, I’m holding YOU responsible, too.”

As she heard
Akio getting thrashed that night, Naoko’s maternal instincts kicked into overdrive – no doubt fueled by a guilty conscience – and she swore to herself that she would take care of the boy. From then on, although she was never really able to reciprocate his romantic sentiments, she was more inclined to let him indulge these feelings, and she responded to his affection if not with equivalent ardor then at least with a comforting and protective tenderness. In return, Akio’s love for her only grew as the years passed. From his mid-teens, he often broached the subject of marriage. Naoko at first took this as some sort of joke, but the pledges of undying affection and gushing loveletters continued even after Akio’s acceptance to the IMA, and she gradually realized he was serious. One day during his graduation leave in 1944, Akio proposed to Naoko while the couple strolled by the Kōzu seaside. But this time, instead of laughing off the subject as she always did, she accepted.

“He was going off to war,”
Naoko-san tells me. “Under the circumstances, I thought sending him off happy and fulfilled was the least I could do. I felt sorry for him.”

  While
Yumi was less than enthusiastic about her stepdaughter’s plans, Shirō was delighted, and immediately set things in motion after steamrolling his partner’s objections. Bringing about the marriage, however, was not simply a matter of giving parental consent and hauling the young couple down to City Hall to exchange vows. There were social complications involved, but these had nothing to do with the mercurial familial arrangement in the Kōzu household, which actually raised few eyebrows under the mores of the era. Rather, the problem was with Naoko, and the Army Ministry regulation that said Regular Army commissioned officers could not marry women with less than three years of junior high school or equivalent education.

In
Naoko’s case, a three-year apprenticeship as a Nihonbashi dancing girl was not going to clear the army’s spousal qualification criteria. Moreover, she had barely cracked a book of any kind in years and had little or no math or science background, so any plan of action involving an entrance examination was doomed from the start. Of course, even in the outside chance that Naoko could pass an entrance exam, the idea of a twenty-year-old enrolling in junior high for a three-year-stint with prepubescent classmates was preposterous. But Shirō – ever the hustling inventor – was dogged in his pursuit of pragmatic alternatives. After some inquiries and spadework, he found a Ministry of Education-accredited sewing academy
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near Kōzu that was willing – for a price – to slip Naoko into the next senior class so that she could graduate in March 1945. Shirō sealed the deal with a handshake and an elegant grandfather clock for the school auditorium. Naoko – at least on paper – was going to be a qualified seamstress.

Naoko
was by heart and trade a dancer, and knew and cared about as much for sewing as she did for integral calculus. But these motivational concerns became moot when the entire student body was mobilized along with most of the other young women in the Kōzu area for war volunteer work in a nearby naval provisions plant in the fall of 1944. Naoko got her seamstress license on schedule the following March while being unable to as much as darn a sock, but she had never bought into the pretense that these credentials were the goal of her “education” in the first place. She had a diploma and was thus now qualified to marry Akio. Mission accomplished. While waiting for Akio’s next visit home, Naoko worked seven days a week with her classmates and neighbors compressing and canning potato starch and rice for the navy.

Akio
, in the meantime, had undergone a topsy-turvy first year as a commissioned officer. Although he had originally branched aviation while at IMA, his biological mother – whom he had neither seen nor heard from for the better part of two decades – suddenly reappeared in his life during his second year at the academy and pulled strings to get him branched armor, a posting she evidently felt offered her son a more reassuring life-expectancy than an assignment as a fighter pilot
[252]
. Heartbroken, Akio nevertheless pushed on with his tank training, and was looking at a post-Armor Officer’s Basic Course assignment to Manchuria when the army announced a last-minute call to Class of ’44 IMA grads for aviation branch volunteers. Akio jumped at this chance to re-alter his destiny, and this go around, the timing left no opening for his mother to pull any more strings behind his back. He was going to be a pilot, and that was that.

Akio
was accepted into a special IMA grad-only Tokubetsu Sōjū Minarai Shikan (Tokusō) course in the fall of 1944, but by the time he had gotten his wings, virtually the only assignments left for newly army pilots were to tokkō units. In a bitter twist of irony, his mother’s interference in his career – resulting in the delay of his flight training – had virtually guaranteed such an assignment. If Akio had been branched as originally scheduled, he could have at least had an outside chance of being assigned to a regular unit, or even ending up on the same flight instructor early career track that saved the life of his IMA classmate Iwao Fukagawa.

****

Kōzu was rainy and windy on the night of Tuesday, April 9, 1945. Shirō – now home permanently to mind the nail factory after losing all of his Southeast Asia properties to the shifting fortunes of war – was eating a late supper with Yumi and Naoko in the tatami-floored living room when the low, mournful moan of Kōzu’s air raid siren floated up from town. No aircraft engines could be heard, but blackout rules were blackout rules, so the lights were turned off and the curtains drawn. The meal was finished in a meditative silence by the light of a single candle. Shirō drank shōchu and smoked cigarettes in the flickering shadows while Yumi and Naoko cleared the dishes.

Around ten o’clock, the threesome heard the crunch of heavy, tired footfalls outside on the
gravel walkway leading to the house. Naoko assumed it was the old man who volunteered as the local air warden making his usual blackout rounds. A moment later, there was a knock at the entrance, followed by the rattling sound of the wood and glass door being slid open. Then there was a male voice – but instead of the old air warden giving his customary “All clear,” it was a young man’s voice saying “
Tadaima
.” (“I’m home”).