Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (51 page)

“No,” the farmer said, openly exasperated. “Japan lost.”

Naoko
remembers her knees giving out slightly as she absorbed the impact and import of this information. A sudden barrage of angry thoughts and panicked disbelief buzzed through her brain like shards of broken window glass:
Why had the divine wind not blown? Had the gods turned their backs on Japan?
How could the Americans have won when the tokkō had made such magnificent sacrifices? All of those thousands of young men dead…Akio…
As the reality sank in, she experienced a falling sensation not unlike what she had felt when told of Akio’s death two months earlier. But the old farmer’s gravelly voice snapped her back to the here and now.

“My wife and I are leaving tonight,” he said. “Heading deeper inland, to stay with relatives. Too close to the coast here. The Americans are bound to pass through...If I were you, I wouldn’t try venturing out of the stable anymore like you’ve been doing recently. No telling what might happen…And keep those windows shut.”

For the next two weeks, Naoko followed the farmer’s advice to the letter, even after the last of her food ran out. But just as she was beginning to wonder when she would begin succumbing to hunger, a breathless Shirō arrived at the barn with an empty wheelbarrow on the evening of September 1. He told Naoko that the Americans were beginning to roll through the Tokyo area, and that there were no reports of atrocities. Using rusty but still serviceable mercenary’s pidgin left over from his Manchurian adventurer days, he had even talked to an advance party jeepload of Americans who had passed through Kōzu the previous day. They were uncouth and a bit cocky, he thought, but he also sensed that they were basically decent men – not the rape/pillage/burn type he was all too familiar with from his own soldiering days on the continent. There was nothing to worry about. All of those panicky warnings on the radio and in the papers had been nonsense. Things were beginning to settle down. It was safe to go home, and that was where he planned to take Naoko now.

Shirō
packed Naoko’s baggage and bedrolls, and Naoko took a seat on top of the pile with her geta-shod feet hanging over the front edge of the wheelbarrow. It was hardly the most dignified mode of transportation for an officer’s widow, but it was functional. Without further ado, Shirō pushed his daughter-in-law down the mountain to Gotenba Station to return to what was left of their lives.

*****

Naoko gave birth to a baby boy on Christmas Day, 1945. They named him Yūkyū (“Eternal”), in honor of his father’s tokkō unit, the 51
st
Shinbu Yūkyūtai. The birth was a beacon of hope in a dark season, and over the next year, the Kōzu household was transformed into an entirely Yūkyū-centric universe. Shirō and Yumi became doting grandparents no one could have ever imagined them becoming in their freewheeling days as Tokyo
boulevardiers
. Naoko vowed and strove to raise a son of whom the spirit of her dead husband could be proud. Although the child had been born undersized and premature, everyone was certain that the proud Motoki blood in his veins would make him grow up to be a strong young man like his father someday.

Hopes were high for one happy year, but the falling leaves of late autumn portended another dark season in store for the family. One cold morning in Dece
mber 1946, Yūkyū stopped breathing while being nursed. The cause of death was never determined. His ashes were buried with his father’s fingernail cutting and epaulets in the Motoki family grave.

After Yūkyū’s death,
Naoko ran away from everything and everyone in Kōzu, heading back to the big city to try to get her dancing career back on track, but she could not land a wealthy sponsor, and the long arm of Shirō ended up reeling her back into orbit around his household. Under the sticky tangle of traditional Japanese familial obligations, Naoko – as Akio’s widow – was now duty-bound to take care of Shirō for the rest of his natural life, regardless of the status of his relationship with Yumi. 

Shirō
and Yumi drifted apart after the war, although as is with all great loves, the flame of their own never quite died out completely. Shirō was a frequent if irregular resident in the rectory of the Rankanji in Asakusa, Tokyo, the Buddhist temple where Yumi lived out the last two decades of her life as the temple abbot. Yumi died in 1964 at the age of seventy-three – for most of her adult life, she had ignored the advice of nearly every doctor she had ever seen to cut down on her drinking. Naoko-san will always think that this was her final undoing.

Shirō
lived to seventy-nine, hard-drinking and being cared for by different Tokyo women of wealth and taste to the last of his days. He died at the Rankanji in 1972 shortly after tape-recording his memoirs in a series of interviews with biographer Seigo Hayashi. People who knew him say that he never stopped grieving for Akio and Yūkyū.

Naoko
ended up marrying another IMA man, Sadaharu Iguchi, in 1949, and raising two sons in a comfortable Tokyo home while her husband learned the ropes of the metallurgy business from Shirō. During the 1950s, the father and son-in-law team developed a heat-resistant alloy for railway car bogie springs and, for several fat decades, sold their product under an exclusive contract to the Japan National Railways System. Iguchi took over the family company when the old man began to slow down, and it was still going strong when Iguchi himself died of a stroke in 1979. Bad investments and a failure to diversify, however, meant that the virtually single-client company would not survive the double punch of the privatization of Japan National Railways in 1987 and the crash of the bubble economy a few years later.

And yet the
Motokis continue to survive – and thrive – in Tokyo. Naoko-san’s sons have successful careers, and her grandchildren have all graduated from top universities. There is yet plenty to live for.

Although twice-widowed
Naoko-san has been alone now for a quarter of a century, she refuses to let the body blows life has given her over the years get her down. She continued her buyō dancing well into her seventies, and now keeps herself occupied with other hobbies, a busy social life and frequent tokkō memorial activities. She cried herself out over Akio and Yūkyū long enough to put all of her attendant ghosts to rest. One important gesture toward this closure was burying Yūkyū’s
ihai
name tablet near the ruins of the old pilots’ barracks at Chiran with Reiko Akabane in 1974. Another was in 1976, when the Chiran Tokkō Heiwa Kaikan (“Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots”) museum opened.

“The moment I walked into the hall and saw that huge mosaic of the ten’nyo angels cradling the dead tokkō pilot in their arms and lifting him to heaven
[255]
, I just sobbed like a baby,” Naoko says, recalling her first visit to the Chiran shrine. “That was the moment I knew everything was all right with Akio. I know he’s happy – wherever he is – and that he is watching me and looking after me.”

“Of course, I know my second husband is watching, too,” she adds with a conspiratorial smirk. “Sometimes I worry about how I’m going to handle the introductions when we all finally meet.”

I ask Naoko if she hopes Akio’s plane was the one that hit the American destroyer on May 11, 1945. Ever the quick tactician, Naoko gives me a brief sidewise glance here, as if she is a bit wary that I may be laying a trap with the question. Then she tells me that nobody knows whose plane from the 51
st
Shinbu Yūkyūtai hit the American ship that day, but that yes, she hopes it was Akio’s. This is not, she is careful to stress, because it would mean Akio could get some licks in against the Americans – as he had always vowed to do – but because hitting a ship was what he was trying to do at the moment he drew his last breath. It was, literally, his death wish. Naoko-san says it is nice to think that Akio might rest easier having accomplished his mission, so whom would it hurt to believe that is the way it was?

Although
Naoko still mourns her dead, she does not dwell on them enough to make her miserable. She grieved long enough like that, and long enough turned out to be a lot of years.

“Life is too short to spend being sad,”
Naoko says. “Some people have never recovered from the war. Losing loved ones ruined the rest of their own lives. I don’t know how they’ve gone all this time like that. As for me, I want to be happy in the time I have left. And I know that’s the way Akio would have wanted it for me.”

T
he weather on the afternoon of June 18, 2002 is typical for Tokyo’s rainy season – clammy, gray and wet. Despite the rain, hundreds of thousands of Tokyoites – mostly young people – are gathering in front of huge outdoor LED screens in parks and main thoroughfares throughout the city to watch the Japanese national team play Turkey in the semi-quarterfinals of the World Cup soccer tournament. Millions of others are about to watch the event on TVs in homes, classrooms or offices. But at a small Buddhist temple in the quiet Setagaya Ward neighborhood of Geba, a group of twenty or so people is gathering to participate in a decidedly more low-key affair.

Located on the west end of Setagaya, Geba is a charming community of narrow, twisting, tree-lined streets, parks, low-rise luxury apartment buildings and impressive private homes – a verdant oasis in the midst of the hyperactive concrete sprawl of the metropolis. Not surprisingly for such desirable residential turf, the cost of living in the area does not come cheap. Even with the precipitous post-Bubble Economy drop in real estate values in this and other Tokyo districts, it is daunting to imagine the fiscal astringency necessary for a middle-class family to make ends meet here, and a passing perusal of BMWs and Jaguars in driveways indicates that unless retirees and people in company-sponsored dormitories count, the breed is rare in these parts. From all appearances, residence in the area is effectively closed to all but an eclectic mélange of wealthy professionals and old folks lucky enough to have staked a piece of ground here before land prices went into the stratosphere in the 1970s.

Another neighborhood “resident” that timed its pre-real estate boom arrival well is the venue for today’s congregation. Setagaya Kan’non is a Buddhist temple established with a modest investment in 1951 that now sits on real estate worth about ten million dollars. The half-acre temple compound consists of a substantial and very ornately carved wooden archway, a few modestly sized one-room wooden chapels, a rectory for Abbot Kenshō Ōta and family, a community house, and a mini pagoda. Outside of the community house and rectory, the compound’s structures are built in a highly decorative, Chinese-influenced Kyoto style, and judging from the breathtaking craftsmanship and heavy elemental weathering of the buildings, a reasonable guess would date their construction to Shogunate days. But as we have noted in our earlier explorations of the Yasukuni facilities, exposure to the humid, polluted Tokyo climate makes natural building materials appear very old, very quickly. This mechanism has painted Setagaya Kan’non’s masonry with damp moss and soot streaks and bleached its woodwork to give the temple an antiquated dignity belying its mere fifty-odd years of existence.

In addition to all the tastefully weathered stonework, there is also an abundance of decorative statuary here – roaring mythical beasts, stone snow lanterns, and presiding over the temple’s well-stocked carp pond with the languid poise of an Angkor Wat love goddess, a bronze statue of Kan’non-sama, the hermaphrodite Buddhist deity of mercy. The statue is a popular draw to the temple during entrance exam season, for it is said that test-taking hopefuls who pray before it can get into the school of their choice, even if their aim is a bit higher than their academic ability merits. The pond itself is also a perennial favorite, especially for the local children who come to feed or pester its captive creatures, secure in the common knowled
ge that nothing short of outright fish rustling will rouse a protest from the ever-convivial Abbot Ōta and his mild-mannered son.

On the eighteenth of each month, Setagaya Kan’non has for the last half-century also been the destination of a very different variety of regular visitor: those who attend the monthly memorial services held in the temple’s Tokkō Chapel, a one-room tatami-floored structure built around a raised wooden platform on the northern edge of the compound. Built in 1952 (the year the Americ
an occupation ended), the chapel owes its existence in large part to the efforts of the late Lieutenant General Michio Sugawara (IMA ’10).

Despite Sugawara’s selfless largesse, assessments of his legacy have not been exclusively favorable over the years.
Beyond his postwar role as benefactor to Setagaya Kan’non, the general carved a larger slice of history for himself as the commander of the 6th Air Army and one of the chief architects of the Okinawa Ten-Gō tokkō campaign. The nature of this final command alone would have been enough to shadow his legacy with a certain measure of controversy, but it was the simple fact of his own survival that ended up causing him the most grief. While many of his general officer and flag-rank tokkō
commander peers committed suicide at the end of the war, Sugawara refused to make such a gesture, thereby earning him the lasting enmity of many veterans and war-bereaved. He endured sporadic verbal assaults, published character assassinations,
[256]
and other forms of harassment for the last four decades of his long life.