Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (53 page)

The Hiroshimas’ academic accomplishments were not their only “firsts” in their little farming community. The family was also the first in Tsuyazaki to have a radio – a gift from the aforementioned rich Osaka uncle – and it was not long before neighbors began paying visits to the Hiroshima’s living room at first merely to gawk at the new gadget. Later, they began gathering weekly to listen to popular radio dramas like
Naniwabushi
, a thrilling chop-em-up about yakuza and masterless samurai battles in a harbor town in old Edo. Most of the rest of the time, however, the living room – and thus control of the radio – was the exclusive domain of Tadao and Fumitake, who used the space as a study area.

On the morning of Monday, December 8, 1941, the boys were studying for midterm exams in the living room with the radio on when the regularly scheduled program was interrupted by a special news report. Books and pens were put down and ears pricked up as an urgent-sounding announcer launched into an impassioned account of a daring dawn raid on the American naval installation at Pearl Harbor. According to the report, most of the American Pacific Fleet was either sunk or in flames. Fumitake and Tadao looked at each wide-eyed before they started jumping up and down and shouting for anyone else within earshot to join them in the living room for the big news. As soon as the short broadcast ended, the boys ran excitedly to school, where a holiday mood prevailed. If the news was to be believed – and of course it was, coming from Imperial GHQ itself – the war against the Americans was now as good as won. It was a proud day to be Japanese.

The small farming community had even more reason to be proud several weeks later, when the names of the midget sub crews from the Pearl Harbor raid appeared in the papers. Not only were two of the crewmen from Kyūshū, but one of them – Ensign Shigemi Furuno – was a local boy, hailing from the next village down the coast from Tsuyazaki. The next day, the entire student body of the local junior high school marched several kilometers to pay their respects in front of the Furuno family home en masse.

In the Hiroshima household, no one was more electrified by all of these dramatic developments than Tadao, who had already been talking for
several years now about a possible career in naval aviation. A large part of Tadao’s motivation was due to the influence of his older brother Keijirō, who had entered the navy as an apprentice sailor in 1934 at the age of fourteen. An early candidate for the Yokaren program, he ended up being turned down for admission at the last minute, even though he had passed his initial test battery. Now in his seventh year of uniformed service as an aircraft engine maintenance specialist, he had long since gotten over the disappointment of not making the Yokaren cut. Tadao, however, had not, and now that the nation was at war, he vowed to make sure someone in the family realized his older brother’s dreams of flying. A family discussion on the subject resulted in approval of Tadao’s wishes His teachers at school were also very encouraging of these future plans, and felt that with his robust physical constitution and exceptional academic aptitude, he would be an excellent candidate for Yokaren training. However, they also suggested that it would be best for Tadao’s military career to be put on hold until he finished his fourth year of junior high so that he could qualify for the elite Kō Shū Yokaren course instead of going in now to the Otsu Shū course with younger boys, most of whom had only completed elementary school education.
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Tadao begrudgingly accepted the wisdom of this argument, which meant that for the next year or so, he was forced to limit his contributions to the war effort to patriotic essay homework assignments and watching war movies with Fumitake after school at the local cinema.

Of the many films the brothers watched together, by far the most impressive and exciting was
Hawai/Marē Oki Kaisen
(
Naval Battles of Hawaii and the Malay Straits
), a Ministry of the Navy Public Affairs Office-financed Toho Studios production released in December 1942 to commemorate the first anniversary of the events it depicted, namely, the Pearl Harbor raid and the sinking of the British
Repulse
and
Prince of Wales
by land-based torpedo bombers.
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Featuring major stars Denjirō Ōkōchi and Setsuko Hara, among other notables of Japanese cinema, the film electrified audiences throughout the nation with its superb special effects, which were supervised by SFX wizard Eiji Tsuburaya (later of “Godzilla” fame – he is the progenitor of the “monsters stomp Tokyo” pop-culture archetype).
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During his long year of waiting, Tadao studied for the competitive battery of tests he would be taking in February 1943. Special textbooks for Yokaren exam preparation were readily available in bookstores, and Tadao bought every one of them he could. In March 1943, his efforts paid off with an acceptance letter from the Nav
y Ministry. A month later Tadao left home for the new Yokaren campus at Kagoshima as a member of Cycle
Kō-
12.

*****

In the lonely months following Tadao’s departure for Yokaren, Fumitake also began talking about entering the military. The dominant sentiment behind this thinking was sincere and patriotic in nature, but there were also aspects keeping with a lifetime pattern of both emulation of, and competition with, his brother. His parents, however, were less than enthusiastic about the idea, their own patriotic sentiments notwithstanding. New developments on the home front had as much to do with their consternation as did concern for their son’s personal safety. The Hiroshima’s oldest son Junkō had married in February 1943, then gotten drafted by the army a mere five months later. Somewhat long in the tooth for a draftee, at the age of twenty-eight, Junkō was an unlikely candidate for induction at a point in the war when the armed services had not yet reached barrel-scraping desperation to fill their ranks. As an eldest son and newlywed, an appeal to the Draft Board for deferment – or at least for local civil defense assignment – would have had a good chance of reaching a sympathetic ear. But Junkō raised no such appeal, and he was duly sent to Manchuria after his basic training, leaving behind his new bride in the now eerily quiet Hiroshima household. With Keijirō a career navy man, Tadao off at Yokaren, and the calamity of Junkō’s induction, Fumitake was the only Hiroshima son safe and sound at home, and his parents had a strong desire to keep him there. But they would not be able to keep their son out of harm’s way forever. The draft age had been dropped from twenty to nineteen earlier in the year, and rumors were that it would drop again even lower in 1944. 

In the meantime, Fumitake spent his time on the sidelines going about his normal – if now considerably quieter – routine as a junior high school student. This all changed when junior high classes throughout the country were halted “for the duration” by official decree in March 1944 to free up labor for war industries and civil defense projects. In the case of Tsuyazaki Junior High School, its students were at first organized into work units digging reinforced bunkers and camouflaged revetments for aircraft at military air bases in the Fukuoka area. Later, the students were parceled out to local war industry plants. Fumitake and several of his friends were assigned to a factory making aircraft parts in the suburbs of Fukuoka City. The boys were pushed through a crash course in machinist’s skills, then put to work on day/night swing shifts tooling and asse
mbling molybdenum wing root
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frames for the Tōkai Type 11, a late war anti-sub patrol design that was a near-copy of the German Ju-88. Fumitake and other local boys commuted to the plant from their homes, but student workers mobilized from communities farther away were forced to live in crowded, uncomfortable dormitories near the factories. 

Like so many other Japanese boys of his wartime generation, Fumitake considered working in a factory a rather drab contribution to the war effort compared with being a professional soldier – preferably an officer – and he dreamed of securing an appointed to one of the service academies before going on to a stellar military or naval career. Letters and news from Tadao about his own progress in naval aviation only fanned the flames of Fumitake’s motivation, and as the grind of late 1944 wound into early 1945, he spent most his rare down time from the aircraft plant looking into application processes for the IMA and INA. He smiled to himself thinking of what a laugh it would be if he could pull rank as an officer on Tadao someday. Sweet revenge for all those lost sumo bouts in front of the living room radio!

Fumitake’s lifestyle at the time, however, was in no way conducive to the dedicated study necessary to pass the service academy tests. He had hardly cracked a book in the year since schools were shut down, and he had little time to prepare for his exams. But try he did, and despite giving it his best, he failed to get into either of the academies.  

Although his family was well off by Tsuyazaki standards, the tuition required to send him to a decent private university was beyond their means. Despondent, Fumitake sought advice from an old junior high teacher who suggested a rather unconventional but perfectly legitimate p
ath to an officer’s commission: veterinary school. What was more, Tsuyazaki Junior High had a few
suisen nyūgaku
(admission based on school recommendation) slots each year for the vet program at Miyazaki University, a campus of the national university system in eastern Kyūshū. The teacher felt that Fumitake was more than qualified.

Suddenly, Fumitake had hope again. Even with the school recommendation, there would still be the hurdle of a competitive entrance exam – which had only a ten percent passing rat
e – but he had grown up tending to the family’s farm animals, and he had also enjoyed and excelled at biology in junior high. He got in as much studying as he could, sat for the exam, and in March 1945, he was informed of his acceptance into the program.  

By the spring of 1945, students in academic majors considered non-essential for national defense – i.e., pretty much everything except for medicine (including veterinary), agriculture and hard sciences – had long since been drafted or mobilized, and Miyazaki University was a virtual ghost campus when Fumitake arrived in April to begin his studies. But even before the new semester started, he and the other few remaining students were put to work digging slit trenches around the university buildings and dormitories. No one really believed they would be needed, though, until Corsairs roared over campus one day in early May.

The raid came utterly without warning, even with an IJA airbase directly adjoining the university, and nary a Japanese plane rose to confront the marauders. Fumitake and his classmates huddled in the slit trenches as the American planes buzzed in low, dropping bombs and machine-gunning everything in sight. Bullets crisscrossed the grass and asphalt, stitching building walls, taking out windows. After a terrifying ten minutes of strafing and bombardment, the All Clear was finally given. Fumitake had just gotten up out of his foxhole and started to head back to the dormitory when one last American fighter screamed in to drop a bomb that landed directly on top of the foxhole he had just vacated. Fortunately for Fumitake and the other students in his group, it was a dud.  

Faculty and students spent the rest of the day assessing damage and cleaning up debris. Outside of some flying glass cuts, ringing ears and jangled nerves, no one was injured. The facilities had taken a pounding, however, with the most regrettable casualty being the campus food storehouse, where fresh vegetables and several weeks worth of rice were ruined by the aerosolized contents of a napalm canister that had punched a hole through the roof of the building and burst on impact but failed to ignite. Everything stank so badly of the jellied gasoline compound that not a morsel could be salvaged. Even the campus livestock would not touch it.

Sporadic American strafing continued throughout the first semester, and Fumitake was relieved when summer vacation came along at the end of July. He was eager to get home, take a break from homework and air raids for a while. But most important, he wasnted to see if there was any news of Tadao. The last word he had received from his favorite brother was this note on the back of an official navy postcard:

Fumitake,

I’ve returned from my assignment safe and sound.

I’m doing fine, as always, so please don’t worry about me.

We must strive to fulfill the duties we have sworn to perform.

Please take care of yourself.

Tadao

July (date censored) 1945, Hyakurihara Air Base, Ibaragi Prefecture

The message was unusual in its cryptic brevity, for Tadao typically wrote fairly lengthy and descriptive letters and cards. Also, the mention of “returning” from an assignment did not make sense to Fumitake, because as far as he knew, Tadao was where he had been for the last eleven months – in Ibaragi Prefecture, north of Tokyo, assigned to the 51
st
Squadron of the elite 601
st
KKT as a Suisei dive bomber pilot. The mystery was solved when Fumitake went back to Tsuyazaki and his parents told him about their last meeting with Tadao.

Two months earlier, a postcard from Tadao with a Kajiki, Kagoshima Prefecture postmark had arrived at the house. Mr. and Mrs. Hiroshima had not seen their son for over a year by this point, and were all too aware from the newspapers of the battle then raging in Okinawa just a couple of hundred kilometers south of Kagoshima. If Tadao was on temporary duty there, they had thought, it could only mean that he was about to ship out. A visit to Ibaragi over the past year had been impossible because of the sheer distance and tight restrictions on civilian rail travel, but a trip to Kagoshima – although still a considerable journey under wartime conditions – was within the realm of reason. With a little luck, the stationmaster could be persuaded to sell them some tickets. After all, there was no telling whether or not this was going to be the last time they would ever get to see their son alive again.