Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (57 page)

As we sit down and regard each other across the table, I sense immediately that this morning’s session is going to be different from the others I have conducted for my project. The two-on-one arrangement has a formal, almost job interview feeling to it that I find inhibiting and not conducive to the kind of deeply personal interaction that I have sought in other sessions. Perhaps this is intentional on my subjects’ part. Not knowing me from Adam, frankly, it is certainly their prerogative if they wish to keep things businesslike. I wonder, however, if there is not also a mutually censorial, policing function at work here between the two old men. I know from experience that opportunities for candid responses from Japanese war veterans are severely hampered by the presence of other veterans within earshot. Both politics and peer pressure in such situations ensure that remarks and conjecture never stray far from the party line
, with critical comments about tokkō philosophy, Japanese war aims, and/or Japanese nationalism most definitely taboo.

While I am not holding out much hope for any personal bombshells of the kind Toshio Yoshitake,
Naoko Motoki, and some of my other interview subjects have laid at my plate, I have every reason to believe that Toshiharu Konada and Harumi Kawasaki also have important stories to tell, for both men spent nearly a year of their young adulthood some six decades ago as members of the most elite and secretive tokkō unit of them all – the Kaiten human torpedo corps.

T
oshiharu Konada’s ancestral home is the old fiefdom of Asano (of Forty-seven Rōnin
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fame) in what is modern-day Hiroshima Prefecture. Although his forebears were not samurai themselves, they were about as close as farmers could get to membership in the power elite, commissioned by the local samurai clan as sword-bearing hereditary village chiefs in the farming community they called home throughout the Edo period and up until the end of the nineteenth century. lord

The household thrived for the first three decades of the Meiji Era under the broad new range of social and economic freedoms they could enjoy as a result of the Emperor’s beneficence (or political acumen, whichever was the case). But ironically, the civic responsibilities that came along with Meiji’s privilege package proved, in a sense, to be the undoing of the family’s pastoral bliss. True, social reforms abolished the centuries-old four-tiered social caste system, made all Japanese ostensibly equal before the law, and gave the Konadas and millions of other commoners the surnames their descendants use to this day. But the reforms also meant that with the abolition of the formal warrior caste, millions of young men across the land were now liable for compulsory military service. Konada-san’s grandfather was one of them, and his conscription into the army during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 sent his family’s agricultural fortunes into a tailspin. After his discharge, he was forced to sell off the farm to cover debts that had accrued during his absence. With family ties to the soil they had tilled for centuries now irrevocably severed, the Konadas migrated to the port city of Kure, Hiroshima Prefecture, where they eventually opened a dry goods shop.

Konada-san’s father, Toshio, was born in 1899, shortly after the family homestead move. Intellectually gifted, young Toshio showed no inclination whatsoever of wanting to pursue a mercantile career. In early adolescence, he made known his desire to attend college someday, but family finances precluded the private higher education route that was still the exclusive domain of the nation’s wealthier classes at the time. This did not, however, mean that his future was locked into a path of dry goods sales. In 1917, Toshio Konada took an alternative route up and away from the fabric rolls and finger-worn abacus of the family store by sitting for and passing the rigorous entrance exams for the naval academy at Etajima.

Toshiharu Konada was born in 1924 at the sprawling naval base complex at Kure in Hiroshima Prefecture, where his father was stationed after his Etajima graduation. Although Kure was near the ancestral home, his father’s frequent transfers meant that Toshiharu spent little time in the area while he was growing up. By the time he reached sixth grade, the introspective, serious youngster had already endured five changes in locale and elementary school. The experience left its mark on the boy’s character, and he learned at an early age that dedicating himself to intellectual pursuits and his studies could be a source of stability in his life that his physical environment could not always provide. Although always quick at making new friends after yet another big move, he was just as happy – if not happier – to be curled up on the tatami at home with thick “grown up” books on subjects like astronomy, geography, world history and biology. 

Toshiharu’s scholastic efforts and natural intellectual gifts meant that many promising future paths were open for him as he approached the beginning of young adulthood, but the career in medical research he wanted to pursue was not one of them.  Born into a more peaceful era, a gifted student like Toshiharu could very well have been able to realize this goal, but for a navy brat in 1930s Japan, the dream would have to remain just that. With war raging in China and conflict with the West looming in the near future, these were not times for self-centered pursuits. A more honorable and patriotic alternative career path would be to follow in his father’s footsteps and take the Etajima admissions tests.  

Toshiharu sat for the first round of entrance exams at the Etajima campus in August 1940, and was informed of his passing score on November 3, then a national holiday in honor of Emperor Meiji’s birthday.
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The Konadas were overjoyed at the news and proud that their son had made the ten percent cutoff for the academic testing phase, but Toshiharu was not yet a shoo-in. He still had to get through Etajima’s exacting physical and medical tests in the last week of November, a final stage in the application that would washout yet another 50 percent of admissions hopefuls.

After getting his clean bill of health from the navy doctors, Toshiharu stayed in temporary dorm facilities in the Etajima Officers’ Club with the other successful candidates. On December 1, the group marched through the academy gates as members of the new INA Class of 1943. Toshiharu had worked long and hard to get this far, but his hard work was only beginning.

Japanese naval academy midshipmen followed a challenging scholastic regimen similar to that of the military academy, concentrating on core curriculum subjects for the first eighteen months of their three-year course of studies, then more specialized naval subjects during the second half of their Etajima careers. In addition to having to cope with a daunting academic course load, the middies were also constantly drilled in kendo, judo and other martial arts to strengthen fighting spirit and build character. Although Konada-san recalls living conditions at the academy as being “relatively comfortable,” they were not by any measure luxurious. Midshipmen lived forty to a room with supervised activity filling every day from reveille to lights-out. As Konada-san describes it, “We had nary a minute of privacy in three years.” Although physical hazing had been officially banned some years before, the senior midshipmen still kept a stern eye on the underclassmen, and screw-ups could expect to be dealt with accordingly. 

Despite its privations, midshipman life was nothing like the Spartan and dehumanizing routine of straitjacketed conformity endured by cadet peers in the IMA. The Japanese Navy had long prided itself on its strongly British-influenced culture – especially among the commissioned ranks – and Etajima put almost as much emphasis on developing the “gentleman” in their charges as it did on the “officer” aspects of their education in preparing them for careers as naval professionals. Instruction in English and other foreign languages, etiquette and even Western table manners was still required for Etajima midshipmen long after Japan’s xenophobic ideological turn in the late 1930s, when the Army Ministry had banned such subjects from the IMA curriculum as decadent foreign influences.
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Etajima graduates were traditionally expected to be cosmopolitan, genteel, well-rounded officers capable of serving in any capacity the nation required of them, including overseas diplomatic assignments as junior naval attachés. But as the Class of 1943 entered its final year of instruction, postings for cocktail party patrol at peaceful embassies were few and far between for new ensigns, even in the extreme unlikelihood that any of them desired such an assignment while their brothers were fighting and dying. As graduation neared, most of the midshipmen were painfully aware that Japan was losing the war, and that as academy men, they would be called upon to set the example for the enormous sacrifices that would be required of the nation to deny victory to the Americans.

“Even though we may have known that we couldn’t win the war,” Konada-san recalls, expressing a notion I have heard from many other Japanese veterans, “there was no way that we could accept losing it.”

For Konada and the overwhelming majority of his classmates, something had to be done to turn around the nation’s fortunes and save the slipping war effort, and air power was seen as having the best chance of accomplishing this. Accordingly, the overwhelmingly popular post-graduation service branch destination was aviation, preferably carrier borne fighters in a hot combat zone. As the navy’s elite, Etajima graduates were traditionally awarded their first choice of branch assignments, but in this case, competition for flight training was so intense that in the end only fifty percent of applicants got slots. Much to his chagrin, Konada was not among this select group. The Navy Ministry had decided that his fine analytical mind could be put to best use in the fire computer and control room of a warship.

After a two-month training ship shakedown cruise with other INA classmates bound for surface units, Officer Candidate Konada was assigned as a gunnery officer on the thirteen-thousand-ton heavy cruiser
Ashigara
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, joining her crew at the Lingga Roads anchorage in November 1943. A frustratingly quiet nine months of sea duty followed. While seemingly every other ship in the navy was fighting with its back to the wall for the nation’s very survival, the
Ashigara
plied the tranquil East Indies and Japanese home waters in uneventful patrol duty interspersed with interminable refits and upgrades at various Southeast Asian and Japanese ports.

The last straw for Konada’s patience regarding his current assignment came when the
Ashigara
sat out the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the largest naval engagement of the war by that point (Leyte Gulf was still four months away). As reports from the disaster off Saipan came in mere hours after the battle, Konada realized that serving Japan to the best of his abilities meant serving her somewhere other than the plotting table of the
Ashigara
’s FC&C room. Although it was not normally in his temperament to bother superiors with personal matters, he had no other choice in his present situation but to send a request up the chain of command for transfer to other duties. He was rewarded for his troubles with orders to report no-later-than August 15, 1944 to Submarine School at Ōtake, Hiroshima Prefecture.

A
lthough I use the term with reservations in attempting to describe my first impression of an eighty-year-old Japanese man, Harumi Kawasaki strikes me as streetwise. Not in a hustling sense, but more like someone who knows all the tricks and angles and can fend off an opponent’s attempt to play them with a dexterous if somewhat world-weary ease. He also exudes a healthy sense of the ridiculous, letting on that he is clued in on the cosmic joke with a slightly iconoclastic – almost impish – energy in his personality and manner of speech that is a neat counterpoint to Konada-san’s staid and august aura. It is immediately apparent that Kawasaki-san will be neither bamboozled nor steamrolled by a persistent interviewer. Nor will he be misquoted – I realize that I am in the presence of a master tactician when, with a sly grin that reminds me of Spanky about to give a hotfoot to a truant officer in some Little Rascals episode, he pulls a tape-recorder from his shoulder bag and places it on the table between us at the start of our interview.

*****

Kawasaki-san was born in 1924 as the third of what would soon be five children of a Kōbe, Hyōgo Prefecture family. Changes in the home situation resulted in the children being put in the care of their paternal grandfather in Yamaguchi Prefecture while they were still small. The new arrangement worked about as well as could be expected for a multi-generational extended family household in Depression-era rural Japan, but it was painfully evident even to these small children that their grandfather – who was also helping to take care of their uncle’s family – was stretched thin by the arrangement both physically and financially.

In explaining why he struck out on his own at the age of twelve, Kawasaki-san mentions kuchiberashi – as so many other of my interview subjects have – a phrase referring to the once acceptable practice of easing the financial burden on a family by reducing the number of mouths it had to feed. In most cases, this meant biological parents giving away “superfluous” children (i.e. any other than first-born sons) for adoption, almost always to relatives or acquaintances. In the case of more desperate or unscrupulous families, another version of kuchiberashi saw children sold off to traveling dealers who trawled the impoverished countryside to keep the assembly lines of the nation’s factories – and the pleasure quarters of its cities – well-stocked with vigorous young bodies.