Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (63 page)

In the midst of all this frenzied activity, an errant sailor spilled a sizable amount of gasoline on a boat that, for some reason, already had its engine running. There was a spark in the wrong place at the wrong time, and before anyone knew it, the boat was up in flames. No one needed a lengthy lecture about the dangers of combining fire with overflowing gas tanks and high explosives, and as the flames rose higher, there was a tangled khaki gaggle of asses and elbows as the maintenance crews and boat pilots scrambled for cover in the dunes behind the cove.

At one point, the flames seemed to subside. A couple of brave souls ventured back down to the boats to investigate. The all-clear was given, and with sweaty brows and a few nervous laughs, the rest of the sailors returned to work. A few minutes later, the still-smoldering boat and its warhead blew sky-high, touching off a domino run of explosions in either direction along the row of boats ringing the cove. It was all over in a matter of seconds. 

Hearing the explosions and seeing the thick black smoke rising from the direction of the cove, radiomen from a nearby army unit g
ot onto the national command grid and began screaming to high heaven and anyone else still listening that the Shin’yō boys of the 23
rd
Totsugeki were giving hell to an American invasion force in Tosa Bay. Air units were scrambled and naval elements began racing to the area before the error was realized and urgent bulletins denying the reports of combat in Shikoku were flashed to bases around the country. But while the combat may have been specious, the reports of mass destruction were not. The explosions had reduced the Shin’yō boats to piles of smoldering ash and twisted metal, and 111 sailors were dead.

After killing 6,310 Japanese and killing or maiming over 15,000 Allied servicemen, Japan’s tokkō program had just claimed the last of its victims. But the
re was yet one more blood sacrifice to be made before a bloody and unprecedentedly horrific chapter in Japanese history could be finally closed.

A
fter hosting a small party for loyal staff members and trusted confidantes at his Tokyo home late into the night of August 15, 1945, Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi retired to his tatami-floored study to write letters until some time in the wee hours of the following morning. One of the letters he wrote was an apologetic farewell to his wife. A second letter was addressed to “Heroic Souls of the Tokkō-tai.” Despite its title, this seems more likely to have been written with the admiral’s place in history in mind. In it, Ōnishi accepts personal responsibility for the sacrifice of the tokkō thousands. In closing, he exhorts the Japanese race to maintain its pride, even in defeat, and to do its utmost “in the best tokkō tradition” for the common good of the nation and world peace. 

Finally, in beautiful calligraphy, the admiral wrote the following haiku:

Oh
how uplifting

The moon shining so clearly

Now that storms have passed
[310]

After setting down his calligraphy brush, the admiral picked up a shortsword, shoved the blade into the left side of his abdomen and drew it as far across his torso as he could before
pain paralyzed his hand. The wound was fatal, but unfortunately for Ōnishi, it did not sever any of the major arteries whose rupture would have mercifully hastened the inevitable.
[311]
When his house servant discovered him still very much alive and conscious around dawn, he was curled up in agony on the blood-soaked tatami of his study, holding his shredded guts in with his bare hands. Refusing medical assistance, the admiral stayed in this position for another twelve hours before finally succumbing to his wounds on the evening of August 16, 1945.

Media handling of the incident was respectful, treating the admiral’s death as the passing of a modern-day hero in the best samurai tradition. Few Japanese at the time disagreed with the semantic implications when fr
ont-page headlines in the nation’s major dailies referred to Ōnishi’s decision to take his own life using the heroic term
jiketsu
(“self-determined final judgment”) rather than the usual
jisatsu
(generic term for “suicide,” which would be used under less honorable circumstances). The incident was one of the more sensational topics of nationwide discussion in the otherwise stunned and stupefied early aftermath of the surrender broadcast.

While the nation was abuzz with news of the Ōnishi incident mere hours after the fact, it would be several months before Konada, still stranded on Hachijōjima, would learn of the demise of the visionary firebrand he and so many other young naval officers had idolized during the war. But even if he had heard the news when ever
yone else did, he would have had little time to mourn the admiral, for he was busy attending to last rites of a more immediate nature – burying the Kaiten, and on an even more personal level, bidding sad farewell to his own identity as an officer in His Majesty’s Imperial Navy.

In no particular hurry to go home and face an unknown future in which the only certainty was scarred pride, Konada stayed on at Hachijōjima for several months after the war to help oversee the work crews dismantling the Kaiten stockpiles and facilities on the island. Most of the heavy lifting had been done by early autumn, but Konada stayed on with the skeleton cadre remaining on Hachijōjima that would oversee the official handover of the base to Allied occupation forces.

The mission of the American inspection teams that arrived on October 30 was to ensure that the Kaitens and any equipment that could be used to deploy or maintain them were permanently denied to the Japanese. Konada, as one of the most experienced Kaiten men still left on the base, was put in charge of liaising with the Americans and coordinating the scrapping operations. Of utmost priority was the extremely hazardous task of disarming and separating the huge warheads from the bodies of the Kaitens. Disposing of the warheads themselves was an even touchier job, and at first no one on the base was quite sure what to do with them. Their immense explosive yield meant that simply detonating them in a ditch somewhere like dud artillery shells was out of the question, and attempting to cut them open and remove the unstable explosive charge inside was, for the same reason, an even less appealing option. It was finally decided that the best solution was to dump them at sea, and local fishermen familiar with the surrounding waters were hired for this task. Whether or not the fishermen were fully aware of the danger involved in this temporary work is not known, but their ability to find the dumping grounds at a later date could not have been better with GPS technology at their disposal; some five years later, when the value of scrap steel in Japan shot through the ceiling at the height of the Korean War, they went back to their explosive stash, raised the warheads from the seabeds, and sold them on the scrap market for a tidy profit.
[312]
  

The Kaiten fusela
ges left over from the disarming operation were trucked by hand trolley into one of the deep storage tunnels dug into the cliffs of Hachijōjima. TNT was rigged among the machines and around the entrance of the tunnel. The subsequent blast buried the remnant of the Kaiten forever under thousands of tons of rock.

“I’ll never forget that final explosion,” says Konada-san. “That was when it really hit me that this was the end. It was all over.”

The Kaiten would now live on only in the history books, and in the dreams and memories of men like Toshiharu Konada and Harumi Kawasaki. While the courage and dedication of the Kaiten pilots was never in question, the legacy of the weapon itself left much to be desired. From an operational standpoint, the Kaiten had performed no more impressively than the IJN’s other flopped wonder weapon, the Ōka. With all of the herculean effort and sacrifice in human lives and materiel involved in the Kaiten program, only one Allied ship – the USS
Mississinewa
– had been sunk, with another – the destroyer USS
Underhill
– damaged severely enough to require later scuttling.

In a dubious honor shared with its rocket-propelled cousin, the Kaiten had been responsible for more Japanese deaths than enemy fatalities. As opposed to less than two hundred American or other Allied casualties caused by Kaiten operations, over a thousand IJN personnel had lost their lives deploying the weapon. This tally included 810 crewmembers of subs sunk during Kaiten-ferrying missions, 148 sailors on transport
ships carrying Kaitens to outlying bases, 118 killed in American air raids and other causes, and 89 Kaiten pilots killed in combat. A further 15 pilots were victims of training mishaps.
[313]

*****

It took several weeks for everything on Hachijōjima to be wrecked to the Americans’ satisfaction, and it was not until November 22 that Konada finally left the island. It was his first time off the base in nearly five months, during which time there had been an ominous lack of correspondence from his family in Kure. Adding to this anxiety was his knowledge that Kure had been heavily bombed, and that nearby Hiroshima had been destroyed in the closing days of the war with a weapon of unimaginable destructive power, supposedly killing tens or even hundreds of thousands in an eye-blink. He had no way of knowing whether or not anyone in his family was among the victims without going to Kure to see for himself. But as a Regular Navy officer, he would not be free to do this until he had officially resigned his commission at the still-functioning Navy Ministry in Tokyo. His resignation was tendered and accepted by the navy on November 25, and when twenty-one-year-old Toshiharu Konada walked out of the ministry building to make his way to Tokyo Station through the rubble-strewn, refugee-thronged streets of an alien city under foreign occupation, he did so as a civilian. His war was over.

Konada arrived in Kure several days later to find that the worst of his fears about family and home had not come to pass. His own life, however, was a shambles, and it would be a long, hard road to pick up the pieces. But like six million other former comrades in arms, time, youth and energy were commodities he possessed in abundance, and the world would not keep Toshiharu Konada – or Japan – down for long. In 1947, after a year of rejections from other universities on account of his Etajima credentials, he was able to matriculate to the elite Kyoto University, which had the top natural science department in the country. Majoring in marine biology, he went on to a successful career in the maritime industry, retiring in 1990 as an executive with a large shipping concern.

Unlike so many other tokkō survivors, Konada-san has never been ashamed of his wartime experiences, nor of his participation in Japan’s special attack corps. In 1962 he was instrumental in founding the first veterans’ group to openly acknowledge its former tokkō affiliations – the National Kaiten Pilots’ Association. He has served this organization with pride and distinction ever since. He now lives with his wife and eldest daughter in the Greater Tokyo area, where he remains active in conservative politics and history awareness programs for young people. 

*****

When Harumi Kawasaki’s war ended, he literally had no place to go. For the previous two years, the navy had been the first real home he had had since early childhood, and for the past year, his fellow Kaiten pilots had been the closest thing to family he had perhaps ever experienced in his life. But the surrender meant that all of that was suddenly gone, and the demobilization activity dominating the Susaki base over the next few weeks provided nothing better than an opportunity to get three squares a day while watching it all die a slow, anticlimactic death. Still, that was better than having to face the displaced persons stations and gruel lines back in the real world. Given the circumstances, it is not too difficult to understand why Kawasaki stayed in uniform as long as possible, which from his perspective, was not long enough. It seemed that he had no option now but to sit tight and wait to be told to leave.

Orders to heave-ho and vacate the prem
ises came down on August 25. Rumors of rebellion on other bases came and went with regularity, so the authorities were taking no chances, especially with ex-tokkō types, who were deemed capable of stirring up some serious trouble if kept together too long on the bases. When the departure date arrived however, one of the Japan’s biggest typhoons of the century was hot on its heels.
[314]
The demobe ships scheduled to take the men home were forced to cancel their stops at Susaki on account of the storm. Finally, after days had passed with no sign of the naval vessels, base authorities were forced to hire commercial ships to take the increasingly restless men home. Stops would be made at Osaka and Northern Kyūshū. The men were free to disembark at either location. 

Kawasaki, however, with no particular “home” to “go home” to, therefore had no reason to board a repatriation boat. With a small group of like-minded individuals, he petitioned the base commander for permission to set up a small logging company to work the heavily wooded local mountains. The idea was nixed, but Kawasaki’s separation from the IJN was given a stay of several months when he was hired to help with personnel outprocessing and equipment dismantling operations at the base.

The temp work at Susaki continued until December, after which there could be no more reality-avoidance. With the base now gone, the IJN no more and no jobs to be had nearby, Kawasaki had no choice but to track down his older brother in Yamaguchi Prefecture and hope he would be allowed to hang his hat for a while until he could get his life together. He had made a rather uncomfortable visit to this married brother the previous July during his final pre-sortie leave (before posting to Susaki, that is – not before an actual attack mission, which Kawasaki obviously never made), so he was not expecting much of a welcome this time, either.