It has been exactly five months to the day since we joined the navy. My life here is utterly lonely. To be lonely in the military is most peculiar, it seems. I live in close contact with the naked flesh of hundreds, even thousands, of other men, shoulder to shoulder, day and night, leading a lively, tumultuous life, always on the move. But when I escape for a moment from all the rush, an overpowering desolation cuts me deep, as if I were totally abandoned in an empty, tranquil wilderness. My heart bonds with nothing, never once have I laid bare my feelings. This loneliness differs completely in nature from the solitude I knew as I studied in my second floor, four-and-a-half tatami room in the Hyakumanben district near Kyoto University, warming my hands over a hibachi on cold winter nights, yet satisfied in the belief that I was doing work that related to the world.
My only consolation is that Sakai and Yoshino are here with me. Still, I rarely get the chance to speak with them in a relaxed sort of way. Besides, both men have changed considerably, each in his own way, over the course of the last five months. As a matter of fact, this place changes every living soul. We have ceased to talk about the Manyoshu. Everyone is trying his best, under a bitter trial, to find some sort of anchorage. I am by no means being sarcastic when I say that Sakai and Yoshino are, after all, uncommonly modest and supple at heart, compared to myself. We know that in order to survive as military men or as naval officers, and above all to face the shadow of death that looms before our eyes, we must have a firm sense of ourselves. We accept that, obediently. In fact, we are more than willing to re-create ourselves for the purpose at hand, when all we ever get drilled into us, by the chief instructor, the division officers, the flight instructors, the daily newspapers with their infamous tone and their conveniently selected extracts from books, is the necessity of carrying through this holy war to its end, our responsibilities as honorable youths, the glorious tradition of the Imperial Navy, and the ideal of “the whole world under one roof.” Neither Sakai nor Yoshino has ever been blindly fanatical, and I wouldn’t necessarily call them that now, but their critical, skeptical air seems to be diminishing with repeated exposure to all these mantras. First, they began to think that the slogans weren’t entirely empty, then they were persuaded that they actually made some sense, and finally they came to believe that these slogans were absolutely right, and that all along only their own “deficient consciousness” prevented them from seeing the light. At least, they seem to be moving in this direction. I stand alone in my pigheaded inability to abandon my suspicions. I could never assume the “spiritual” frame of mind that the instructors demand of me, and yet I can’t figure out for sure what to do about my future. In point of fact, that timid Sakai (and maybe this is precisely because he is timid) recently declared that he has begun to fathom the deep meaning of the phrase, “We shall be united into a single Emperor.” He is even prepared to espouse the theory that we never truly understood the Manyoshu, which is, after all, a collection of “ethnic” poems, because we failed to comprehend this great spirit of “being united into a single Emperor.”
Several days ago, Yoshino came to me with a somber look on his face and reported a dream he had had. He tells me that his soul left his body while he slept, and traveled to his home in Osaka. He says that, while there, it read Poems for the Reverend Emperor, which Yoshino himself had never read before, and that, now, he vividly remembers the lines of a poem in it. Yoshino was shaken. Maybe he has already sent you a postcard describing this incident. What touched me, though, was how thoroughly Yoshino struggles, thinking, as he takes matters so hard, that he must stir in himself a spirit of martyrdom, and that he must train himself up. No doubt he is anything but insincere. I can tell that by his look. Yet I think it highly symbolic that what Yoshino supposedly did, among all the other things he could have done, and would have wanted to do, at his old house, was read a bit of the Poems for the Reverend Emperor, such-and-such a poem celebrating the martyrdom of General Nogi. It was fortunate that Yoshino’s soul wasn’t caught when it went AWOL and given a blow by the rigorous guard commander at Tsuchiura Naval Air Station. Interestingly enough, though, in Yoshino’s outfit there is a geeky fellow named Wakatsuki from Takushoku University, and he has had in his possession, for some time now, this same book, volume one of Poems for the Reverend Emperor. Anyway, to me, it seems far more rational to suppose that Yoshino had read this poem a long time back, and had simply forgotten about it until it put in an appearance in his dream, than that his soul made an excursion to Osaka.
About a month ago, a Mr. Gakushu Ohara from the Association for the Enhancement of Imperial National Prestige visited our base, and gave a fanatical talk, pure gibberish, for two and a half hours, earning the ridicule of everyone present. He was one of those inspired leaders of whom there is an epidemic these days, the same genre of men you often complained about. Yoshino and Sakai were both scornful. But when things reach this point, we can’t content ourselves with sneering at Mr. Ohara alone, I think. Besides, fellows like this Mr. Something Ohara reap tidy profits making the rounds of the military training units and the schools, giving their “inspirational” speeches, and performing their “purifications.” And who knows, they may be perfect realists at heart, all the while laughing into their sleeves. But Sakai and Yoshino aren’t of a calculating turn of mind, and that makes me more apprehensive about them.
Professor E.
I know I wasn’t a very good student. I often put on airs, and now and then I launched into arguments against the theories of all you scholars out of conceit. Consequently, I was never a favorite with the professors. Many a time I wished I could, and thought I must, have an open, cheerful, supple mind, just like all the other students, but now I’m determined to stick to this cranky, arrogant disposition of mine. Only extraordinary crankiness can save you from being cajoled into the belief (and this, mind you, while leading the kind of life we lead here) that the war is indeed a great mission given to us by our country, and that our country will be saved by our martyrdom. Things will change someday. Our desperate feelings may not be understood forever, either by the older generation or the younger. Still, whenever I get the chance to see Yoshino and Sakai in private, I tell them, in the strongest terms possible, just how foolish it is to force themselves, and so rapidly, too, to change their way of thinking. Occasionally, after giving the matter some thought, they say, “You are right,” and we all agree in criticizing certain aspects of navy life and the general conduct of the war. But for the most part, they (Yoshino in particular) will not budge an inch, saying, “Still, at this point anyway, Japan must win the war. I take it to heart, as a Japanese citizen, that we must fight it all out, with the fate of our race at stake. It’s a supreme duty. You can’t quarrel with it. Our country will collapse if each of us starts to express his own particular view and turns his back.” Gazing into Yoshino’s earnest face makes me falter somewhat. It is true, the war is “in progress,” however wrong it may be. And though, as I say, I oppose the war and don’t want any longer to be a cog in its machinery, I can make no concrete answer if asked what it is I believe I should do. One possible course of action is simply to try to save my own life. Shrewd as I am, however, it would be extremely difficult for me, a navy pilot, alone to escape death. It’s not that I’ll be killed unless I finish off the enemy first. No, I’ll be eliminated whether or not I kill the enemy. It’s not that my friends will die unless I do. No, everybody must die, my friends, me, one and all. That such total war is our destiny I take for granted. Needless to say, I’m not prepared in the least.