A man from Kyoto visited today, with reports that they are suffering severe shortages of supplies. A student had gone out to meet him, expecting a gift of sweets or something, but as it turned out, he ended up offering food to the man from Kyoto. What a disappointment! He watched as the man wolfed it all down, saying, “It sure would be swell to be in the navy. Surely it would be.” Professor O. must be having a hard time getting his hands on his favorite Japanese confections.
September 17, Memorial Day for the Battle of the Yellow Sea
A typhoon has been approaching Kyushu since yesterday. With it come occasional bursts of rain. The barracks sprang a leak in the middle of the night, and we had to shift things around. Consequently, I didn’t get enough sleep.
A ceremony was held from 0745 on the first floor of the barracks, after which we sang martial songs written for the Battle of the Yellow Sea: “The Brave Fight of the Akagi,” “Audacious Sailors,” and so on. Afterwards, we were granted liberty.
We heard that the Kagoshima Main Line was blocked off around Hinagu, but the usual three of us managed our excursion to Minamata anyway. However, the train schedule made for a hectic visit. We arrived at the Fukais’ house at eleven and had to leave at half past one. It was as if we went there solely to eat lunch. Mrs. Fukai and Fukiko had to hustle to prepare a meal in time. Fukiko donned her rain gear and went out into the downpour to fetch something they needed, ignoring our pleas.
Today we were served satsuma-imo. As the name indicates, this region is the home of these yams, and they are certainly delicious, fluffy in texture, rather like chestnuts in taste, and not at all stringy. A package had arrived from Sakai’s family in care of the Fukais, and it contained dried chestnuts and pancakes. To our regret, the pancakes were moldy, but, after carefully wiping them off, we savored them nonetheless. They weren’t at all bad.
I told Fukiko about how, a while back, I paid my respects to the family during a training flight.
Fujikura broke in. “You did? So did I. I flew by during solo exercises just the other day. I could make out the stripes on Fukiko’s clothes quite clearly.” He seemed to take it for granted that Fukiko had turned out when I flew over. My heart sank.
“What time did you come?’ Fukiko asked me, casting her eyes up in an effort to remember. “It’s a wonder I didn’t notice. Had I gone off shopping? But if I was out, I should have noticed it all the more. What happened?” Again and again she said she was sorry.
“You shouldn’t be sorry.” I laughed, but it seemed both accidental and somehow not accidental that she had heard the roar of Fujikura’s plane and not the roar of mine. In any case, I wasn’t really amused.
We returned to base in a slashing rainstorm. The rain cascaded over the windows of the train, and we couldn’t so much as glimpse the scenery.
We haven’t flown in more than a week, but at last the fuel has arrived. We should resume operations when the weather cooperates. Once we start flying again, and once our formation drills are complete, they will tell us which type of aircraft each of us is to pilot. Never shall I regret having requested assignment to a carrier-based attack bomber. I shall face the prospect with an open heart. There are only ten days to two weeks left of our life here at Izumi.
September 20
Another Ginga crashed yesterday. At about half past seven, the southwestern part of the already-darkened airfield suddenly flushed red, and a number of men from the Todoroki Unit sprinted off. I myself didn’t go out to the site, but I was told that one Ginga, taking off at a speed of 80 knots, had plowed into another that was grounded for repairs. The reconnaissance crew and the signaler in the first plane died on the spot, and the pilot, who tumbled out engulfed in flames, was rushed off to the infirmary, out of which, at around ten o’clock at night, eight coffins emerged.
These days it is still dark at reveille, and there is a chill in the air. We do calisthenics after morning assembly, and as the alpenglow over Yahazutake Mountain diffuses across the eastern sky, taking on its tint of gold, one by one the black mountains shake off their sleep. And today, in the midst of such beauty, while we were engaged in calisthenics, outfitted all in white, as usual, three more coffins were borne from the infirmary. The toll of last night’s accident is three crew members and eight mechanics, and the cause was carelessness. They say the Ginga is difficult to service. It costs eight hundred thousand yen to build one, and they struggle to produce eighty planes a month.
The majority of the Todoroki Unit, however, set out for Okinawa at 0930 today, leaving behind them, at this station, the souls of their comrades. They boarded the officers’ bus in front of the administration building for their ride out to the airfield, and there they climbed into their planes, swords in hand, looking just as they do during daily training flights. “If you don’t hear of any significant results in twenty days,” this crew of the 13th Class told us, “then assume we have all been destroyed.” The signaler stood on the airplane waving a stick of some kind, and the Gingas lifted their tails and gallantly took off, one after another. The remaining forces of the Todoroki Unit, the student units, and everybody else drew up in columns along the runway and twirled their caps to see the men off. The Gingas flawlessly arrayed themselves in formation, took a course southward, and shortly disappeared from view.
As for us, we started instrument flying today. During the suspension of actual flights, we were trained quite well using a mock-up on the ground. This is a kind of aircraft-shaped box, into which we step, pulling down a curtain behind us. Only the control stick and the gauges are really lifelike, and as this motorized “airplane” quakes, we practice holding our position, solely by peering into a gauge. This is called “blind flight.” And today we begin airborne instrument flight training.
We made a dual flight, instructor in the back, student in the front. A hood, only the back of which opens, is pulled down over the cockpit. The instructor does the takeoff and landing from the rear seat.
The command “Commence instrument flight” came in through the voice tube, and, with that, the stick was in my hands, at an altitude of one thousand meters exactly. Actually, it is quite difficult to fly blind. The needle on the gauge wiggles neurotically, and we must hold it in the correct and level position. I tend to the left. When the nose is up, the needle rises above the level line, and when the nose drops down, the needle plunges.
“You’re going down! Watch out!” The scolding rang through the voice tube. I remember the experience well from the “dual” phase of formation flight training. The instructor, an aviation petty officer second class, would say, “What? Do you want to die!?” And availing himself of the elastic rubber voice tube, he would thwack my head from behind with its metal funnel. If that didn’t do the trick, in came the order: “Release your hands and raise them.” Well, it was no fun at all floating along in this banzai posture as a punishment. Thanks to the hood, I didn’t have to do a banzai this time around, but I did have to keep a close eye on all the instruments—speedometer, altimeter, oil pressure indicator, thermometer—even while enduring a good dressing down. The flight lasted about thirty minutes. I gathered that most of the time we had been over the ocean, though, needless to say, I couldn’t see anything at all.