“Yes, sir.”
“Or do you want to trade your life for that of a single American?”
“No, sir.”
“Then how many enemy lives is your own life worth?”
I thought for a moment and then replied, “About ten might do, sir.”
“Idiot.” Flight Leader Miyabe finally cracked a smile. Then he said in an uncharacteristically blunt tone, “Is your life so cheap?”
I burst out laughing, in spite of myself.
“If you fail to kill an enemy but manage to survive, you’ll have the chance to kill him later on. However,” Miyabe-san continued, his eyes no longer smiling, “if you are shot down just once, Izaki, it’s all over.”
“Yes, sir.”
Miyabe-san took on an authoritative tone at the end. “Therefore, Flight Seaman 1st Class, prioritize your own survival.”
His words reverberated deep within my heart. Maybe I was able to take it especially seriously because his advice had come not long after I’d prepared to die. It was thanks to Miyabe-san’s words that I managed to survive the innumerable air battles that followed.
That wasn’t the only thing I learned from Flight Leader Miyabe.
He always left his quarters in the dead of night and disappeared for over an hour. When he returned, he was covered in sweat and a little out of breath. Ridiculously enough, I thought maybe he had a habit of going somewhere far from our quarters to, you know, pleasure himself.
All of us were healthy young men in our late teens and early twenties. Even though we spent our days in battle not knowing if we’d live to see tomorrow, we had sexual appetites. Or rather, it was precisely because we lived in such close proximity to death that we felt such powerful urges. Oh, I don’t know. We had but one adolescence, and it’s impossible to compare it to some other life.
This is embarrassing to say, but I did it too, many times, in my bunk or in the toilets. Sometimes I wandered off away from the barracks where no one was around and did it out in the open. There were military brothels at Rabaul and I made use of those as well, but there weren’t any around Lae. If someone like me was beset with sexual desire, I imagine a married man like Miyabe-san felt even more restless. That is why I never inquired as to where he went on his midnight sojourns.
Then one evening, making my way back from fishing in a river some distance from the barracks, I heard groaning from a thicket. At first I was startled, but then, unable to contain my curiosity, I quietly crept closer toward the source of the voice.
In the shadows of the thicket was a man lifting something. It was him. Stripped to the waist, Flight Leader Miyabe was gripping the barrel of a broken aircraft machine gun in his right hand and lifting it up repeatedly. Since I’d snuck up, I was unable to announce myself and ended up peeping at what he was doing.
His body was flushed all over. In the end, he let out a cry that was close to a scream.
He rested briefly, then swung his legs over the branch of a nearby tree and hung upside-down. He stayed in that position for as long as he could endure it. His face turned beet red and the veins on his forehead bulged out so far they looked like they might burst open at any second. I wonder how long he held that pose for. I can’t remember, but it seemed like an incredibly long time.
At long last I realized what he was up to—training for air battles. During turns and loops, the Gs increase and the control stick gets incredibly heavy. The G is the gravitational force exerted during flight. Fighter pilots must manipulate the heavy control stick with one hand during battle. In order to build up the muscles in our arms we did push-ups and pull-ups, but I had never seen anything like Miyabe-san’s workout. And hanging upside-down had to be training for when the blood rushes to the head during sharp turns and loops in battle.
After Miyabe-san left, I went over and tried to lift up the gun barrel he’d held. I was absolutely stunned. I couldn’t lift it at all. No matter how hard I tried, it wouldn’t move, as if it was stuck fast to the ground.
I tried gripping the barrel with both hands. I finally managed to lift it up using every ounce of strength in my body. For him to lift and lower it with just one hand, he must have had incredibly powerful arms.
Monstrous strength underlay his elegant piloting skills.
The next day, I called out to Miyabe-san as he left the barracks. “Would you mind if I accompanied you, sir?”
He seemed a bit taken aback, but then smiled pleasantly. “Oh, saw me, did you?”
“My apologies, sir. I didn’t mean to spy on you. I just happened to find you on my way back from fishing.”
“It’s fine. It’s not like I was keeping it a secret or anything.”
Miyabe-san went back to the same spot as the day before and went through the same drills. I couldn’t very well stand there in silence as he sweated, so I dropped and did push-ups.
As we sat on the ground afterwards, I said, “You’re amazing, sir. I tried to pick that up yesterday but couldn’t lift it at all.”
“Practice does it, whatever it is. You just need the perseverance to continue. You’ll definitely get stronger the longer you train.”
“Really?” I asked giddily, but realized he was only trying to console me. “You are an incredible man, Flight Leader Miyabe, sir.”
“No, I’m not. Everyone does this.”
“Is that true, sir?”
“Sure, Sakai-san, Nishizawa-san, all of them.”
“I didn’t know.”
Miyabe-san laughed. “Nobody does it where everyone can see.”
Once he mentioned it, I recalled that Sakai-san often did pull-ups on the crossbeams in the barracks. I felt like a total fool for assuming that was just a hobby of his. I had simply thought him a natural when it came to flying aircraft.
As a pilot in training back in the program, I was put through a grueling physical regimen every day, long-distance running and swimming, chin-ups, etc. But once I became a pilot, I no longer had such obligations. I was ashamed to have been so grateful for that. I realized that it had all been for my own benefit.
“But isn’t it difficult to keep up with regularly?” I asked him, as if making excuses for myself.
“It’s not easy. But it’s nothing compared to the pain of death.”
I felt like he was scolding me. “You train every day, sir?”
He nodded in silence.
“Even on days that you’ve sortied?”
He nodded again. I was impressed. The night after a mission, I was always so tired that I couldn’t bear moving more than necessary. And yet he…
“Don’t you ever think, ‘I’m not going to bother doing it today’?”
Instead of answering me, he abruptly pulled a small bag of cloth out of his breast pocket. In it was a folded piece of paper. He unwrapped it to reveal a single photograph neatly coated in cellophane.
“A photo of my family.”
“Please show it to me, sir?”
Flight Leader Miyabe passed it to me gently as if it were some kind of treasure. I took it gingerly, using both hands. In the photo was a young lady holding a newborn baby.
“Apparently, she had this taken at a photo studio in our neighborhood,” Miyabe-san explained. He’d reverted to his polite way of speaking, partly because we were alone, but no doubt more because remembering his wife and child brought out his native sincerity.
The woman in the photograph was very lovely. I recall feeling envious.
“Her name’s Kiyoko. As in ‘pure child.’”
“Kiyoko-san is a lovely lady.”
Flight Leader Miyabe laughed a bit bashfully. “No, my wife’s name is Matsuno. Kiyoko is my daughter’s name.”
My face flushed in embarrassment. Flustered, I said, “She’s an adorable baby.”
“She was born in June, right after I returned from Midway. But I couldn’t get any time off, so my hopes of seeing her were dashed. I haven’t even met my own daughter yet.”