On the flight, I told Keiko what our mother had said a few days ago.
“I see. A man who was a risk-taker in his youth realized he should value his life after he fell in love with Grandma. That’s wonderful.”
I made a noncommittal noise in reply.
“Does it sound off to you?” she asked me.
“No, I understand how he might have come to value his life once he had Grandma. But him joining the military just because he was young and reckless? I’m not totally convinced.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t think that fits the image I have of Kyuzo Miyabe. It seems out of character. But maybe that’s just my opinion. Heck, maybe he was just a gung-ho military youth.”
“You don’t want him to have been a gung-ho military youth.”
“To be honest about it, no. What Takayama-san from the newspaper said has been snagging at my mind.”
Keiko was silent.
“I wonder, was some part of him glad to be sacrificing his life for his country on his final mission as a kamikaze?”
“I doubt it. I don’t think he was happy at all,” Keiko declared. Then she added in a more subdued tone, “I think Takayama-san has it wrong.”
Once we landed at Kansai International Airport, we got on a train to Kokawa Station in Wakayama Prefecture.
As soon as we emerged to the rotary outside, someone called out, “Are you the Saekis? I’m Nagai’s son.”
This was a well-tanned fifty-something man in work overalls. He had gone out of his way to meet us at the station in his car.
“My father told me about you. Coming all the way from Tokyo, you must be tired,” he said with a smile as he drove along. “Yes, come to think of it, my father experienced war. Now he’s a doddering old man, but amazingly enough, he fought against America when he was young. He said your grandfather was stationed with him at Rabaul?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t know how much the old man remembers, but I hope he can tell you some good stories.”
“Thank you.”
Former Chief Petty Officer Kiyotaka Nagai, Aviation Maintenance, lived in a farmhouse. It was old but fairly large, with a sizable garden out front sporting well-tended trees and shrubs.
Nagai was leaning on a cane, waiting for us.
“You all right, Dad?”
“Why do you ask?” the old man laughed.
“I’ve gotta do something at the agricultural co-op, so I’m heading out,” his son said, then turned to us. “When you’re ready to leave, call me on my cell and I’ll drive you back to the station.”
He drove away, and my sister and I were shown to a large Japanese-style room that faced out south.
“I remember Miyabe-san very well,” Nagai said. “We met at Rabaul. I worked on the Zero engines, as part of the ground crew.”
Aircraft aren’t like cars, where you can just turn a key in the ignition and start moving right away. Planes need constant maintenance. After a fixed number of flight hours, the plane’s engine needs to be taken apart and given a full check and tune-up. With the Zeros, we gave their engines a major overhaul after 100 flight hours, I believe.
Rabaul was on a volcanic island, with Mount Hanabuki as we called it fuming all the time. The runway was always covered in ash. When aircraft took off, their wheels kicked up clouds of dust so thick you couldn’t open your eyes.
First thing every morning, I used a palm branch to clear off the ash piled on the aircraft’s wings. As you can guess, the fine particles also got into the engines, so the tune-ups were a real hassle. If the engines weren’t properly maintained, the planes could stall out mid-flight and kill the pilots, so we spared no effort.
There was a leading seaman called Heisuke Kimura who’d enlisted the same year as me. One day, a Zero that he’d serviced ran into engine trouble, had to turn back, and ended up crashing into the ocean, killing the pilot. Kimura committed suicide by disemboweling himself. To be honest, I wouldn’t have gone that far myself, but regarding engine maintenance I was the embodiment of seriousness. Even so, occasionally a plane that I was responsible for had to return right after takeoff because of engine problems. That always made me feel like a chump.
I was a mere mechanic, but I felt like I was participating in the battles fought by those Zeros. It pained me whenever one of my planes failed to return from a mission. It felt like I’d lost a child. Of course, it meant a pilot had died, too, so my sorrow was two-fold. I’d worry whether he’d lost a dogfight because the plane wasn’t properly maintained or if he’d crashed into the sea on his way back because of engine failure. It’d make my chest ache like I was having a heart attack.
Rare was the day when all the pilots who sortied made it back to base. It was common for pilots who had laughed happily in the morning to have departed this world by nightfall. At first it came as such a shock that my dinner would stick in my throat. But after a while, I got used to it. Casualties were commonplace at Rabaul. Still, when a land-based bomber went down, it took the lives of seven men with it, so that was always sad. The bomber crews always flew as a team and liked to dub themselves the This-or-That Family. They all got along great with each other. And when they died, they went together, as a family. At Rabaul, we lost over a thousand bomber crewmen.
Looking back now, I feel sorry for the airmen. They were ordered to sortie almost every day to do battle at faraway Guadalcanal. The higher-ups were basically saying, “Go die.”
They say the General Staff used to joke that airmen were “expendable goods,” but I don’t think they were kidding. Apparently, they called us maintenance crews “accessory equipment.”
But the truth is that I wanted to be an aviator.
They were gallant and carefree and really cut a dashing figure. I would think, “Now that’s what a man should be.” At the time I was twenty by the old reckoning, only eighteen or nineteen by today’s way of counting. I didn’t fear death at all. What a brat, huh? Sure, I was afraid of air raids and dying, say, of illness. But getting killed in the skies fighting like a man was, you know, exactly what I wanted. Now I can look back and see how badly mistaken I was, but that’s how I felt then. If only I was in the interior, I could be taking the pilot-in-training test, I lamented.
But if I had become an airman, I don’t think I’d be alive today. So maybe it was for the best that I never got to be one.
This sounds petty, but the airmen got the good food. Compared to the meals we mechanics were served—well, theirs were delicious and nutritious beyond comparison. That made us all very jealous because we ground crew ate really poorly at Rabaul.
One thing the mechanics always looked forward to was hearing the reports of the aircrew returning from missions. I just loved hearing pilots say things like, “Today I shot down an x number of planes.” I would always pester them to tell me about what had happened. Some pilots loved to talk, and they’d describe the air battles in great detail, gesturing with their hands for effect. As I listened, my heart would be aflutter with excitement. Listening to their stories made me feel like I was right there in the midst of battle.
Among the aviators there, Miyabe-san was something of an oddball.
How? I don’t quite know how to put it, but he didn’t seem to have a shred of that old bravado. He spoke politely and had the air of a well-bred salaryman in today’s terms. He didn’t seem anything like a fighter pilot. No matter how much I pestered him for battle stories, he never told me any.