I realized that Miyabe-san had told me something very grave. Yet he continued to speak in a dispassionate tone.
“Our family that he left behind had a hard time of it. I had to drop out of middle school. My mother fell ill and soon passed away. In just half a year, I became entirely alone in the world. I had no money, no family, and no relations that I could turn to. I didn’t know what else to do so I signed up with the Navy.”
This was the first I’d heard of Miyabe-san’s past.
“Master Segoe said to me, ‘I’ll look after you, so become my apprentice.’ But he wasn’t well-off, either, so I declined his offer. I figured if I failed to get into the Navy, I’d become an apprentice in some shop or another.”
Incredible. Miyabe-san’s no different than me, I thought. Most non-commissioned officers in the Navy were farmers’ sons who’d left home to reduce the number of mouths that had to be fed. Unless you were the eldest, the son of a farmer typically had to choose between becoming an apprentice in a city or joining the military. Only a handful of kids were able to attend middle school. And in fact, many Naval Academy students weren’t from affluent families, either. Military academies were free, so a good number of smart kids who couldn’t afford regular high schools went there instead. Japan was really poor back then, and a class society to an extent that’s hard even to imagine today.
Miyabe-san wasn’t the younger son of a farmer. But due to family misfortune, like us, he’d had no choice but to join the military.
I, myself, was the third son of a tenant farmer. After graduating from an ordinary primary school, I went to work at a local soy sauce factory. When it went bankrupt, I found myself with nowhere to go. So I enlisted in the Navy. It’s probably impossible for young people these days to imagine such a thing, but we joined the military just to keep ourselves fed.
“Are you going to try to become a pro after this war is over, sir?” I asked Miyabe-san.
He laughed. Perhaps he thought it was funny that I was assuming the war was going to end. “Impossible,” he said. “I’ve lost too much precious time to become a professional.”
“But if you work hard…”
“Becoming a professional is all about how much you can learn during your teens. I wasn’t able to at all, and I’m already twenty-three. Even if the war were to end right now and I studied my head off, I’d never be able to go professional.”
“That’s a shame, sir.”
“Not really,” Miyabe-san shrugged off my sympathy. “When I was a kid, trivial things could upset or delight me. As a middle schooler, I really wrestled over whether to attend First Higher School or become a professional go player. And when both dreams were shattered, I was extremely distraught. But compared to the deaths of my parents, it was nothing.”
He laughed. “Looking back now, even that wasn’t such a big deal. We face more terrifying things on a regular basis in this war. Lots of men are dying every day. Just think of how many bereaved family members there are back home.”
I couldn’t bring myself to voice agreement. Death in battle was considered an honor, a joy. Nobody could publicly express sorrow over such deaths. Miyabe-san’s words could quickly get him labeled “un-Japanese.”
He noticed my perplexed expression and smiled, a little sadly. After a moment he said, “Do you know what my greatest dream is right now?”
“What is it, sir?”
“To survive this war and go home to my family.”
I remember feeling incredibly disappointed by that statement. Is that really something that an Imperial Navy fighter pilot should say? So the rumors that he’s a coward are true, I thought.
For me back then, “home” and “family” were things that you left behind, and my parents were people who supported my going out into the world. Wanting to go back struck me as unmanly. I hadn’t even an inkling of the concept that being a man might mean protecting and taking care of family. I only understood after the war ended, when I was discharged from the service, got married, and set up house. Well, actually, I still didn’t quite get it then. It wasn’t until I had a child of my own that I saw that my life was not mine alone and that “family” is something a man carries on his back with all his might. Only then did I feel the true weight of Miyabe-san’s wish to go back home to his family. How embarrassing.
I’m going to change the subject. Guess what my current favorite activity is?
It’s go. We play easy-going games of go at the seniors’ club. It’s the highlight of my week. Too bad Miyabe-san can’t play and teach me once.
Starting in the summer of ’43, Rabaul suffered near-daily raids. The Lae airfield, once home to the stalwarts of the Tainan Air Corps, fell into enemy hands, other islands in the area were being recaptured, and Rabaul was in a very precarious position.
And towards the end of 1943, the Grumman F6Fs arrived on the scene. These new fighters were far more powerful than their F4F predecessors.
Once, I saw close up an F6F that had crashed at Rabaul and was dumbstruck. The fuselage was certainly intimidating, but the engine in particular was absolutely massive, a total monster. The impact of the crash had damaged it badly, but the chief mechanic estimated its output at 2,000 horsepower—double that of a Zero. The heavy armament and thick bulletproof armor enabled by that power were impressive.
Under the supervision of the chief mechanic, the whole crew disassembled and studied the engine. Even I could tell that it was very finely crafted. The chief just shook his head and said, “It’ll be next to impossible to build such an engine in Japan.”
The Grummans weren’t the only superior fighters used by the enemy. There was also the Sikorsky, a cutting-edge fighter with a high-power engine and wings that resembled upside-down gulls. We mechanics felt like a new era was upon us.
The pilots in our air corps confirmed that the Americans’ latest fighters were indeed excellent. Nevertheless, the Zero fighter pilots of Rabaul kept bravely facing those sterling enemy aircraft.
At that point, we were no longer trying to invade Guadalcanal like before and mostly intercepting incoming enemy aircraft, so our fighter pilots had the geographical advantage in battle. They could engage in combat without worrying about running out of fuel or bullets. If worse came to worse, they could parachute out and still live. By then most pilots were wearing them into battle.
Even so, it was definitely not an easy situation. The cutting-edge F6Fs and Sikorskys were superior to the Zeros, and their numbers were just overwhelming. Some two hundred would show up for each air raid, and we could launch at most fifty Zeros to intercept them. No matter how many enemy planes we managed to shoot down, it barely seemed to hurt them, while replacement planes, not to mention pilots, were hard for us to come by.
Gradually the Zeros were driven to the brink.
In the span of a month, over half the roster of Zero fighter pilots had changed. Only a handful of the old guard, like Hiroyoshi Nishizawa and Tsutomu Iwai, remained. Nishizawa-san was renowned as the top flying ace in the Imperial Navy, and Iwai-san was a seasoned veteran, too. He was one of the original thirteen pilots back when the Zeros had first come into operation in 1940. He had survived a legendary air battle where they’d shot down all twenty-seven Chinese Air Force planes without suffering a single casualty. In later years, his students at the flight prep academy nicknamed him “the Zero fighter god,” and his aerial combat skills were very nearly divine.
Both Nishizawa-san and Iwai-san said that the American fighters weren’t so fearsome as long as you dodged their first strike, but only pilots like them could say that. They must have been confident they wouldn’t be shot down once they got into a dogfight.