Then one day my brother offered me ten kilograms of rice as a farewell gift and told me to flee to Tokyo. It was a polite way of kicking me out. I took Kae with me, of course, and we left our hometown behind.
We arrived in Tokyo at the end of October. The place was a charred field in every direction. Kae and I stayed in a makeshift hut made out of tin sheets. I went out looking for work every day, but there was none to be had. We soon ran out of my brother’s rice, and I ended up working as a day laborer just to eke out a living.
Things were really hard back then. The city was crawling with Occupation soldiers. The American troops walked with Japanese girls on their arms. It was hard to believe that just three months earlier I’d been engaging American fighter pilots in mortal combat.
We somehow managed not to starve back then only after Kae spotted a want-ad looking for people who could sew. They hired her and provided lodging on site. Kae and I shared a literal closet of a room, but compared to the tin hut, it was heaven.
The following year, thanks to the influence of a former superior in the Navy, I was hired as a temporary worker for the Waterworks Bureau. But only a year later, I was fired during GHQ’s purge. The Americans didn’t want anyone associated with the previous regime to be in the public sector. After eleven years of service with the Navy, I had been discharged with the rank of lieutenant junior grade, and this had resulted in my being considered a career soldier. When Kae learned why I had been fired, she tried hard to console me.
“ ‘Career soldier’? What a terrible term. As if those who risked their lives for the sake of the country were doing it for the money. It’s unforgivable.”
Nothing gave me greater joy than to hear such words. And I made a fresh resolve to devote my life to her.
I decided to go into business for myself. I tried my hand at all sorts of trades. I was deceived and betrayed countless times. People in the postwar years were entirely different from the prewar years. The night after a certain betrayal, I recalled my comrades who had fallen in battle and found myself wondering if they weren’t the lucky ones. I envied them for not having to witness what had become of Japan.
Yet the chaos and destitution of the immediate postwar years was a short-term state of affairs. Many Japanese showed compassion and warm-heartedness. Some tried to help others, even though staying alive themselves was almost all they could do. I believe that was why my wife and I survived that miserable period. I was eventually able to own a modest building in Tokyo only thanks to many kindnesses.
It wasn’t until many years later that Japanese truly changed.
Japan became a democracy, a peaceful society. We entered a period of rapid economic growth and enjoyed freedom and material wealth. But that caused us to lose something important. Postwar democracy and prosperity robbed the Japanese people of “morals”—I think.
Nowadays, the streets are filled with people who only care for themselves. It wasn’t like that sixty years ago.
Perhaps I’ve simply lived for too long.
The reception room that had been alight with the setting sun was now dark.
I felt that far more time had passed than the few hours that Tanigawa had spent talking. He’d looked like a young man as he spoke, a youth who fairly sparkled with fearlessness. But now there was just a skinny old man in a wheelchair.
I looked at his bony arms. They seemed so fragile. Once, those arms had handily commanded a Zero fighter fleeting through the skies, engaging in battle. The passage of sixty years made my chest feel tight.
“Even now I sometimes wonder if what I saw back at Nichols Field actually happened,” Tanigawa said softly, “or if I just dreamed it.”
“You mean how our grandfather refused to volunteer for the special attack?”
“Since it wasn’t an order, he couldn’t be accused of insubordination. But that’s what it was.”
“Insubordination?”
“Yes, disobeying orders. In the military it was an offense punishable by death.”
I let out a groan. What a man my grandfather had been.
“But there’s something I don’t understand. When Miyabe was ordered to become a kamikaze at the very tail end of the war, why didn’t he make an emergency landing somewhere? Why did the very man who’d urged me to abandon the mission and land somewhere safe go off and blow himself up?” Tanigawa folded his arms. “A good many veteran pilots were sent out to perform special attacks at Leyte, but I think that was due to the chaos and confusion. True, while Ensign Minami wasn’t a kamikaze himself, after sortieing from Ozawa Fleet, attacking the American task force, and making it to Echague Base on Luzon, he was tasked with the unforgiving duty of escorting kamikazes, which cost him his life.”
“So he, too, died conducting a special attack, in effect.”
Tanigawa nodded. “I also heard that Ensign Tsutomu Iwai and others from Ozawa Fleet who flew to the Philippines were nearly forced into becoming kamikazes. But by the time of the Okinawa Special Attacks starting in March of ’43, they had stopped using veteran pilots as kamikazes. They needed experienced pilots as instructors and to defend the mainland.”
“So that means that most kamikaze pilots were very young.”
“The majority of special attacks took place during the Battle of Okinawa in the final year of the conflict. Most were student reservists or very young airmen. I thought it was a mistake to use veteran pilots as kamikazes. Of course, the lives of young pilots were just as valuable as those of their seniors, and I’m not saying it was perfectly fine to send student reservists off to die. But I just can’t forgive the higher-ups for letting Minami-san get killed.”
Tanigawa’s voice rose as he said, “Those men swore to follow behind and ordered so many subordinates into kamikaze units—how abominable that once the war was over, they coolly decided to go on living.”
He slammed the desk, rattling the ashtray. I jumped.
“Sorry. Got a bit worked up there.”
“It’s fine, sir.”
Tanigawa pulled a medicine bottle out of his breast pocket and put a pill in his mouth. My sister stood up, walked over to the sink, and filled a cup with water, then handed it to him.
“Thank you, young lady.” Tanigawa took the cup and washed down the pill. After a moment he said, “I just don’t understand why Miyabe didn’t ditch someplace. He had the skills to do so.”
“Were there pilots who did?”
Tanigawa’s features briefly clouded. “Some kamikazes returned saying that they’d failed to make contact with the enemy or had engine trouble.”
“Isn’t that—” Keiko began, but Tanigawa firmly shook his head.
“I don’t know if it was intentional. But there were such pilots.”
Silence filled the room.
I opened my mouth. “My grandfather was listed as having died on the seas near Okinawa. Supposing he had run into engine trouble, where could he have landed in that area?”
“Kikaijima Island,” Tanigawa replied instantly. “Kamikazes who had mechanical issues preventing them from completing their mission after taking off from southern Kyushu were to land there.”
“Ah.”
“But towards the end of the war the Americans controlled the airspace over Kikaijima too, so perhaps even Miyabe couldn’t pull it off with a heavy load of ordnance.”
I nodded.
“In any case, this all happened sixty years ago. We have no way of knowing the truth.”
Tanigawa heaved a sigh. He reached out and flicked the switch on the wall and the fluorescent lights blinked on, brightening the dark room. He slowly pulled a single photograph from his pocket.
“This is my wife. She passed away five years ago. She was incredibly devoted. When I returned to my hometown after being discharged, she started bawling the moment she saw me. She was a woman of iron will. I never saw her cry before nor since.” Tanigawa’s eyes shone faintly with tears. “Had Miyabe not said to me what he did, we might never have spent our lives together.”