This is it then, I thought. But the shock of actually receiving that sheet of paper was far greater than whatever resolve I’d been able to muster.
I had been prepared to die from the moment I joined the training unit as a student reservist. This was something I had discussed many times with classmates that I was friendly with. But we had meant dying after giving our all in battle. Volunteering for a special attack unit and certain demise was something altogether beyond what I had been prepared for.
But we’d known that they’d started using kamikazes the previous year, so I wasn’t totally panicked in face of the volunteer form. Shikishima Unit’s actions at Leyte Gulf in the fall of ’44 had been announced with great fanfare by the papers and such. The media and Imperial General HQ had continued to issue news on kamikaze units for days on end. So I had kept the possibility of this happening in the back of my mind.
—Was I shocked by reports of the first kamikaze attack? Not really, to be frank. It did make me gird up.
By that time, I think I’d become desensitized with regards to death. It had become common to see the phrase “shattered jewels” in newspaper columns. What did “shattered jewels” really mean? Annihilation. It meant that all members of a unit had died in combat. They replaced “annihilation” with “shattered jewels” to paper over the sheer calamity of it. Back then, the Japanese military used such rephrasings on all sorts of matters. They referred to the mass evacuations from the cities to the countryside as “dispersals,” and retreating on the battlefield was “advancing upon turning.” But I think “shattered jewels” is the worst example because the intent was to disguise death as something beautiful. Eventually, the press bandied about the phrase “100 million shattered jewels”—a call for the entire nation’s all-out fight to the death.
After seeing news reports of so many deaths day in and day out, I began to think of life as something quite insignificant and transient. As thousands of soldiers were dying on the front lines each day, the thought of a dozen or so kamikaze pilots sortieing to their certain demise didn’t seem all that shocking.
But once I found myself in their shoes, my perception of the situation completely shifted. People are so very self-centered, as you know.
I thought of my parents—my mother and father who had doted on me like nothing else. And I thought of my little sister, ten years my junior. While my parents would be able to bear my death, my sister would no doubt weep inconsolably. She loved me more than anyone else. “I love you the best, big brother. I love you even more than Mom or Dad,” she liked to say.
The truth is, my sister was mentally disabled, though not acutely. Like many such children, she was exceedingly innocent, never mistrustful of anyone, which made her all the more pitiable and endearing.
Had I had a girlfriend or wife, things might have been different. But thankfully I was single back then. I didn’t even have someone I admired in secret. So at the time, I was only concerned for my family.
I thought that my parents would be able to bear up. They would even pardon me for failing in my filial duty. Perhaps they would feel pride over their son having given his life to defend the homeland. But I was filled with remorse for my sister. There would be no one left to care for her once my folks passed away, and I couldn’t get over that.
I don’t remember how I actually made up my mind with the volunteer form staring me in the face. I don’t really remember a thing now as to whether I made the decision with some deep-seated mental resolve or what.
Near dawn, I finally checked the box next to the “I volunteer” option. I think I was driven by the sense that many if not all of the others would be volunteering. I didn’t want to become the only coward. I remember taking care to keep my hand steady when I wrote down my name. I was worried about such things even at that juncture.
All of the flight students elected to volunteer. But later I did hear that some had originally checked “I do not volunteer.” Those reserves had been individually called up by the officers and persuaded to change their answers. “Persuasion” by one’s superiors in the military back then was essentially the same as being ordered to do something. It was virtually impossible to disobey.
Do you think we were wimps? I don’t expect people born and raised breathing freedom to be able to understand. But really, even nowadays, how many people at work do you think are actually capable of sticking their necks out and boldly saying “no” to their superiors? We “volunteers” were faced with a far more severe situation back then.
When I heard that some had initially chosen not to volunteer, all I thought was that since we were going to be coerced into doing it anyway, they should’ve just consented from the start.
Now I’m convinced, though—the men who initially refused to volunteer were truly admirable. The ones who made completely unfettered choices about a matter of life and death, according to their own will and nothing else, were the real men. Looking back, had more Japanese people, including myself, been made of such stuff, we could have ended the war much sooner.
The ones who convinced those men to change their answers might not have been superior officers but their fellow reserves. To be sure, none of us were happy with the idea of going to our deaths. But back then, there simply was no alternative. The military would never have forgiven us for refusing to volunteer for the kamikaze units. Indeed, there were rumors to that effect. Pilots from other training units who had stubbornly refused were shipped off to join the ground troops fighting on the front lines or were deployed in suicidal battles. They were only rumors, so we had no way of knowing how much, if any of it, was true. But for those of us in that era, it was sufficiently close enough to the truth to believe.
The military thought nothing of the lives of the troops. I said earlier that 4,400 young lives were lost in kamikaze attacks. But a single mission of the Surface Special Attack Force led by the battleship Yamato during the Battle of Okinawa saw the loss of nearly as many lives.
The Yamato’s sortie was a desperate effort. The preposterous plan was for the ship to be beached on Okinawa and used as a land-based gun battery against invading American troops. Of course, such a plan of action was doomed to fail. A single battleship with no air cover and just a handful of escort ships had practically no chance of actually making it to Okinawa.
Essentially, the Yamato was turned into a kamikaze unit that took the lives of her entire 3,300-man crew plus those of smaller vessels along with her. The staff officers who had come up with that plan didn’t care a farthing about the lives of those men. Maybe they were incapable of imagining that the 3,300 were all human beings with families, mothers and fathers, wives, children, and siblings. Even in a battle they knew they would lose, the higher-ups couldn’t just stand by, so they used the Yamato and several light cruisers and destroyers and thousands of crew members in a “special attack” to save face with a bold gesture.
The General Staff and the Combined Fleet admirals who drew up a flimsy battle plan which would sacrifice the Yamato, the pride of the Combined Fleet, would obviously not hesitate to throw away the lives of student reservists as kamikazes. In the best-case scenario, a warship could be sunk at the cost of only one man and one plane. They likely thought it couldn’t be helped that dozens of aircraft and pilots would be lost for the sake of one such strike hitting its target.
By the way, even when you volunteered to become a kamikaze, you weren’t immediately shipped off. Making us volunteer for special attacks was merely a premise, an element of process for the military. Once you volunteered, you were put into the pool of special-attack personnel from which the higher-ups could freely select when and who to send on kamikaze missions.