CHAPTER 30
TARO
March 1945
“Did you tell her?” Nakamura’s voice was loud in the smaller bunkroom. With only eight beds, instead of dozens, their new housing reflected their status as Tokkō Tai. Nakamura was hanging his head upside down off the foot of his bed so that his face was very red. He was playing with something bright that Taro could not make out. Taro sat on his own bed, staring at his violin, pretending to polish it with a soft cloth. Tokkō training began in an hour.
“I couldn’t bring myself to,” Taro admitted. The shame he felt was palpable. “It’s strange. I felt such a sense of peace; I thought of Lieutenant Saito’s Bushido.”
“Ah! You’re samurai now?” Nakamura laughed.
“I’m serious, Kenji. It felt as if nothing mattered more than what we are doing. Even telling my mother was not important.”
Nakamura rolled over to look at him. “Was?”
Taro sighed. “Was. It seems important now. Did I take the coward’s way out?”
Nakamura shrugged. “Who’s to say?”
“I suppose you told your family?”
Nakamura gave him a lopsided smile. “Best and worst thing I’ve ever done. My grandmother slapped me, my grandfather got drunk with me, my sister’s girlfriends all asked to marry me, but I had to say no because my mother made me this.”
He held up the toy he’d been fiddling with. It was a bride doll. A petite pale-faced woman sewn of cloth and hand painted with rosy cheeks and smiling lips. She wore a miniature wedding kimono of elaborate silk dotted with cranes.
“Meet the wife!” Nakamura said, sitting up. “Her name is Nobuko—at least, I think that’s what my mother said. She’s going to serve me in the afterlife.”
Taro felt a pang in his stomach. “It’s . . . I mean, she’s beautiful.”
“Eh, she’s okay. Not fat enough to guarantee happiness, like that old guy said. But she’ll do. The kimono’s nice—cut from my mom’s wedding outfit. Little sis wasn’t too happy about that, but I told her by the time she got married, Western dress would be all the rage. That caused a ruckus. If we win the war, Western clothes will probably be banned for a thousand years, or so she told me in many, many more words. Sis is the only one not impressed by me. I’ll have to take out a big battleship just to make her blink.
“So that’s what you missed out on. A slap, a hangover, an angry sister, and you could be married to a doll, too.”
Taro imagined his own mother carefully cutting up her wedding kimono, painstakingly painting a little face. He gripped the neck of his violin and tried to summon his fortitude again. She would understand. He was doing this for her. He was doing this for Japan.
“Oh, and the women,” Nakamura added. “Just watch the love letters I’ll be getting from here on out. Girls love pilots, but they go crazy for tokkō.”
Taro surprised himself with a laugh. “Nakamura, your ‘secular’ fortitude is impressive.”
Nakamura smirked. “Laugh all you want. By next mail call, you’ll see.”
Tokkō training was very different from fighter training. Instead of learning swift maneuvers and how to dogfight, the new CO instructed Taro and his flight in the fine art of trust.
“You will have no guns, so you won’t be able to engage the enemy. You must trust your escort planes to take care of them for you. In this way, you are no different from a bomber plane. You have one job. Do it well. The others will do theirs, and they will report your success when they return.”
From there, it was charts and graphs and spotter cards. How to recognize an enemy ship from a distance. The best places to target—preferably near the ammunition storage or fuel tanks. Either would provide a sufficient blast to cause maximum damage and disable a ship.
“There is nothing more pointless than sacrificing yourself without hurting the enemy,” the CO said. He was a ruddy-faced man. Rumor had it he drank too much. Taro didn’t doubt it. The man had trained over four hundred tokkō.
“The deck of this aircraft carrier is armored. Crash on deck, and if you are lucky, you cause a fire and take out a few sailors. Hit the fuel stores, though—” He tapped the chart on the wall highlighting the spots where highly volatile aviation fuel was held for the thirty-six fighter planes and fifty-four bombers on board. “And you become gunshin warriors, lifted to Yasukuni in the arms of beautiful kami.”
They discussed wind speed, when and how to drop out of the sky, to skim the waves, to hold steady.
What they did not discuss was spiritual fortitude. Perhaps the CO was not capable of it. Or perhaps it no longer mattered. They were committed. They would follow through.
And that was it. One day of training, and then they had little to do but wait for an assignment. Taro imagined rooms full of generals in impressive uniforms, somewhere in Tokyo, moving chess pieces along a great board the size of the Eastern World. When they were ready, they would push their knights into position. And Japan would be preserved.
Nakamura hadn’t been kidding about the love letters. They came in, three a day, then five, then a dozen. Word had spread around his hometown. Entire schools of girls, and even grown women, were writing him by the time the boys got their orders to ship out. Some of the girls even sent extra letters to be given to his friends. Taro read one from a twenty-two-year-old schoolteacher in Kagoshima. When Nakamura saw him blush, he took the letter back “for careful review.”
He also gave the postmaster clear forwarding instructions: Chiran Imperial Army Air Base, Kagoshima Prefecture. Nakamura had a fan base now. He wasn’t going to miss reading a single line.
Taro wrote a letter home to tell his mother where he would be, but he did not mail it. The censors would not allow him to say what mattered most, and even if they would, he still could not bring himself to tell her the truth. His actions would have to speak for him.