A Thousand Stitches (16 page)

Early the next morning, the Commander ordered me to take a patrol out to the residential area nearby. Much of it was burnt to the ground, and we saw a number of incinerated bodies lying in the streets. We also saw a few people who were just standing in the rubble dazed. We stopped to talk to one man and learned that his home was gone. He kept saying that he was happy that his family had evacuated to another part of the city, that they were safe. It was clear that he was in shock and had no idea what to do. I went back to the Commander and suggested that he send food and arrange for shelter for our neighbors. He sent off a few cables; once he had secured permission, he ordered Lieutenant Shimizu to help our neighbors. We loaded up food to distribute and assigned cadets to use Detachment trucks to transport the civilians anywhere they wanted to go within the city limits. Evidently there was no space for them at the Detachment. That was the day we felt the war had come to mainland Japan.

Late in the afternoon of December 1, I was summoned to Commander Fujimura's office. As I entered his office I wondered why he wanted to see me and tried to think if there was something I had done wrong. As I stood in front of him and bowed, I was astonished to hear him say, “Congratulations.” I didn't understand and worried more about what I had done wrong.

“May I ask what this is about, Sir?”

“I offered my congratulations because as of this date you are promoted to Lieutenant Junior Grade,” he said.

I was so surprised that I said the first thing that came into my head. “What about my classmates, Sir?” We had all been promoted to Ensign together the previous July, and I assumed that all our promotions would be on a lockstep basis.

“No, it's just you. Here,” he said handing me two small silver cherry blossom pins, “these are to add to the emblems on your collar.”

Back in my quarters, Seaman Hashimoto did a careful, professional tailoring job: he cut the emblems off my collar, pushed the new silver cherry blossoms through them and sewed them back on. It would have taken me hours, but Hashimoto finished in about half an hour. I slipped my jacket on again and admired the gleam of the silver blossoms in the mirror, two of them on each side of my collar.

At dinner time, I strolled into the dining room as nonchalantly as I could manage. Most of the other junior officers were already there. No one noticed anything until I took my seat at the table. Kawazaki, sitting across from me said, “Hey, Imagawa, are you sure you're wearing your own jacket?” When all heads swiveled in my direction, I explained. There was some joking about how I shouldn't pull rank on them. I truly couldn't figure out why I was promoted, and I don't think any of my colleagues could either. I did find out later that about ten percent of those whom I started with at Mie were promoted that day; I was the only one at the Tokyo Detachment.

With my promotion, I was appointed Deck Officer, which, I learned, meant I was responsible for morale. We had a three-day break to celebrate the New Year holiday. As Deck Officer, I was at the front gate to welcome the professional comics, dancers, and singers who came to entertain us. Several of them greeted Hashimoto as old friends. The cadets loved the performance, and the other officers and I enjoyed it too, of course. Losing ourselves in laughter was a rare treat.

Now that I was Deck Officer, Seaman Second Class Ito was an even greater asset to me than Hashimoto. Ito was a well-known
samurai
actor. Like Hashimoto, he had been drafted and considered himself lucky to be stationed in Tokyo. I often sent him to movie distributors to borrow films. The distributors were happy to supply them and refused to accept payment. The cadets loved
samurai
films, and all of the first ones we watched featured Ito. There was always a great cheer when he appeared on the screen.

One day when Ito returned to the Detachment, he told me that we had seen most of the
samurai
films available, but the distributors had American films we could borrow. I was surprised, thinking they had all been locked away or destroyed. They were absolutely forbidden in movie theaters. The other officers wanted to see them, and I was curious. I told Ito to bring some back the next time. They had Japanese subtitles, so the cadets enjoyed them—but not as much as the
samurai
films, of course. I sat transfixed in the dark, watching the elegant, long-limbed actresses, and listening to the language of my childhood. Many winter and early spring mornings were foggy. When there wasn't enough visibility to fly, we organized activities to keep the cadets busy. Volleyball was the most popular. We also organized group singing. We had the cadets form circles, with one ring around another. I loved watching the inner ring march in one direction, and the outer ring the other way. The cadets sang as they marched, and the sounds of their voices crossed each other, mingled, and made a wonderful whole. Every one of these group sings concluded with the naval aviators' version of the popular song
Doki no Sakura
:
We are cherry blossoms that bloomed on the same day. Although we are not blood relatives we cannot be separated. We will scatter and fall together for our country. Although we will die elsewhere, we will meet and bloom again as cherry blossoms in the spring tree tops of Yasukuni Shrine
. Music was always sheer joy for me, and I loved watching the cadets march and listening to them sing. Listening to the lyrics and the layers of harmony of the song made me remember the cherry blossoms at Matsuyama Castle. I didn't allow myself to think much about Yasukuni Shrine and these teenagers—and myself—dying far from home.

As it got warmer, we let the cadets wade in the Bay on some of the foggy mornings, digging for clams. The area was off-limits to civilians, so the catch was quite plentiful. And when the cadets were successful, the officers were the beneficiaries; because they had no way to cook the clams they caught, the cadets gave them all to us, and we grilled them on a
hibachi
in our Gun Room. Needless to say, a great deal of
sake
went down with those clams. Our bellies were full, and one evening I realized that I had come to quite enjoy the shabby place called the Tokyo Detachment.

February
11 is the day Japanese celebrate the origins of the country, the old story I had learned at Bancho about the god and goddess dipping their spears into the sea at Amanohashidate and shaking off droplets that became the islands of Japan. During the war, the holiday was called Empire Day, and the glory of the Japan's Asian Empire was the focus of the celebration. It was still dark at our morning assembly that day. We knew there would be no training because of the holiday, but had no idea how special the day would be until Commander Fujimura finished his holiday address, and then went on, solemnly, to say that he had received a special communication. The Naval General Staff Office had ordered him to form a Special Attack Unit at the Tokyo Detachment. By then we all knew what that meant. Special Attack units had been operating since the fall, first from the Philippines and then from Okinawa and Kyushu.

Commander Fujimura never mentioned the death—the suicide—that was involved. Instead he said, “The time has come for you to serve your country in the best way possible. But the Special Attack Unit of this Detachment will be formed with volunteers only. You need not volunteer if you are married or if you are the first or only son of your family. Think carefully. I will ask those of you who want to volunteer to take one step forward.”

There was absolute silence. Time stretched and warped during his pause of a few seconds. “Volunteers, one step forward!”

There was a loud thud. Virtually everyone stepped forward—together. Cadets and instructors alike. I was among them. I gave no thought, no consideration to the fact that I was the first and only son of the Imagawa family. In fact, I don't think I thought about anything at all. At the command, my body moved automatically. To volunteer to die for the country was the only thing to do. I was not afraid, and afterwards I had absolutely no regrets.

“I commend you for your courageous decision, but I see that we have too many volunteers for the small number of aircraft available to us. The squadron commanders will take down the names of the volunteers, and later the senior officers will select the pilots and navigators needed for the Unit.”

We were given the news in the Gun Room. Lieutenant Commander Shimizu was appointed the training commander for the Special Attack Unit, which would consist of two squadrons. Each squadron would have three squads of four planes each. I was to lead the second squadron and was also the leader for my group's first squad. With twenty-four planes assigned to the Special Attack Unit, there would be only about a dozen planes left for regular flight training.

Special Attack Unit training began the next day to prepare us to fly those flimsy bi-wing trainers into the territory of enemy fighters. If we allowed ourselves to think about it, we would have felt helpless at such a prospect, but we were determined to succeed in our missions. We put everything we had into our training.

We concentrated on formation flying. The squad leader took off first and had to gain altitude while keeping speed down to give the others time to catch up. At first the formations were quite loose, but with practice they got tighter and tighter, until the four pilots could make out each other's facial expressions. We cruised at 2,000 meters to specific points, such as Odawara to the south and Choshi to the east, before turning around to return to the airfield.

On March 1, 1945, the Detachment became the Tokyo Naval Air Corps (NAC) under the command of the Eleventh Combined Air Force. But it was a change in name only. Everything remained the same. By then we were ready to begin night flight training. Taking off for our missions in the dark would help us evade enemy fighters and give us a chance to make it to our targets. The idea was that we would dive into the targets at dawn.

March
9 was a lovely spring-like day—a first taste of real warmth. That afternoon we again witnessed a single B-29 flying high above the city. The afternoon was windy and the sky clear. By evening, even though the winds had risen, we decided it was warm enough to show the evening movie outside. We were enjoying Olivia de Havilland in
Robin Hood
when the air raid siren sounded. We ran toward the planes still on the tarmac, moved them into the hangars, and then scrambled into the shelters. The B-29s roared in overhead. It sounded like there were hundreds, in large formations. They flew from the southwest to the northeast, dropping bombs—most of them incendiary bombs—along the way. It sounded to us like the central and northern parts of the city were taking the hardest hits. Fires began almost immediately; they were so huge that we heard and felt them in the shelter. When we emerged it looked like the entire city was in flames. We scanned the sky, looking for the enemy planes. When the cloud cover parted, the underbellies of the huge silvery aircraft glowed red, reflecting the sea of fire below. The B-29s remained beautiful, sailing high above the destruction.

The all clear sounded just before dawn. After our morning assembly, Commander Fujimura took me aside and ordered me to fly around the city and report back with an assessment of the damage. He was particularly concerned about the Imperial Palace. Following orders, I flew to the Palace first and was relieved to see that the large green oasis in the middle of the city was untouched. But when I turned northeast, the picture changed dramatically. The central, northern, and eastern portions of the city, the oldest and most traditional parts—Tokyo's old
shitamachi—
spread on either side of the Sumida River, were flattened, burned to nothing. Where there had been miles and miles of factories and the small wooden houses of the working classes, only the shells of a few concrete buildings remained.

The winds had tossed burning embers and debris into the air and whipped the fires from the incendiary bombs into a storm that had devoured the flimsy dwellings along with their occupants, who had heeded the government's instructions to avoid the few public shelters and stay near their homes to defend them. Fires were still burning and I could make out the smoldering skeleton of Kokugikan, the national
sumo
wrestling hall. I descended to look for the nearby Asakusa Kannon Temple, which had been a refuge for the people of that neighborhood during the great Tokyo fire that followed the earthquake of 1923. I couldn't find any trace of that grand structure and was shocked that at the lower altitude, the heat from the ground reached up to my plane.

It was hard to grasp what I was witnessing. Tokyo, the heart of the nation, the vast ocean of the metropolis that I had encountered as a ten-year-old, was devastated. Much of one of the world's great cities was gone. The B-29s had done their job with startling and ruthless efficiency. America's might had obliterated much of the capital and many of its citizens. How much longer could this be endured?