Lt.Foo
07-22-2005, 04:14 PM
The kamikaze and the communist: WWII survivors embody conflict that still haunts Japan
The U.S. warships were so close that Toshio Yoshitake could see the black puffs of anti-aircraft-gun smoke wafting up from the blue sea below. Flying over the Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, he figured that in another 20 minutes he would be upon them and, in a ball of fire, fulfill his duty.
He was just 22. But he wasn't afraid.
"We had already been at war for a long time," he said, showing off an old photo of his comrades the day they left Japan for the front lines. They are in their flight gear, and smiling broadly. "It's hard for people now to understand, but when we were given our orders, I was happy. I was filled with the desire to carry it through."
As a kamikaze pilot, that meant sure death.
None of the 17 other pilots and flight instructors in the "Special Assault Corps" unit who took off with Yoshitake from the Imperial Army airstrip just east of Tokyo that chilly morning in November 1944 survived. Yoshitake is still around for the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II only because an American warplane shot him out of the air. He crash-landed and was rescued by Japanese soldiers.
"I never saw what hit me," he said, a hint of disappointment in his voice. "I was very close."
Two thousand miles (3,200 kilometers) away in Tokyo, Hamako Matsuzaki was struggling to survive those final months of World War II. As a communist and an opponent of the war, she had endured beatings and humiliation, and was keeping her head down, working in an aircraft factory in a city that would soon be bombed into a raging fireball.
Yoshitake is 82 and thinks the war was just. Matsuzaki, 10 years older, still feels affronted by the mere sight of her country's flag. In a nation three quarters of whose people were born after the war, and where the rights and wrongs of it are still regarded by many with ambivalence, they are among the few still alive to tell their stories.
___
Summer in Japan has long been dominated by remembrances of the war, but next month's anniversary is looming especially large.
Just a few months ago, violent demonstrations broke out in China and South Korea over the way the war is portrayed in Japanese textbooks. Territorial disputes dating back to Japan's half century of imperial expansion have recently boiled over _ yet again _ into high-profile diplomatic spats.
This year's main commemoration, hosted by Emperor Akihito and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, will be held as usual at the relatively innocuous Budokan martial arts arena in central Tokyo on Aug. 15, the day Akihito's father, the late Emperor Hirohito, announced Japan's defeat in 1945.
But right across the street is the Yasukuni war shrine, a symbol of Japanese imperialism since it was built in the late 1800s. Because of rising outrage across Asia to his previous visits, Koizumi _ who was only three years old when the war ended _ is not expected to go to the shrine that day. Dozens of senior Japanese ruling-party politicians and members of his Cabinet probably will, however.
Yoshitake won't be there.
"There's no particular reason to do anything on that day," he said.
Yoshitake, small and soft-spoken, has tried to put the war behind him. At the urging of a military historical society, he wrote his memoirs six years ago. But he says he has never talked about his wartime experiences with his own sons, or his grandchildren.
"I don't think they could understand," he said.
Even so, he is quick to say he is proud of what he did for his country.
He didn't know it, but by the time Yoshitake was on his final flight the battle of the Leyte Gulf had already been lost. It was the biggest naval battle in history, and the first in which kamikaze were deployed.
Bloody and dazed, he was rescued after crash-landing his Type 99 assault plane on the island of Mactan. After escaping intense enemy fire on several islands in the Philippines, he gradually made his way to Taiwan, and, in 1947, was repatriated back to Japan.
"When my family saw me, they must have thought they were seeing a ghost," he said, the scars from the crash still visible on his shaved head.
Purged by the U.S.-led occupation authorities, he struggled to find work after the war, holding a series of menial jobs. But when Japan's military _ now called the "Self-Defense Forces" _ was revived in the 1950s, he immediately rejoined, became a pilot instructor and retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
Though he doesn't mark the official anniversary of Japan's defeat, Yoshitake does get together with some other veterans a few times each year to pay respects at Yasukuni.
"It can still bring tears to my eyes," he said.
Koizumi's staunch support of the Yasukuni shrine reflects the political power of a huge lobbying group representing the families of the 2.4 million soldiers who died during the war. But his visits have been slammed by non-Shinto religious groups in Japan _ including the Buddhist-backed partner in his ruling coalition government _ and the Chinese and Koreans, who bore the brunt of Japan's march through Asia.
Yoshitake shrugs off Yasukuni's political baggage.
"We have a right to pay our respects," he said. "It's really no one else's business."
He was ready to sacrifice himself, he said, because he believed Japan was trying to rid Asia of Western colonialism. Japan wasn't invading Asia, Japan was liberating it. And, in the end, Japan had no choice but to fight or die.
"I still believe that today," he said.
___
Matsuzaki spent the war years on the other side of the political divide _ in Japan's tiny opposition.
She underwent her first interrogation by Japan's special police, the equivalent of the Nazi brownshirts, after helping organize a railway strike in 1932.
"I refused to tell them my name," she said. "So they decided I needed a lesson."
She said she was tied to a chair, slapped, beaten with batons and bamboo swords and then kicked repeatedly. Guards had taken the sash to her kimono, which hung open during the ordeal. After she was returned to her cell, she spent the night listening to the screams of a man who had also led the strike.
"They singled us out as the ringleaders," she said. "They never let us out of their sight."
Now 92, Matsuzaki said she became an activist almost casually when she was 18 because of the daily social injustices she saw at the subway station in Tokyo where she worked from dawn to dark selling train tickets.
But she soon became engulfed in a larger struggle.
Matsuzaki joined Japan's Communist Party in January 1932, as Japan was setting out to occupy northern China in the prelude to a rampage through Asia that would culminate in world war.
"Democracy had just begun to flourish in Japan," she recalled. "But the government used the war as an excuse to crack down."
Though kept under close surveillance, Matsuzaki continued to organize small groups in an effort to generate a movement against the government, and against the war.
On Dec. 9, 1941, two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor put Japan at war with the United States, she was placed in "preventive custody."
"That time there were no beatings," she said. "They just let me sit, alone, for six months."
The guards had a map on the wall with Rising Sun flags on pins to mark the limits of the Japanese empire.
"They made a big point of moving the pins farther out with each victory," she said. "That's why, for me, the Rising Sun flag will always be a symbol of aggression."
The night before Japan surrendered, Matsuzaki was running for her life to a makeshift air-raid shelter she had dug with her family in the woods. Incendiary bombs rained down, hitting a little boy in front of her and setting him ablaze.
"I just kept running," she said. "No one stopped."
Clutching wet pillows, she huddled in the shelter, little more than a dirt pit, with her mother and infant niece. After sunrise, she walked through her smoldering neighborhood to the factory where she supervised women assembling parts for military aircraft.
The factory was partially destroyed. But 30 or 40 people were gathered there because they had heard a major announcement was to be made. Days earlier, atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was exactly noon on Aug. 15 when, for the first time ever, Hirohito personally addressed the nation.
The war was over.
"The city was still on fire when he spoke," Matsuzaki recalled of the famous radio broadcast. "I felt very happy to be alive."
After the war, Matsuzaki rose through the ranks of the Communist Party, eventually becoming a member of its central committee. She now holds an advisory post.
The socialist revolution she had hoped for never came. Japan is one of the world's most successful capitalist powers, and the Japan Communist Party is a small and often marginalized opposition group in a conservative-controlled Parliament.
But while democracy has taken root and the average Japanese enjoys an array of social and political freedoms she could have hardly imagined, Matsuzaki said she believes Japan's future will not truly be secure until it accepts the lessons of its past.
She cited increasing political apathy among the young, and said she is frightened by the growing role of Japan's military overseas _ Japan now has several hundred non-combat troops on an unprecedented deployment in Iraq, a mission she strongly opposes.
"People are forgetting," she said. "They are acting as though nothing happened."
Matsuzaki has accepted invitations to speak at several anniversary gatherings.
Like Yoshitake, she won't be going to Yasukuni.
"I have never gone through its gate. I've never wanted to," she said. "I went to see the cherry blossoms outside once. But that's the closest I've gone." (By Eric Talmadge, Associated Press Writer)
July 13, 2005
The U.S. warships were so close that Toshio Yoshitake could see the black puffs of anti-aircraft-gun smoke wafting up from the blue sea below. Flying over the Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, he figured that in another 20 minutes he would be upon them and, in a ball of fire, fulfill his duty.
He was just 22. But he wasn't afraid.
"We had already been at war for a long time," he said, showing off an old photo of his comrades the day they left Japan for the front lines. They are in their flight gear, and smiling broadly. "It's hard for people now to understand, but when we were given our orders, I was happy. I was filled with the desire to carry it through."
As a kamikaze pilot, that meant sure death.
None of the 17 other pilots and flight instructors in the "Special Assault Corps" unit who took off with Yoshitake from the Imperial Army airstrip just east of Tokyo that chilly morning in November 1944 survived. Yoshitake is still around for the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II only because an American warplane shot him out of the air. He crash-landed and was rescued by Japanese soldiers.
"I never saw what hit me," he said, a hint of disappointment in his voice. "I was very close."
Two thousand miles (3,200 kilometers) away in Tokyo, Hamako Matsuzaki was struggling to survive those final months of World War II. As a communist and an opponent of the war, she had endured beatings and humiliation, and was keeping her head down, working in an aircraft factory in a city that would soon be bombed into a raging fireball.
Yoshitake is 82 and thinks the war was just. Matsuzaki, 10 years older, still feels affronted by the mere sight of her country's flag. In a nation three quarters of whose people were born after the war, and where the rights and wrongs of it are still regarded by many with ambivalence, they are among the few still alive to tell their stories.
___
Summer in Japan has long been dominated by remembrances of the war, but next month's anniversary is looming especially large.
Just a few months ago, violent demonstrations broke out in China and South Korea over the way the war is portrayed in Japanese textbooks. Territorial disputes dating back to Japan's half century of imperial expansion have recently boiled over _ yet again _ into high-profile diplomatic spats.
This year's main commemoration, hosted by Emperor Akihito and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, will be held as usual at the relatively innocuous Budokan martial arts arena in central Tokyo on Aug. 15, the day Akihito's father, the late Emperor Hirohito, announced Japan's defeat in 1945.
But right across the street is the Yasukuni war shrine, a symbol of Japanese imperialism since it was built in the late 1800s. Because of rising outrage across Asia to his previous visits, Koizumi _ who was only three years old when the war ended _ is not expected to go to the shrine that day. Dozens of senior Japanese ruling-party politicians and members of his Cabinet probably will, however.
Yoshitake won't be there.
"There's no particular reason to do anything on that day," he said.
Yoshitake, small and soft-spoken, has tried to put the war behind him. At the urging of a military historical society, he wrote his memoirs six years ago. But he says he has never talked about his wartime experiences with his own sons, or his grandchildren.
"I don't think they could understand," he said.
Even so, he is quick to say he is proud of what he did for his country.
He didn't know it, but by the time Yoshitake was on his final flight the battle of the Leyte Gulf had already been lost. It was the biggest naval battle in history, and the first in which kamikaze were deployed.
Bloody and dazed, he was rescued after crash-landing his Type 99 assault plane on the island of Mactan. After escaping intense enemy fire on several islands in the Philippines, he gradually made his way to Taiwan, and, in 1947, was repatriated back to Japan.
"When my family saw me, they must have thought they were seeing a ghost," he said, the scars from the crash still visible on his shaved head.
Purged by the U.S.-led occupation authorities, he struggled to find work after the war, holding a series of menial jobs. But when Japan's military _ now called the "Self-Defense Forces" _ was revived in the 1950s, he immediately rejoined, became a pilot instructor and retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
Though he doesn't mark the official anniversary of Japan's defeat, Yoshitake does get together with some other veterans a few times each year to pay respects at Yasukuni.
"It can still bring tears to my eyes," he said.
Koizumi's staunch support of the Yasukuni shrine reflects the political power of a huge lobbying group representing the families of the 2.4 million soldiers who died during the war. But his visits have been slammed by non-Shinto religious groups in Japan _ including the Buddhist-backed partner in his ruling coalition government _ and the Chinese and Koreans, who bore the brunt of Japan's march through Asia.
Yoshitake shrugs off Yasukuni's political baggage.
"We have a right to pay our respects," he said. "It's really no one else's business."
He was ready to sacrifice himself, he said, because he believed Japan was trying to rid Asia of Western colonialism. Japan wasn't invading Asia, Japan was liberating it. And, in the end, Japan had no choice but to fight or die.
"I still believe that today," he said.
___
Matsuzaki spent the war years on the other side of the political divide _ in Japan's tiny opposition.
She underwent her first interrogation by Japan's special police, the equivalent of the Nazi brownshirts, after helping organize a railway strike in 1932.
"I refused to tell them my name," she said. "So they decided I needed a lesson."
She said she was tied to a chair, slapped, beaten with batons and bamboo swords and then kicked repeatedly. Guards had taken the sash to her kimono, which hung open during the ordeal. After she was returned to her cell, she spent the night listening to the screams of a man who had also led the strike.
"They singled us out as the ringleaders," she said. "They never let us out of their sight."
Now 92, Matsuzaki said she became an activist almost casually when she was 18 because of the daily social injustices she saw at the subway station in Tokyo where she worked from dawn to dark selling train tickets.
But she soon became engulfed in a larger struggle.
Matsuzaki joined Japan's Communist Party in January 1932, as Japan was setting out to occupy northern China in the prelude to a rampage through Asia that would culminate in world war.
"Democracy had just begun to flourish in Japan," she recalled. "But the government used the war as an excuse to crack down."
Though kept under close surveillance, Matsuzaki continued to organize small groups in an effort to generate a movement against the government, and against the war.
On Dec. 9, 1941, two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor put Japan at war with the United States, she was placed in "preventive custody."
"That time there were no beatings," she said. "They just let me sit, alone, for six months."
The guards had a map on the wall with Rising Sun flags on pins to mark the limits of the Japanese empire.
"They made a big point of moving the pins farther out with each victory," she said. "That's why, for me, the Rising Sun flag will always be a symbol of aggression."
The night before Japan surrendered, Matsuzaki was running for her life to a makeshift air-raid shelter she had dug with her family in the woods. Incendiary bombs rained down, hitting a little boy in front of her and setting him ablaze.
"I just kept running," she said. "No one stopped."
Clutching wet pillows, she huddled in the shelter, little more than a dirt pit, with her mother and infant niece. After sunrise, she walked through her smoldering neighborhood to the factory where she supervised women assembling parts for military aircraft.
The factory was partially destroyed. But 30 or 40 people were gathered there because they had heard a major announcement was to be made. Days earlier, atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was exactly noon on Aug. 15 when, for the first time ever, Hirohito personally addressed the nation.
The war was over.
"The city was still on fire when he spoke," Matsuzaki recalled of the famous radio broadcast. "I felt very happy to be alive."
After the war, Matsuzaki rose through the ranks of the Communist Party, eventually becoming a member of its central committee. She now holds an advisory post.
The socialist revolution she had hoped for never came. Japan is one of the world's most successful capitalist powers, and the Japan Communist Party is a small and often marginalized opposition group in a conservative-controlled Parliament.
But while democracy has taken root and the average Japanese enjoys an array of social and political freedoms she could have hardly imagined, Matsuzaki said she believes Japan's future will not truly be secure until it accepts the lessons of its past.
She cited increasing political apathy among the young, and said she is frightened by the growing role of Japan's military overseas _ Japan now has several hundred non-combat troops on an unprecedented deployment in Iraq, a mission she strongly opposes.
"People are forgetting," she said. "They are acting as though nothing happened."
Matsuzaki has accepted invitations to speak at several anniversary gatherings.
Like Yoshitake, she won't be going to Yasukuni.
"I have never gone through its gate. I've never wanted to," she said. "I went to see the cherry blossoms outside once. But that's the closest I've gone." (By Eric Talmadge, Associated Press Writer)
July 13, 2005