Japan: Return of the Samurai

Bowing deeply before 49 bashful, middle-aged matrons at the old Myoen-ji Temple in Ozuki, seven former Japanese army pilots last week gathered for one of the most improbable war reunions ever. They were the survivors of Katsura Squadron, one of the Kamikaze (“Divine Wind”) Special Attack Corps groups designed to destroy the U.S. fleet in the desperate months before V-J day. The women were the girls the pilots had left behind, never, as far as anyone then knew, to see again.

In the dark hours of a May morning 21 years ago, the twelve fighters of Katsura Squadron roared off the Ozuki airstrip for assignment to a suicide mission. For the 16-year-old local Tabe High School girls, whose part in the war had been to wash down the planes, it was the end of an idyllic spring with the young second lieutenants. As one of the moonstruck maintenance girls remembered, when the squadron got its orders, “We felt like the wives of samurai sent off to battle in old Japan.”

As things turned out, they need not have worried. By that late date, the only planes the shattered Japanese air force was able to supply the pilots were obsolete, Type 97 fixed-landing-gear crates in bad repair. Three of the pilots did eventually get off on Kamikaze missions. But one by one, the other nine on the flight from Ozuki were forced to ditch or crash-land. Except for one pilot who died in a crash, they were still waiting for replacement aircraft when the war ended three months later.

The women might never have known Katsura Squadron’s odd fate had not Mrs. Atsuko Hori, now the wife of an Ozuki businessman, tracked down the pilots and invited them to a reunion. To Kenji Katayama, a mild-mannered Kyoto agricultural official at 43, the invitation brought a “burning nostalgia for those days when I was so pure that I thought nothing of dying for the glory of my nation. All at once I was full of desire for a rendezvous with my past.”

“The Best Days.” Sure enough, the seven pilots flocked to Ozuki. They had no trouble recognizing the girls from Tabe High. Spotting Mrs. Hori, ex-Kamikaze Hideo Kawai cried: “Why, you look exactly the same!” “And you look as handsome as ever,” said she. “Banzai!” cheered Kawai, a portly, balding Kyoto milk dealer who obviously could not swing into a fighter cockpit as easily as he once did. Over a lunch of rice, shredded cuttlefish and beer—a traditional Kamikaze last meal —the men and women swapped toasts “to the best days of our lives,” promised to meet again next year.

Yet for all the talk of old times at Ozuki, the Divine Wind two decades later was barely a zephyr. Eying a row of modern U.S. trainers on the familiar runway, Shipyard Salesman Tatsuo Suzuki, 43, wished that “our planes had been as good as these in those days.” Ah, rasped Hotel Manager Jumpei Watanabe, “if our planes had been this good, we wouldn’t be here now.”