The soldiers all left smiling. We smiled at them, too.
I never told this to anybody.
Hi, this is Judit Kawaguchi for Morinoske in Tokyo, Japan.
In this series we’ll bring you interviews that will hopefully give you a whole new insight into Japanese history and culture.
I’ve been living in Japan for over 10 years,
and I’m working as a freelance TV reporter and columnist
and I really really love living in Japan because the Japanese people welcome me and treat me so well every single day.
and I think this country is just amazing, very well developed and safe and really fun to live in.
Everything is great, except one thing:
I don’t feel that Japanese people appreciate their own country enough,
especially that they, sort of, lack
a thankful heart for the previous generations.
I have lots of elderly friends,
as you can see them right here,
who suffered so much and built up this country
from the ruins of World War II,
or the Pacific War as it’s called here,
and not only that, but they even fought for Japan in the war.
And I think it’s really time to thank them for their efforts
and listen to their stories.
What did these men go through when they fought for Japan and lost the war?
And what happened to them after the war?
More amazingly, these men, not only that they fought for Japan,
they were the members of the elite Ohka unit
which was a very special suicide bombing unit.
How come they’re still alive?
What happened to them?
I was extremely curious to hear their stories.
And they were kind enough to open their hearts,
and tell me a lot of their stories
and I am here to share them with you.
I 'm still a student of Japanese culture and history.
I am just your guide.
I think it’s time to really study and learn more about Japanese history and culture.
And I would love to thank
Mr. Suzuki, for his cooperation.
And also
Yasukuni Shrine and Yushukan
because they allowed us to film on their premises
extremely freely, and they helped us with lots of materials. So I’d like to thank them very much. So thank you!
Kenchoji Kamakura
Mr. Suzuki was born in 1923. After graduating Waseda University in 1943,
he joined the navy in January 1944
and was stationed in Taiwan for a while.
After which he came back to Japan, joined the Jinrai Butai, Ohka
and became a trainer there.
In 1945 April
he was called for an attack
but while he was waiting in Kanoya, Kyushu,
the war ended.
829 members of the Jinrai Butai died.
They were all brave, true air fighters.
Yushukan, Yasukuni Shrine
Ohka was the main weapon of Jinrai Butai.
We were called Ohka Special Attack Forces.
Let me explain.
You see the little plane under the mother plane’s belly?
That is Ohka.
It’s like a torpedo with one seat
and it has wings.
The pilot inside Ohka is waiting
to fly out.
When we hear the signal,
the mother plane lets the Ohka go.
Ohka’s steering was excellent.
On test flights, it felt so comfortable.
It doesn’t have an engine, it was so silent.
All we heard was the sound of the wind. It felt so comfortable.
Its steering was so good.
Now I will explain about Ohka and also Jinrai Butai:
first of all, this is Ohka.
It’s a very, very tiny plane.
It’s right here, it’s really like a baby plane,
just enough for one single person
and it is carried by the mother plane
right here in its belly.
So the Ohka is attached to the mother plane
and when it’s ready to hit its target,
the mother plane releases the Ohka, and it flies out.
It glides out of the mother’s belly
and these other planes,
for example,
these tiny planes are around the mother plane to protect it.
This is called Bakusentai.
As we look at this illustration,
we can see how small the Ohka is
and it goes at the incredible speed of up to about 600 kilometers.
Once the mother plane called Rikkotai, releases the Ohka,
the Ohka finds its target, which is normally,
an aircraft carrier.
And if it can hit, it does hit the target like this,
and causes incredible damage
because it goes at a huge speed
and it’s filled with explosives.
Now let’s look at some of the historical background why Japan had to develop such weapons of destruction.
This is a chart that compares
raw material production in 1944
between Japan and the US.
And if we look at that, we see that
aluminum production was 5.4 times more in the US than in Japan.
And steel production was 39 times more,
and even more incredibly,
oil production was 209 times more
in the US than in Japan.
Once again, between 1940 to 1945,
this is the Japanese and American production of artillery.
First of all, firearms:
the US produced 6.5 times firearms than the Japanese,
and 11 times more artillery.
The bullet production was 524 times more in the US than in Japan.
That means; for a single Japanese bullet,
524 American bullets were coming back.
So really, no way to even continue the war.
How about airplanes? Again this is 1944.
The US produced 3.4 times more airplanes than the Japanese.
This is warships; which is 11 times more
and tanks; 100 times more.
So this is a war where
the Japanese had to come up with something
to even stay in the war.
Look at this chart:
it compares the Japanese and US airplane production between 1940 to 1945.
The blue represents the US and the red; Japan.
The green dot shows the rate,
how many times the US supply
is over the Japanese.
In the beginning of the war,
the US produced 4 times more aircrafts than the Japanese,
but by the end of the war,
this number jumped almost 10 times more.
This is exactly the time, 1944, when the Japanese got so desperate
that they came up with the idea to develop suicide attackers,
Tokkotai, to somehow end this war as fast as possible.
And this is what Mr. Suzuki was telling us all about.
We were college students at that time.
After the Greater East Asia War broke out
various people came to lecture at our school.
One of them was then Prime Minister Tojo
and some top navy officials.
They said even though
we were winning,
we won’t win if the war lasts
more than 2 years.
We wondered why they said that.
Japan won the Japan Russia War,
so we thought we would win this war, too.
When we made good military results,
we figured Japan had secret measures
to end the war.
And when Singapore was taken,
we thought, it was the end of the war.
But it wasn’t. Japan was already
devastated and now the US was coming to the mainland.
We thought that if we sank US aircraft carriers by tokko,
then the US civilians would
demonstrate against the war.
And then the war would end, and we’d have peace.
I was be willing to give my life
to stop further damages
and to end the war.
So I applied for tokko.
I wanted to protect my family,
and my hometown.
That means my country
as a whole and
its beautiful culture.
Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine
where 2,460,000 soldiers’ spirits
are enshrined.
How do you feel now?
I am filled with emotions.
That’s all I can say.
If I say more, I’ll cry.
I remember all their faces.
People only talk about Tokkotai,
but there were many others
who died for the country,
not only Tokkotai.
I hope the spirits of those soldiers
protect the peace in Japan.
This is Mr. Suzuki.
Thank you for coming today.
Why didn’t you talk about tokko before?
You know, most of my friends
who fought with me, died in the war.
But I survived and
I felt sorry
for those who died.
I felt they died because of my uselessness.
On top of that, we lost the war.
I kept feeling ashamed
for being alive.
So I kept silent for a while
even though I was asked about tokko.
How did education change after the war?
Well, changes can be observed in many ways.
I think Japanese should work together
hand in hand, with the weak and
the strong helping each other.
We used to be that way, but now
the strong stays strong and the weak stays weak.
We are losing the desire to help others.
And we became self-centered.
And people are cast into 2 groups:
the strong and the weak.
You can’t behave selfishly.
It’s important to help
society and your family.
This is what’s missing now.
The last 60 years of occupation
had a bad influence on the Japanese.
This has to be fixed
by every one of us.
That is how I feel.
Here is a typical 2006 Japanese high school history book.
In it, there’s only one line that talks about tokko.
Isn’t this weird?
Is this the way it should be?
Textbooks should be more balanced, I think.
What do you think, Suzuki san?
It’s an important part of history,
I think.
Considering many young people died as tokko.
I feel sorry that the media
has been ignoring tokko.
I wish there’ll be more talks
about tokko.
I was born in Hungary,
when the school textbooks were
written from the Soviet viewpoint.
But my grandparents told me the real history.
Hungarian children were educated that way.
Why did you decide to talk about tokko now?
I didn’t want to talk about it for a long time.
But things change and
when I wondered why
these soldiers died,
the answer was that
they died for Japan.
So if it’s better to be quiet,
I stay quiet. But if it’s not,
I need to speak up.
Especially, if otherwise,
we’d lose the meaning of
their deaths.
We should tell how we fought
during the war.
I hope that this way
people understand how we fought for the country.
Then Japan will be
better and so we decided
to start talking.
We hope our stories will be passed down
and not forgotten.
So we need to leave our stories
for the later generations.
We could be criticized
if we say we love our country
because nowadays many Japanese
mistakenly think that if you love your country,
then you love war, too.
Isn’t that ridiculous?
I live in Japan.
I wonder why Japanese people don’t love Japan more.
You’ve been interviewed before,
how were those interviews?
Yes I’ve been interviewed.
Depending on the era,
like right after the war,
the interviewers had their own viewpoint
and they wanted me to
tell what was in their scenario.
They would look for holes in my talk,
they made up stories using me,
they modified my story
until it was not my story anymore.
I thought I would never
talk to the media again.
But Morinoske understands our feelings.
When I was interviewed,
I felt I could trust you.
I knew that with
Morinoske I could talk.
Thank you.
We’d like to gather the
stories of your friends,
the other soldiers’ as well.
How would they feel?
I’m sure they feel the same way as me.
They would be happy to talk to you.
But I worry because fewer soldiers
attended the recent memorial service,
so I realized that we need to
talk while we are still alive.
Our time is limited.
Fewer and fewer of us are alive.
We need to hurry up to tell our stories.
That’s right. Please do so.
It has been 62 years since the end of the Pacific War
which is a period Mr. Suzuki calls
occupation. In his mind,
Japan is still occupied.
I think what he means is
occupying mindset.
You know, somehow Japanese people still look at history
from the viewpoint of the victor.
This is what Suzuki san refers to.
I think that looking at history from various viewpoints
is extremely important because
listening to the different voices is like a beautiful chorus
and from this chorus, we can somehow get the real sense of history, what really happened.
And I think to do that, we must begin at home.
When I was young, I always asked my great-grandparents about what happened to them when they were younger, and later
and this is what made me into the person that I am today.
So if I can recommend anything, I would say
please, listen to your grandparents, listen to
people in your neighborhood, ask them questions,
let them tell you their stories because elderly people
went through so much, they have lots of wisdom and lots of stories to share,
and they will enrich your lives.
And if there is anything that you would like to share with us,
please email us, contact us.
We would love to come and listen to more stories from elderly people in Japan.
If you’d like to contribute to this project,
please check our homepage for different ways.
We also hope that you keep coming back, because we plan on making more and more TV shows for you, from here in Tokyo, Japan.
Till then, see you again. Bye bye! Sayonara!
Looking at the latest trends,
even young people
wonder whether Japan is ok as it is.
Recently more people are feeling that way.
I think.
Japan is coming to a turning point.
In this 60 years of occupation,
our lifestyles have been strange.
Now, it’s time to realize
what’s wrong with us.
Once we do that,
we should fix each mistake
one by one.
I hope that Japan will be a great country again.
When will that be?
I guess we’ll just have to live longer.
Yes, you’ve got to, both of you, please!
Thank you. I’m so happy that you, Judit,
understand us.
Of course, that’s natural.