Takako fell in love with an assistant director at Daiei and retired after appearing only “once or twice in films where she was listed in ‘The Rest of the Cast’ section of the credits.” She married him after graduating from university and was blessed with three children. She subsequently got a qualification as a nursery school teacher and worked as the head of a nursery that her father-in-law had set up.
“My mother worked very hard to send me to university. My parents-in-law also treated me very kindly, and I’ve lived my life without experiencing any real hardship. I’m sure that my father, who was so worried about my future, is very happy.”
Then she thought for a while and added, “I think that my father was happy, too. He was able to live to over fifty in those difficult times and he rose to a high rank as a military man. Yes … I think he had a happy life. Really.”
Without thinking I blurted out, “Do you mean even right up to the very end?” She nodded, and said “Yes” emphatically.
THERE WAS A REASON behind my asking so tactless a question: I couldn’t help but think that Kuribayashi must have died feeling thwarted and frustrated. The more research I did, the more I realized how Iwo Jima had been abandoned even before the battle was begun.
With the defeat in the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the fall of Saipan, which meant that the “national area to be defended at all costs” had been breached, the Imperial General Headquarters formulated its shôgosakusen—meaning “strategy for victory”—on July 21, 1944:
We shall strengthen our defenses along a new line of defense running through the Philippines, Taiwan, Nansei Shotô, Oga-sawara, the Mainland and the Kuril Islands. If the enemy attacks us anywhere in this area, the army and navy will immediately mobilize their forces and crush them.
Such was the new policy. If the new defense line were to be broken, then Japan would be finished. The so-called Victory Strategy was no more than a desperate last stand.
This strategy and the imperial mandate (the official order from the emperor, who was daigensui, or supreme commander) endorsing it were never transmitted to Iwo Jima. And this was despite the fact that Ogasawara was included in the “new defense line” that Imperial General Headquarters had decided to defend to the death. The Imperial General Headquarters had decided that the Philippines was a more pressing problem.
In August, Major General Sanada, chief of the Army General Staff, and Rear Admiral Tasuku Nakazawa, chief of the Naval General Staff, visited Iwo Jima. Four of Kuribayashi’s requests on that occasion were recorded in the diary of Major General Sanada.
1: At present we have only ten fighter planes (including one heavy fighter), and three midsize attack planes. When I left Tokyo, I was informed we would be provided with 48 fighters and 48 midsize attack planes. With current numbers, we are unable to conduct patrols.
4: We are using only 12 to 13 twin machine guns. In total there are more than 160 25-mm twin machine guns available. The (infantry) battalions only have two light machine guns per platoon.
There were more than twenty thousand men on the island, but a paltry total of only thirteen fighters and midsize attack planes. Kuriba-yashi is also complaining that when it comes to weapons, each platoon has only two light machine guns. The ships that transported supplies to Iwo Jima at this time were often loaded with large quantities of green bamboo. If a ship was attacked and went down, the sailors could cling to it and swim; while, if the ship got through, soldiers could fashion the bamboo into spears to use in lieu of small arms on the battlefield.
Airplanes and weapons were not the only things in short supply.
5: I want thirty-five SB boats [1,000-ton second-class transport vessels] between here and Chichi Jima. I urgently want fishing boats and motorized sailing ships to be mobilized to make the trip between Chichi Jima and Iwo Jima.
[In Chichi Jima] there are enough provisions for a year and a half, but we only have enough for fifty days here. It is unacceptable for ships to transport things as far as Chichi Jima, and then just go back home. I want heavy and light machine guns to be airfreighted here. I was promised that 250 light machine guns and 160 heavy machine guns would be sent, but only one quarter of that number reached Chichi Jima. I also urgently need light trench mortars.
9: Since the start of June, we have had neither alcohol nor anything sweet. The navy have their PX [a shop where you can buy everyday goods, food, and drink] and they received an increase in the sake ration. It is not good for the difference in treatment to be so blatant on such a small island.
Clearly there were too few supply ships going between Chichi Jima and Iwo Jima, and the necessary provisions and weapons were just not making it out to Iwo Jima. There is something pitiful about the commander in chief having to beg for things to be sent to him even in fishing boats if need be. Similarly, “motorized sailing ships” were simply sailing vessels with a motor attached. Used for transporting freight along the coast, they hardly deserve to be called supply ships, particularly in wartime.
In this situation, Kuribayashi was desperately trying to figure out how to defend the island from an enemy who could attack at any time. In the end, only one quarter of the necessary materials that had been promised for the underground defenses actually arrived, while weapons and ammunition continued to remain in short supply.
Nonetheless, at this time the Imperial General Headquarters still appeared to take Iwo Jima seriously, regarding it as “a place requiring priority reinforcement as part of homeland defense.” The strategy was to use concentrated airpower to annihilate the Americans when they attacked.
Things were in short supply on every front. The Imperial General Headquarters, which had overextended its battle lines, was busily devising plans and issuing orders, but was simply unable to dispatch the necessary materials to actually implement any of those plans. It was more than just a matter of a lack of supplies. Since Japan had lost naval supremacy, many of its supply ships were being sunk, so few made it through to their destinations.
As the tide of the war in the Pacific started to turn against the Japanese, the interest of the Imperial General Headquarters switched to the final battle on the homeland, and the defense of Iwo Jima was neglected.
The “Basic Principles of the Imperial Army and Imperial Navy Operations Plan,” the first strategic plan of the war devised by the army and navy together, was drawn up on January 20, 1945. At this stage, Iwo Jima was still defined as “an important territory that must be safeguarded as the frontline of homeland defense.”
That position changed on February 6 when, following on the heels of the “Basic Principles,” the “Research into an Agreement on Army-Navy Cooperation on Air Strategy (Provisional Title)” was decided. This document declared that “Ultimately, Iwo Jima will inevitably fall into the hands of the enemy.” This was the point when it was decided to abandon the place before the fighting had even started.
The reasons the Imperial General Headquarters gave were that since Iwo Jima was located “far away from the airforce bases on the Japanese homeland, exercising air power there is problematic;” and that “it has little value for the Americans as a base from which to invade the Japanese homeland.” If they really believed that, why, one wonders, did they send twenty thousand men to the island? Their policies were so inconsistent that they seem to have been made up haphazardly as they went along.
In the end, the garrison on Iwo Jima met with defeat after holding out for thirty-six days. Few Japanese people know how heroically Kuri-bayashi and his men fought. The hell that they endured is now buried in history.
Takako is aware of this, but she still maintains that her father died happy.
“Why? Because no matter how awful things were, the soldiers all believed in my father and stuck with him to the end. Surely there’s no greater happiness for someone in the position my father was in.”
“Tako-chan”—now far older than her father when he died at the age of fifty-three—delivered this remark with a firm voice and a smile on her f
ace.
I went to Takako’s house three times to speak with her. The last time was a cold day in January 2004. She came down to the front gate to see me off and pushed some chocolate into my coat pocket, saying, “Have this on the bus on your way home.”
It was six months later that I heard she had died.
KURIBAYASHI’S WIFE, yoshii, had died the year before, in 2003. Her husband had written her: “Henceforth our fearful destiny is to lose this war…. It is crucial that, woman though you are, you be strong— strong so you can live through it all.” And she lived on for fifty-eight years after the war, her long life finally coming to an end at the age of ninety-nine.
The Kuribayashis were married on December 8, 1923. Kuribayashi was thirty-two, his wife nineteen.
Kuribayashi had graduated from a middle school (under the old system), then went on to the Military Academy. After being made a second lieutenant, then a first lieutenant in the cavalry, he proceeded to the Army War College, an elite training institution where officers studied in order to command division-size or greater units.
Apparently senior officers approached Kuribayashi, who graduated from the Army War College second in his class, with offers of their daughters’ hands in marriage. But Kuribayashi turned them all down to wed Yoshii, who came from the same region of Japan that he did.
Yoshii was the daughter of a landowner in Higano, near Kawanaka-jima, the site of a series of famous battles in the sixteenth century. Her maiden name was Kuribayashi, too, but this was merely coincidental, and they were not related. According to Kuribayashi Matsue, Yoshii’s sister-in-law, the couple met at a miai, or “arranged meeting,” that came about through the introduction of a dyer who was a frequent visitor to both households.
Kuribayashi seems to have doted on Yoshii, who was thirteen years his junior. After the war, Yoshii remembered her husband like this:
He was very punctilious and exact; whatever he did, he liked to do it efficiently. But if I was working late in the kitchen, he would say: “Don’t worry. Just leave things as they are and go off to bed.” He was a very thoughtful person.*
With only one elder brother, Yoshii had few siblings for a family of the time. As a result, she was the apple of her parents’ and her big brother’s eyes. Her sister-in-law Matsue says, “She was brought up like a lady,” and as an unmarried girl she was terribly shy. “When the draper came by and she had to choose a piece of something, she would be so embarrassed that she would run off into the back room and not come out.” “Above all, Mother was a kind and gentle person,” says Tarô, her son. “She was quite easygoing, and may have seemed a bit careless to my father, who was more highly strung.”
Kuribayashi clearly worried a great deal about Yoshii, and the letters he sent from Iwo Jima overflow with expressions of concern for her. In earlier chapters I quoted from letters in which Kuribayashi was worrying about everything from drafts in the kitchen to her chapped skin and what to do about dirt in the bathtub, but there are also many passages in which he frets about her health, as can be seen from this letter, dated October 4, 1944:
Perhaps I’m just worrying too much, but recently I had a dream in which you looked terribly gaunt and your eyes were shining feverishly. Are you getting the massage lady to come? Make sure to take a bath about twice a week to improve your circulation and avoid hardening of the arteries.
And from this one, dated October 10, 1944: “Clearly, stuffing gunpowder into bags isn’t an easy job. You must get stiff shoulders. I’m really sorry for you. It’s important for you not to overdo it. Overdoing things will be bad for your health.”
Stuffing gunpowder bags is likely to have been a form of labor service, with each house having a quota to fill. Yoshii must have sent Kuri-bayashi a letter complaining about what awful work it was, and he is writing back to her with extraordinary sweetness. After all, on his side he had more than stiff shoulders to worry about, as with Iwo Jima subjected to round-the-clock air raids and naval barrages he was having to sleep in an underground shelter.
As with this letter about stuffing bags with gunpowder, Kuribayashi was always very careful to address all the points that his wife raised in her letters. This from a letter dated August 31, 1944:
On the subject of using naphthalene to kill ants, these ants are just not the kind of ants that you can get rid of that way. They’re all over everything—on the ground, on tree trunks, on the pillars of the houses, on the walls of the houses. Unbearable. But at least they go back to their nest at night, so there are far fewer of them then.
And from September 20, 1944:
I read the clipping from Shufu no Tomo (The Housewife’s Friend) magazine. Tragedies like that are happening everywhere. We’re in a war, so be thick-skinned and just accept these things. If you start worrying about everything that’s happening, you’ll just get depressed.
You might not expect a soldier at the front to have the time or the inclination to deal with questions about the suitability of naphthalene for ant extermination, or clippings from women’s magazines, but Kuriba-yashi’s replies dealt scrupulously with every point. For a wife to write to her husband, who happened to be a lieutenant general, about air raids and the course of the war would normally have been considered forward and impudent in this period.
Kuribayashi loved the childish sincerity and desire to be helpful that saw his wife trying to send naphthalene to the front. Clearly they had the sort of relationship where they could tell each other what they were really thinking. For his part, Kuribayashi shared honest opinions with her that he could not reveal to anyone else: “What a pity that I have to bring the curtain down on my life in a place like this because of the United States” (September 12, 1944); “If things were normal and this great war weren’t on, we’d all—you, the children, and me—be having such a nice, happy life right now” (November 26, 1944). Reading their letters, you feel you are listening in on the couple having a chat.
From December 8, 1944:
You’ll get cold sometimes when you’re in the air-raid shelter, so you need to prepare a small foot warmer or a hot-water bottle. You’ll need a blanket, too. And make sure you’ve got straw matting.
From December 11, 1944:
Please take good care of yourself. Make sure to wear a stomach band and a waistcloth so you don’t get cold. Instead of underwear, I suggest you wear my camel hair shirt. I imagine there isn’t much heat, so it’s important to dress up warm.
From December 15, 1944:
Now, let’s talk about clothes. In my previous letter, I recommended tie-up straw sandals, but what do you think about my old lace-up boots? The best thing is to try all sorts of things and see what works.
From December 22, 1944:
I mentioned my lace-up boots in my last letter, but they may be in really bad condition, so what about my army boots? You could probably wear them over your tabi socks…. My army boots are in the box full of shoes that I tidied up. (It’s in the second-floor guest room.)
Holding them in my own hands, I read the forty-one letters that Kuribayashi sent home. Lofty terminology—words like “Emperor,” “National Polity,” “Sacred War,” “Noble Cause”—was nowhere to be seen. Instead, there were footwarmers and hot-water bottles, stomach bands and camel hair undershirts, and boxes of shoes shut away in the guest room.
Kuribayashi thought hard about every detail of the domestic life of his family, and the same temperament was at work on Iwo Jima, where he carefully inspected the topography, made a daily tour of the defenses, and checked what and how much the soldiers were getting to eat.
There were stories that the commander in chief would often inspect the First Defense Line on his own. One day, when the members of the trench mortar company were all busily constructing their positions, Kuribayashi came to Mount Higashi by himself with his wooden cane.
The order was hastily given for them to fall in and stand at attention, but Kuribayashi told them to stay as they were. He asked how things were, went into the tin-roof
barracks where they were in the middle of cooking, and carefully inspected the state of their supplies. Then he thanked them and went back to the headquarters. The bill of fare at the time was soft rice with powdered soy sauce, and clear soup with one or two bits of dried pumpkin in it.*
Kuribayashi planned a fight that was based not on empty ideals, but on deep knowledge of how people lived.*
Kuribayashi was also anxious about air raids on Tokyo, and they form a persistent theme in his letters. In Kuribayashi’s case, he was tormented by the image of his wife and children desperately trying to escape from a sea of fire. On September 12, 1944, he wrote to Yoshii:
As usual we’re getting air raids every day. These days it’s usually one or two planes in the night, and about twenty in the daytime. Our airstrips and our defense positions are damaged every time. As far as the eye can see, trees and plants are wiped out, and the ground is all turned over—a pitiable scene. People on the mainland cannot imagine what it’s like….
When I imagine what Tokyo would look like if it were bombed— I see a burned-out desert with dead bodies lying everywhere—I’m desperate to stop them carrying out air raids on Tokyo.
So Sad to Fall in Battle Page 10