I walked along Nagare-gawa Street toward the mountain. An aircraft carrier stood offshore, at anchor, and as I headed back I noticed a sign, “Navy Hour in Progress,” hanging from the door of Senbiki-ya, a restaurant we had come by before. I dropped in, ate a persimmon and a fig, and was about to start in on a lunch of fried fish and pork cooked in soy sauce, when a lieutenant who was drinking at the next table addressed me. When I told him I was a student reserve officer at Usa Naval Air Station, he said, as if he wanted to pick a fight, “So what’s your morale like? You must be depressed, having been dragged into this hopeless navy. Aren’t you? Well, it’s written all over your face.”
“No, sir,” I replied. “Everybody is in high spirits, especially after hearing the splendid results of the aerial engagement over Formosa. We are all itching to capitalize on the victory. We want nothing more than to master our skills as quickly as we can. And then we will set out to have our own duel with an enemy aircraft carrier.”
The lieutenant soured and banged his beer glass on the table.
“Stop it with your big talk,” he growled, glaring at me. I just gazed at his face for some time, startled. “Do you really believe the report that Imperial Headquarters issued?”
“Is it a problem if I do?” I answered back. Again, he burst out with a guffaw. Evidently he is assigned to the Hosho, the carrier anchored offshore. His uniform was soiled and a trench knife dangled over it. He was obviously quite drunk, and also, it appeared, thoroughly desperate.
“Do you want to know the truth?” the lieutenant said, and proceeded to inform me that a vast enemy task force had been steaming into Leyte Gulf since yesterday, accompanied by a number of attack transports that obviously intended to land.
“Do you think that America could endlessly bring out these aircraft carriers,” he continued, “if we had been sinking them one after another? Do you think they are performing some kind of magic trick to produce these carriers?” Then he asserted that reports of the fighting at Formosa were riddled with cases where targets struck in night raids had been misidentified, and that the reports were also marred by wishful thinking.
“The war situation is fifty times worse than you think. The central command should reflect on what it is doing. The Navy Press Bureau ought to be straightened out. And you. Don’t you talk so big, when you can’t even fly like an honest-to-god pilot.” He gulped down his beer, in terrible humor, and then he added, “Shall I dig potatoes? Do you want to see a crewman from a rattletrap carrier dig potatoes?” (“Dig potatoes” is navy slang for “tear this place apart.”)
I wolfed down my lunch and excused myself, but I felt melancholy. It was astonishing that the Naval Academy could have produced, as I can only assume it did, an officer like this, but is there really any truth in what he told me? If, as this lieutenant maintains, we have been diving at oil tankers and landing craft and mistaking them all for aircraft carriers, then there is no reason why the enemy task force should be weakening. According to the lieutenant, the central command, half knowing what it was about, published its figures as an “official” report from Imperial Headquarters. But surely we men haven’t all been mustered simply to embellish the front pages of newspapers with false numbers.
I had been wandering around in agitation, when it occurred to me that I intended to get a haircut, so I dropped into a barbershop along the seafront. A barbershop has a nice folksy smell about it. Tonic, cosmetics, steamed towels, and ear cleaning. I was somewhat able to calm myself at last, as I listened to the soothing sounds of the scissors.
I felt better by the time I left the barber’s, so I decided to peek into a small shop of boxwood crafts. This area is noted for its boxwood.
I remembered poems from the Manyoshu for the first time in quite a while, and I thought I would like to buy a fine, pretty boxwood comb for someone (actually, I had a concrete “someone” in mind from the outset). I debated a good long time before deciding on an elegant, rounded comb, which I arranged to have sent to Miss Fukiko Fukai in Minamata. An hour or so later I joined Fujikura and Sakai at the inn in Kamegawa Hot Springs that we treated rather like a boarding house. The two of them were already drinking orange wine and eating brown chicken sashimi. By that time I had started to regret having done such a thing behind their backs, and I fell into a deep gloom. It would have been different had the three of us sent the gift together. How will Fukiko and her parents take my having done so all on my own account? I rather doubt they will accept it without a second thought. I just wanted to express my gratitude and special affection. It will pain me if they ignore the gesture, and it will present another kind of problem if they accept it. I can’t help feeling tenderness toward Fukiko. That’s one thing. But it is another thing altogether for a man who will most likely die within a year to give voice to that sentiment. This can only disturb her, and also me, and to no good purpose. I decided to cancel the delivery, and tried, without success, to find the comb shop’s telephone number.
What a foolish thing to do! A dull sense of melancholy always sets in after a day of liberty, and the incidents of today make me feel it all the more. I took a bath at Kajiya, emptied the bottle of orange wine, and, having said almost nothing, returned to base before ten.
October 25
An alert was issued this morning: B-29s were flying over Cheju in four squadrons, making their way toward Japan. We sprinted out to field headquarters, and shortly thereafter ducked into the air-raid shelter.
Today’s cloud index was nine. The ceiling was six to seven thousand meters, and the enemy aircraft flew at an altitude of about five thousand meters. As I took a peek out of the shelter, beautiful vapor trails emerged through the rifts in the clouds to the northwest, lengthening as the planes moved eastward. For the first time I heard the roar of American aircraft. I felt carefree, as if I were watching a sporting event.
These days we are constantly forced to forego training flights and my body is rusting away. Fuel supplies are very tight, and our allocation has been cut in half. We consider ourselves lucky if we get to fly every other day. Our training period has been extended accordingly, and now we are to receive our commission on December 25, three months behind schedule. The German army has withdrawn from Aachen. The Allies will penetrate the Rhineland. The defeat of Germany is in sight. What will ever become of Japan?