My Dad, the Kamikaze Pilot

A few years after I met Oshikawa-san at Canon, he told me something about himself.

During the war, he was a pilot. A kamikaze pilot.

This astonishing statement takes a little explaining. Oshikawa-san obviously never flew his one-way mission. In the last months of the war, when the Japanese army was conscripting every able-bodied man for the final, apocalyptic show-down with the United States, Oshikawa-san was drafted. He was 16. And whether he was pushed into kamikaze service or, more likely, was, as a high school student, so deeply indoctrinated with end-time emperor worship that he volunteered to make the ultimate show of patriotism, he never told me. It was enough for me to know that, in order to protect the homeland, he trained to fly his plane, specially designed to hold explosives rather than enough fuel for a return trip, into an American warship at the water-line. He never got the chance because -- fortunately for him, his family, me, and who knows how many American sailors and their families -- the war ended before his training did.

Oshikawa-san also told me another shocking fact about the war. He was stationed in Nagasaki. Suddenly, in early August 1945, the soldiers were suddenly mustered out of the city and into the surrounding hills without explanation. On August 9, 1945, with the soldiers safely outside the city, most of Nagasaki disappeared in a 1000-degree fireball in the second atomic bombing. News of the bombing of Hiroshima was as a state secret and the Japanese government kept it from the civilian population and low-level soldiers like Oshikawa-san alike. Oshikawa-san's story may have been repeated in hundreds of cities throughout Japan -- potential A-bomb targets all. The government evacuated soldiers to fight another day, but left millions of innocent Japanese civilians to their fate.

To bring the reality of the bombings even closer to home, Oshikawa-san's wife, Chisako, is from Hiroshima (although I believe she was born after the war). Her grandparents died in the atomic bomb blast.

I don't presume to think that meeting me led to some kind of epiphany of forgiveness on the part of the Oshikawa family. The Oshikawas were, like many Japanese of their generation, fascinated by the United States and had visited there as tourists. Any bitterness about the war had long since receded into the past for them. But, still, the fact that this family -- so deeply and directly touched by the horrendous conflict with the United States -- decided to call me their "son" is something I will never forget.