Burial in the Clouds by Hiroyuki Agawa Page B

“Yes, I understand. I understand what you’re saying.”
    Then an instructor’s voice displaces Fujikura’s. “What’s eating you, Cadet Yoshino?” And not one of those bitter old maids who hang on in the training units, but my favorite instructor, the gentle, plain-spoken, clear-eyed chief flight officer whom we all call “the long-nosed goblin of Kurama.” “You look depressed,” he says. “Open your eyes and examine the situation. Things have come to such a pass that no one can say the tragedy in Saipan won’t be repeated scene for scene on mainland Japan. If we don’t want to see our country destroyed, we have to pitch in hard. We have no alternative. I know it’s difficult, but you must follow me without qualms. You can’t grip the control stick while casting a backward glance.”
    â€œI understand, sir,” I reply, snapping to attention in my daydream. Can there be such a spineless attack bomber pilot as I am, a man who understands a little of this and a little of that, a man who is half-assed in everything?
    My energy drains away into fancies of an old hermit’s life (and here I am, a mere twenty-four years of age!), and then the reverie absorbs me utterly. . . . Alongside a mountain stream, deep in the hills and bathed by the sun, there stands a forlorn cottage. Bestowed with the blessings of birdsong and abundant fruit, and with a few books to read and a good country wifi to talk to, I will consign my feckless self to the vicissitudes of nature, like the grasses that grow silently and wither silently, locking all the old agitations away in my heart, and close my life in solitude and peace. . . . At other times I summon up as my ideal something rather more concrete. In this scenario, I’m pushing along a wheelbarrow of tomatoes on a farm of my own, or capering about with puppyish children at a district school, on some small island of terraced fields.... But then the whistle sounds beyond the deck, “ Hoa-hi-hoa ! Cease work in five minutes,” and I pull out of my stupor.
    Speaking of Saipan, I heard the following tale from a PO in the mess hall. The POs there are generally a realistic, hedonistic lot, fat and flabby—not at all the “gallant” type. Anyhow, this officer said that on a small island off Guadalcanal two navy signalers, men who had been left behind all but dead, somehow managed to filch a canoe and make their escape. Open wounds festered on their legs, streaming with bloody pus, and they had nothing at all to eat. For several days they drifted with the tide, gnawing their leather belts. Finally they made shore on a strange island. Human voices were audible just beyond a cliff draped with grasses and tree branches. The men couldn’t tell whether the voices belonged to friend or to foe, but still they ventured to land. It turned out to be a Japanese army unit, and the two signalers were safely packed off to Saipan. From there, one of them was shipped back to Yokosuka, but the other, whose infection was not so severe, stayed on at Saipan, and when his health recovered, he was assigned to the island’s signal unit. On the fortieth day after his rescue the American troops started landing, and this signaler, aware now that he would not survive, despite having made such a harrowing escape, rapped out a message in plain language to all navy units as he went to his death: “Damn the Imperial Navy.
    â€œIt might be true, the PO said. I just don’t know how credible the story is.
    We hear of three successive uprisings in Korea recently. Once I might have dismissed the rioters as a nuisance, but now I believe their actions may spring from a perfectly natural impulse. Japan talks about a lasting peace in East Asia, a peace on whose terms every nation can agree, but Japan has never said she will grant Korea her independence. What could be more reasonable than that Koreans should resent being asked to