YM COLUMN ARCHIVE

April 1, 2009

The Kaiten Memorial Hall of Shunan city

The 126th Shunan squad of Young Astronauts Club-Japan (YAC) was set up in Yamaguchi prefecture, to which I was invited to participate in its opening ceremony. The nearest JR station to the club is Tokuyama of Shin-kansen (bullet train). I arrived there previous night and had a brief meeting, and next day I used my free time in the afternoon prior to the ceremony to visit the Memorial Hall of “Kaiten” (human bomb).

There is a ferry landing adjacent to Tokuyama station. A waiting room of the landing was crowded with people, whom I imagined if they would all go to the Hall to have found out later that all of them did.

Smooth cruising by a ferry in the Seto Inland Sea on a cloudless clear day reminded me of the happy hours of the good old days that I spent in fishing together with my brother. We arrived at the small island called Ozushima. While going on the Inland Sea by splashing waves, we could see from the ferryboat a small island shaping like no other way but to say saddle, beyond which to the right was spotted a little larger island. The ferry anchored there at the island and we came ashore. It appeared that the Hall was on the island, where I wanted to visit.

In the year 1943 when Japan was so desperately driven into a corner at the Pacific War that even mainland battle was assumed, 20 and 22 years old Sekio Nishina and Hiroshi Kuroki who had been trained at the naval arsenal in Kure were living together in the same room on the island. Amid the war getting worsened, all they talked about was if they could think of some drastic new weapon or strategy.

They finally came to pay attention on “Kyu-san (nine-three)” type torpedo that Japanese Imperial Navy was highly proud of as the most excellent torpedo in the world. It was a remarkably efficient torpedo installed with 500kg bursting explosive and ran by high-pressure oxygen at the velocity 50kt/h ranging 22km within its target. Most of its exhaust gas was vaporized to be absorbed in the seawater so that it was hardly discovered by enemy because of leaving no traces behind. It was much valued of its merits for a time being, but as the radar technology of the allied forces remarkably advanced, the merits of torpedo were reduced of its effectiveness; on top of that efficiently developed fighter planes drove the Japanese torpedoes out of battleship war. Thus several hundreds of torpedoes were laid down in weapons depot at naval port.

They had their eyes on those Kyu-san torpedoes. They came to the idea to improve the torpedo so as to make possible to maneuver the torpedo to charge themselves against enemy battleships, for which realization they continued their study in haste. Finally they submitted their blueprint and opinion to the man in charge at the local Bureau of Naval Affairs. But their proposal was dismissed because of the weapon of unavoidable death.

Two men, desperate as they were, went up to Tokyo with the blueprint of human torpedo on December 28, 1943. They appealed not just to the men in charge at the Naval Affairs but also up to the then Minister of the Navy, Shigetaro Shimada. Meanwhile the war situation was getting severely worse, and the biggest Japanese naval base at Truk Island was completely destroyed by the enemy mobile force to have lost its operational capacity as the frontline naval base on February 17, 1944. It was ten days after the defeat at Truk when three test “human torpedoes” so tentatively named were ordered under utmost secrecy to manufacture at the experimental department of Kure naval arsenal.

The three prototype torpedoes without escape equipment were implemented its final test at the end of July to have been adopted as a formal weapon on August 1, which was named “Kaiten” (literally meaning “turning heaven”) by Kuroki’s idea. The name has an implication to turn over the war situation as if turning the heaven. Even one month before the official adoption of the weapon, the application for crews of human torpedo had been already started.

Rapid production of the torpedoes was ordered to Kure naval arsenal and four training bases for Kaiten were set up along Suhonada as if to surround the coastal waters. One of the bases was here on the island Ozushima. Here in this base the special missioned navy force was formally set up on September 1, 1944 before any other bases and started its training four days later. I heard that the number of torpedoes for the trainee was far less than that of crew candidates so that despite hard works of maintenance personnel around the clock, they had to wait long for taking training drills that were carried out every time in highly tensioned pressure for risking their lives.

In the Memorial Hall of Kaiten on top of the hill were vividly displayed the letters of the crews to their mothers before their sortie, which I just couldn’t face straightly. Between the first sally from Ozushima Island in autumn of 1944 and war defeat, many lives of future promising young men were lost in the naval operation in the southwestern Pacific. The number of Kaiten torpedoes all told was thirty-two and that of total crews on a suicide mission was one hundred and forty-eight. The number of the war dead in Kaiten operation amounted as many as one thousand one hundred and ninety-nine.

At the end of 400-meter tunnel through which the torpedoes were carried by lorries is left the site traces of test firing. An old man at the small shop near the ferry landing of Ozushima feelingly said, “I heard that the battleship Yamato dropped by at the nearby Kurokamijima Island on the way to Okinawa suicide attack in early April of 1945, for there was a rumor that the water on the island was so tasty.”

Stone monuments carved with the names of each crewmember of Kaiten are seen lined up on the both sides of the street leading to the Memorial Hall. All of them hidden in a dark place charged on with their hands on a detonation button. They must have dreamed a dream of happy future beyond death in their charging suicide torpedo for the several tens of seconds until the very last moment. As walking alongside the monuments step by step, their features were keenly appealing to my heart at each step I took.

We must never waste their lives lost in Kaiten. I strongly bore it in my mind that we must pass over to children the lesson of the past mistake that we must never repeat. With this determination in my mind, I headed for the opening ceremony.

I welcome your opinions on this column to the following E-mail address.
matogawa@planetary.or.jp

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