So Sad to Fall in Battle Read online

  On June 25, 1944, he sent Takako this letter.

  My dear Tako-chan,

  How are you, Tako-chan?

  In my mind’s eye, I can still see you and Mother standing by the gate to see me off on the day I left.

  Since then, I’ve dreamed several times of going back home and taking a walk around the neighborhood with you and Mother. Sadly, though, it’s something I can’t really do.

  You know, Tako-chan, Daddy just can’t wait for you to grow up to be a support to your mother.

  Build up your strength, study hard, and do exactly what your mother tells you to do. That will really put my mind at ease.

  Now I must say “Good-bye.”

  Daddy at the front

  Takako had been born when Kuribayashi was over forty years old. He doted on her, addressing her with the pet name of “Tako-chan,” and generally made a fuss over her. She appeared frequently in her father’s dreams while he was at the front. On November 17, 1944, he wrote to her:

  Tako-chan! How are you? I’m fine!

  Last night we had two air raids: one just after I’d got to sleep and another just as it was getting light. But I still managed to have a funny dream.

  In my dream, you, Tako-chan, had just got out of the bath and were sniveling and whimpering. “Why are you crying?” I asked you. “Was the bathwater too hot?” Then Mother appeared. She laughed and said, “I bet it’s because you want something nice and sweet.” Then she brought out her breast and put it in your mouth. The two of you lay down, and your cheeks, Tako-chan, were all puffed out as you sucked away greedily on the breast. You just looked so very happy.

  Just then out came your big sister. “I’m shocked!” she said. “I’m shocked! Honestly, Tako-chan, still suckling at your age!” Then she started poking your cheeks.

  That was about all that happened, but Daddy saw all your faces so clearly that it was just like being there with you.

  What do you think? A pretty funny dream, wasn’t it?

  Then, on December 23, 1944, he wrote:

  Tako-chan, a little while ago Daddy had another dream with you in it.

  In my dream, you were very tall—about as tall as me, in fact. You also had on Daddy’s pants, but your hair was in a bob.

  I was marveling at how very tall you were, when, lo and behold, who should turn up but your mother! With her there, I thought it would be nice if the two of us swung you between us the way we always did, but you were so very heavy we just couldn’t do it!

  Kuribayashi probably dreamed about Takako whimpering like a baby because he could not forget how she had cried when he had left for the front.

  In his dream of the following month Takako was a grown-up. She was “tall” and “very heavy” and wore her father’s hand-me-down pants, while her hair was done “in a bob”—just as when they parted at the gate. Outside of this dream, Kuribayashi was never to see Takako as an adult.

  KURIBAYASHI WAS A PROLIFIC letter writer. In fact, it was a letter of his that I came across in a history of the war that first sparked my interest in him. Dated June 25, 1944—the same day he wrote his first letter to Takako—it was addressed to Yoshii, his wife.

  The letter includes the phrase: “Please understand that I will not be sending you any more letters after this one,” so Kuribayashi may well have intended it to serve as his final message before death. But the letter—seven pages in length—was totally atypical for the final message of a military man.

  It starts by describing what the island looked like and the everyday lives of the men.

  As regards water, there isn’t any spring water here, so we just collect all the rainwater we can and make use of that. That’s why I keep thinking how much I’d love a nice, cold drink of water, but there’s absolutely no chance of that!

  There are more mosquitoes and flies than I’d imagined. Most annoying. We have no newspapers, no wireless, and not a single shop. There’s the odd farmer’s house here and there, but they’re only suitable for cows or horses. The men are all either living in tents or in caves. The caves are airless and humid, and they really are—really, truly—awful. I’m living the same way, too, naturally.

  He then goes on to talk about an air raid on the island that occurred soon after he had taken up his post.

  We have already had three air raids in which we were heavily bombed, hit with a rain of incendiary shells, and strafed with machine-gun fire. On the sixteenth, a massive bomb landed next to the dugout, setting off a huge explosion. I was convinced that the dugout—with me in it—would be blown to bits, but as luck would have it, I didn’t even get a scratch. For the duration of the ferocious raid, the only thing I could do was wait in the dugout in a state of extreme anxiety, and pray.

  By the time Kuribayashi arrived at his post in June, American air raids were taking a heavy toll. In three raids that month, the Japanese lost more than a hundred airplanes on the ground, while a raid on the sixteenth also killed forty soldiers. This sapped the morale of the Japanese forces and reinforced Kuribayashi’s awareness of the acute challenges he faced. The Americans actually made their landing eight months later, but even in these early days the Japanese could not relax their guard for an instant.

  “If the island I’m on is captured,” wrote Kuribayashi in one of his letters, “the Japanese mainland will probably be subjected to air raids day and night.” He urged his family to get out of Tokyo fast. The letter goes on: “Just when I thought that I, as both a husband and a father, was about to make a happy life for all of you, I have been ordered to defend the most crucial territory of all for Japan in this great war. It is a duty I have to accept.”

  He goes on to reveal his innermost thoughts:

  Last of all, I want to say something to the children. Always do what your mother tells you. After I have gone, I want you to help your mother, treat her as the center of the family, and help each other so you can all live vigorous, positive lives. With you in particular Tarô, I pray with all my heart that you become the kind of strong, tough-minded young man that your mother and your younger sisters can depend on. Yôko, you are pretty robust, so I’m confident about you. I feel sorry for your mommy because maybe she hasn’t got that strength of character. I do regret that I had so little time to love you, Tako-chan. Please grow up to be big and strong for me.

  The letter certainly sounds like a final message.

  After the concluding words, “Farewell to my wife and my children from your husband and your father,” there is a three-part postscript:

  1. By this post, I’m sending back anything I don’t really need out of the things I brought over with me. I think they’ll serve as keepsakes to remember me by (and it’s possible that my possessions and my remains won’t be delivered to you after I’m dead). Some military baggage may reach you, and I may send back more stuff later. Don’t send me whiskey or any other extras like that. I really don’t need them. Who knows if they’ll get through to me, and even if they do, there’s every chance I may no longer be alive by then anyway.

  2. I think I more or less did everything that needed to be done around the house. I wanted to put something in to block the draft that comes up from under the kitchen floor, but sadly didn’t have the time. Tarô is, I believe, working his way through the list of things I asked him to do. Have you heard any more from Hayashi of the Imperial Guards?

  3. I am not sending letters out to anyone at all just now. If any soldiers from the old days or friends ask about me, just tell them that I have gone to the front somewhere in the south.

  The first postscript shows that even before he had been there a month, Kuribayashi was already sending home the personal effects he had brought with him to the front.

  He must have realized once he got to the island that he would never leave the place alive. Knowing that his possessions would not make it back if he died in battle, he decided to send them back as keepsakes for his family while he still could. It’s also possible that after he took up his appointment he simply decided
that anything beyond the bare minimum was superfluous. As he wrote in a letter, Iwo Jima was like a desert: “To put it in a nutshell, we’re living in caves in a barren wasteland like Iizunahara in Shinshû or Sugadaira, so, depending on how you look at it, our life is hell.”

  It was the second postscript that surprised me and really got me interested.

  Here was a commander in chief in charge of more than twenty thousand men and he was worrying about a draft in the kitchen in his final message.

  Kuribayashi was fifty-two years old. Just prior to shipping out for the front, he had been granted the honor of an audience with the emperor, who had wished him well in his endeavor. How incredible that such a man should have chosen to list a piece of repair work in the kitchen of his home among his last, lingering regrets.

  Iwo Jima was the only battle where the Americans suffered more casualties than the Japanese after America took the offensive in the Pacific War. It was an extraordinary feat for the defending side to inflict so much damage on their attackers and to force the U.S. Marine Corps to fight the harshest and bloodiest battle in its history.

  On the American side, there were a total of 28,686 killed and wounded, while the equivalent figure for the Japanese was 21,152. When it comes to the number of dead, the Americans lost 6,821 men, and the Japanese 20,129. Here the Japanese figure is higher, but when the enormous gap in military strength is taken into account, the overall picture remains startling.

  The Japanese army was being defeated everywhere else and it was Kuribayashi’s staunch leadership that pulled together an ill-equipped bunch of randomly cobbled-together units and enabled them to put up such a heroic fight. The enemy officers had a high regard for Kuriba-yashi. Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith, the marine officer who was in command of the assault on Iwo Jima, had the following to say about Kuribayashi in his book Coral and Brass: “His ground organization was far superior to any I had seen in France in World War I and observers said it excelled German ground organization in World War II.”

  “My enemy he may be, but I respect him” goes the old Japanese saying. A heroic leader of men, Kuribayashi caused the Americans more pain than they were to experience anywhere else.

  But this soldier who masterminded a battle that lives on in the history books was also a husband who worried about the draft in his kitchen back home. Kuribayashi’s unconventional final message makes clear that he was a man who existed in both of these worlds.

  You can see how unusual Kuribayashi’s final message is by comparing it with those of other soldiers. Despite being private and personal documents addressed to their families, the letters and final messages of the majority of fighting men were terse and unemotional. They bottled up their deepest feelings and kept things brief, and if anything, it is their manly self-restraint that makes them moving.

  In the afterword to his book Senshi no Isho (Final Messages of Fighting Men), Handô Kazutoshi provides an example. It is the final message that naval ensign Yoshida Mitsuru, who served on the batttleship Yamato and survived its sinking, wrote to his parents: “Please throw away everything that belongs to me. My only concern is that you all enjoy good health and live a long time.”

  Handô Kazutoshi was curious about the deep love Yoshida had for his parents and the various anxieties that lay beneath the surface of his austere final message, and he quotes a passage from Senkan Yamato no Saigo (The End of the Battleship Yamato), an account that Yoshida wrote after the war in which he reveals what his real feelings at the time were:

  What can I do about my mother’s grief? Is there any way that I, doomed thus to die before her, can console my mother in her sorrow? Mother shall be left behind to bear the burden of grief in my place, and I have no way of thanking her for my life, the gift of her motherly love.

  Stop. Pull yourself together now. I am a warrior going to war. For me, the battle is everything. I must not think of my mother, her head bent in grief.

  Yoshida, however, did not mention the feelings that were tearing him apart in his final message. His message was short and formal—as was thought proper for a Japanese fighting man.

  Handô’s book also includes the final message of Fleet Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku. It was found in his desk after his death with the inscription “Disposing of my Possessions.”

  1. There is a danger of secrets leaking out, so please deliver all my books, documents, and letters to the place that Lieutenant General Horie, class group head, designates.

  2. From the rest of my baggage (there is one piece in Kuresuikôsha), any presents which I received in wartime can be handed over [two ideograms in the original are illegible at this point] to be disposed of.

  The message is terse to the point of being cold and brusque. This, presumably, represents the values of the Imperial warrior carried to their extreme.

  Set beside final messages like those of Yamamoto and Yoshida, Kuribayashi’s is very everyday, very family-oriented—even slightly effeminate for a military man of that time. That, however, is precisely what drew me to him. I found myself wanting to learn more about this unusual commander.

  I researched his family and discovered that Kuribayashi’s son, Tarô, was alive and well and living in Akishima in Tokyo. It was the autumn of 2003 when I visited him in his house in a quiet residential area.

  It was an old detached house. The living room was not big and it felt cozy. The sliding doors leading to the Japanese-style room next door were open, and above the carved lintel hung a photograph of Lieutenant General Kuribayashi in uniform.

  Tarô was seventy-nine years old. Tall and lanky, he somehow managed to squeeze himself into an easy chair, but every time his old cat scratched on the door leading to the corridor, he would get to his feet and open it. There was nothing in his gentle, slow way of speaking or his benevolent, slightly drooping appearance to suggest that he was the son of a “military hero.”

  Tarô had been a student in Waseda University’s Department of Science and Engineering when Kuribayashi left for Iwo Jima. His major was architecture, and after the war he had practiced as a First-class Architect. Kuribayashi did not send his son to military preparatory school—something high-ranking soldiers tended to do—nor did he recommend that Tarô take the entrance exam for the Military Academy. According to Tarô, his father never told him he should become a soldier.

  On the table lay a thick binder that Tarô had gotten out for my visit. “Go ahead,” he urged me, and I had a look inside. Sheets of yellowing writing paper were neatly filed in order. These were the letters from Iwo Jima.

  The paper was probably military issue. There was a space to write the date and the page number, and “Kuribayashi Tadamichi” was printed on the bottom left. The paper was yellowing with age, but the finely penciled characters were so dark that they looked as though they had been written only recently.

  The characters were crammed in tightly, with three lines of text to every two printed columns, and, possibly in order to save paper, all the letters had writing on both sides of the page.

  The sheer number of letters took me by surprise. In the roughly eight months Kuribayashi was in Iwo Jima before the Americans made their landing, he sent a total of forty-one letters home, if you include the letters to his children. And the letter in which he had expressed his regret at not dealing with the draft in the kitchen turned out not to be his last letter after all.

  AS I READ KURIBAYASHI’S letters in chronological order, I realized that they all started with an assurance of his safety.

  “Skipping all the opening formalities, I am hale and hearty as ever, so there’s no need to worry about me;” “I am robust and working away, so there’s no need to worry about me;” “I am really very well, so there’s no need to worry about me;” “I am still safe and sound, so there’s no need to worry about me.” Given the circumstances he was in, Kuribayashi clearly felt that his still being alive was the most important fact for him to get across to his family. The first sentence of every opening paragraph invariably conc
ludes with the phrase: “There ’s no need to worry about me.”

  It seems that he continued to worry about the “draft in the kitchen.” The following passage occurs in a letter he wrote to Yoshii on November 28, 1944, five months after the previously cited one:

  You haven’t mentioned it since then, but did you block the crack in the kitchen floor?

  Everyone was always complaining about how cold the draft that blew up through the floor was, so I meant to do something about it. I ended up going to the front without having done anything, which is weighing on my mind. Why don’t you get Tarô to fix it right away?

  While you’re waiting for him to get round to it, either double fold some old thin matting and spread that over the crack, or cut some roofing paper (there’s a bit left over from the air-raid shelter in the storeroom) to the right size and put that down. I suspect the roofing paper will probably not last all that long.

  “If you do get Tarô to do the job,” continues the letter, “I think he ought to do it as in my diagram” and Kuribayashi has added illustrations to explain the best way to stop the draft. The two diagrams, one from above and one from the side, with red pencil marks to indicate the places where the nails should go, make clear just how concerned Kuri-bayashi was about his family back at home.

  On September 4, 1944, he had written: