|
|
Saburo Miyakawa with parents.
Photo taken during return home
when in training at Sendai
Pilot Training School
|
|
|
|
Miyakawa was assigned to the 104th Shinbu Special Attack
Squadron to sortie on a kamikaze mission from Bansei Air Base. The squadron
divided into two groups of six planes each that sortied on April 12 and 13,
1945, but Miyakawa had to return to base due to engine problems. He said he
wanted to sortie again quickly in a good plane, but he was sent to nearby
Chiran Air Base to wait for orders. During his wait, he by chance met a former
Ojiya Elementary School classmate named Yoshikatsu Matsuzaki. However,
Matsuzaki sortied on a kamikaze mission on May 20. Miyakawa finally received
his order to sortie from Chiran. June 5, the day before his scheduled sortie to
death, was his 20th birthday. He visited Tome Torihama and her two daughters at
Tomiya Restaurant, where he told them that he and his friend Enosuke Takimoto
would both return as fireflies at 9 o'clock the following night. They sortied
together the next day, but Takimoto signaled many times to Miyakawa that they
should return to base due to driving rain and heavy clouds. Miyakawa signaled
that Takimoto should return and he would go on. On the evening of June 6,
Takimoto returned alone to Tomiya Restaurant. At 9 o'clock, a firefly came
through the open restaurant door and alit on a ceiling beam. Everyone in the
restaurant marveled that Miyakawa had returned as a firefly.
Much of this book strays far from the life story of Saburo
Miyakawa. Chapter 2's fifty pages, organized by season starting with spring, at
times reads like a tour guide for the region in Niigata Prefecture where
Miyakawa lived and went to school. The author describes the region's festivals,
wildlife, foods, farming activities, sports, and plants, but Miyakawa's name
only gets mentioned now and then as part of these general depictions of the
region. As another example of the book's digressions, the end of Chapter 1
tells the stories of ten other kamikaze pilots who sortied from Chiran, but
these pilots had almost no direct connection with Miyakawa. As a final example,
Chapter 6 goes into much more detail about Tome Torihama's life than needed for
a book intended to be Miyakawa's biography.
Besides many extraneous details contained in this book, the
idealization of Miyakawa's life makes this biography rather tedious. Although
he may very well have been outstanding in many respects, Miyakawa seems based
on this book to never have done anything wrong, excelled in academics and
sports, and treated everyone kindly. Not only that, he was an idol for all the
local teen girls. Hiroi gathered much information for this book from secondary
sources, but he also interviewed some family members and friends, who may have
been hesitant to say anything negative about someone they consider to be a hero
who died defending his country.
Although the bibliography includes several standard books on
Chiran and the kamikaze pilots who sortied from there, the author still commits
a few errors. For example, he states that 1,028 kamikaze pilots died in sorties
from Chiran Air Base. Actually, this number includes all Army airmen who died
in attacks around Okinawa. Only 439 of these men sortied from Chiran. In
another lapse, the author states Miyakawa would encounter the American fleet
within an hour after leaving the mainland, but his actual flying time would
have been about two hours.
The book contains several touching stories, but these tend
to be brief with few specifics. Enosuke Takimoto, who had sortied with Miyakawa
but returned to base due to poor weather, traveled right after the war's end from his home
in Yamanashi Prefecture to Miyakawa's parents' home in Niigata Prefecture.
Takimoto stayed at their home for a month as they treated him just like their
son, but they never met again as he passed away just three years later. In another
moving story, on the eve before Miyakawa's kamikaze sortie, Tome Torihama's
14-year-old daughter Reiko received from Miyakawa his flight watch and his
treasured fountain pen given to him by his brother Eijiro when they worked
together at Tachikawa Aircraft Factory. Miako, Reiko's older sister, said
years later that if Miyakawa had lived he might have married Reiko when she
grew up. The book also tells of the emotional meetings of Tome Torihama with
Saburo's brother Buichi in 1970 at a Tokyo television studio and his brother
Eijiro in 1982 at Chiran.
This biography of Saburo Miyakawa contains much information
that other books do not mention about his short life. However, this book
suffers from excessive and irrelevant details in many places. A much shorter
book, maybe about one third of its current size, would have given the key episodes of
Miyakawa's life much more emotional impact.
|
