Tokkō kaiten "isho" no nazo o ou (Pursuing mystery of special attack
kaiten last letter)
by Takahiro Ōmori
Tentensha, 2021, 215 pages
Takahiro Ōmori, Sankei Shimbun newspaper journalist, tells the
story step by step of how he tracked down the source of a fabricated last letter
supposedly written by an 18-year-old kaiten (manned torpedo) pilot to his
mother just before he died in a special (suicide) attack when his kaiten
was launched from a submarine toward an American ship. The letter in Japanese
was published in several webpages and YouTube videos without an author or source
attached to it, so Ōmori became curious about whether the letter is genuine and if not what
is the original source of such a widely publicized
forgery.
An English translation of the falsified last letter follows:
Last letter of 18-year-old Kaiten Special Attack Corps member
Mother, three hours remain until I go and fall. My heart is clear. It is
true, Mother. I am not afraid even a little bit.
However, since there was time, I tried to think and became somewhat
lonely. It was about when the notification of my death in battle today
arrives. Since Father is a man, I think that he will understand. However,
Mother, since you are a woman and gentle, won't you shed tears? I think
that my younger brothers and sisters will be lonely when you say that their
older brother has died.
Mother, when I try to think of such a thing, I also am a child with
parents and am lonely as may be expected. However, Mother, please try to
think about it. Are you thinking about what will happen when today I must go
as part of a special (suicide) attack squadron? As the war is approaching
the Japanese mainland, I go since it is possible that the mother who is
loved more than anyone in this world could die.
Mother, if today I do not go as part of a special attack squadron, it
will become such that even you who are getting older will get a gun. So
Mother, just because today I die in battle, please somehow resist just the
tears. But in any case they serve no purpose. Since you were a kind person,
I will not be afraid of any enemy. What I fear most are your tears.
After Ōmori contacts many people and reviews numerous written sources,
he concludes that the fabricated kaiten pilot letter came from Seizō
Okamura, who served as first Director of the
Etajima Museum of Naval History
(at site of former Imperial Japanese Naval Academy) for 23 years until his
retirement in 1979. Interestingly, the author never provides Seizō Okamura's
name and only refers to him as O, but the book has biographical information to
identify easily his name by an Internet search. Okamura passed away in 2007, so Ōmori
never had the opportunity to confront Okamura with his findings regarding the
letter and his false claim to have trained as a kaiten pilot. Although
names are provided of many of Ōmori's contacts during his research, later in
the book Ōmori interviews sources A and B to confirm certain parts of the
story, and he keeps their identities secret based on journalist ethics to not
reveal sources unless permission is obtained.
Except for the last chapter, the book's eight chapters present
chronologically the steps pursued by Ōmori to discover the story behind the
fabricated last letter of a kaiten pilot. He first investigates its
authenticity, then researches its source and the false claims made by the author
Seizō Okamura about his military service, and finally probes into possible motives of the author
of the
fabricated letter by interviewing men who knew him. This non-fiction book somewhat
resembles a detective novel as journalist Ōmori takes extremely
thorough steps in order to try to uncover the complete truth regarding the
forgery. Ultimately, the facts regarding the case get revealed fully, but in the
end Okamura's actual motives regarding the creation of the kaiten
pilot last letter and parts of his military background cannot be known, and those
closest to this unpleasant case can only conjecture why he did it. As Ōmori
goes from source to source in his meticulous investigation, some parts of
Okamura's story get repeated as he interviews different sources or examines
written records, but this repetition does not necessarily mean that readers will
lose interest since each new source adds details or provides confirmation to
information previously provided. The fake last letter of an 18-year-old
kaiten pilot that had been circulating on the Internet goes back to a
lecture that Seizō Okamura, former Etajima Museum of Naval History Director,
gave at Kōgakkan University on July 7, 1995. In December 1995, a booklet of about 50
pages was published based on the contents of that lecture, and Okamura reviewed
and edited its contents prior to publication. The booklet is entitled
Kōgakkan daigaku kōen sōsho dai18shū, Jingū Kōgakkan
daigaku senbotsu gakuto ireisai ki'nen kōen: Senbotsu gakuto no kokoro
(Kōgakkan University Lecture Series 18th Volume, Memorial Lecture at Service to
Console Spirits of Jingū Kōgakkan University Students Who Died in War: Heart of
Students Who Died in War). Okamura also made similar talks in various other places
that included his story of the kaiten pilot's last letter. In 1997,
Nippon Kaigi, which is Japan's largest ultraconservative and ultranationalist
non-governmental organization, produced a video with an interview of Seizō
Okamura, where essentially he told the same story of a kaiten pilot and
produced the same last letter that he had included in his 1995 lecture at
Kōgakkan University. The letter in the video also displayed the
following ending:
Just before sortie on April 6, 1945
Taichi
However, the only kaiten pilot who died in the war with the name of
Taichi was Taichi Imanishi, but he died at Ulithi Atoll on November 20, 1944,
and the last letter of
Taichi Imanishi was to his father and younger sister, not to his mother.
Also, Imanishi was the age of 25, not 18, when he died in a kaiten attack.
The story told by Seizō Okamura contains several other points that do not match
with historical reality. He explains that he received the last letter from a
kaiten pilot whose kaiten was ready to be launched from a submarine,
and the pilot asked Okamura, also aboard the submarine as he was returning to
mainland Japan, to deliver it to his
mother who lived in Kyōto Prefecture. The questionable points in Okamura's story
include the following:
- Okamura received kaiten training. There is no evidence of
this, since he was still in attendance as a cadet at the Naval Academy
until December 1944, and afterward he was assigned to the cruiser
Yakumo. Finally, he was transferred to Fushiki Harbor in Toyama
Prefecture as commander of a minesweeper until the war's end in August
1945.
- Since Okamura suffered from a pleural disorder, he claimed that he was transferred
to an unnamed island in the Marshall Islands to build a kaiten
base there. No such kaiten base existed. The only kaiten
bases were three in Yamaguchi Prefecture and one in Ōita Prefecture.
- The kaiten piloted by Taichi Okamura was launched a little
less than 200 kilometers west of Hawaii. Such a position would have been
nearly impossible in the latter stage of the war, since the U.S. Navy had long
since controlled the seas in this area.
The 1997 Nippon Kaigi interview of Seizō Okamura on video tape was
transferred to DVD and sold to the public starting in 2005. At some
later point in time the interview was uploaded to YouTube, where the
author Takahiro Ōmori first viewed it. However, besides this Nippon Kaigi interview
on YouTube that included the name of kaiten pilot Taichi
Imanishi, other text copies of the last letter included in YouTube
videos and Internet webpages did not provide information
about the source of the last letter other than it was written by an
18-year-old kaiten pilot. In addition to Okamura's telling lies
that altered actual historical records and that spread throughout the
Internet, the fabricated last letter of a kaiten pilot also was
used for commercial purposes by the Shūnan Tourism Convention
Association as they sold tourist souvenirs such as a hand towel and a
package of canned goods that included parts of the fake letter. Shūnan
is the current city name of the location of the former kaiten
base on the island of Ōtsushima, site of the
Kaiten Memorial Museum.
The Shūnan Tourism Convention Association initially resisted stopping
sales of such goods that depicted this falsified history but eventually
decided to stop sales as Ōmori's investigation continued and after the
results were published in an article in the Sankei Shimbun on
August 12, 2020. As a result of Ōmori's rigorous research, he
discovered that Kōgakkan University and the National Kaiten Association
recognized in 2000 that the kaiten pilot last letter presented by
Seizō Okamura was a fake. Kōgakkan University indicated in writing that
it would stop publication of the booklet that contained the letter and
Okamura's story. However, Ōmori was able to buy a copy two decades
later as part of his investigation of the falsified last letter. The
National Kaiten Association thought in 2000 that the matter had been
resolved and did not imagine at the time the future spread of the
fabricated letter throughout the Internet. After 2000, Okamura stopped
giving lectures that included the story of the kaiten pilot last letter. The book ends with no clear
explanation of why Seizō Okamura fabricated the kaiten pilot last
letter and part of his military record. On the one hand, in his position
as Etajima Museum of Naval History Director, he was involved with the
collection of many last letters written by members of the Navy's
Kamikaze Special Attack Corps and Kaiten Special Attack Corps, so this
would indicate great respect for the historical record and the memory of
those who died in special attacks during the Pacific War. On the other
hand, the evidence conclusively points to his reckless disregard for
historical accuracy during his retirement activities as he forged a kaiten pilot's last letter
that later got published in many places on the Internet. A kaiten
researcher speculates that the last letter that he fabricated may have
been based on a variety of actual last letters. An acquaintance (unnamed
source B) does not believe Okamura would do such a deed intentionally since
he had such great respect for Special Attack Corps members and their last writings. However, overwhelming evidence gathered by Ōmori makes
such a conclusion nearly impossible for any objective reader. |
