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Tome Torihama in 1990
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Each chapter gives readers a glimpse into the feelings of the
kamikaze pilots and their bereaved family members. For example, one chapter
tells of a pilot who wrote a final
letter in katakana to his five-year-old son and his two-year-old daughter.
The last part of the chapter gives postwar episodes about his wife and children. Another chapter tells about
a baseball player who as a
professional only had two times at bat, both as a pinch hitter, before he
entered the Army to train as a pilot. He struck out the first time, and he
grounded into a double play during his final at bat. The book also contains two of
Tome's most well-known stories of
Second Lieutenant Fumihiro Mitsuyama, the Korean pilot
who sang the Korean song Arirang on the night before his sortie, and Sergeant Saburo Miyakawa, who told Tome he would return as a firefly.
A chapter near the end of the book tells the story of Tadamasa
Itatsu, a kamikaze pilot who sortied on May 28, 1945, but crash landed at
Tokunoshima. He had no chance to sortie again before the end of the war, and he
was tormented by feelings of guilt for many years since
he was the only one to survive. He later became director of the Chiran Peace
Museum for Kamikaze Pilots. Itatsu personally visited over 600 family members of
kamikaze pilots, and many of these visits led to donations of photographs,
letters, and other items to the Chiran Peace
Museum, making it today the museum with the most extensive collection
of artifacts related to kamikaze pilots. He mentions that a few parents who he
visited had never acknowledged their sons' death and still believe they
survived.
One chapter tells about Tome Torihama's photograph albums full
of blank spaces. She had about 20 albums full of photos of Chiran Air Base
pilots together with her taken when they visited her restaurant. These included
not only the kamikaze pilots who sortied in the spring of 1945 but also student
pilots who from 1942 came for a few months to the Army's Tachiarai Flight School
branch at Chiran Air Base. During the war Tome was prohibited by the military
from sending these photos to parents, but after the war's end many family
members visited Chiran and took these photos when they met with Tome.
Tome Torihama died in 1992, two years after publication of this
book, at a Makurazaki City nursing home
that faces Mount Kaimon, a mountain at the southern tip of Japan where Chiran
kamikaze pilots flew over on their flights toward Okinawa. Her touching stories
about the young men who went to their deaths remain alive in this
book.
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