Kunitake Toriya, a former serviceman, discusses his service in a suicide pilot unit and his postwar internment in Siberia during an interview in Saga on May 9. (Photo courtesy of Jiji Press)
SAGA – Kunitake Toriya was preparing to embark on a kamikaze suicide attack mission against Allied forces during the Battle of Okinawa when the fighting ended in June 1945, just weeks before Japan's surrender in World War II.
Spared from having to make the desperate attack, Toriya, then a corporal in the Imperial Japanese Army, was later detained in Siberia after the war.
"People died one after another, both in 'tokko' and in Siberia," said Toriya, a 98-year-old resident of the southwestern city of Saga, using the abbreviation for "tokubetsu kogekitai" or special attack corps.
He recalled quietly sharing honest thoughts with fellow pilots who had received suicide attack orders: "We don't want to die."
In April 1943, at 16, Toriya entered the Tachiarai army flight school in neighboring Fukuoka Prefecture.
After rigorous training on the Korean Peninsula and in Manchuria, now northeastern China, he spent the summer of 1944 preparing for anti-ship missions as a pilot of the Army Type 97 fighter.
By the spring of 1945, as the Battle of Okinawa intensified, he was stationed in Siping, Manchuria, and assigned to a unit designated for suicide attacks in Okinawa. The memories of those days still visit him like a nightmare. Day after day he drilled, tormented by the same question: "Will I be ordered to depart tomorrow?"
Although confident in his flying, he knew that carrying more than 100 kilograms of explosives would make him easy prey for the enemy. He came to regret enlisting despite his mother's opposition.
Toriya was ordered to write a farewell letter to his parents. Instead, he handed in a blank sheet with strands of hair and nail clippings attached.
He had wanted to write, "I don't want to die," but he knew it would never pass the censors.
"It's true that some men volunteered, even writing their applications in blood. But for most of us, the honest feeling was that we didn't want to go, we didn't want to die," Toriya recounted.
When the brutal Battle of Okinawa ended in June, his suicide mission was called off. He could not say it aloud, but in his heart he shouted, "Banzai."
Even so, he said he would never forget the sight of a comrade who had already taken off, calling back, "Don't come," as he took to the sky.
His army unit was transferred to southern Manchuria, where members learned the war had ended.
Around that October, they were loaded into freight train cars and transported to a detention camp in the Kemerovo region of western Siberia. Along the way, some soldiers jumped from the moving train in desperate attempts to escape. Their fate remains unknown.
Life in the camp was unbearably harsh. They were forced to work in such punishing cold that a blink could leave their eyelids frozen shut. No news reached them, and the future felt unknowable.
Food and medicine were scarce, and many of his comrades died of malnutrition. Proper burials were impossible, so the bodies, frozen rigid like lumber, were hauled on sleds and buried in the snow.
Toriya remembers the wolves howling as they made their way back, and the helpless realization that there was nothing he could do.
Returning to Japan in May 1947, Toriya landed at Maizuru Port in Kyoto Prefecture, western Japan. The sight of elementary school children with their schoolbags brought tears of relief to his eyes, he said. Yet even in that moment, he remembered fellow servicemen who had died in work accidents soon before their scheduled return home.
After the war, Toriya refused his military pension and kept his distance from the conflict.
"I didn't want to receive money related to the military," he said.
About 10 years ago, however, the death of a comrade-in-arms prompted him to start sharing his experiences in lectures and other public forums.
An injury sustained during training left him barely able to hear in his right ear. Even so, he can still demonstrate flight procedures with smooth, deliberate hand gestures.
"It would be frustrating to allow the unreasonable war to be relegated into darkness," he said emphatically. "I want people to know what actually happened for the repose of the souls of my fallen comrades." (Jiji Press)
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