Burial in the Clouds

December 12, Showa 18 (1943)

My first Sunday since joining the Imperial Navy. Our duty today was to organize our belongings. I have recovered my composure somewhat and decided to start this journal.

At 11:50 a.m., the day before yesterday, I stepped off the train at Otake Station and headed for the Naval Barracks. Had a physical exam in the afternoon and passed it as “B” class. I was pronounced flight-worthy, and that determined the course I shall follow. I traded in my school uniform for a sailor’s togs (called jonbira), and donned that clumsy sailor cap. Our snow-white fatigues were distributed, too. At night, I was taught for the first time how to sling a hammock and how to fold my clothing so as to make a pillow out of it. Had my first navy supper. The dawn following my first night here was cold.

Only four nights have passed since I left bustling Osaka Station, with all my friends and family there to see me off. But I feel now that this must have happened six months ago, a year ago, even three years. It seems like an event lodged deep in the past, and I look back at it as if through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

I have no idea whether the navy is hell or paradise, but when I heard the division officer say the word shaba—the term navy men use for the “free world” without—I fully realized that I had entered a new realm, utterly different and completely estranged from the snug world I have always inhabited. I knew all of this before, of course. Nevertheless, at one moment my spirit balloons out with a courage that floods my entire body, and I am determined to confront whatever comes. And at the next moment it deflates, and I am vexed and bereft, as if thrown into the abyss. I have a lingering attachment to the studies I left behind. I yearn for my parents. Fond sentiments bind me to so many people. And these feelings twine round and round about me, cutting me to pieces in the end. But I suppose we are no longer to “choose” anything. The only option open to us is to train ourselves, according to a fate already determined.

In the navy a bucket is referred to as a “tin case.” A dust cloth is an “inner gunwale match,” a tub is a “washtub,” and so on. Use of such worldly expressions as boku, kimi, ne, and tono is absolutely prohibited. One slip of the tongue gets you a “cow killer” from the drill instructor—a disciplinary knuckle on the forehead. I must become proficient at the language and order of this new society. In fact, I need to master it, down to the minutest detail.

Scholar-sailors like me are grouped according to the schools we are from. There is the Waseda Division, for example, and the Tokyo University Division. There are Divisions from Chu-o University, from Hiroshima Higher Normal School, and of course from our own Kyoto University. I look about me as I write and see Fujikura, with a long face, chewing his “Jintan” mints. Sakai is writing a postcard. And Kashima—well, he must be someplace around here. In this, I am really quite fortunate.

After our last seminar on the Manyoshu, at the end of November, we played baseball out on the grounds till it grew dark. Then we sat down and talked under a broad oak tree behind the library. Kashima composed a poem for the occasion, which I liked and still remember.

It encourages me to no end that half of those old friends are living here together.

The tide of the war is not in our favor, but I don’t think it is necessarily in favor of the United States either. I can imagine that American students have given up their study of Shakespeare or Whitman to take their place in the battle line, and in a sense the outcome of the war might well be determined by youths like us. I must sink all impertinent thoughts to the bottom of my mind and try to become a man.

The ceremony officially marking our enlistment is set for Monday, which is tomorrow. The commander-in-chief of the Kure Naval Station make a tour of inspection. The turn of a vast wheel galvanizes all the merely private movements of our minds, and we are welded, little by little, into a larger organization.

December 15

Fujikura was caught reading this morning as the division officer, Lieutenant Yuhara, delivered a moral lecture. The lieutenant defined one aspect of navy spirit as “smartness.” He was not talking about stylishness or anything like that. To be “smart,” he said, is to be swift, flexible, and agile, all the while retaining a certain grace so as never to be rough. We must acquire this “smartness” in our carriage as well as in our minds, for without it we will be useless to the navy, whether as sailors or as pilots. And then, abruptly, Lieutenant Yuhara thundered:

“Who’s that reading? Stand up!”

We all looked on anxiously. The lieutenant demanded to know what Fujikura had in his hands and was baffled when the latter replied that it was a “literary journal.” He had to ask again.

“I was reading a literary journal, sir,” Fujikura all but shouted, in a tone just a shade defiant. “The article is on Basho, the poet. My old teacher wrote it. I was just thinking that the ‘smartness’ you describe is rather like the quality Basho has in view when he speaks of his principle of‘lightness.”’

“You mean to tell me that you understood what I said, even while reading?"

“Yes, sir. I did."

We all got a chuckle out of that, except for the division officer himself. “All right,” he said. “Put down that magazine and don’t let this happen again.” He gave no further rebuke. Incidentally, Professor O. wrote that article on Basho, and I remember it with nostalgia. At the same time, I formed no bad impression of Lieutenant Yuhara.

We took the Student Reserve Officers Examination this afternoon. The subjects were Japanese, composition, mathematics, and physics. The proctor was our drill instructor, Petty Officer First Class Zenta Yoshimi. If we pass the exam and finish our course at the naval barracks, in a little more than a month we will be given a naval officer’s uniform and assigned a rank just below midshipman, and we start acquiring skills specific to our positions. I’ll probably be sent to the Tsuchiura Naval Air Station.

Petty Officer Yoshimi is among the surviving crew of the aircraft carrier So-ryu, which was sunk at the Battle of Midway Island. He is a veteran of ten years’ standing, yet before long we will outrank him. And if we find ourselves together on the same battlefield, we students must assume command, taking into our hands the lives of officers like these. We cannot treat the matter lightly. I can well imagine that it won’t be pleasant for these drill instructors to see students like us—men who don’t know their left from their right—outrank them, and in such short order, too. But at least our instructor, Petty Officer Yoshimi, has the good humor to say, with a laugh, that he “has now become a college professor.” Besides, he takes his responsibilities seriously and never makes unreasonable demands of us.

As for the examinations: It is a piece of cake for us to tackle Japanese and composition, but we humanities students are totally out of our element in mathematics and physics. I have only the faintest memory of ever hearing such terms as “Ohm’s law,” or Helmholtz’s “Conservation of Energy,” and that was when I was in junior high school. Everybody is having trouble. However, navy custom fosters a decidedly strong rivalry among its various divisions and outfits, and to that rule the Student Reserve Officers Exam is no exception. The drill instructors would do anything to avoid the dishonor of producing a failure from their own outfits. So the proctors themselves cheat. Petty Officer Yoshimi paused once beside my desk and rapped it with a pencil. I turned, but he stepped away as if nothing had happened. Whereupon I scrutinized the paper: I had given the wrong answer to one of the questions in mathematics. I looked around me and saw our proctor rapping, here and there, as he walked among the desks.

In the evening, we had a special course in navy calisthenics.

December 28

Our third time rowing the cutter. About fifty strokes. I can think of nothing more beautiful and orderly to look at, and yet more arduous to do myself But I have to pull my own weight.

Navy mottoes: Iron will. Order. Initiative. And above all, praxis.

But honestly, I know my heart always harbors the antitheses of all these elements of virtue, side by side with each of them. Weakness. Slovenliness. Passive maintenance of the status quo. And above all, just going through the motions. As for that last one: I’m really not shrewd enough to pull it off, though I sometimes feel that you have to pull it off if you want to survive in the military.

“Ingenuity, Yoshino,” Fujikura said to me bluntly during a cigarette break. “Ingenuity. I tell you this because you’re rather naively honest. We can do what we’re asked to do without letting ourselves be cast into the mold of this insular navy world. If you can’t salvage at least that much independence, to what purpose have you lived such a free and easy life at high school and university? Of course, the brass would be furious if we didn’t at least appear to fit their mold, and that’s where the ingenuity comes in. You know, the novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa once said, ‘There is also a truth that can only be told through lies.”’

Fujikura still won’t use military talk like kisama, ore, and omae,[1] unless a supervisor is within earshot. He seems to enjoy putting up a little resistance. I don’t always agree with him, but I can listen to anything with an open mind so long as it comes from Kashima or Fujikura. Among the four of us, it’s Fujikura and Kashima who rebel most strongly against the navy atmosphere. Sakai is the most amenable, though he’s timid and somewhat whiny. And I’d say I’m just about in between.

The navy adheres to a diet of brown rice, and before each meal a voice bellows instructions from the loudspeakers. Dinner is ready! Wash your hands! Chew thoroughly and eat slowly! Chew thoroughly and eat slowly.

We always heard that in the military you have to eat quickly, or else they teach you a lesson. To prepare ourselves we even staged an eating contest at a restaurant we used to haunt called Ogawa-tei, if only for fun. But I find that in the navy it’s actually the other way round. I don’t know whether this has anything to do with it, but the sailors, to a man, empty their bowels with remarkable frequency, quite as if their bodies had somehow altered. I myself take a good hard shit three times a day, every day. The bathroom is always packed during short breaks. If you delay getting in line, you miss your chance. It’s quite painful to engage in battle drills while holding at bay so urgent a call of nature. This is especially true when you have to stand at attention. Your lower abdomen feels bloated, and you have to struggle not to let out a fart. Maybe I should get up in the middle of the night and finish off a portion of the business. That might be an example of “ingenuity.”

January 2, Showa 19 (1944)

A new year begins. Our first march to Iwakuni. For the first time since joining the navy, I breathed the air of the outside world. Chickens clucking. Children playing battledore and shuttlecock in their Sunday best. A drunk peddler taking a leak by the road, his bicycle at his side. The sights and sounds of the holiday impressed me vividly. The waters of the Iwakuni River ran clear, with round, white pebbles covering the bottom. The landscape around the Kintaikyo Bridge reminded me of the country near Togetsukyo Bridge in Arashiyama, in the western suburbs of Kyoto. We returned to base in the evening.

I want something sweet. For two weeks I have been craving botamochi. What preoccupies me most since I entered the navy? Well, I find myself always thinking of food. I don’t have any sexual desire at all, probably because I haven’t had any experience, but I certainly desire mame-daifuku, beautifully browned over red-hot charcoal. Just one more time I want to sit down to some breaded pork cutlets at Ogawa-tei.

We are eating white rice for the first three days of the New Year. I am so used to staring at brown rice day after day that freshly cooked white rice, with its moist, pearly finish, is precious in my sight. Lunch was served at 1000 on New Year’s Day: salad, steamed fish cake, herring roe, sweet black beans, beef, and soft azuki-bean jelly, immediately followed by two parcels of treats, an apple, and four satsuma oranges. We were told, however, that we had to polish it all off at the table. We were forbidden to set anything aside for later. We wondered why, but as they say, we haven’t mastered soldiering yet if we are forever asking why. Nobody openly opposes that idea, and yet isn’t it true that skepticism is the father of modern science? And isn’t the navy, above all, founded upon the modern science of the West? I mean, the navy is hardly the infantry. Naval officers know perfectly well that soldiership alone can’t move its warships and aircraft. Isn’t this all something of a paradox?

Anyway, it seems that if you wish for something from the bottom of your heart, you will be heard. Last night, unbeknownst to me, someone laid three dried persimmons in my hammock. And there was another anonymous gift today of five miso-seasoned rice crackers. It requires supreme skill to eat rice crackers without making any noise. They say that, even now, with the world cut in two by the war, there are ways to get steel from Sweden or equipment from the United States, if you only have the will to do it. And in much the same way, we aren’t shut off completely from the outer world. For example, the father of S. in my outfit is a man of some influence in the city of Otake, and he manages to send food in through the executive officer at the naval barracks. This accounts for the miso-seasoned rice crackers, a bequest from S.

Kashima belongs to the outfit bunking next to us. As New Year’s Eve wound to a close, he was startled by a sharp, goblin-like cackle, coming at him from above: “Hey, Kashima! Kashima!” Before he could recover from the shock, he was hauled up onto a broom closet. There, with Drill Instructor Ishii at his side, Kashima found himself forced to wolf down dried persimmons and twenty-odd boiled eggs. The story goes that Kashima’s father came for a visit bearing various morsels for him to eat during the New Year holiday. However, he was not allowed to see his son. “Well, it’s a shame to waste this,” he said. “Please share it with the instructors.” And he left all the food for them. Many fathers and mothers reportedly come out to visit their sons only to be turned away. Some try to bribe their way in, and the drill instructors have been known to wink at the practice. I don’t like this sort of business, but I could sell my soul when it comes to food. Needless to say, last night’s dried persimmons came from Kashima.

During study session New Year’s Eve, a fellow got caught drawing elaborate pictures of an oyako-donburi, curried rice, and all manner of cakes. This was M., of the 6th outfit, and he used pencils in twelve different colors to sketch these painstakingly detailed pictures. But no matter, they ended up torn to bits. He received a slap on each cheek from the division officer. Fortunately, I have yet to suffer a blow since joining the navy.

January 7

The cold last night chilled me to the bone, and, sure enough, we had snow this morning. It has been falling steadily ever since, blanketing the mountains of the Chugoku district and the islands of the Seto Inland Sea.

Bending and stretching exercises. Jogging. Then rowing drills in the cutter.

“Make it snappy! Go!” Petty Officer Yoshimi barked out his commands, banging on the broadside. But that was just while we were boarding the boat, and with the division officer overseeing the exercise. Once we were out in the offing, he ordered us to cross oars, and then he gave us a little talk. We snuggled up together to get warm, like a group of chicks, and rubbed our hands as we listened. Itsuku-shima Island, which before had always looked blackish-blue, lay powdered in the snowy inland sea. A thin layer of snow covered the cutter, too. I could make out two German submarines in port.

Petty Officer Yoshimi told us the story of how his warship, the So-ryu, went down at Midway Island. That battle was a watershed defeat for Japan, and we have now lost nearly all our big carriers: the Akagi, the Kaga, the Ryu-jo, the So-ryu, the Hi-ryu, and the Sho-ho. The auxiliary aircraft carrier Chu-yo was also sunk recently. According to the officer, the Chu-yo used to be a Japanese mail-boat called the Nitta-maru, but it was converted into a warship. Only two vessels, the Shokaku and the Zuikaku, remain in service as purpose-built aircraft carriers. From now on, he explained, the war will be an extremely difficult affair for Japan. He doesn’t think our prospects are necessarily as bright as the radio reports from Imperial Headquarters suggest. The men who have taken part in actual combat know this better than anybody else. of us, he added, should understand that our lives will likely end sometime next spring; we must prepare. Officer Yoshimi spoke with feeling, and his words absorbed us utterly. We forgot even to rub our hands. Before long, he also said, we will join operational units as officers, and our sense of responsibility might well lead us to impose severe discipline on our subordinates. The more earnest and dedicated we are, he suggested, the more we will be prone to do that, but the fact is that there are many occasions when neither the character nor the degree of the discipline we enforce has any bearing at all on the wider situation. It is perfectly all right to tighten the reins, to push the men, or even to beat them if necessary. However, Officer Yoshimi said that he wants us all to take care to discern when to come down hard, and also to slacken up a little bit, occasionally turning a blind eye to the men. How gratifying that is for deprived young soldiers! He urged us never to forget how we felt during our brief period as seaman recruits at the naval barracks.

Later, a man in my outfit criticized Petty Officer Yoshimi. He claimed this little speech was done from calculation, that Officer Yoshimi says we’ll all be dead next spring, but all the while is just shrewdly looking out for his own hide in a way perfectly characteristic of petty officers. Well, I can’t agree, and it is impertinent of that fellow to say such a thing, pulling a rank he doesn’t even have yet. If we indulge ourselves in needless conceit and lose our humility, we surely invite needless troubles.

It’s so cold that my fingers are almost numb, but I’m getting the hang of rowing the cutter. Also we are learning light signals, semaphore, and rope work. Rope work involves the half hitch, two half hitch, bowline knot, bowline on the bight, sheet bend, log hitch, and so on, and is all rather complicated. We learn to clean the toilet and do the laundry, how to wash socks as well. It seems I’m gradually assimilating myself to navy life. They say we’ll leave this barracks on the 25th of this month at the latest.

We had hot tofu miso soup and a sardine for dinner. The fish, complete with its head and tail, had plenty of fat, and the saltiness penetrated it. Quite good. I saw a guy slip a second sardine into his bowl of rice, taking advantage of its being his turn to serve the meal. He hid the fish well, but inevitably it poked its head out as he ate. Still he kept at it, cool as a cucumber. Is this what we should expect of someone from the law college at Kyoto University? His conduct is beneath contempt, but all the same I clearly envy him that one sardine—intensely. Why do I get so hungry?

Quite unexpectedly, we will be allowed to have visitors on the 14th. I sent out a mimeographed invitation today, and asked for A Trip to Manyo by Bunmei Tsuchiya, The Complete Works of Sakutaro Hagiwara, matches, mentholatum, and medicine for stomachaches.

Another secret gift of sweets tonight: an-mochi. As I munched mine in the hammock, I thought of seeing my parents, and I was thrilled.

January 10

A cluster of letters has arrived from Professors O. and E. at Kyoto University, from my old high school teacher Mr. N., and so on. Kashima, Sakai, Fujikura, and I sat around the cigarette tray during the break, exchanging postcards. It has been quite a while since we had so lively a discussion of the Manyoshu and the scenery and customs of Yamato (the very heart of the anthology). But as we talked I noticed a certain look on the face of a fellow from another division, and it struck me that we should take care lest our most innocent conversation sound strangely pedantic. This is the case even in a company of seamen with an academic background, and soon enough we’ll be assigned to operational units, where we must mingle with career officers and enlisted men. We really can’t indulge this pointless nostalgia for university life. We should tuck it away deep in our hearts until the world is again at peace—that is, if we survive the war.

All the same, I enjoyed the conversation. What a consolation it was to chat about the three mountains of Yamato, about Mt. Futakami, the Yamanobe Pass, the streaming Furukawa River, and about all the places we visited during our Manyo trip last winter! In the town of Nabari, we played the card game karuta at an inn, warming ourselves in a kotatsu built into the floor, while out back brown-eared bulbuls swooped down from the hill to eat the red berries of the oleaster. I also remember sitting up through the night once, at the inner temple of Nigatsu-do, for the water-drawing ceremony spoken of in Basho’s poem.

When midwinter ends, the water-drawing season will come again to Nara. I distinctly remember how my feet felt as I tread on the thin ice, and as muddy water seeped into my worn-out shoes. After all, we entrusted our very lives to these “things of Yamato” and to the Manyoshu. But I have to remember: All that is just a fine memory now, a lovely bit of atmosphere, and this isn’t the time to dwell on an atmosphere. War is about to teach me firsthand what the poet Otomo no Tabito felt when he was sent to fill a government post at Dazaifu, that remote land where “incessantly the light snow falls,” as he once put it. So I will set aside my studies for the moment and devote myself utterly to the navy. This can only deepen my understanding of the Manyo poems anyway, should I be fortunate enough to outlive the war. I really have to believe that.

Mr. N. reports in his letter that he will be participating in “rites of purification” and other such things at the Training Center for Doctrine in Koganei-cho, Kita-tama, Tokyo, through February 9. I hardly know what to think about that. He says each high school is to send one teacher to study these rites, but I have to wonder: Could this sort of thing possibly help usher in a new era? Is it really worth the bother? Or is it just useless folly, like rowing against the current? If you ask me, instead of abandoning their vocation for “rites of purification,” I would much prefer that teachers and students put their hearts into their studies just as they did before the war—no, even more diligently than they did before the war, so as to make up for our absence. I hear that the professors’ offices at the university are all desolate. Letters trail in to them, one by one, from students who joined the army and wound up in some transport unit in Fushimi, in some regiment in Takahata, Nara, or in scattered places such as Kagoshima, Tokyo, or Manchuria.

January 12

Well, it happened, exactly as I feared it would. Some student in the 217th Division got off a wisecrack. “You see,” he said to a drill instructor decorated with four good conduct medals—to the guardian spirit of the navy, so to speak—“You see, I’ll take good care of you when I receive my commission. So why don’t we meet each other halfway? You know, give-and-take.” As a result, everyone in the 217th was ordered this evening to do push-ups with their feet up on chairs, almost in the position of a handstand. And while they were at it, they got a good “dive-bombing” in the bargain (that’s when an officer gathers all his momentum and thrashes you on the ass). Next, they were doused with cold water from the washtub. Their strength was utterly depleted. Men whose brittle arms could no longer support the weight of their bodies were forced to lick the water off the deck. My heart ached when I heard how severe this correction was, but I’d better not quail at it. They say that in the army much worse punishments (and far more unreasonable ones, too) are a matter of course. I can’t pamper myself or give in to conceit. I must come to grips with the realities of military life. This incident happened in another division, but I have to learn from it nonetheless.

Smoking alone at night, I gazed up at Sirius, its bright light flaring off the lower left side of Orion.

January 14

Today, a series of military reviews.

Received visitors after that. Father and mother came to see me. My father said the train was so packed that they had to stand all the way from Osaka. Mother had sunken eyes. The two hours given to us, from twelve to fourteen hundred hours, passed all too quickly. I forgot myself, and now I have no clear memory either of what I heard or what I said. It seems I just repeated such commonplaces as “I’m all right,” “I’m trying my best,” or “I don’t find things so difficult,” all the while feeling embarrassed as my mother gazed at me in my sailor suit, half in admiration, half in pity. My parents told me that my brother Bunkichi has been transferred to a newly organized unit that set out from the port of Osaka on the 8th. He is now a corporal. Still, he was allowed to spend some four hours at home before departing. “Today may be the last time I see you in this life,” he told our parents, looking very sad. As he was wearing a summer outfit, my parents speculate that he will be sent to some island in the Pacific. I don’t worry so much about my own situation, but I really am anxious when it comes to my brother. He is timid, has a weak constitution, and was drafted at the age of thirty-four. My mother grumbled that she didn’t know who would inherit the family business. “Don’t bring up an issue like that,” I chided her. “How could I possibly make an answer now?” Nevertheless, I grew quite emotional when I heard that Professor E. said to them, “Please tell him to take good care of himself,” and also when my father said, “We’ll come see you anywhere, whenever they allow us a meeting.”

The reception room is located to the right of the gate to the naval barracks. It was a lovely day, sunny and warm, and it made me wistful to think that we were forbidden to eat anything. I saw many a regretful face scattered about, gazing at what must have been big bundles of botamochi, or sushi, or red rice. “Father and I can cover for you. No one will see. Why don’t you try some?” said one young mother, almost pleading. Her eyes misted up when her son replied in a whisper, but still maintaining his military bearing, “No, it is not permitted.” Filial devotion is a blessing, but it can also be ticklish, and in our case that devotion might well turn out to be a burden at times.

Anyway, what ingenuity Fujikura possesses! When the meeting ended, his gaiters were all puffed out and gawky. And after the inspection, two satsuma oranges materialized in my hammock. I felt guilty indulging my appetite when my friend had borne all the risk (I never got my hands dirty). But I accepted the gift with gratitude.

January 17

The commander of the naval barracks has changed. Rear admiral Takaaki Kamai just arrived to fill the post. We saw off his predecessor, waving our caps.

There was a dress inspection this afternoon, followed by the drills in which we sling and fold up our hammocks as quickly as possible. Very tough.

About a week ago, I wrote in this diary that devoting myself entirely to the navy would only deepen my appreciation of literature, should I survive the war. Then it occurred to me that this way of thinking—that is, treating navy life as a means to a strictly private end—not only contradicts the idea of “devoting myself to the navy,” it also suggests that I am anything but prepared to endure an ordeal that will carry us beyond our physical and mental limits. At the end of the day, when I take a hard, honest look at myself, I see how desperately I wish to live through the war and return to private life. It horrifies me to call to mind what Officer Yoshimi told us in the cutter on that snowy day a while ago. I loved the literary vocation to which I had aspired, loved it completely. Good friends, good professors, tranquil offices, and beautiful poems. No doubt it had its sentimental side, but I studied with all my heart. I sowed and watered the soil, and I have harvested nothing yet. I can’t bear to think that I may close my life of twenty-three years and several months without harvesting a single crop in what I believed to be my true calling. Perhaps I just lack the good grace to give it all up.

January 25

Yesterday we ran races in full battle gear, then had a tea party in the afternoon. After the tea, the results of the Student Reserve Officers Examinations were announced, and, as I expected, I have been assigned to the aviation branch, and will be sent to the Tsuchiura Naval Air Station in Ibaraki Prefecture. It never occurred to me a year ago that I would become a navy flyer.

Law graduates like Yonemura and Yoshizawa will go to the Naval Paymaster’s College in Tukiji, Tokyo. Kashima has been assigned to the seaman branch and will head forTakeyama Naval Barracks in Yokosuka, Kanagawa. My Tsuchiura group is to be the last to depart, so we spent a busy afternoon packing lunches for Kashima and his fellow seamen. The bamboo husks we used to wrap the food in were small, but we had no good alternative. Anyhow, we kept struggling at the task. We took the greatest possible care we could, out of respect.

At one-forty, in the middle of the night, the Yokosuka group folded their hammocks and left the barracks en masse. Will the day come, I wondered, when we meet again under that blue oak tree, as Kashima said in his poem, given that we can’t assume we shall live even to see tomorrow? Following navy custom, we simply raised our hands in salute and waved our caps, without shaking hands or patting each other on the shoulders. A lump rose in my throat, but with no opportunity to speak to Kashima, I just continuously saw the men off as they marched in their long line across the dark wintry grounds, all in their identical seaman’s uniform. With some of these men, I had kicked a ball about on the field, sung, and debated philosophy, until just two months ago. I will probably never see them again.

Kashima is rather bohemian. He acquainted himself once with the proprietress of a certain “tea house” in Miyagawa-cho. He hung out there all the time—all but boarded there. On another occasion he simply cut his classes and military drills, sojourning for a month at a hot spring in Aomori. Like Fujikura, he has been either harshly critical of the war, or else indifferent to it. But now I suppose he, too, has but one choice—namely, to bear his fate with courage, and fight battles. I wanted to say a word of farewell to thank him for the dried persimmons, but it was too dark for me to make him out in the long procession.

Fujikura and Sakai have also been assigned to the aviation branch. That means they will go to Tsuchiura with me. After the Yokosuka group left, the long row of hammocks looked like a set of gums with teeth missing. It was ominous. We were given travel expenses and briefed on the journey in the afternoon. We set forth tomorrow morning.