This is a piece about a painting of a man looking at a painting. Unfortunately, I can’t reproduce the image here, I can only tell you about it and the man who painted it.
His shoulders face the painting propped up on an easel next to the back wall of his studio. It is as if you have walked in and caught him in a moment of reflection. He is looking at you, but his attention is still on the painting.
He is wearing his room slippers; he is quite comfortable. His right arm is draped over the back of a simple chair, his left hand rests on his knee, cupped as though he is holding a ball or preparing to play the piano beautifully.
A white apron hangs from his neck, and it is stained with paint on the bottom. A palette sits on the table in the foreground, but there is no brush. It is evident that he was just sitting in his studio, studying the painting before him. A mannequin hides in the shadow of the easel.
The painting with which he is so enraptured is one of himself at age sixteen. It is 1945, and he is dressed in his earthen Japanese Navy fatigues. His shoulders are thrown back and his hands are on his hips; it is a confident pose. Heavy white gloves make his hands seem quite large in proportion to the rest of his body. The young man’s lips are pursed and his eyes look down at the painter. There is no fear in the boy’s face and there is perhaps a slight hint of duty.
The painter has the same pursed lips and his shoulders too are rolled back. His head is cocked to the side to acknowledge your intrusion into his studio. There is no trace of apology, regret, or pain on his face; his expression is simply one of acceptance. It is as if he is saying to you, “there I was.”
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Fumio Takemura was a member of the Special Attack Force, different but not completely dissimilar to the familiar kamikaze fighters. He was part of a troop that was to fly a new kind of Zero Plane called a “Rocket Fighter” in Japanese.
“The planes weren’t designed to be able to land,” Takemura recalled. “There was no landing gear, just a wooden sled on the bottom, and that made it very rough if the pilot did indeed decide to land.”
The Rocket Fighters burned what little fuel they carried quite quickly, within six minutes of taking off, in order to reach the altitude of the bulkier Allied fighter planes in a fraction of the time. From there, the assignment was to glide around the Allied aircraft, get off as many shots as possible, and if there was an opportunity, to plunge the Rocket Fighter into an enemy plane.
“Kamikaze pilots who returned were castigated and tortured,” Takemura said. “Our orders weren’t so strict, but we wouldn’t have been expected to return.”
Takemura and his troop practiced their techniques using hang gliders in the mountains of distant Nagano Prefecture. They built the camp from scratch, clearing boulders away from the top of a mountain rise, sleeping in tents, and making do without toilets or showers.
“We’d pass the time at night killing the crab lice we all had all over our bodies,” he recalled with nary a shudder. “No showers. Nothing to do. It was kinda fun after awhile.”
Takemura was to depart on “permanent deployment” in the summer of 1945, and would have done so if the Rocket Fighter’s test flights had met expectations in early July. Mitsubishi developed three Rocket Fighters, but one of the first test flights ended with the death of its pilot.
With the release of the final version of the Rocket Fighter pushed back until September, the Japanese Navy never got the chance to deploy its new weapon before the country surrendered to the Allied Forces in August 1945.
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Takemura painted this work when he was 60 years old. Kanreki, or the “turning of the calendar,” is the Japanese idea that life begins anew at age 60. Traditionally, working men retire and work on hobbies and projects that have eluded them during their forty years of six- and seven-day work weeks. It is a time to reflect, assess, and explore.
“I didn’t talk much about [the war] before my kanreki,” Takemura mused. “It was then that I decided that our stories needed to be told.”
His studio is full of picture books and model airplanes, and the resemblance to the American servicemen of that era with regard to the history of the war is striking.
Around the family dinner table, with his two daughters and their teenage children present, he recounted war tales that the women never heard when they were young. It sparked memories of talking with my grandfather, who saw action over Europe, over games of gin with my father and him in the final years of his life.
“Young people don’t know about what happened, they just don’t know,” Takemura grunted, offering a rare glimpse at his crusty side. “We’ve got to make these stories last.”
He talked of the fire-bombing of Kochi, a town that even then didn’t make it onto the map except as the small capital of the countryside prefecture. Many people, he said, fled to the Kagami River, thinking that they could escape the flames by being in the water. The oil and explosive materials inside the fire bombs floated to the surface of the river and fried them alive.
He mentioned the techniques that villagers in each of the coastal towns practiced in case the Allied troops attempted a ground attack. Each port had boats loaded with explosives ready to go out and meet Allied ships. Some civilians were given oxygen tanks and told to wait under water for smaller passenger boats to come by during an amphibian landing. They were to spring up, shoot their oxygen tanks, and blow themselves up in addition to the enemy.
He spoke of the network of tunnels and makeshift forts that still remain in the mountains of Kochi, there for additional civilian defense against an Allied invasion. Locals gave up valuable land for rice in order to build mounds of dirt, hollow them out, and park planes inside, keeping them out of sight from above.
All of this made my American high school textbook seem like it paid Japan lip service for its role in World War II. I had no inkling of fire-bombing outside of the big cities, no perception of the degree of the threat that armed civilians would have posed in a land battle, no idea that any of this spread all the way to one of the farthest corners of the country, Kochi, still Japan’s best-kept secret.
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Takemura talks seriously about his experience in the armed forces, but there is a hint of the huge smile that is always on his face when he talks about art or his family. It lights up the room whenever he enters, but dims just a bit when he speaks of the war.
Japan had been militant and imperialistic for Takemura’s entire life, teaching him that America and the Allied Forces were enemies of Japan. Suddenly, Japan was on the defense.
“They told us that our way of life would end if we lost,” Takemura recalled grimly. “We did not want Japan to become America.”
Takemura spent time training and imagining his death for the glory of his country and, on the surface, committed himself to that idea with mere weeks to go until its execution.
Then it all ended. He went back home to a broken and devastated Kochi.
“I was so relieved when it was over,” Takemura said with his trademark smile. “Just making it back to Kochi was enough for me.”
He loved to paint, and the war stole years away from his development. In his words, “wartime had no place for painting.” He sketched all of the different planes he saw during training. He painted while working as a civil servant first at the prefectural government office, then as an officer of the arts in Kochi City.
He was nearly thirty when one of his paintings was recognized and awarded for the first time, and he kept at his craft until he became the artist that everyone knows today.
Fifty years later, he has a three-story studio crammed full of paintings of old men playing Japanese chess, coastal scenes, and people and places from around Europe from his many tours there. He still teaches art classes and is active in Kochi’s art community.
The delay in the Rocket Fighter’s development and the end of World War II gave Takemura a virtually limitless bonus: the rest of his life, 64 years and counting. He bounces around from place to place, smiling, teaching, doing what he loves, and taking care of his family, whom he has kept close in Kochi. Is there any other way to live?
