Word: chiran
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Dates: during 2002-2002
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...Chiran is a hike. Located on the southernmost tip of Japan, the tiny town lies hours from any major city and deep in a valley surrounded by a fortress of mountains. Yet on a mid-August national holiday, visitors throng its sleepy streets and pack its inns. They've come not for Chiran's green tea and purple yams, nor for its exquisitely preserved samurai estates?but to honor its kamikaze pilots...
...over the past few years, books, television specials, movies and plays about kamikazes have drawn ever-bigger audiences. Last year, nearly a million people visited Chiran to pay tribute at what was once the nation's biggest kamikaze base. Locals speculate that demoralized Japanese come here in search of heroes. Or because Sept. 11 sparked increasing curiosity about Japan's own suicide bombers. But most know they come because of a Chiran woman named Tome Torihama whom the kamikazes called...
...fall of 1944, facing defeat and short of resources, the imperial army began to send off pilots in planes with enough fuel only for a one-way trip. Chiran's location in a hidden valley close to Okinawa made it an ideal launchpad for the so-called Tokkotai, or Special Attack Corps. Tome ran the Tomiya eatery in Chiran. The pilots, many still teenagers, spent their last days hanging around her place. She cooked their favorite meals, smuggled their farewell letters to sweethearts past military censors, and gave the airmen their final hugs goodbye. Tome, then a middle-aged mother...
...that she won her lifelong struggle. Thanks to Japanese media reports, she became known nationwide as the "Kamikaze Mom," and even skeptics repulsed by the deadly missions warmed to the granny's tale. Ken Takakura, the John Wayne of Japan, conceived of a motion picture after visiting Chiran, in which he starred as a former kamikaze pilot who survived. Among the top-grossing domestic films of 2001, it was called Hotaru (Firefly). Hatsuyo now runs the Tomiya Inn in the building that once housed the eatery. Last fall, Akihisa, her brother-in-law, opened a near-exact replica...
...Right-wing nationalists have made Chiran a shrine: every Aug. 15, which the Japanese mark as the date of the war's end, trucks roll through the streets blaring nationalist messages and songs. But in Tome's eyes, the kamikazes were kids, not political symbols, and she relentlessly preached peace. "She always said, 'No one wins in war,'" recalls Hatsuyo. "To her, these boys were victims." Many of the families visiting Chiran this Aug. 15 heed her message, and express pity and sorrow rather than jingoistic pride. "I came because I wanted to know the truth," says Kazunori Matsuo...
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