Word: katsura
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Bowing deeply before 49 bashful, middle-aged matrons at the old Myoen-ji Temple in Ozuki, seven former Japanese army pilots last week gathered for one of the most improbable war reunions ever. They were the survivors of Katsura Squadron, one of the Kamikaze ("Divine Wind") Special Attack Corps groups designed to destroy the U.S. fleet in the desperate months before V-J day. The women were the girls the pilots had left behind, never, as far as anyone then knew, to see again...
...dark hours of a May morning 21 years ago, the twelve fighters of Katsura Squadron roared off the Ozuki airstrip for assignment to a suicide mission. For the 16-year-old local Tabe High School girls, whose part in the war had been to wash down the planes, it was the end of an idyllic spring with the young second lieutenants. As one of the moonstruck maintenance girls remembered, when the squadron got its orders, "We felt like the wives of samurai sent off to battle in old Japan...
...women might never have known Katsura Squadron's odd fate had not Mrs. Atsuko Hori, now the wife of an Ozuki businessman, tracked down the pilots and invited them to a reunion. To Kenji Katayama, a mild-mannered Kyoto agricultural official at 43, the invitation brought a "burning nostalgia for those days when I was so pure that I thought nothing of dying for the glory of my nation. All at once I was full of desire for a rendezvous with my past...
wanted to build a new consulate general in Kobe, Japan. Yamasaki went to Japan, was enchanted by the traditional architecture he saw. He visited the Katsura Palace and the Gosho (Old Imperial Palace) in Kyoto, spent hours studying the ancient temples in their garden settings. "I was overwhelmed by the serenity that can be achieved by enhancing nature," says he of those gardens. "It was here that I decided that serenity could be an important contribution to our environ ment, because our cities are so chaotic and full of turmoil." Work on the consulate general - a white structure raised slightly...
...geisha had hitched her fortunes to a falling star. Though Japan won the war, the peace terms were unpopular, and the press reviled Katsura and his "concubine." With rioters in the streets, O-Koi had the presence of mind to tack a FOR RENT sign on her house, and hid out in a back room. The lovers were reunited before Katsura's death, and O-Koi later entered a Buddhist nunnery, where she died after the end of World...