The Elusive Imperial Refuge

English translation

AI-assisted English translation. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

A Record of the Hamano Household: An Essay

The Imperial Residence That Never Was

Seishu Hamano

In the early Taisho years, a landowner’s eldest son was sent away for adoption

My father, Sadao Hamano, was born in 1907 as the eldest son of the Tokoro family in Kojima Village, Ibi District, Gifu Prefecture. My grandfather’s surname was Tokoro and his given name was Yataro. He was an eccentric who erected his own gravestone, five meters high, while still alive.

Japan had fought the great power Russia in the Russo-Japanese War and astonished the world with its victory in the Battle of the Sea of Japan in 1905. My father was born two years later. As the eldest son of a major landowner at a time of surging national prestige, he must have carried considerable expectations. All the mountains behind the house were forest land he was supposed to inherit, amounting to several million tsubo. There were dozens of rice paddies and other fields besides. He was, in other words, destined to become a typical wealthy country gentleman. I remember from early childhood that the Gifu house had a persimmon tree and a stream running before the gate. A watermill using that stream stood in the right-hand corner as one entered the gate.

The fortunes surrounding that house and my birth were quite extraordinary. Why was my father sent away to be adopted by the Hamano family of Nagasone Village, Minamikawachi District, Osaka Prefecture? I shall write about those circumstances separately, but both family lines have connections with the Ii family of Hikone.

Looking back, the marriage of a boy from such a rural landowning family in Ibi District, Gifu, to Akino, the fifth child of the Ishii family, descendants of a professor at the domain school of Takatori deep in the mountains of Nara, seems an almost impossible encounter of fate. Moreover, I was born in the farming hamlet of Joroku in Noda Village, far from central Sakai. This was before war broke out between Japan and the United States. Apparently, when my mother registered my birth, the village office gave her a roll of flannel as a congratulatory gift. That December the Imperial Navy attacked Pearl Harbor. I was a frail child, and through a gap in the sliding doors came the sound of a special news bulletin from the three-tube radio on top of the tea cupboard in the next room: “The Imperial Army and Navy entered a state of war with the United States and Britain in the western Pacific before dawn today, the eighth…”

Born as a child-subject of the Emperor, I heard from my bed that first announcement in what was to become the all-too-familiar voice: “We bring you a special news bulletin…”

You, too, will have seen many times the newsreel footage of Zero fighters leaping from an aircraft carrier’s deck into the predawn sky. The proud sight of those light fighters, so formidable in aerial combat, taking off from their mother ship in the flecked and dirty footage of history makes an utterly incongruous pairing with my fragile body. Yet together we became a page in this world’s history. The archival images and vacuum-tube radio voices are witnesses to history. Having heard them over and over, I had been born into a great empire filled with martial spirit and intimations of overwhelming victory. My father Sadao, who had appeared in that Empire of Great Japan a little earlier, and I lived in a dim back tatami room in Joroku, Noda Village, looking through the snow-viewing paper screens, across the courtyard, at the door of the white-plastered storehouse visible to the left of the stone lantern.

My father was then only in his mid-thirties. Thirty years after being cast out of Gifu, he was already the president of a munitions factory, employing a number of office workers and rushing between the military and the industry. In Gifu he owned a manganese mine and employed hundreds of villagers. Seated in the place of honor above the village headman, with the alcove at his back, he drank with the village’s leading figures and was revered. Like me, my father had a frail frame. I imagine that beside a noncommissioned officer who had passed his physical examination with the highest rating, he would have appeared so unmanly as to invite ridicule. Yet all the villagers bowed to him as the most distinguished man Gifu had produced. There was a reason for that.

Secret ties with the military continued

With everything devoted to military production, my father was directly connected to the government. The wire ropes he made ran through the fuselages of Zero fighters, providing high performance ideally suited to dogfighting. Their sharp maneuverability brought victory after victory over Grummans. People also said, “For the special steel wrapped around the battleship Musashi’s main guns, it is Mr. Hamano,” and so he commanded respect. Even the military treated him with consideration. Soldiers who lorded it over everyone else would reportedly bow and scrape, saying, “Mr. Hamano, Mr. Hamano.” A patriot to the core, he entered the steel industry in his early twenties. With his natural tactical resourcefulness, he developed business connections with Yawata Steel, now Nippon Steel, and Hitachi. By his late twenties, he had already established himself independently under the name Daitoa Kiko as a sole agent handling special steel. Yasugi steel was famous, but its small output was fiercely contested. Japan had little special steel. He went as far as Yasugi in Shimane Prefecture, familiar to everyone through the “Yasugi Bushi” loach-scooping dance, to procure the Yasugi steel that served as his raw material. Naturally, his thinking began to change.

Putting the whole village to work on a manganese deposit

How does special steel differ from iron? They are entirely different. According to my father, the first difference was the price, which was on another order altogether: a fist-sized piece of iron would cost perhaps 500 yen in today’s money, while special steel would cost a million. Why? If a round piece of iron is put on a spinning lathe and shaped into a round bar, it has to be cut away. The cutting edge is made from very hard special steel that does not wear down. Its molecular composition is different; it is fundamentally unlike iron whose hardness has merely been increased by quenching. Steel does not stretch or shrink. So, made into wire rope, it does not stretch. To evade an enemy aircraft closing on a Zero, the pilot could stamp hard on the pedal, hold the tail elevator up in a steep climb, loop through the air, and in a flash settle right behind the Grumman, firing the 7.7-millimeter machine gun between the propeller blades—da-da-da… These were the stories my father told me when we bathed together. Even after the war, he told me, steels bearing names such as high-speed steel type three or type four traded at staggering prices.

If the wire rope securing the elevator were merely ordinary iron wire, he said, wind pressure would stretch it out and impair the Zero’s performance. Out of patriotism, he supplied wire rope of extremely high purity, and apparently this made him very popular with the navy.

Craftsmen making military swords flocked to Yasugi. Swords, too, were indispensable to war. But my father bought up the material, arguing that rather than use it for swords, it should go into Zeros and battleships, and that tanks would now need steel plate to stop enemy rounds penetrating. This material was called tamahagane. Yasugi had deposits, but could not produce it in quantity. If people on the same side competed domestically for raw materials, they would lose the war.

Thinking this way, he changed course and decided to mine the raw material himself. The military officers and bureaucrats who supported the idea apparently found him extremely useful. But ore alone does not make a good product without good refining technology. He sent it to Yawata Steel for refining. It was around then, he said, that “Mr. Kishi often came to our house and ate ochazuke.”

That story lived on as a legend after the war, but I took it with a grain of salt. It must be one of my father’s tall tales, I thought.

Then, when the United States held a Space Shuttle exhibition in Yurakucho, Mr. Kishi invited me. That was when I realized the legend was true. I went along on the day of the ceremony, and as Mr. Kishi shook my hand, his face broke into a smile. “Your father really was very kind to me in all sorts of ways,” he said. I was still young and felt bewildered under the eyes of the politicians around us, but he told me, “Don’t stand on ceremony. Sit here,” and seated me right beside him. We sat together for almost an hour, the former prime minister and I. Never have I felt my father’s extraordinary legacy of goodwill more strongly. The day during the war when I had been taken to that manganese mine came vividly back to me.

We might have been destined to live in a dark mine tunnel

There were mine-cart tracks in the tunnel, and bare bulbs shone at intervals on the rough-cut rock. We went farther and farther in. Drip, drip… drip, drip… Drops fell from overhead. Water trickling into one’s collar is not particularly pleasant. I shall return to this memory later, but as we rode together in the cart, my father said quite casually:

“成生, we’re going to be living here, you know…”

“No! I’m scared! I don’t want to be in a place like this…”

I began to cry. Soon afterward the war ended, military orders ceased, and the mine closed. It was fortunate that operations stopped and we were spared a battle on the Japanese mainland. But had the Emperor delayed his rescript ending the war by a day or two, a great American force would surely have landed on the coast of Hayama in Kanagawa, swept aside the machine-gun units defending the shoreline in an instant, and reduced the area to scorched earth with flamethrowers. Yokohama would have been burned in turn, and the capital subdued. We were still living on the outskirts of Sakai then, so there was every possibility that we would have fled to Gifu and lived in the manganese mine’s caverns.

Thinking of that, I cannot dismiss my father’s prediction.

“We were even going to build a residence for His Majesty there.” Really? The imperial residence was supposed to be at Matsushiro. But Matsushiro was already well known during the war, so there is a certain credibility to my father’s claim that His Majesty was scheduled to come here instead. Could Prime Minister Kishi have asked my father to provide an imperial residence…?

There is now no way to trace that possibility.

An imperial residence, and the cry, “Your Majesty! The enemy is coming!”

My father would have said that, then fled deep into the mountains… together… The thought alone makes me shudder. Toward the end of the war, even refining manganese ore had become difficult. The wire ropes my father made were used as farewell gifts to special-attack aircraft. He argued that it would be pitiful if aircraft leaving Chiran encountered Grummans along the way without a single machine-gun round aboard, and had them carry as much ammunition as possible. Their stretched steel wires were replaced before takeoff. “But those wires kept getting thinner as materials ran short, so we twisted the new ones together with the old, stretched ones.”

He said that he and Mr. Kishi watched the aircraft depart with tears in their eyes.

Eighty years have passed since then. Here I am now, living safely and comfortably near the Imperial Villa in Hayama. We are kept alive, perhaps, by the strange turns taken by the generation before us. Thanks to my father—who held dance parties at our house many times after the war—I often heard him say, “I misunderstood the Americans. They’re all good people. It’s shameful that we were fighting a war against men like these…” I was put in charge of the gramophone in the drawing room. When I think of what was in my father’s heart as he watched American officers dancing the blues with my mother, something rises powerfully within me.

Was it all a dream? Former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi gave me a thick volume of his personal history with his signature in it. His brush signature had the same strokes as the one at the time of the Japan–US Security Treaty.

Yet there is no account of the manganese mine in Gifu. There is no record of his friendship with my father either.

Did Mr. Kishi and my father live in a hidden world? Has that buried friendship, which could be spoken of to no one, disappeared? No, no. Their friendship still seems somehow, faintly, to linger around the rare-book shelves in my study.

(To be continued in the next issue.)