Japan has very few war museums. The most famous, of course, is the Peace Museum at Hiroshima with its 'Genbaku Domu' or Atomic Bomb Dome. Another museum commemorating the deeds of the Imperial Japanese Navy is found at Kure just outside Hiroshima . One day some friends and I discovered one of the smallest yet most affecting war museums in Japan, at Otsujima Island in southern Honshu. There, we learned about one of the most unusual weapons of World War Two — the kaiten, or human torpedo. Japan is of course famous for its use of kamikaze suicide planes loaded with explosives, but it is relatively unknown that they even went to the length of placing human pilots inside enlarged torpedoes for suicide missions. The Japanese defeat at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 tilted the naval balance of power towards the Americans. Two junior officers in the Japanese submarine service, Sekio Nishina and Hiroshi Kuroki, began to work on the problem of designing an accurate, high-speed weapon to be launched from a submarine and used to sink American aircraft carriers and battleships. They decided to adapt the oxygen-fueled Type 93 'Long Lance' torpedo to include a human pilot inside. The pilot would be released underwater from the deck of a submarine and guide the torpedo to its target by stopwatch, compass and periscope at speeds of up to forty knots. The torpedo would do the rest. Nishina and Kuroki named this weapon kaiten. Translated, the word means 'sky change,' but the true meaning implies a dramatic change or reversal of events. They hoped that this weapon would halt Japan's slow slide into defeat. By January 1943, they had finished plans for a model that was 48 feet long and seated one pilot behind 3,400 pounds of high explosive. At first, the Naval General Staff would not listen to their ideas but after they submitted a petition for consideration written in their own blood, permission was granted to build and test prototypes in February 1944. The small island of Otsujima, located in southern Japan about 125 km southwest of Hiroshima, was chosen to be the first training and testing base. It was one of Japan's most secret bases during the war: the island was referred to only as 'Base P' and the kaiten themselves were referred to as 'Circle Six Metal Fitting.' Another base was later built at the nearby city of Hikari. The kaiten were built at various naval yards around Japan, and almost 400 had been built by the end of the war. The 'Marianas Turkey Shoot' in June 1944, another catastrophic naval defeat for the Japanese, led the General Staff to place a high priority on the kaiten program. A first class of two hundred volunteers was chosen from Naval Air Force trainee pilots (for whom there were no longer enough airplanes anyway) and trained at Otsujima in August 1944. Submarines loaded with kaiten sortied against American fleets and naval bases nine times in the last year of the war, but the program had little effect. The efficient American anti-submarine forces usually discovered and sank the Japanese submarines before they could get close enough to launch. The kaiten often could not be launched due to mechanical failures, and since the weapon's terminal guidance was provided by a pilot simultaneously steering to follow a compass bearing given him by the submarine captain before launching, adjusting the torpedo's trim so as to stay submerged, and checking his stopwatch, the kaiten often missed the target anyway. A U.S. naval officer wryly remarked after the war that the Japanese got better results with their torpedoes before they started putting people inside them. The kaiten program was an unmitigated failure, characteristic of the desperate state of mind the Imperial Japanese Navy towards the end of the war. In all, the Japanese lost eight submarines and almost 900 lives in the program, while the U.S. Navy lost two ships — the fleet oiler Mississinewa, destroyed by Sekio Nishina on the first sortie (His close friend Kuroki had died in a training accident but Nishina carried his ashes with him on this mission) and the destroyer escort Underhill on the last. Otsujima today is a small quiet island with few people living on it, a short ferry ride from the industrial city of Tokuyama. Its only attraction is the Kaiten Museum, a small white building at the base of a steep mountain that dominates the island. The long gravel path to the entrance is lined on both sides by small marble plaques let into the ground. Each plaque is carved with the name of a kaiten pilot who trained at this base and later died in action. A kaiten is on display outside the museum, and a nearby tunnel leads through the mountain to two gloomy concrete submarine pens. These pens were used to launch kaiten for training missions in Tokuyama Bay and have been kept just as they were in 1945. Most Western military museums seem to rely on impressive displays of large machines and weapons for their effect. This museum is somewhat different. Photographs of the men who had trained at the base run in a continuous band along the walls inside the museum. The bland, emotionless stares demanded by formal photographers of that time do not belie the fact the their average age was only 18 or 19 years. Display cases contain exhibits of the uniforms they wore, personal possessions they had left behind, paintings and poems they had made while training and waiting to go on their first (and last) mission, and farewell messages written to their parents before leaving on that mission. As my friends and I left the museum, we stopped at a small shrine on the museum grounds and rang a large temple bell for the safekeeping and peace of the souls of the young men who had trained there in this desperate and futile effort to stave off inevitable defeat. It is difficult for us to imagine now the devotion and strength of will that can be aroused in people — sadly and all too often, a fanaticism that can be found only in time of war. Back to Cry Havoc #27 Table of Contents Back to Cry Havoc List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by David W. Tschanz. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com