Kamikaze Pilot’s Effects Returned to Japan

They sat for decades in a cardboard box in a Kansas garage, souvenirs an American serviceman had grabbed from the body of a Japanese kamikaze pilot whose plane had slammed deep into an aircraft carrier in the Pacific.

A pocket watch. A piece of a parachute harness. A letter written in Japanese.

To the American, Robert Schock, the items were gruesome reminders of the horrors he had witnessed in World War II and of the 1945 suicide attack that killed nearly 400 people aboard the Bunker Hill.

Not until he died in November did Schock’s family see the pilot’s belongings. Tuesday night, the items were back with the pilot’s family.

In a tearful meeting in a Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, Schock’s grandson handed pilot Kiyoshi Ogawa’s belongings to his niece, grandniece and an old friend from high school. Overcome with pride and sadness, the choked-up visitors bowed and said they probably would donate the items to a naval museum in Japan.

“As soon as we go back to Japan, I will make a report to Kiyoshi’s grave site that he is finally coming home,” grandniece Yoko Ogawa told Schock’s grandson through an interpreter who had arranged the meeting.

Schock’s grandson, Dax Berg, nodded and smiled.

“I know my grandfather,” he said. “I think he’d be proud of what I’ve done.”

Since World War II, American veterans have returned flags and other spoils of war to Japanese families, but few--if any--have included the belongings of kamikaze pilots, who were generally obliterated in their missions.

The Bunker Hill joined some of the fiercest fighting in the Pacific, including the invasion of Iwo Jima and the capture of Okinawa. More than 3,000 servicemen were on the Bunker Hill when it was attacked May 11, 1945, while off Okinawa. The ship was hit by two Japanese suicide bombers, triggering deadly explosions and fires.

One of the pilots was 22-year-old Kiyoshi Ogawa, whose parents would lose three sons in the war. Just before his final mission, he had written to them: “I feel that I am the happiest person on this planet. I am going to repay my respects to the emperor, and you, my father.”

Between sips of Sapporo beer, Berg, 27, relayed his grandfather’s tale to his Japanese guests.

The story Schock told his grandson couldn’t be independently confirmed. But Larry Ricciuto of Cape Coral, Fla., president of the Bunker Hill Assn., and Irv Udoff, a Bunker Hill survivor in Baltimore who has written about the attack, said they had no reason to doubt it.

“Over 3,000 men, 3,000 stories,” Udoff said. “This more or less ties it together. Look how many lives have been affected by a kamikaze.”

According to Berg, Schock had been a restless teenager in Los Angeles before forging his birth certificate to enlist in the Navy, where he became a diver who performed underwater repairs on ships.

When Ogawa bombed the deck of the aircraft carrier, his plane plowed several levels into it. Schock told his grandson he volunteered to go down into the wreckage.

Schock said he could tell the pilot had died instantly. The pilot’s watch, which had been on a loop around his neck, was embedded in his breastbone.

He grabbed the watch and other items from the pilot’s flight suit and hid them, afraid they would be confiscated, Berg said.

After the war, Schock became a boxer, owner of a wall-spackling business and mayor of Haysville, Kan. All that time, he kept the pilot’s belongings in a box, next to the Purple Heart that Schock had been awarded, Berg said.

When Schock died of a heart attack in Haysville on Nov. 17 at 72, Berg sought out the items.

He found a pocket watch, a parachute harness and buckle, two photos of Japanese pilots, a brown swatch of cloth with Japanese writing, a letter in Japanese and lots of 1940s money: American, Chinese and Japanese.

Some family members suggested selling the items, but Berg persuaded them to let him try to find the pilot’s family.

Through the video game design company he works for, Berg got in touch with a professional interpreter. Mickie Grace, the wife of a 3DO Co. executive, had come to the United States from Japan in 1982.

She saw that the strip of cloth had belonged to someone with the rank of ensign and a last name ending in “gawa.” The letter contained poems from a friend to someone named Ogawa from a region northwest of Tokyo.

With the help of contacts in the Japanese military and a monk who specializes in World War II history, she learned that a Kiyoshi Ogawa was killed in a kamikaze mission on the Bunker Hill. The government gave her the name and address of the pilot’s brother, Matsuishi Ogawa, who as the eldest of his family’s four sons was held out of the war.

Matsuishi Ogawa had died the previous spring, but the Japanese postal service still delivered Grace’s letter to the family in Takasaki.

Although the pilot had no children, he is revered by Matsuishi Ogawa’s descendants, who maintain a shrine to him and other ancestors in the family home.

Out of duty and familial pride, the pilot’s niece, Sachiko Ogawa, 68; her daughter, Yoko Ogawa, 41; and Yoko’s 3-year-old son Rurito made their first trip to the United States to reclaim the pilot’s belongings. Ogawa’s sister was too frail to make the journey.

The Japanese visitors gave Berg a model kit of a Japanese Zero fighter plane and hand-painted wooden dolls, and they communicated with Berg through Grace.

“We’re going to make sure this story will be told to our children, our grandchildren, our descendants,” Yoko Ogawa said.