Change of Residence

JAPAN Change of Residence

There was a notable vacancy this week among the ghosts of Bushido warriors who circle endlessly above Tokyo's Yasukuni shrine. The AWOL god was Naval Warrant Officer Magoshichi Sugino, who was racked up among the immortals 42 years ago when (supposedly) he lost his life in Admiral Heihachiro Togo's crippling attack on the Russian Far Eastern fleet at Port Arthur.

Unlike the discharged marine in Hail the Conquering Hero, who posed as a hero to save his mother disappointment, Warrant Officer Sugino had behaved courageously enough. But he had fallen down on the job of dying. Like Hobson at Santiago, he ran a block ship into the harbor's mouth and sank it. Then a Chinese boat rescued him.

Ashore, Sugino learned of the adulation accorded him at home for his promotion to glory. Rather than surrender his godlike reputation and disappoint the folks, Sugino settled down to nearly a half century's hiding in Hulutao, a bleak blister on Manchuria's coast. But in Japan his fame grew with the years, reached fruition when death-seeking members of the Special Attack Corps began hurling then-frail planes into U.S. warships at Lingayen Gulf and Okinawa.

Last week hale, hearty, undeniably mortal and a little shamefaced, old Magoshichi Sugino came home to Japan--the first modern Kamikaze, and one of the few who ever came back.

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