Weeping for the Dead Warriors

Ah, this wilderness of summer grasses. Here, too, slumbered yesteryear's warriors to dream.

--Basho, a 17th century Japanese

troubadour

The summer grasses are especially lush where it is always summertime: Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Tinian, Luzon, Iwo Jima--World War II battle sites where hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers died in a losing cause. But rather than rely on troubadours to describe the battlegrounds, many Japanese are making the grim journey to these islands in the sun. Not incidentally they have spawned a lucrative sideline for Japan's booming tourist industry--senseki jumpai, or battlefield pilgrimages.

The Japanese, of course, are not alone in paying homage to their wartime dead. American travel agents fly nostalgic World War II G.I.s to Pearl Harbor commemorations every December. But as with much else in the land of rising statistics, the Japanese effort appears to be much bigger, or at least more zealous. Last year about 6,000 Japanese toured World War II battlegrounds. A Pan Am jumbo jet last month brought 300 pilgrims home from Saipan, Guam and Tinian; another 400 will soon be leaving on a cruise ship for the burning sands of Iwo Jima, where no fewer than 20,000 Imperial troops died in combat. Later this year, other battleground pilgrims will visit Mindanao, Leyte, New Guinea and even Siberia.

One nation that still refuses to permit the tours is China, whose leaders have unpleasant memories of the Emperor's war machine at work, and may not want to encourage anything that smacks of resurgent Japanese militarism. But the pilgrimages are far from chauvinistic because the groups do not visit the sites of World War II victories but defeats. Reason: after Japan's initial wartime victories, military graves registration was efficient. Soldiers' bodies were cremated and the ashes returned to their families. After Japan's cataclysmic defeats, however, survivors had no opportunity to recover the bodies of their fallen comrades, and tens of thousands of men disappeared without a trace.

Kazuo Shimada, a Tokyo psychologist, contends that Japanese mourners who cannot see the ashes of their fallen kin imagine the departed souls "aimlessly wandering and wailing for help." Explains one war widow who joined a senseki jumpai: "One night I dreamed a dream in which my husband stood in the corner of my room. He was full of spleen and said that even though he had committed suicide in a cave deep in a jungle, nobody had come to see him."

Maudlin Routine. Tour organizers have honed their business into a maudlin routine worthy of Evelyn Waugh's Whispering Glades. "The vital thing is to create the right mood for our clients," says Yuzuru Kajiwara, director of a Tokyo agency that specializes in senseki jumpai. On a recent trip to the Philippines (seven days, $445), Kajiwara stopped his busload of pilgrims at a jungle clearing near the City of Baguio, where thousands of fleeing Japanese troops had died of starvation. He broke out a portable record player and began playing wartime songs. Then an army veteran who serves as a tour guide began describing how various soldiers had died, one after another; tourists sobbed. Finally, Kajiwara switched on a powerful public address system and asked the pilgrims in turn to call out as loudly as possible the names of their dear ones. "When the echoes start coming back, I have seen nobody among my clients brave enough not to burst into tears," says the tour director.

Kajiwara will not tell how much the 51 battlefield excursions have earned for his firm so far. "Money is beside the point," he says. But his rivals in the Japanese tourist trade do not conceal their envy, because future prospects look even better. Until recently, Kajiwara's clientele consisted almost entirely of bereaved families. But on a tour that he arranged to the Philippines last month, more than half of the 130 members were nostalgic veterans touring with their wives. Kajiwara is convinced that children of the veterans will soon become customers as well.

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