Chaplain Kagao Shunin

II. Fourteen Who Fell at the Gallows

An Ominous Cloud Rides In on a Dream

On New Year’s Day of Showa 26 (1951), the blazing sun was shining at Muntinlupa as it always did. It was New Year, but there were no pine decorations, and there was certainly no way to obtain zoni soup or otoso (spiced New Year sake) in this foreign prison.

But this was my second New Year in the Philippines, and I no longer felt any sentimental sense of lack over such things. On the contrary, burning with fresh resolve that this year I must strive to win release for one more man, or two, I offered sutra chanting before the Buddha.

Ordinarily, however, when I chant the sutras I experience what might be called the joy of the Dharma: my spirit is filled to every corner with a refreshing, ethereal calm, as if passing from the darkness of night into a clear morning. On that New Year’s morning alone, even the face of the statue of Yumetagai Kannon (the “Dream-Averting Kannon”) that I looked up at before the Buddha seemed clouded. And the more my heart hurried, the more a heavy, oppressive unease weighed upon me.

There was a reason for it. On the night of New Year’s Eve, I had had an all too grave dream.

—Four or five of the death-row war criminals were suddenly ordered to commit seppuku, and I was obliged to attend the seppuku. There I recited the first half of a poem:

“If they were blossoms, there might be a wind to scatter them —”

and General Y immediately supplied the second half:

“—why should the warbler’s song scatter them?”

completing the verse.

Startled by the dream, I woke with a jolt. When I sat up, I was drenched in sweat. For a mere dream, even the words of the poem remained all too clearly in my memory.

Something ominous? — Could an execution be about to take place? — I sat cross-legged on my bed, lost in thought.

But more than a year had already passed since I arrived in Manila and moved to Muntinlupa, and in that time matters had, if anything, been brightening, and there was not the slightest sign that an execution would be carried out. Neither the prison authorities nor any of the Filipinos I met gave any hint at all of an execution. On the contrary, when I asked about repatriation to Japan, some even said it would likely come very soon.

It was a dream. It couldn’t be. So I told myself. — My chronic heart condition had recently worsened, to the point that blood stagnated even with continued injections; perhaps I had dreamed it out of the exhaustion of all my organs (gozo roppu). — Or perhaps, because I habitually composed clumsy waka poems, my worry about executions had joined with that habit and combined in my half-awakened mind. — So I considered.

Still, as is the way of Japanese people, who read meaning into the first dream of the new year, I simply could not dispel this dark foreboding. I tried to sleep again, but could not. So as dawn broke I rose, purified myself more carefully than usual, chanted the sutras with all my heart, and recited the mantras. (To be continued in Part 2)

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