[Short Story] In the Eternal Summer Sky ~Youth Buried in the Grassland~ with Acoustic Performance

Finding that place was truly a coincidence.

During the summer vacation of my second year of high school, Yuji, Shota, and I went to the beach in the neighboring town. Although it was called a neighboring town, it had been incorporated into the same Tsu City following the Heisei Great Mergers.
Facing Ise Bay, it featured a beautiful coastline of white sand and green pines, with calm waves and clear, blue, shallow water.

In the evening, as we rode our bikes home, tanned dark from the sun, we noticed an unusually wide grassland stretching endlessly along one side of the road.
Struck by the vast, desolate landscape, we instinctively stopped our bikes and, as if drawn by something, left them behind and walked into the grassland.
Pushing through the evening primroses and fleabanes, we felt that this vast field was clearly not just an ordinary vacant lot.

After walking for a while, we reached a spacious area where the grass was short.

"Hey! There's no soil here!"

It was Yuji who noticed it first.

In the gaps between the grass where he poked with his beach sandals, old gray concrete was exposed. If not for the grass, the flat concrete area would be far wider and longer than the coastal national highway.

"Hey, it's dangerous if you go over there!"

An old man who had been working in a field on the other side of the road had followed us into the grassland.

"This is the site of an old naval base."
"Then, what is this concrete?"
"It's the remains of a runway. For the kamikaze pilots."
"Kamikaze pilots!?"

Guided by the old man, we visited the history museum.
It was almost closing time, but they kindly let us in.

The gateposts of this history museum were the original gateposts of the Mie Naval Air Group used during the war.

Inside the museum, there was a long row of portraits of the airmen who had undergone special training here and perished as kamikaze pilots in Okinawa and the waters near the mainland.
And I was shocked by how young they were.

Shota muttered,

"They're the same age as us!"

Young people who left behind farewell letters to their mothers, siblings, and loved ones, and scattered into the vast sky at the tender age of 17 or 18.
Young people who took off on one-way flights from the sky above this beautiful Karasu coast where we had been enjoying our swim.

We returned once more to the grassland at the site of the runway as the sun was setting.
Standing on the gray concrete, I instinctively looked up at the sky.

From the summer sky filled with madder-red cumulonimbus clouds, I felt as if I could faintly hear the sound of a Zero fighter's engine.

< End >

Thank you for reading.
This story is a work of fiction, but
the Mie Naval Air Group, the Tsu City Karasu History Museum, and the site of the base
are real, and these are facts that I personally experienced.