An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan (1931-1945) Read online

  After the surrender, the U.S. military sent experts to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to satisfy themselves of the efficacy of the new weapon. But the truth of its devastating effects was revealed to the Japanese public only in 1952, after the end of the U.S. Occupation. Until that date the survivors of the bombs had been suffering from their after-effects and slowly dying, their plight never reaching the ears of their fellow-countrymen. Some of the survivors tried to make the truth known by way of a book intended for private circulation, but even this was banned by the Occupation. A two-hour documentary film which had been put together by a film company from newsreels was confiscated, along with the negatives, by the U.S. Army. A few men on the staff secretly preserved a rush film, which today is the only film of the cities immediately after the bombs fell. Two Asahi Newspaper cameramen who photographed Hiroshima and Nagasaki immediately after the bombings were ordered by the Occupation to destroy all the negatives, although they secretly preserved them. The Occupation authorities judged the release of these materials to be inappropriate to the advancement of their aims. They were probably right. The image of a humane and democratic occupation could not have been upheld in the face of this evidence of the suffering inflicted on the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. According to the U.S. announcement, made after the surrender, there were 78,000 dead and 13,000 missing in Hiroshima. Today, it is clear that at least 200,000 died. The Japanese Red Cross estimates the dead at 250,000 and the wounded at 150,000. The number of dead increases with the years, and even today the death rate among survivors far surpasses that of others in the same age groups. In Nagasaki about 120,000 are estimated to have died.

  On 28 April 1952, the peace treaty concluded at San Francisco took effect, putting an end to censorship by the Occupation authorities in Japan. The photos and films of the atomic disaster were then gathered together and published.86 On the very day of the treaty, the editors of the Asahi Graph, a weekly graphic magazine published by the Asahi Newspapers, held a conference and decided to publish photographs of the atomic bomb disaster. This special issue of the Asahi Graph ended almost seven years of secrecy.

  Herbert Feis, in his The Atom Bomb and the End of World War II (1966), after reviewing the materials available to the U.S. military decision makers, reached the following conclusion:

  There cannot be a well-grounded dissent from the conclusion reached as early as 1945 by members of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. After inspection of the condition to which Japan was reduced, by studies of the military position and the trend of Japanese popular and official opinion, they estimated . . . that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

  This conclusion is supported by the report of the experts of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, sent to Japan right after the war to ascertain and appraise the effectiveness of U.S. air attacks on the country. Nevertheless, Feis says that the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ought not to be censured. He argues that they ended the agony of war as quickly as possible and that lives were saved, and he notes that kamikaze attacks had already sunk thirty-four American ships, including three aircraft carriers, and had damaged 285, including thirty-six carriers of all sizes and sorts, fifteen battleships, fifteen cruisers and eighty-seven destroyers.

  From the point of view of the U.S. military leaders in 1945, the war needed to be ended as quickly as possible, before Russia came in to claim a share of the booty, and the use of the atomic bombs was thus justified. The question is whether we now should adopt the point of view of the U.S. military leaders of 1945. British military historian Liddell Hart, who is not confined to the American perspective and who writes from a strictly military viewpoint, says in the last pages of his History of the Second World War:

  Japan's surrender was then announced by radio.

  The use of the atomic bomb was not really needed to produce this result. With nine-tenths of Japan's shipping sunk or disabled, her air and sea forces crippled, her industries wrecked, and her people's food supplies shrinking fast, her collapse was already certain - as Churchill said.

  The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report emphasized this point, while adding: The time lapse between military impotence and political acceptance of the inevitable might have been shorter had the political structure of Japan permitted a more rapid and decisive determination of national policies. Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Admiral King, the U.S. Naval Commander-in-Chief, stated that the naval blockade alone would have ‘starved the Japanese into submission’ - through lack of oil, rice, and other essential materials - ‘had we been willing to wait’.88

  Why were they not willing to wait? This is the crucial question. The answer lies in the competition between the United States and Soviet Russia, and in the desire to satisfy U.S. public opinion with a quick end to the war. The decision was thus imposed not only by military necessity but also by political necessity, although this is something which the U.S. Government is loath to admit.

  Liddell Hart also notes the opinion of Admiral Leahy, Chief-of-Staff under both Roosevelt and Truman, who, like Admiral King, had a different view of the situation.

  Admiral Leahy's judgement is even more emphatic about the needlessness of the atomic bomb: The use of this barbaric weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.’

  Why, then, were the bombs used? Was it only to cut short the loss of American and British lives at the earliest possible moment? Two other reasons have emerged. One is revealed by Churchill himself in the account of his conference with President Truman on 18 July, following the news of the successful trial of the atomic bomb. He describes the thoughts that occurred to them, including the realization that

  We would not need the Russians. The end of the Japanese war no longer depended upon the pouring in of their armies. . . . We had no need to ask favours of them. A few days later, I minuted to Mr Eden: ‘It is quite clear that the United States do not at the present time desire Russian participation in the war against Japan’. (Sir Winston Churchill: The Second World War, Vol. VI, p. 553)

  Stalin's demand at Potsdam for a share in the occupation of Japan was an embarrassment to the U.S. leaders, and something which they were anxious to avoid. The atomic bomb could help to solve this problem. The Russians entered the war on 9 August - two days after Hiroshima.

  Another reason for the bombs’ precipitate use is revealed by Admiral Leahy: The scientists and others wanted to make this test because of the vast sums that have been spent on the project’ - $2 billion. One of the higher officials in the Manhattan Project put the point still more clearly:

  The bomb simply had to be a success - so much money had been expended on it. Had it failed, how would we have explained the huge expenditure? Think of the public outcry there would have been. ... As time grew shorter, certain people in Washington tried to persuade General Groves, director of Manhattan Project, to get out before it was too late, for he knew he would be left holding the bag if we failed.

  No doubt the relief to everyone concerned was enormous when the bomb was finished and dropped.

  But another writer, one removed from military history, was able to see how the dropping of the atomic bomb would look to the people of the world in the future. Robert Guillain was a French reporter stationed in Japan. After France's surrender, he was placed in confinement, until the end of the war. In his La Guerre au Japon - de Pearl Harbor à Hiroshima (1979), he poses the following question: ‘Would the white man dare drop the atomic bomb on people who were not coloured?’89 The answe
r, he conjectures, is negative. He, as a white journalist, is of the opinion that a subconscious racial prejudice influenced the Allied leaders, making the use of the atomic bomb easier for them to contemplate.

  On 1 March 1954, the Lucky Dragon No. 5, tuna-fishing off Bikini Atoll in the Central Pacific, passed through a shower of ash from a U.S. hydrogen bomb experiment nearby. The ship returned to the port of Yaizu on 14 March. The crew of twenty-three men had fierce headaches and nausea, their skin was swollen and red and their hair was falling out. The Communications Chief, Kuboyama Aikichi, aged forty, died on 23 September. The tuna they had caught off Bikini were found to be radioactive. The message that we should not eat tuna flashed across Japan like an electric current. Tuna has a unique significance in Japan: a slice of raw tuna on top of a ball of boiled rice is considered one of our greatest delicacies. Now this had become a link connecting the terror of the hydrogen bomb to the daily life of every Japanese. Numerous sushi shops all over Japan were suspected of selling ‘atomic tuna’, and had to close down. Fish markets also suffered. The city council of Yaizu, the Lucky Dragon's home port, passed a resolution to appeal to the U.S.A. to outlaw atomic and hydrogen bombs. This began a wave of similar resolutions passed by small villages, towns and prefectures all over the country. The only prefectural councils which did not pass such resolutions were those of the city of Tokyo and the prefectures of Miyazaki, Kagoshima and Fukui. The small community groups like the city council of Yaizu turned a new page in the history of the anti-war movement in Japan.

  Although the Metropolitan District of Tokyo did not pass a resolution against nuclear bombs, one of the wards in Tokyo, the Suginami Ward, became the centre of a nationwide anti-bomb movement. Most of the residents of this area were company or government employees and their families, and the movement was predominantly one of middle-class women. In Tokyo (Edo) of the Tokugawa period, a multi-faceted mass culture, which included the lower and lower middle classes, had existed. But after the Meiji Restoration Tokyo expanded to five times its former size and there followed a long period of cultural formlessness. In the immediate post-war period, this formlessness was exaggerated. Now, nine years later, as a result of the Korean War there was some economic recovery, which provided the basis for a new middle-class culture in the uptown (yamanote) area, in places like Suginami ward. The new middle-class culture provided the social conditions for this type of protest movement to catch fire. Although nobody, not even scholars, realized it at the time, Japan was in the incipient stage of a middle-class cultural revolution which was to reach full development in a few years’ time.

  The anti-bomb movement in Suginami set a new pattern for anti-war movements: the women would stand in the street and collect signatures for a petition from passers-by, and they formed small reading societies for the study of literature about nuclear bombs. At first this movement was an object of scorn to veterans of the pre-war proletarian movement. Some Marxian scholars criticized the movement with the argument that in Marxist literature petitions are not considered a useful form of protest. But as the movement gained momentum the Communist Party and the Socialist Party joined it and then tried to seize control of it. The leadership struggle between these two parties finally split the anti-bomb movement.

  The ward's head librarian, Yasui Kaoru, was important in the formation of the movement in Suginami. Yasui Kaoru (1907-1980) had been a professor of international law in the Law Department at Tokyo Imperial University. He was purged from his post by the Occupation because of his role as a theorist of the Greater East Asia War, and from 1952 he served as the head of the local library of Suginami, where he organized, with the help of his wife, small reading societies for housewives in the community. Yasui's story can be seen as an example of post-war tenko, brought about by the purge of war leaders by the Occupation.90 After the petition campaign had begun, and the Suginami Ward Council had passed its resolution against atomic and hydrogen bombs, Yasui took the opportunity to organize a ‘national signatures campaign’, which he linked to the World Peace Conference held in Vienna in January 1955. By the summer of that year, the movement which had started as a small reading society for local housewives, ‘Children of the Cedars’, had succeeded in collecting signatures from 280,000 of the 390,000 members of the Ward. Eventually 32,380,000 signatures were collected from the whole of Japan, which then had a total population of 110,000,000. The number of signatures collected from all over the world reached 670,000,000 by the summer of 1955. The effect of the actual experience of bombings on the people of Japan can be seen in the enormous percentage of the population which signed the petition, a far greater percentage than in other countries.

  If the Japanese Government had had an atomic bomb at their disposal during the Fifteen Years’ War, we can assume, judging from their actions earlier in the war, that they would have used it against the U.S.A. without hesitation. But although the Japanese Government was in no position to protest at the U.S. use of atomic bombs, this does not apply to the people living in Japan, not only Japanese but Koreans and prisoners of war from other countries. For example, as we have seen, Robert Guillain, who was under house arrest in Japan at the end of the war, took a somewhat different view of the bombings from the U.S. Government. As long as the world is conceived solely in terms of states, and people only as members of states, there can be little basis for criticizing the use of atomic bombs. But the housewives of Suginami Ward and the people all over Japan and throughout the world who signed the appeal against the use of atomic and hydrogen bombs did not act in the name of their separate governments, but as human beings. When political parties joined the movement, parties which by their nature were affiliated to some government, they shattered the original unity of the people's voices. On 6 August 1962, the Eighth World Conference for the Prohibition of Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs was held. The Japan Socialist Party and Sohyō (the Federation of Labour Unions) threw the conference into confusion by proposing a resolution protesting against the nuclear bomb test by Soviet Russia. The Socialist Party and its followers withdrew from the conference. The conference was thus split, and ended without any resolution or declaration. Later, nuclear tests in China added further complexity to the annual conference, and representatives from socialist countries withdrew from the conferences whenever their states were criticized. Their socialism was inseparable from the particular policies of their states, and they could not stand against their own governments.

  The movement against atomic bombs begun by Suginami housewives in 1954 was a precurser of the citizens’ movements of later years. It was a form of self-criticism, and thus a balance to the middle-class complacency generated by economic prosperity after 1960. Today, when more than 90 per cent of the Japanese people feel that they belong to the middle class, this complacency is even more pronounced, and even the self-criticism itself bears the stamp of the mood of the urban middle class.

  The housewives’ movement against nuclear bombs was sparked off by the pollution of tuna. It can thus be seen as the first major anti-pollution movement by citizens of Japan. Pollution from sources other than nuclear weapons had been a characteristic feature of Japan since the beginning of the Meiji Government's policy of industrialization. Japan, now a highly industrialized society on a narrow string of islands, is burdened with serious pollution problems. The Government had been fairly successful in concealing these from the people from the middle of the Meiji period. But when the war was lost, it no longer wielded its former authority, and there was opportunity for a protest movement to develop. Even then, engineers tended to side with the Government and private enterprise, and it was only the protests of small groups of citizens who had been directly affected by specific forms of pollution, aided by technological and scientific consultants, which gradually brought the anti-pollution movement to the attention of the majority of the population, and finally, in some cases, forced the Government and private enterprise to give in.

  In order to evade this pressure, Japanese enterprises built facto
ries in Korea and the Philippines, thereby exporting pollution to these countries. This can be seen as a post-war version of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The citizens’ movement against pollution at home has not ceased its protest in cases where the pollution has been exported. Rather, it has set up an information centre to receive and register protests from these other countries.

  The theoretical structure of the citizens’ anti-pollution movement is in many ways diametrically opposed to that of the student movement which began with the Association of New Men. The New Men thought that they had grasped general laws of civilization, and sought to apply these to the situation in Japan with which they were faced. The anti-pollution movement, in contrast, began in response to a specific problem which was causing suffering, and from this initial point proceeded to search for the general knowledge needed to solve the problem. In addition, the Association of New Men was essentially cosmopolitan in nature, whereas the anti-pollution movement started with a local problem and was primarily a local movement. However, although it began as a local movement, its activities had necessarily to expand beyond national boundaries. This was especially true of the anti-bomb movement. Here the relationship between the local and the cosmopolitan is in sharp contrast to that within the Association of New Men. Here a new style of thought and action has appeared which will act as a force against the trait of insularity (sakokusei), which has long been and will presumably long continue to be one of the features of Japanese culture.

  The victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki do not like to talk about the experience. They do not find it easy to join in the protest movement. They have reached a state of general disillusionment with humanity, and live their daily lives in withdrawal and resignation. This has been shown by sociological research on the victims, and is also apparent from the novels of Hara Tamiki, a victim of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. He recorded the events he witnessed in several short works and then committed suicide on a railroad in 1951, during the Korean War. A Summer Flower (1942) is a documentary novel of Hiroshima at the time of the bombing. A Country of Longing (1951) is a fantasy which he wrote some time later. In Gulliver's Travels (1951), a scene of horses serenely grazing in devastated Hiroshima recalls the horses which serve as critics of humanity in Swift's fantastic story.