Nagasaki
Page 12
Conservative Japanese Cabinet members and military leaders fervently sought to reject the U.S. conditions because they did not adequately protect the emperor’s role as sovereign ruler; these men feared that the U.S. surrender terms threatened kokutai and that Japan could be destroyed for good. They held out hope that the emperor would reverse his decision and allow the Japanese military to fight—even at the risk of its own destruction—for Japan’s existence as an independent nation ruled by the emperor. In fact, some junior military officers—having concluded that the emperor had been manipulated into surrender and that capitulation would desecrate his dignity and turn Japan into a slave nation—were already plotting coups to topple the national government.
Other Cabinet members found the U.S. counteroffer acceptable and argued that the Cabinet should follow the emperor’s August 9 surrender decision without question. They believed that Japan as a nation could be totally destroyed if it stayed in the war, and that the country had at least some chance of survival if it surrendered. After hours of debate, the Cabinet was still deadlocked, and heated arguments extended into the evening of August 12 and through the next day.
On the morning of August 14, the emperor gathered his Cabinet ministers in the imperial underground shelter. Again, he broke the stalemate and announced his decision to accept the Allies’ terms of surrender, stating that he believed Japan’s kokutai would not be lost under Allied occupation and that he could not bear to see his people suffer any longer. The emperor requested that every Cabinet member “bow to my wishes and accept the Allied reply forthwith.” Again, the ministers clung to one another and sobbed. By eleven p.m. that night, the emperor and Cabinet had signed the final surrender papers, and an imperial rescript was prepared for the emperor to record for radio broadcast to the nation the next day. To maintain order, Army Minister Anami called for the military’s complete support of the emperor’s decision. Attempts by low-ranking officers to take over the palace and block the emperor’s surrender announcement ultimately failed.
In the meantime, the war had raged on. Russian troops had continued to push back Japanese soldiers in Manchuria and on Sakhalin Island north of Japan. Allied planes had delivered more conventional and incendiary bombs on military, industrial, and key urban areas on Japan’s main islands. Before President Truman received Tokyo’s response, he ordered additional attacks on Japan. On August 14, just as Washington received word of Japan’s acceptance of the Allied terms, Truman’s orders were implemented: Approximately 740 B-29s dropped bombs on specific targets, and an estimated 160 more delivered over 12 million pounds of demolition and incendiary bombs on multiple urban areas, causing the deaths of thousands more Japanese.
At seven p.m. on August 14 in Washington (eight a.m. Japan time on August 15), President Truman held a press conference to announce the end of the war. The room was packed with White House correspondents and current and former Cabinet members. Two million people jammed New York City’s Times Square, and millions of others crowded into city centers across the country to celebrate the long-awaited conclusion to the nearly four-year global war that had claimed fifty to seventy million lives across the world. All Allied armed forces were ordered to suspend their military operations against Japan.
The people in Japan, however, did not yet know that their country had surrendered. At 7:21 a.m. that morning, Tateno Morio at NHK Radio made a special announcement directed to all Japanese citizens, telling them that at noon that day, the emperor would broadcast a special rescript. Outside the emperor’s close circle of family and government leaders, no citizen had ever heard the emperor’s voice, and from house to house across the country, word spread that the emperor would address the nation. Rumors grew about what he would say: Some thought he would announce Japan’s surrender, but many believed that he would rally the nation for greater support of the war and ask his subjects to be prepared to give their own lives for Japan’s honor.
At noon, millions of people in neighborhoods across Japan huddled around single radios to hear the emperor’s prerecorded announcement. At army headquarters, hundreds of officers stood at attention in their dress uniforms. Japanese soldiers at military bases throughout the Pacific waited by their radios for the news. The emperor himself listened on an old RCA radio in his underground shelter in Tokyo.
Japan’s national anthem, “Kimigayo,” played over the airwaves, then the emperor’s quiet, stilted voice could be heard. Static splintered his words, and much of the ornamental language he used was difficult to comprehend. Some listeners remembered hearing the word chin—a term reserved only for the emperor’s use—confirming for them that they were indeed hearing the emperor’s voice. In his extended address, the emperor justified the attack on Pearl Harbor and referred to the United States’ use of “a new and most cruel bomb.” Without using the word “defeat,” he stated only that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” The emperor portrayed Japan’s surrender decision as a heroic and humane act—to prevent not only the “ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation,” but also the “total extinction of human civilization.” He implored the Japanese people to “suffer what is insufferable” with “sincerity and integrity.”
Reactions across Japan were swift, profound, and complex. Army officers in Tokyo wept. Others in the city and across the country cheered. A small group of people knelt in front of the imperial palace, bowing in respect to their emperor. Prime Minister Suzuki resigned. High-level officials frantically burned files that might incriminate them in war trials, and they destroyed or disbursed huge stores of food and supplies they had secretly and often illegally amassed for personal benefit. Soldiers at the Western Army Headquarters in Fukuoka blindfolded, handcuffed, and executed seventeen Allied POWs. Some Japanese officers would not concede that the war was over and rallied their men to join together to annihilate the enemy, but their emotional stirrings did not manifest into large-scale action. By August 17, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy had ceased all military actions except in some remote locations where the message of surrender had not yet been received.
Approximately 350 military personnel, including Army Minister Anami, expressed their sense of personal accountability for Japan’s defeat by committing seppuku, a ritual suicide by disembowelment using a short sword to slash one’s abdomen, formerly part of the samurai Bushido code of honor. Nearly 200 more officers and soldiers, and a few civilians, would kill themselves by October 1948.
Many citizens throughout the country, however, did not fully understand what the emperor had said and relied on radio announcers and special editions of newspapers to summarize and explain the emperor’s address in lay language. Surrender was an act previously forbidden to soldiers and considered traitorous for civilians even to think about—and when people realized that this was what the emperor had announced they clung to one another or collapsed to the ground, overwhelmed with conflicting emotions. They felt grief-stricken that their nation had lost the war, anguished about the extreme number of men sacrificed, and relieved that their suffering would end. They were also angry and confused at having been continuously lied to by their government, and many felt lost without the indoctrinated “divine” purpose that had united them for so many years. Thousands of families also felt grateful that their military sons and fathers would come home alive and hoped that they would not choose suicide over surrender as they’d been trained to do.
• • •
In Nagasaki, countless survivors remember exactly where they were when the surrender was announced. Many Catholics were observing the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, honoring her death and ascension into heaven. A mother searching for her daughter in Shiroyama-machi listened to the emperor’s broadcast in the shade of a house that had survived the bombing. When the surrender announcement ended, she stood silently and stared blankly at the vast nothingness all around, then started out again to find her child. One man had j
ust gathered scraps of wood to cremate his wife’s body. Three of his young children had died in the bombing, and he had found his injured wife on a tatami mat in the middle of a field, the corpse of their infant son next to her. In the days that followed, as his wife had become weaker, she had begged him to suck the milk from her engorged breasts to relieve her pain. On the afternoon of August 15, as the man stood next to the makeshift funeral pyre and watched his wife’s body burn, he could hear the slow strains of the national anthem coming from a radio inside a house nearby. Outside Nagasaki, a fifteen-year-old girl sat in a hospital waiting room holding a still-warm urn filled with the ashes of her younger sister when an agitated military officer shouted, “Japan surrendered! We are defeated!”
Dr. Shirabe Raisuke, a professor of surgery at Nagasaki Medical College, was walking along a road when he first heard from local residents that the war had ended. Later that day, his badly injured older son, Seiichi, told Dr. Shirabe how much he detested the war, a sentiment that could never have been expressed before.
Dr. Akizuki had no radio, but he cried when he heard the news, not because his country had surrendered, but because the end of the war had come too late.
Taniguchi, Yoshida, and Do-oh knew nothing of the surrender that day. Wada listened on his father’s radio inside his damaged home. Although he couldn’t understand everything the emperor said, he was deeply relieved that Japan would finally have peace. Nagano’s experience most closely mirrored the reactions of many Nagasaki survivors. She and her parents were inside the air raid shelter when word of the emperor’s announcement spread through the city, from one person to the next. “Everyone who had survived was crying and hugging each other,” Nagano remembered. “‘Why?’ we asked. ‘After everything we did to try to win the war! What purpose did it serve? So many people died. So many homes have burned down. What will we do now? What will we do? What will we do?’”
CHAPTER 4
EXPOSED
From the day after Japan surrendered, rumors circulated across the country that American troops would soon land on Japan’s shores. Thousands of Japanese fled inland from coastal regions in fear of their enemy’s mistreatment of civilians. City officials in Nagasaki urged women to leave the city, and some nurses were released from duty so they could get away. Many families packed their valuables and as much food as they could carry, then escaped to the mountains.
Do-oh’s parents agreed that their family should retreat to the hills, but since Do-oh was too injured to join them, they decided that her father would stay behind to care for her. Her mother hastily packed onigiri, canteens of water, and a few changes of clothes for herself and her three youngest children. Before their departure, she and Do-oh’s father lifted Do-oh, lying on a futon on top of a stretcher, high above their heads and placed her between the ceiling and roof of their house. At night she could see her father below, lit by candlelight. Whenever he was out of sight, though, she felt terribly alone and terrified about what might happen next. She remained hidden in the rafters until her mother and siblings returned three days later, when the panic began to subside.
U.S. soldiers did not arrive that week, but for Do-oh, the unimaginable future she had feared was suddenly realized a few weeks later when she began to suffer a series of new and unexplainable symptoms: high fever, diarrhea, hair loss, inflammation of her gums, and mysterious purple spots all over her injured body. Dr. Miyajima, the retired military doctor who had treated Do-oh since the bombing, told her parents that she would live only a few more days. He suggested that they “feed her well and let her go.”
Do-oh’s parents would have liked to give their daughter rice, but they had none. Instead, they gave her tiny sweet potatoes they had planted near their house. Do-oh’s mouth was inflamed, so her mother steamed and mashed the potatoes and placed small bites into the deepest part of her daughter’s mouth, gently encouraging her to eat. Do-oh later learned that since there were no crematoria left in her area, her father had collected firewood and saved some kerosene to burn her body.
Isolated in her house, Do-oh had no idea that within a week after the bombing, thousands of others across Nagasaki and the surrounding region had begun to experience various combinations of symptoms similar to her own—high fever, dizziness, loss of appetite, nausea, headaches, diarrhea, bloody stools, nosebleeds, whole-body weakness, and fatigue. Their hair fell out in large clumps, their burns and wounds secreted extreme amounts of pus, and their gums swelled, became infected, and bled. Like Do-oh, they developed purple spots on their bodies—“at first about the size of a pinprick,” one doctor recalled, “but growing within a few days to the size of a grain of rice or a pea.” The spots were signs of hemorrhaging beneath the skin; they also appeared at medicinal injection sites, which became infected and did not heal. Infections in other parts of the body were rampant, too, including the large intestine, esophagus, bronchial passages, lungs, and uterus. Within a few days of the appearance of their initial symptoms, many people lost consciousness, mumbled deliriously, and died in extreme pain; others languished for weeks before either dying or slowly recovering. Even those who had suffered no external injuries fell sick and died. Some relief workers and victims’ family members who had come into the hypocenter area after the bombing also suffered serious illnesses.
Fear gripped the city. As the pattern of symptoms, illness, and death became clear, some people pulled on their hair every morning to see if their time had come. Believing the illness was contagious, many families turned away relatives and guests who were staying with them after the bombing, and some farmers outside Nagasaki refused food to hungry refugees from the city.
Family around a cremation fire, mid-September 1945, three-quarters of a mile from the hypocenter. (Photograph by Matsumoto Eiichi/Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images)
At first, Dr. Akizuki and other physicians suspected dysentery, cholera, or possibly some form of liver disease. Others believed the illness was due to poisonous gas released by the bomb. By August 15, however, when Japanese scientists had confirmed that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki, physicians deduced that what appeared to be an epidemic killing their city was somehow related to radiation contamination. This discovery was helpful in ruling out contagious diseases and other conditions, but it did nothing to minimize the mystifying, confusing, and terrifying truth about the invisible power of the bomb. People died korokoro-korokoro—one after another. Dr. Akizuki likened the situation to the Black Death pandemic that devastated Europe in the 1300s. Observing the cremations taking place in his hospital yard, he wondered if his body, too, might soon be burned. “Life or death was a matter of chance, of fate, and the dividing line between the man being cremated and the doctor cremating him was slight.”
A second wave of radiation illnesses and deaths swept through the city in late August and early September. Dr. Akizuki and his whole staff came down with nausea, diarrhea, and fatigue, which, he remembered, “made me feel as if I had been beaten all over my body.”
Dr. Shirabe Raisuke, the professor of surgery at Nagasaki Medical College, became sick as he was simultaneously grieving the death of his older son, Seiichi, and searching for the remains of his younger son, Koji, a medical student who had been in class at the time of the bombing and never came home. Shirabe’s initial fatigue was so intense he could barely function, but in this condition, he, his wife, and three daughters walked to the ruins of the college to look once again for Koji’s ashes. Dr. Shirabe was tall, with dark skin and deep-set eyes that still could not comprehend the scenes of the college’s ruin. “Several hundred crows were flying in the sky overhead,” he remembered, “scouring the ground below for the flesh of the dead.” As Shirabe and his family picked through the debris, the doctor’s youngest daughter found a fragment of blue wool trousers that provided the final confirmation of his son’s death: Sewn into a belt loop was the name of Dr. Shirabe’s nephew, a reminder that before leaving Nagasaki for the war, his ne
phew had given the pants to Koji. Disconsolate, Shirabe and his family gathered ashes from the area where his son had died and carried them home.
A few days later, Dr. Shirabe collapsed. Small purple spots covered his body like those he had seen on his patients before they died. For weeks, he was so frail he could barely turn his head, and his days and nights were filled with anxiety over the future of his family. One day, however, a medical student came to visit and offered Dr. Shirabe a drink of nontoxic ethyl alcohol mixed with sugar water. Shirabe resisted at first but then took a few sips. “This tasted wonderful in my mouth,” he recalled, “and I drank a whole glassful. My body warmed up, and I found that I could talk without getting tired.” He began drinking small amounts of wine at meals, and though he couldn’t say for sure that this was the reason for his recovery, he began to feel stronger, and the purple spots began to fade.
Still weak, consumed with grief over his sons’ deaths, and concerned about the future of the Medical College, Dr. Shirabe resumed treating others suffering from injury and radiation illness. Later that fall, at the invitation of a joint team of U.S. and Japanese researchers, he directed a detailed survey of more than eight thousand people’s atomic bomb injuries and deaths. Working under extreme conditions at Shinkozen and in the surrounding community, he and his team of fifty medical students and ten physicians from Nagasaki Medical College and Kawatana Kyosai Hospital spent months conducting interviews and examinations to catalog injuries, illnesses, and mortality rates relating to various factors, including distance from the hypocenter, shielding, access to medical care, evacuation, gender, and extent of multiple types of injuries.