The Storm on Our Shores

by Mark Obmascik

  Taeko knew the odds were that some of her friends, neighbors, or church congregation members in Tokyo were killed in the firebombing, but wartime communications were difficult, and she never knew for sure. In some ways, she was grateful for her ignorance. She had never been a country girl, but living in Ibaraki at least meant she was not a likely military target.

  On June 22, Okinawa fell. Six days later, General MacArthur declared the end of Japanese resistance in the Philippines. For the rest of June and July, the United States led hundreds of bombing and firebombing raids across Japan. In more than sixty cities, at least one of every five buildings was destroyed. In thirty cities, at least half of all structures were destroyed. As many as 500,000 people were killed and five million were left homeless. Much of the country’s oil, armaments, and shipping industry was destroyed, crippling the country’s defense.

  In Washington, Harry Truman, who had become president upon FDR’s death in April, conferred with his military advisors about the next step. At this point in the war, they believed Japan had about five million troops remaining, including two million in the home islands; two million in Korea, Manchuria, China, and Formosa; 200,000 in French Indochina, Thailand, and Burma; and 500,000 in the East Indies.

  After Japan’s fight-to-the-death battles on Okinawa and Iwo Jima, Secretary of War Henry Stimson believed an American invasion of the Japanese home islands would exact an almost unbearable toll on both countries.

  “If we once land on one of the main islands and begin a forceful occupation of Japan, we shall probably have cast the die of last ditch resistance,” Stimson wrote in a July 2, 1945, memo to President Truman.

  The Japanese are highly patriotic and certainly susceptible to calls for fanatical resistance to repel an invasion. Once started in actual invasion, we shall in my opinion have to go through an even more bitter finish fight than in Germany. We shall incur the losses incident to such a war and we shall have to leave the Japanese islands even more thoroughly destroyed than was the case with Germany. This would be due both to the difference in the Japanese and German personal character and the difference in the size and character of the terrain through which the operations will take place.

  Stimson estimated one million Americans would be killed or wounded in an invasion of Japan.

  That price, Truman decided, was too high. In the July 26 Potsdam Declaration with Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek, Truman opted instead to give Japan a last-ditch warning:

  We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.

  Japan did not officially respond to the Potsdam Declaration, but at a press conference in Tokyo, Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki dismissed the demand with the word mokusatsu, which U.S. officials translated as meaning, “unworthy of public notice.”

  United States responded by sending warplanes that dropped millions of leaflets over Japan urging citizens to evacuate:

  Read this carefully as it may save your life or the life of a relative or a friend. In the next few days, four or more of the cities named on the reverse side of this leaflet will be destroyed by American bombs. These cities contain military installations and workshops or factories, which produce military goods. We are determined to destroy all of the tools of the military clique that they are using to prolong this useless war. Unfortunately, bombs have no eyes. So, in accordance with America’s well-known humanitarian policies, the American Air Force, which does not wish to injure innocent people, now gives you warning to evacuate the cities named and save your lives.

  America is not fighting the Japanese people but is fighting the military clique, which has enslaved the Japanese people. The peace, which America will bring, will free the people from the oppression of the Japanese military clique and mean the emergence of a new and better Japan.

  You can restore peace by demanding new and better leaders who will end the War.

  We cannot promise that only these cities will be among those attacked, but at least four will be, so heed this warning and evacuate these cities immediately.

  On August 6, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a city chosen by United States leaders because it was headquarters of the Army defending southern Japan and a major military storage and assembly point.

  On August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria.

  On August 9, a second atomic bomb was dropped, on Nagasaki, a major seaport with several large industrial facilities.

  For weeks, as the war turned against Japan, local extremists had been trying to build support for a death-before-dishonor mass suicide. Soldiers had always been trained that surrender would be too shameful to bear. Families at home braced. Would they, too, be expected to give their lives to protect the emperor?

  Though the masses did not know it at the time, Emperor Hirohito had been conferring behind the scenes with top government officials to consider an end to the war. After the U.S. nuclear bombs and Soviet declaration of war, the emperor and cabinet officials concluded their chances for victory were over.

  On August 13, at 11:25 p.m., the emperor entered a bunker at the Imperial Palace and recorded on disc a four-and-a-half-minute speech of surrender. The plan was for the record to be broadcast on Japanese radio stations, but a cadre of ultranationalist military officers, adamantly opposed to surrender, stormed the palace in the pre-dawn hours of August 14 in an attempted coup. After successfully disarming most palace guards and severing outside communications lines, the rebels searched frantically for hours for the emperor’s recording. They did not find it. Loyalists to the emperor had hidden the recording first among a stack of papers, and then, legend held, in a basket of dirty laundry. By dawn, the coup had been defeated. Many rebel leaders took their own lives.

  On August 15, radios across Japan broadcast the recorded voice of Hirohito, the man descended from the gods, announcing the end of war. For almost every resident of Japan, including Taeko, it was the first time they had heard the emperor’s voice. “To our good and loyal subjects,” Hirohito began in the speech that became known as the Jewel Voice Broadcast. “After pondering deeply the general trends in the world, and the actual conditions obtaining in our empire today, we have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure.”

  Hirohito went on to explain that Japan had accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. He did not describe it as unconditional surrender, but he did offer an explanation.

  Despite the best that has been done by everyone—the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of our servants of the state, and the devoted service of our one hundred million people—the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.

  Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.

  Such being the case, how are we to save the millions of our subjects, or to atone ourselves before the hallowed spirits of our Imperial ancestors? This is the reason why we have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers.

  The bombing stopped. Guns fell silent. The war was over.

  Most estimates placed the number of dead Japanese, military and civilian, at 2.6 million to 3.1 million. The war had killed at least three of every 100 Japanese.

  Japan had exacted a far more costly toll on its enemies. As many as 20 million were dead in China; three million in the Dutch East Indies; one million in French Indochina; 380,000 in Korea; and up to one million in the Philippines. The ov
erwhelming majority of those killed were civilians, not soldiers.

  Taeko Tatsuguchi had lost her husband and her home. She was living in a shed where the lice on the floor were as loud as the rain dripping through the roof. She still had her daughters, though. She could pick up Misako and Mutsuko, and she could hug them.

  The end of the war did not end the bad times. Food shortages were severe. Starvation was rampant, and some cities advised citizens to eat worms, acorns, and peanut shells. Medicine was in short supply. Many died of treatable diseases.

  At her uncle’s house, Taeko felt like she was wearing out her welcome. The uncle’s vegetable garden would go only so far. Besides, Taeko did not see much of a future for her in a place with few jobs or even opportunities.

  She earned enough money through odd jobs for a train ticket out. She moved nearly 500 miles southwest to Okayama, where they moved in with an aunt. Misako remembers being required to carry her own bowl on the train for sanitation; the train was so crowded that she could not move far enough to use a bathroom.

  In Okayama they were given another one-room shack with a dirt floor. There was no electricity or indoor plumbing, but also no lice. The vegetables they grew in their small but manicured garden were cooked in a clay pot shichirin, which was fired with bamboo or anything else that would burn. On windy days, the shed shook.

  Taeko’s aunt ran out of food at about the same time that Misako was old enough to enroll in school. So Taeko moved her family to Kobe, where Allied bombing campaigns had destroyed 55 percent of the city and left a half million people homeless. Postwar reconstruction, combined with the luck of finding a friend of a friend of a relative with connections, allowed Taeko to move herself and her girls into another shack on the outskirts of town.

  The best part about Kobe was the school, where Misako learned to read. Each day she was given one hot meal, which was almost always whale-in-miso soup. The smell made Misako retch, but it was her only guarantee of daily food. She saw others eating out of trash cans.

  With Misako in school, Taeko would entrust the younger Mutsuko to an elderly woman. Taeko then would work with businessmen learning to speak English. The extra money meant she could skip fewer meals.

  At this point after the war, it was possible to write letters to Taeko’s parents in Hawaii. One day a surprise package arrived in the mail. Taeko’s mother sent her a hand-me-down maroon sweater, her first piece of new clothing in more than a year. Misako and Mutsuko watched their mother joyfully dismantle the sweater to make two new sweaters for the girls. After washing the yarn, Taeko hung it to dry outside, where it was stolen.

  Taeko wanted out, badly. Her parents could afford to send her somebody else’s used sweater, but not tickets for Taeko and the girls to move to Hawaii. Besides, her parents may not have understood the true desperation of postwar Japan. In her letters home, Taeko downplayed problems. The Japanese way was to grit through the hard times of war, and also to grit through the hard times of peace.

  After several months, Misako’s school began struggling to keep students and find teachers. Taeko moved the family to Osaka, where the school was more stable and Misako and Mutsuko could walk to classes together. Taeko found more businessmen to tutor in English, but all she could afford was a shanty next to an extremely loud business that, in hindsight, was likely a brothel. With a parade of men and music and drunkenness just outside their door, Taeko and the girls learned to focus on the task at hand.

  In Osaka, Taeko’s fortunes began to change. Two American soldiers, Pete Roehl and Melvin Baker, had visited her father’s Seventh-day Adventist church in Honolulu and pledged to find Taeko in Japan and help her, which they did. They secured her a job at the local Army Post Exchange, or PX, where consumer goods were sold to American servicemen. The two soldiers opened their hearts to Taeko and the girls, bringing them food and clothes and supplying the girls with a steady supply of chewing gum and chocolate. For the first time, other kids in school had reason to be jealous of the Tatsuguchi girls.

  Even better was the access to the U.S. base. On weekends, when few people were around, the two soldiers would stand watch outside the locker rooms and let the mother and daughters inside to take showers. Accustomed to either bathing with a pot at home or standing in line once a week at bathhouses, a private shower was an unimaginable luxury. “It was so hot and I felt so good,” Misako said. “It was an incredible treat.”

  For the first time in years, Taeko was able to save some money. She began to feel some hope. Things stayed steady, but the Seventh-day Adventist soldiers eventually moved on. They left Misako and Mutsuko with great respect and curiosity about the United States.

  And then, in November 1954, they didn’t have to feel curious any longer. Taeko and her parents had saved enough money—and secured the necessary U.S. visas—to move everyone to Honolulu. “We landed in Hawaii and they welcomed us with a lei,” Misako said. “The sun was so bright and shiny and the people were happy and jolly and not gloomy. It was so different than Japan.”

  With the move to Hawaii, Taeko repeated a tradition that her husband had adopted. Now that they were in America, the girls would use the American middle names they had been given at birth.

  Misako became Joy. Mutsuko became Laura.

  Both girls enrolled in the local Adventist school. Though Joy had just completed eighth grade in Japan, she started in third grade in Hawaii to learn English. She towered over her much younger classmates, but learned the new language easily enough to move quickly through fourth and fifth grades. She had difficulty speaking English, but could understand it.

  Laura adjusted more easily. She remained in classes mainly with children closer to her own age, and had more of an aptitude for English.

  To earn tuition, Taeko, Joy, and Laura cleaned and did maintenance work at the school. Taeko taught Japanese to Hawaiians, and earned money going door-to-door selling church books and Bibles. Her father, who had retired from the ministry, helped support them.

  For many months, neither Joy nor Laura could say she fit right in. They still felt more Japanese than American. But they were with their grandparents, who loved them, and a supportive church community, and they lived in a beautiful place where tropical fruit grew in backyards and the ocean water was warm enough for swimming. If Americans were prejudiced against Japanese, Joy and Laura couldn’t feel it. Hawaii was filled with enough different kinds of people to make them feel tolerated, if not accepted. The girls could not imagine a better start. “It was paradise,” Joy said.

  As the girls grew older, they wanted to know more about their father. Taeko had told them he was a surgeon opposed to war who was killed in Alaska. At the time, that was all Taeko knew. No one else really knew more, either. The only Japanese survivors of Attu were a handful of prisoners of war too ashamed to show their faces, much less say anything about what they saw. In fact, nobody in Japan was saying much about the war. They were trying to move on.

  In the United States, however, classmates of Paul Tatsuguchi did not want to forget the past. They wanted to change the description of it. After the Battle of Attu, dozens of newspapers across the United States had printed stories about Tatsuguchi, almost all highlighting the final entry of his diary.

  Most stories accused the Japanese doctor of an unthinkable act. “Japs Slew Own Patients on Attu, Diary Discloses,” said the headline on a September 9, 1943, story in the Chicago Tribune. “How Japanese medical officers on Attu blew up their own field hospitals with grenades, killing the patients, and then killed themselves as American invaders tightened their hold on that Aleutian island late in May was revealed today in a bloodstained diary.” None of the stories said anything about Tatsuguchi’s background, his religious devotion to pacifism, or his time living in the United States as a college and medical student. In all likelihood, journalists at the time knew nothing about Tatsuguchi beyond his diary. It was the thick of war, and American newspapers were all too willing to promote stories portraying Japanese as fanatical killing ma
chines.

  However, Tatsuguchi’s old medical school classmates read the same stories and were infuriated. The published descriptions of Tatsy as a heartless murderer did not fit with their remembrances of a gentle, careful, and devout physician. His classmates took the accusations as an affront to their Seventh-day Adventist faith. They did not believe a man who inscribed his Bible with Deuteronomy 30:19, “Choose Life,” could kill the wounded so heartlessly.

  They set out to clear the name of Paul Tatsuguchi.

  In September 1944, with the war in the Pacific still raging, the death of Tatsuguchi was noted in The Medical Evangelist, the Seventh-day Adventist journal from his alma mater at the College of Medical Evangelists at Loma Linda University. The original mention of his death in the school newspaper was straightforward and not controversial. However, the newspaper followed up the first story with a second article that disputed the way Tatsuguchi’s death was reported in the popular press.

  “We have received the following in a letter from a responsible source,” The Medical Evangelist said without further identifying the writer. “This letter is being written in an effort to straighten out some of the facts regarding the conduct and manner of death of Dr. Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi, Class of’38, on Attu in the Aleutian Islands.”

  The editorialist said he had

  obtained copies of the New York, Chicago, and Seattle newspapers, which have had lengthy articles on this news story. In practically all of those articles the context of statements in his diary have been so changed as to imply conduct by him for which there is no factual foundation.

  I had occasion to talk with officers in the Alaskan Intelligence, who were actually on Attu during this action, and who assisted in the translation of the original diary. I believe that there is nothing in this information that I am giving you which has any military significance, so it should pass the censor.