Those ‘militarists’ were an equally heavy and worrying presence in the files. ‘Rid Japan of the war-mongering military’ ran one piece of graffito, while a voter in local elections spoiled his ballot paper with ‘End the war quickly, idiot militarists’. Another added ‘Our Lord Lenin’ to the candidate list and cast his vote accordingly.
There was probably little appreciation in the Tokkō offices for the resilient wit of a population under terrible strain. An organization traditionally preoccupied with leftist sedition now faced the prospect that Leon Trotsky’s prediction might come true: war would push Japan into communist revolution, wiping out its fragile middle class and leaving behind a classic tinderbox polarization of a wealthy elite and a mass of peasants and labourers deeply aggrieved at the former’s self-centredness. Asia looked at least as ripe for communism as it did for Co-Prosperity. Nor was it just the usual trouble-making rabble keeping the Tokkō busy: members of the elite Cabinet Planning Board were caught reading Marx.
Those who did end up toeing the line did so as much out of necessity as enthusiasm. Textiles ended up in such short supply that for many there was no longer much choice except to wear monpe and the national civilian uniform. Interest in entertainment fell largely because a ration of 330g of rice per day didn’t leave a person with much energy for going out, while others were soon too preoccupied with foraging for food in the countryside. Fuel and matches were so hard to come by that people in Okinawa were said to be reading at night by the light of phosphorescent sea creatures. Neighbourliness was tested to its limits when young girls were discovered stuffing cushions up their dresses in hopes of procuring a pregnant woman’s rations.
Cities like Tokyo and Osaka were becoming all but unrecognizable. Homes were losing their colour, their laughter and most of their valuables and metal goods, as pots and pans were handed over to the military for use as scrap. Streets lost their statues, their iron railings, even their temple bells. Only wood and paper remained.
But that was fine for American strategists planning the final stages of the war in 1944–5. Wood and paper were all they required for an endgame so brutally simple you could sum it up in a word: fire.
A young boy sat in the cinema marvelling at the sequel to ‘Momotarō’s Sea Eagles’: Momotarō: Umi no Shinpei (‘Momotarō’s Divine Sea Warriors’). ‘One day I’m going to make animated films,’ he swore to himself. And yet Tezuka Osamu, future godfather of Japanese anime and manga, found he had almost no one with whom he could share his resolution. Much of Osaka had been devastated by America’s new B-29 Superfortresses. And though the Shōchikuza cinema had so far been left mercifully intact, most of Tezuka’s friends had been evacuated to the countryside. They were amongst more than 10 million Japanese civilians to flee the country’s cities in the final months of the war, compared with around 1.2 million civilians from Britain’s urban areas during the Blitz of 1940–41.
Across Japan, people were now being asked to throw everything into the war. Schoolgirls worked long hours creating enormous balloons to which incendiaries could be attached, in an effort to turn the jet-stream into a divine wind capable of raining destruction on the American mainland. Around 350 devices reached North America, with balloon fragments found as far east as Iowa. An explosion at a picnic in Oregon resulted in the only six wartime casualties anywhere on the US mainland.
But very little provision had been made in return for people’s defence, especially in Japan’s big cities. So while children’s balloons floated hopefully away into the skies, hundreds of the most advanced bombers ever seen began regular flights over Japanese cities – each zoned by the Allies according to the flammability of its architecture. Thanks to Japan’s lack of anti-aircraft guns, the B-29s were able to come in at chimney-top height, their defensive gun turrets taken out and replaced with extra quantities of incendiary.
A raid on 9 March 1945 against Tokyo, whose population density was around 103,000 people per square mile at the time, turned into the most destructive sortie in history. A quarter of one of the world’s largest cities burned to the ground overnight. Canals boiled, glass melted, and up to 100,000 people were killed, most of them suffocating as firestorms sucked up the available oxygen.
Life for those who remained was a never-ending round of harsh, war-focused labour, to which ever younger men and, belatedly, women were recruited: enlisted in volunteer groups, drilled by soldiers in the use of bamboo spears, digging trenches and setting up barbed wire and pillboxes – getting ready for an imminent invasion. People were woken from their beds at 3 a.m. once per week for worship at local shrines. Schoolchildren were sent to the forests to collect pine stumps, so that the sap could be turned into aircraft fuel – it was claimed that 200 stumps could keep a single plane flying for an hour …
*
12 April 1945. Hayashi Ichizō had been a child of just nine when Japan’s long war on the mainland started in 1931. He had made his way through typical Japanese schools of this period, in which maps of ‘Japan’ seamlessly blended its four main islands with disputed territory and recent conquests; ethics textbooks harped on Japanese values and spirit; swashbuckling stories were told of ‘elder brother’ making his way in the army; and the practice of martial sports and singing of military songs was common. He had attended one of the country’s elite Higher Schools, in Fukuoka, and graduated from there to Kyoto Imperial University, where he had hoped to study philosophy, but had made do with economics. Now, he was pinned back in the cockpit seat of a navy plane as it screamed down towards an American ship off Okinawa.
Plenty of Hayashi’s comrades in the Tokubetsu Kōgekitai (Special Attack Unit), better known as the kamikaze or ‘divine wind’, dreamed of taking as many Americans with them as possible when they went. Perhaps they would even pass beyond human into divine life: becoming a god, as both myth and the kamikaze manual promised. ‘Aim for the smokestack,’ the latter advised. ‘Crash with your eyes wide open. Many have done so before you – they will tell you what fun they had …’
But as that glorious day approached, some pilots got drunk and rioted in their barracks. They took their sen’ninbari – ‘thousand-knot [good luck] sashes’ – and burned them in disgust. At least one pilot turned back on his final flight and strafed his commanding officers. Many more sabotaged their own planes or deliberately steered them into the sea.
Under a level of pressure at which later generations could only guess and wonder, the people and the pilots of Japan found themselves forced to think about what a ‘nation’ really is, in the end. It was a self-conscious endeavour in which few populations on earth can ever have been so well resourced. They had lived through more than a decade hearing stories about a phenomenally successful society now sharing its distinctly Asian modernity with its neighbours, listening to grand future plans, to heroic tales and to divine bluster of every kind.
And yet, when it came to it, young men like Hayashi Ichizō chose to imagine the nation as though none of this had ever existed, as though ‘Japan’ was better captured in a pre-modern poem or a woodblock print. They mused, in their last letters and diary entries, on the beauty of the moon, on the faces of family and on the flowers of their hometowns.
They had been told, in every way possible and via every means available to an increasingly unchallenged state, that Japan – and the world itself – was approaching the end-time. Yet they felt as though time was not ending, but turning: history was a force of nature, poised now to sweep away the nation’s terrible mistakes and tragic misapprehensions of itself. Japan would lose this war. And they would die. But if nothing else they could be proud to have fed the fire that burned the field, making it fertile once again for the families they left behind.
‘Dear Mother,’ wrote Hayashi, by the light of a bonfire at his airbase in the far south of Japan:
The cherry blossoms here have all fallen. But the green leaves are lovely, reminding me of home.
This is like a dream. Tomorrow, I’m no longer alive. Those who went o
n sortie yesterday are all dead.
I’ll be going ahead of you. I wonder if I’ll be allowed to enter heaven. Please pray for me. I can’t bear the thought of going to a place where you will not join me later … I just want to be held in your arms, and sleep.
Part Four
* * *
MODERNITY 2.0?
(1940S TO 1960S)
11
Afterlives
Hell was much as the Buddhists had billed it. People staggered ghost-like along flaming streets, vomiting, as buildings ignited all around them and trees crashed to the ground. Steadily they lost more and more of their bodies to the soft, bubbling asphalt, as their flesh first drooped, then dripped, then fell away altogether. Finally, they collapsed, joining thousands of blistered and bloated figures already lying on the ground; some cried out for water, others were unable to speak through mouths filling up with maggots and flies.
On one point, however, Buddhist imagery had misled. Hell was not a realm, but rather a state of affairs. You didn’t go there – it came to you, transfiguring your home, your family and your friends. For Nishimoto Setsuko, it arrived while she was sitting on the toilet. The old world simply vanished: at first bleached into white nothingness, then lost in utter black. An indescribable sound ripped through her, and then the new world arrived. The paper-and-wood partitions of her home had been repositioned. The wall outside was gone altogether. Neighbours discovered their roofs pitching upwards at odd angles, after a tremendous gust of wind forced itself inside and around their houses, sending everything sailing through the air.
The picture became stranger the closer you went into the centre of Hiroshima. Pushing empty carts along its burning streets, in search of lost loved ones, one entered a world fused together in the weirdest of ways. The flowers on women’s kimonos had become imprinted on their bodies. Human silhouettes had appeared on the walls. Trying to make sense of it, some said that a shipment of oil drums must have exploded. Others blamed enemy saboteurs, parachuted in. It could be a gas attack: that would explain the ‘electric smell’ in the air. Or else this rain, just started, was gasoline being poured from the sky – ready to be lit up when the enemy made a second pass.
Setsuko scoured the streets and air-raid shelters looking for her husband, peering into the mouths of charred bodies in search of a tell-tale pattern of gold teeth. Tade Kinuyo did the same, with her baby on her back. She listened to him cycle through the same three words – ‘hot!’, ‘milk!’, ‘bang!’ – as her straw sandals were steadily worn away by the hot road.
Neither woman found anything. In place of a body, Setsuko burned her husband’s tobacco pouch down by the river, burying the remains along with his pipe. That would have to do for a grave. A few days later, both she and her son Akio developed a fever. Smoothing her hair, she found clumps coming away with her hand. The same was happening to Akio. Rumours circulated about what this was, and how it might be cured. Setsuko’s experiments included water infused with the dokudami herb.
Yokochi Toshiko, living nearby, heard that powdered human bones might soothe her son’s burns. So she ground up the cremated remains of her husband in an earthenware mortar – both he and her nineteen-year-old daughter had faded away and died in front of her – and dabbed at her son’s body with the powder. He died later that afternoon.
A sick and balding Akio got his call-up papers for the army. He and his mother set off again towards the city centre, back through all the bodies. Akio was given a little rice gruel when they arrived, served in a length of bamboo, and was told that he would be departing the following day. He slept that night at the railway station. Setsuko was all set to wave him off the next morning, when they heard an announcement: ‘Discharged from military service’. They made their way home. Two days later, at noon on 15 August 1945, a voice was heard for the first time ever on the radio, offering one of history’s great masterclasses in understatement. ‘The war situation has developed,’ reflected the Emperor, ‘not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.’
The surprising thing about heaven was how solicitously it catered to the voyeur. Down below, one could see Tokyo blackened by fire: buildings scorched, trees half burned away. The damned shuffled along what remained of the streets, emaciated and desperate. Up here, a curious sense of spaciousness persisted – and almost everything, naturally, was white. The chairs were covered in white slips; a throw of white bearskin adorned a davenport sofa. A large mirror hung on one wall, a life-size nude on another.
And there were women: Japanese, Russian, German and Italian. There was food and drink without end: shredded chicken in wine sauce, raw fish, fried shrimp, the very best whisky. And there were friends. So many influential friends, cultivated by way of the women and the food and the drink.
Such was the afterlife of Ando Akira. A lavish HQ and a lavish early post-war existence; a reward, you might say, for saintly service in his previous life, as ‘Guardian of Korean Labourers and Protector of Korean Juveniles’. These protectees had formed a small army in the early 1940s, controlled by him and doing whatever Japan’s wartime leaders required: dismantling munitions plants and rebuilding them, away from Allied airstrikes; setting up underground factories; digging tunnels.
The heavenly voice that drifted across the airwaves on 15 August 1945 had announced the end of that old world. Precisely how the new one would turn out, neither Ando Akira nor anyone else knew at that point. They understood only that a judgement of sorts was on its way, aboard American planes and ships, scheduled to reach these shores by the end of the month. All around the country, it was set to be a busy fortnight.
*
In the Imperial Palace, a family closed ranks. The Emperor’s uncle, Prince Higashikuni, was appointed Prime Minister. Konoe Fumimaro, risen from the political dead, became his deputy. The war was lost, but the kokutai, the national polity rooted historically and spiritually in the imperial institution, could – must – be saved. It would come down to identifying the deadliest of enemies, and then working with the others.
Konoe had been giving much thought to this in recent months. In February, he had implored the Emperor to end the war. Since Midway in 1942, the United States had been on the counter-attack. A list had been building up, of locations previously all but unknown to most Americans, but destined to acquire iconic status in their own modern story: Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands (1942–3); Saipan (summer 1944); Leyte, in the Philippines (October 1944); Iwo Jima (February 1945); Okinawa (spring and summer 1945); Potsdam, from where at the end of July 1945 the Allies declared that only ‘unconditional surrender’ would forestall Japan’s ‘prompt and utter destruction’.
Defeat, Konoe had suggested to the Emperor in February 1945, was inevitable. But, he added, there were worse fates. A Japanese communist revolution was surely coming: fomented by the Soviet Union, preying on the population’s exhaustion and deep disillusionment with their rulers, and working with lower-class elements in the army who naïvely believed that such a thing as Emperor-centred communism was possible. Japanese newspapers, meanwhile, were spreading rumours that the military was to be deployed to the country’s central mountains, in preparation for a protracted battle to defend the homeland. The Emperor, they claimed, was to be evacuated to mainland Asia, and from there the struggle against Anglo-America would carry on.
The Emperor had listened to Konoe’s plea, but had not acted. He still hoped that the Soviet Union would decide it needed Japan in what would surely be its next war – against Britain and America. In any case, what could he do? The only way to be rid of the militarists now was to sponsor a rival and equally untrustworthy faction in the army. The recent past had revealed that there were those in that vast and fragmented institution who understood loyalty to the kokutai as transcending obedience to any particular Emperor.
Some of these extreme elements had shown themselves early in the morning of 15 August. The incineration of much of urban Japan across 1944 and 1945 had not been enough. Nor had American use, twice in quick
succession – on 6 August at Hiroshima and then 9 August at Nagasaki – of a devastating mystery weapon, with who knew how many more waiting to be deployed. A Soviet declaration of war against Japan on 8 August, and a swift march into Manchuria, had ruled that country out as an intermediary with the other Allies. Nearly half a million Japanese civilians were now dead, including around 140,000 at Hiroshima and 70,000 at Nagasaki. Still it was not enough. A small group of soldiers invaded the grounds of the Imperial Palace, intent on stealing or destroying the phonograph record bearing the Emperor’s surrender message. The recording had to be smuggled out in a laundry basket, and delivered to a radio station which itself had suffered an army attempt at sabotage. Even once the broadcast had been made, rumours swirled of a planned attack on the approaching US fleet. Japan’s few remaining aircraft had to be disarmed as a precaution, their fuel tanks emptied.
The imperial loyalists gathering around the throne were for the most part more level-headed men. One of the reasons why the Japanese Cabinet had waited so long before ending the war was deep uncertainty over whether the Emperor would be held accountable for it. The terrible possibility loomed that an august, even divine institution, stretching back countless centuries, might end with a man soiling himself, his neck broken in a hangman’s noose. Now that the decision had been made to stop the war, the Emperor himself having intervened, the task for these imperial loyalists was to lay out a red carpet for the incoming conquerors, angling it carefully according to their own hoped-for direction of travel. The Allied leadership might just be persuaded to accept a version of recent history in which the Emperor was innocent of wrongdoing: held captive by a military clique whose prime mover, Tōjō Hideki, had been ousted more than a year before.
Japan Story Page 23
