TOKYO, JAPAN
AUGUST 9, 1945
10:30 A.M.
Emperor Hirohito is morose. He again walks through the elms and pine trees of his extensive garden, knowing the war is lost. He is brooding about the destruction of Hiroshima—he knows it has crushed the spirit of the Japanese people, and now there is even more horrible news: the Soviet Union has invaded Manchuria.1
Although he is protected in a bunker, Hirohito understands that his people are not. The United States has been bombing Japan for months, destroying so many cities that they are running out of targets. Tokyo itself has been hit more than a dozen times. Just last night, the emperor once again heard air-raid sirens throughout his capital city as sixty B-29s bombed a nearby aircraft factory. The Japanese people are weary of war, but they continue to endure it, hoping to save their god-king from shame.
The invasion of Manchuria makes surrender inevitable. Russia and Japan signed a nonaggression pact four years ago, which Stalin has now violated. Hirohito knows the Russians to be an aggressive people, as evidenced by their continued occupation of Eastern Europe three months after the European war. The Soviet entry into the Pacific war makes it possible that the Russians may also attempt to invade Japan. Hirohito’s nation has neither the men nor the arms to hold off a two-pronged American and Soviet invasion.
Ignoring the heat, Hirohito continues to ponder the possibility of surrender. But this path is fraught with peril: the Japanese military might not cooperate. Some military and civilian leaders actually welcome the coming invasion for the chance to make a historic last stand against people they consider to be barbarians. “If it came to a final battle on Japanese soil,” War Minister Korechika Anami believes, “we could at least for a time repulse the enemy, and might thereafter somehow find life out of death.”
Even as the emperor absorbs the terrible news about the Soviet attack in Manchuria, the top military and civilian cabinet known as the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War is meeting in the concrete bunker beneath the residence of Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki to discuss whether or not to accept the Potsdam Declaration and take the first steps toward surrender.
Hirohito knows that surrender to the Americans will require the complete backing of his military. Despite Hirohito’s deity and his imperial reign, it is the military that truly holds power in Japan. It has been almost ten years, but Hirohito well remembers the terrible events of 1936, when a military mutiny saw the assassination of several top government officials and the takeover of downtown Tokyo.
A faction loyal to Hirohito was successful in crushing the revolt, but there is no certainty the results will be the same should such a coup happen again.
* * *
In his Spartan Manila office, General Douglas MacArthur greets the news of the Manchurian invasion with great joy: “I am delighted at the Russian declaration of war against Japan. This will make possible a great pincers movement which cannot fail to end in the destruction of the enemy. In Europe, Russia was on the eastern front, the Allies on the west. Now the allies are on the east and the Russians on the west, but the results will be the same.”
Like many other top American military leaders, MacArthur still sees Joseph Stalin as an ally, not an enemy. He has previously told other officers that “we must not invade Japan proper unless the Russian army is previously committed to action in Manchuria,” believing that such an invasion would pin down Japanese divisions that might otherwise be shifted to fight against American forces. The general also thinks that Russian occupation of large segments of China and Korea is “inevitable”—not realizing he will one day be called upon to fight the Communist advance in those areas.
It has now been three days since the atomic bomb was dropped. The Japanese have chosen not to surrender, and MacArthur is still hoping to lead the greatest amphibious invasion in the history of the world. To the general’s way of thinking, another A-bomb is not needed.
America has him.
* * *
In Hiroshima, the stench of burned flesh and rotting corpses still hangs over the city as citizens search for missing family members. In scenes played over and over again, the living wander into first-aid stations, calling out the names of lost loved ones. They are rarely answered.
The surviving soldiers of the Akatsuki Corps lead relief efforts, distributing rice, using wood to burn dead bodies, and arranging transportation out of the shattered city for the living.
“A light southerly wind blowing across the city wafted to us as an odor suggestive of burning sardines. I wondered what could cause such a smell until somebody, noticing it too, informed me that sanitation teams were cremating the remains of people who had been killed … the dead were being burned by the hundreds,” one survivor will later remember.
The mayor of Hiroshima at the time of the blast was a teetotaling Christian named Senkichi Awaya. His official residence was in the city’s Kakomachi district, well within the blast-zone radius. At the time of the detonation, he was eating breakfast with his son and three-year-old granddaughter; all three were killed instantly. Awaya’s wife, the mother of his seven children, survived the bombing, only to die one month later from radiation poisoning.2
The head of Hiroshima’s rationing department is a man named Shinso Hamai, who will one day become mayor himself. Before the bombing, concerned that the people of Hiroshima would not have food in the event of a major disaster, Hamai arranged that rice balls should be delivered to the city. So it is that villagers in the surrounding countryside make rice balls and deliver them to the hungry survivors in Hiroshima.
Within days, the exodus from Hiroshima is complete. More than 150,000 residents travel by military truck or train to temporary shelters. The island of Ninoshima, five miles offshore in Hiroshima Bay and untouched by the A-bomb blast, is a storehouse for medical supplies and becomes the region’s biggest relief center, providing comfort to more than ten thousand burn victims. The number of wounded quickly overwhelms the available hospital beds, leading many of the burned and maimed to sleep in stables and other enclosures.
Bacterial infection stemming from the extreme smoke and debris of the blast runs rampant. Teams of doctors perform surgery around the clock, seeing so many patients that there is no time to clean the operating theater between victims; the most common procedure is amputation. The island facility is not actually a hospital but a quarantine center that once housed military men and horses returning from duty in foreign lands. There is no provision for the removal of medical waste, so surgeons dispose of severed limbs by throwing them out hospital windows. Piles of arms and legs soon rise higher than the level of the window itself.
Yet the amputees are the lucky ones. At least they are alive and can begin planning for a new future; many victims of the blast who come to Ninoshima seeking medical help die within days from their infections and burns. At first, their corpses are stacked one on top of the other for burning. But soon the number of dead bodies is so great that mass cremation becomes impossible. Instead, the dead are carried to air-raid shelters and caves, where they are left to rot. These impromptu burial sites will be excavated decades later, uncovering not just bone fragments and ashes but artifacts like rings and shoes that will help reveal the identities of the dead.
This is the new reality in Hiroshima as Emperor Hirohito walks his gardens. Despite the unprecedented carnage, the god-man continues to dither.