In 1941 I was fifteen years old and halfway through middle school. I was well aware of the Japanese conflict in China that started in the early 1930s, and when I got to middle school it was really at the height of militarism. We had military training, but it was considered athletic exercise. Toward the end of the fourth year of middle school, I was taught how to use a rifle. In senior high school, there was military reserve training. We lived in Tokyo, and my parents didn’t talk about the war at first. But a few years later when the bombing started, my father said, “I cannot leave the city, but if the rest of the family wants to move with their belongings to the countryside, that’s okay, but I can’t do it.” He was active in the military reserves, and because of that he felt that he couldn’t leave.
On December 7 when Pearl Harbor was attacked, it was December 8 in Japan, a Monday, and I was in school. Since the war had been going on in China for so long, it wasn’t a big shock. People were anticipating that something else was going to happen, because we knew the diplomatic situation with the U.S. was becoming difficult. I was too young to make judgments, but I remember that initially most people were really excited. It sounded like things were going very well until we heard about the Battle of Midway. The Japanese media made it sound like it wasn’t all that bad, but we knew we couldn’t trust the media because it was controlled by the government.
But I remember what was later called the Doolittle Raid in 1942. The American bombers came right overhead. You could see bombs dropping out, and we were all very surprised. The American planes I saw were flying low, and they seemed quite large, bigger than the other planes we had seen over Tokyo. Afterwards, not much was mentioned about the bombing in the newspapers, but everyone was talking about the American planes and knew about the bombing.
When I got to senior high school, we only had classes one day a week. The rest of the week, including Saturdays, all the students worked in factories, and the teachers, too. There was also one day for military drill. I was working at an iron press factory just in the outskirts of Tokyo. We would get big chunks of iron, and then we’d put them into a press that would make them into plates. About a year before the end of the war, we noticed that we had more and more idle time because of waiting for the material to be delivered. At that time, even before the bombing started, I realized that the war wasn’t going well for Japan because they weren’t able to deliver the iron to us like they had before. Obviously we knew we couldn’t trust everything we read in the newspapers, but we were hesitant to discuss the situation or say anything negative about the war.
But we were just sitting around at the factory waiting for materials to come in, and what else could you do but talk about things. Some of my friends there were very vocal and active pacifists and said more than others about how they thought we were losing, but then they were arrested. We realized that if someone overheard anyone talking about things going badly for Japan in the war, they’d be turned in and arrested. So after that I didn’t talk about the war. You had to be careful.
There was a military draft, and draft age was nineteen. I went through my physical and would have had to go into the military except I got a deferment because I was a science student. I think medical students also got a deferment. But, of course, a lot of my friends had to go into the military.
My brother got old enough to start smoking legally at age twenty-one. He got a ration, and so I started smoking even though I was underage. Later I got a cigarette ration. Everything was rationed. If you joined the army, you could receive a special package of cigarettes from the Emperor as a reward!
The air raids before 1944 were sporadic and infrequent and didn’t really bother us, but when the B-29 raids started in 1944, and we saw so many planes flying overhead, we knew something had changed for the worse. But even though I saw the bombers dropping bombs, as long as they don’t drop them on your head you don’t worry too much. I think that is the psychology of survival. It’s kind of strange. No one really got angry at the Americans when the bombing started, but neither did it really increase our will to fight. We didn’t get angry at the Japanese government either. The military police were particularly active, and if you said something that someone overheard, you could be in much worse shape than if you were bombed by the Americans. So that’s the choice you have, and when you come into a situation where there is no solution, you just don’t think about it. We were in a situation where we couldn’t do anything but try to survive, so nobody was really angry. Number one, we couldn’t go anyplace. Number two, we couldn’t do anything to stop our country from fighting, so what option do you have? It was a very helpless feeling. All you can think about is how to live under these circumstances, how to survive.
I finished high school and started university in 1945, and I moved to the countryside and lived with relatives. The individual departments in the University of Tokyo made their own decision whether to relocate to the countryside, and my department decided to move. I think the campus had some fire damage, but it was not bombed. Some parts of Tokyo weren’t bombed or burned. Most of the destruction occurred downtown.
Our family house burned during the big firebomb raid in March 1945. I happened to be home that night with my parents, my two sisters, and one of my brothers. My other brother had been drafted and served in China for a while, but he got sick and they sent him back, and he was somewhere else in Japan.
First we could hear the planes coming overhead, but we couldn’t see them because it was dark. Then air raid sirens went off. The bombing was taking place downtown, and since our neighborhood was distant from there we didn’t immediately go to our designated evacuation area. Then you could see the big fires started by the bombing, and I saw a B-29 get shot down in the distance. It went down in a long bright streak in the darkness. But as the downtown fires intensified, the flames propagated and started burning toward us. They were getting closer and closer, and we were finally told we had to evacuate. We had a preassigned place to go, and we realized that our house was going to burn and there was nothing more we could do. So we grabbed our things and left. To get to our evacuation location, we had to go through an area that had just burned. I saw a lot of people who had been burned. There was a bomb shelter where people had gone, and they were killed down in that shelter, either from the heat or lack of oxygen. I saw people dying. There weren’t many medical people around, but I did see a few fire engines.
My father had made a shelter in our backyard, not for us but for some of our belongings. He dug out a hole and made a concrete shelter. We figured we were probably safe from the bombs, but fire is what we were most worried about. We thought we could escape to our evacuation area, but we couldn’t carry all our belongings with us, so that is why we had the shelter. I put a lot of books in the shelter, and I still have some that are burned around the edges. Even though they were in the shelter, the heat burned the edges. It’s kind of interesting what you preserve in a situation when you think everything will be totally destroyed. I have a feeling that people are basically optimistic. They never think this is the end of the whole thing. You believe you are going to survive somehow, so you try to keep whatever it is you have, to the extent possible. That’s the reason I felt those books were important. I didn’t even know if I was going to use them after the war. I simply felt that it was important for me to keep those books. I wasn’t thinking about that at the time, but I wondered afterwards why I kept those particular books. I think it was because I had hope for the future, that I would want to have them in the future, and that there would be a future.
So it was a frightening night, with so much of Tokyo burning—huge fires—and I think it was especially traumatic for older people. My father was about fifty-five or so, and I think it was hard for him. If something like that happened to me now, it would really affect me! But I was young, and it seemed to me at the time that we were just going to deal with things as they happened.
We got to our evacuation area, in a park, and a relief group was there to help people. People were talking about all the areas of Tokyo that were burning. I remember the fires and evacuating, but I can’t remember where we stayed that night. It must have been in that park, and it wasn’t just that night but for the next few days. The fires burned for a while, and then you couldn’t touch anything in the burned-out areas because everything remained hot, so we couldn’t really go anywhere. Finally a few days later we went back to look at our house, and it was totally destroyed, burned. We dug out our possessions from the shelter and moved outside of Tokyo to live with relatives.
Downtown was totally destroyed where there were commercial areas, but uptown, where the wealthy people lived, it didn’t burn. I don’t know if that was intentional or not. After that raid I went back to the university, and my department already had moved to the countryside. That’s where I heard about the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.
Even when the Japanese military went into Manchuria and Korea, we were told there was some kind of logic to it, and the Japanese people kind of understood why we were doing it even if they disagreed. We had had a war with Russia, and the government said we needed a buffer zone between us and Russia. So to create this buffer zone, the military went into some areas of China. Since China was not well united at that time and kind of weak as a country, the Japanese were afraid China might easily be taken over by the West and bring our enemies very close to us. So to avoid that, the government said the only way to survive was to exert influence over China. In the thirteenth century the Mongolians tried to invade Japan through Korea, so the government thought the Russians could easily do the same, and that’s why they said they had to annex Korea. So at least up until Pearl Harbor, there was some kind of logic for the actions of the government. Before Pearl Harbor, I always thought we were on reasonably good terms with the Americans, even though there was diplomatic tension. But when all the government propaganda changed, and suddenly America became our enemy after Pearl Harbor, I guess some people believed it, but others wondered about it. It didn’t seem to make much sense to me to expand the conflict beyond China.
I understood that the reason the Japanese Navy built all their ships was not for battle, but to keep from fighting. They said that having a strong defense system discouraged Western forces from invading. Before the war, when the Japanese military went down into Indochina for the oil, the Navy thought the Americans would be afraid that we were getting too close to the Philippines. That’s why the Navy tried to stop the military expansionists. The Navy didn’t want to have a war at that time. They wanted a strong military to be able to deter Western influences and to be able negotiate better with other countries. So the Navy had that philosophy all the way. The Navy didn’t want to attack Pearl Harbor. That was dictated by the military planners. But once you have a situation where military expansionists come into power, it’s very difficult to go against that policy. If you object or question the government, you are branded unpatriotic and a traitor. So once the decision had been made to attack Pearl Harbor, the Navy knew what they were getting into, but they wanted to do their best once it was started. They were military professionals. It is not just a question of good or bad, or what for—once it’s done it’s done.
I have heard after the war that Americans feared that every Japanese civilian would have fought to the death, even using bamboo spears. And, indeed, there was talk in Japan before the war ended that we would all fight. There wasn’t much discussion, because we knew we couldn’t really discuss things like that or question them because you’d be arrested. But many of us realized that this was crazy, you know, bamboo spears? What would you want to die like that for? It was a joke! You couldn’t have said that at the time, but obviously it was strange. So, I think, maybe some people were worried about the Americans invading and may have fought like that, but many wouldn’t when they saw there was no point. I wasn’t worried, because I was outside of Tokyo, a long ways from where the Americans would be invading.
But what I did worry about was Hiroshima. Clearly this was a new type of bomb. I had taken a university physics course, so I knew what it was, and the other science students knew what it was. From physics we knew that this was being worked on and that those types of bombs might exist. We saw then that something had to be done. We knew we couldn’t fight against that. But what I didn’t know, and a lot of people didn’t know, was the radiation effects. Ayoungjapanese scientist named Ted Fujita—I met him later when he became internationally known for his research on tornadoes—he went to do the survey at Hiroshima right after the explosion. He went right to the epicenter when radioactive material was still there, and he didn’t know anything about the radiation risk. But what he really was proud of was that he calculated the altitude of the bomb when it exploded from the shadows objects cast from the heat and radiation. Other people did this calculation later, and I heard that his initial estimate was not far off from the others.
I think the Japanese feeling was that if that was the only bomb, and if it didn’t happen any more, we could take it. But when the second one exploded, we knew we couldn’t continue. It wasn’t a question of morality. I think that to some extent it is correct to say the bomb ended the war. But at the same time, if someone asks me if the bomb was needed to end the war, probably not, because things were already so bad. But the thing is, someone has to decide to end it, someone on the Japanese side. They could have stopped before, but the bomb became the trigger.
Then we all listened to the Emperor’s address on the radio telling us we’d lost the war. I felt relieved. I also had a great deal of hope that things would be normalized. Toward the end of the war it had gotten so crazy, I couldn’t imagine things getting worse. For example, one of the craziest things that happened during the war was that every time the Emperor’s picture appeared in the newspaper, we had to cut out the photo and bring it to school because an image of the Emperor was sacred. You had to cut it out of the paper so the picture wouldn’t be damaged when you threw the newspaper away. I don’t know what they did with all those newspaper pictures of the Emperor students cut out. Even though we had been told the Emperor was a god, there are some things that just strike you as crazy, and that was one of them. You think, “Why does this have to be done?”
In fact I never remember being told in elementary school, in the 1930s, that the Emperor was a god, but suddenly just before the war with the U.S. started, that’s the time the government really began to tighten down. They started to push the Emperor as god, and that business of cutting out the pictures was the craziest example of what started to happen. But you know you can’t always fool kids. I remember asking my teacher one time why we had to cut out the pictures of the Emperor and bring them to school. And she said, “It’s not a question of ‘why,’ it’s just something you have to do.” And once we were told that, we never asked again, but that didn’t stop us from questioning it ourselves.
So that day of the Emperor’s broadcast, I was really surprised by what he sounded like. We had never heard his voice before. He spoke kind of slowly and sounded strange. I think we understood he sounded different because of the way people treated him and because of his isolation from everyone else.
After the Emperor’s radio address, I heard that American ships were coming into Tokyo Bay for the surrender. I didn’t go down to the shore to look at the ships, but I think some people did. But then the war was over, and I was relieved. And of course nothing worked, a lot of the infrastructure had been destroyed, like electricity and water plants.
After the war when the American occupation troops came in, people didn’t know what to expect. I don’t think we hated the Americans, we just didn’t know about them, except for the government propaganda during the war. But very soon, even in the first few days after the Americans came, things started to turn around for the better, so we thought maybe the Americans weren’t so bad. Trains started moving, and we started to get electricity and water back, so the infrastructure came back fairly quickly, and I don’t know how they were able to do that. But then things were really bad for the economy. We had terrible inflation, there were shortages, and the rebuilding was a massive task.
One of the things the American occupation forces did when they came into Tokyo was to set up a library. They really worked hard to win us over, to win our hearts. During the war we couldn’t read any American or English journals or publications, but there were books in the library on all kinds of subjects, including science. That was the first time I ever saw the Journal of Meteorology, and as it turned out I ended up making a career in meteorological research.
At this time the traffic was totally jammed. There were no stoplights working, and the attitude of the people toward the Japanese police was not to listen to them, since they had treated people so badly during the war. So the American military police had to come in and do traffic direction, and that’s the only thing that kept traffic moving. They did a great job with the traffic, and things like that won the people’s hearts.
I never saw MacArthur in person, but of course he was a very prominent figure. Some people were saying he was a god. The Emperor was powerful and a god, but MacArthur was even over the Emperor, so he must be a god! But I think MacArthur did very well. He was quite diplomatic.
Some Japanese were against the Emperor after the war, since they blamed him for how badly the war had gone. And there was a quite active Communist movement to try and abolish the Emperor system. But I think MacArthur recognized this movement was directly related to the Communists, so he made an effort not to tear down the social system, since he knew the Emperor was a key to keeping order in the country. A lot of people still respected the Emperor system, and I didn’t have any negative feeling about the Emperor. However, it didn’t take me long, during the war, to figure out who was really running the system, and it wasn’t the Emperor. It was a group of militarists. In fact, in the whole history of Japan, the Emperor was used by various people as a figurehead to unite the country, and not necessarily to hold absolute power. And that was the way all of Japanese history was.
So the people knew the Emperor didn’t have any real power, but there was historical continuity. People were comfortable to have that arrangement, even though they knew others were using the Emperor for their own ends. So the question is, who uses the Emperor and what do they do to achieve their goals? When MacArthur used the Emperor to stabilize the country, there was a precedent in Japanese history for doing that. Then he brought in some new systems we had never seen before, but he blended the new things with some elements of our old system, like the Emperor. That’s why I think that if you totally tear down a country’s system, it’s difficult to replace it entirely with something new. People have to develop their own system if it is truly self-government.
My father ended up going back and rebuilding his house, but he rebuilt it on another lot nearby. He didn’t own the land we were living on, so he rebuilt on another lot, a smaller lot. I can’t remember exactly how that worked, how he was able to rebuild the house when there were so many shortages and a lack of construction materials. I think he did it gradually over time as things became available. I was still living with relatives in the country. I continued in university and finished my undergraduate degree in 1948. Then I went to graduate school and got a qualifying degree, which was like a master’s degree, and then my Ph.D.
I traveled around a bit after the war, even though traveling was quite difficult. I took one trip to make meteorological measurements in Hokkaido during a total solar eclipse. We got help from the American occupation headquarters to let us use a sleeping car on the train for all of us who were going to Hokkaido. So we had good weather, saw the eclipse, and were able to make our measurements. Science was popular, and people were interested in helping, like that American library with scientific publications in it.
I got married in 1952 and came over to the U.S. in 1954. In those days invitations to get positions in the U.S. were so instantaneous! When I wrote a letter asking about the availability of U.S. positions, I got a letter back right away. There were post-doctoral positions open, and if I wanted to come they’d send me all the paperwork, and that was amazing! It wasn’t so easy to get a visa to come to the U.S., but in those days there was a fairly strong incentive for the U.S. Embassy to get Japanese to come to the States to study. So it took time, and I had to go through all the health checks and so on, but it was pretty easy. I expected it would be hard for me to live in the U.S. since I was coming from a defeated country, but it turned out that people in the U.S. were very friendly to me. One year later my wife joined me and stayed. It was a wonderful opportunity. I’ve been an atmospheric scientist in the U.S. ever since.