Wow ..reading that article and knowing all those names of towns and cities in Kyushu so well , as I have lived near them for 20 years ...Saga , Kurume , Takanabe , etc...
Thank you Homer for this fine post.
1) Some of the headlines of the English-language Nippon Times (today the Japan Times) announcing the Hiroshima bombing here
2) A copy of the orders for the Hiroshima bombing here
these articles are so interesting......
I did not know that Japan had a fuel from coal manufacturing ability in 1945
There was a very informative piece on rationing
Based on the ads, furs and pajamas are not rationed
BOOKMARK
It's an old adage that Americans smile because they are happy, while Japanese smile because they want you to be happy. The Japanese think they are doing Americans a favor by fake-smiling, but the usual result is that Americans think they have been hoodwinked by slant-eyed liars, which is one of the emotional reasons for the hatred of Japan during WWII.
There is a Japanese equivalent to this, by the way. I'll just give one example. When you visit a home in Japan, you bring something to eat (cookies, crackers, etc.), to repay the host for the trouble of letting you in the home. The host then asks you if you want some tea. You always say no. The host then serves it to you and him/herself anyway, along with whatever you brought; you and the host drink the host's tea, and the host and you eat the guest's sweets, and that way you establish a harmonic connection. So a Japanese comes to an American home with something to eat. The American expresses gratitude for the gift, takes it into the kitchen, and leaves it there, because it would be impolite to serve a guest his/her own gift. The American then asks the Japanese if s/he would like something to drink, and the Japanese says no. The American then takes the Japanese at his/her word, makes something for him/herself, and visits with the Japanese, who is neither eating nor drinking, and is also greatly insulted--but who is smiling profusely because s/he wants the American to be happy, all the while slow-burning inside, while the American thinks s/he is being a great host, the proof of which is how happy the Japanese is acting.
That's a very roundabout nemawashi way to say that Imabari was bombed just as much as any other city in Japan, and there are two paragraphs about it in today's edition. I am sitting in front of my computer this morning, thinking about how Imabari looked all the times I was there, and it hits me: there were no pre-war buildings anywhere. (The castle is a copy of the original, but that is true throughout most of Japan, and it was because most of the castles were torn down after the Meiji Restoration, in the 1870s.) Every once in a while, for someone who lived in Japan, and who has studied Japanese culture for decades, I can be a naïve American, and get hoodwinked, believing Japanese who tell me what they think I want to hear.
But I will return to something I said yesterday: if we're bombing a schlub place like Imabari in August 1945, we're running out of places to bomb in Japan. If all the incendiary bombing in the world wasn't going to end the war--and on August 6, 1945, that was becoming painfully obvious to both sides--it was going to take at least two atomic bombs.
Tomorrow’s reporting should be interesting. How much info about “the bomb” was released?
The Japanese never felt as though they had to apologize either. Not so much to us but to the Chinese, Filipinos, Indonesians, Burmese or Malaysians. Those were the people who suffered the most. Maybe its just not in their culture to admit to it.
I waited until today to respond to this, because it relates to "today."
As I see it, there are two reasons the Japanese balk at apologizing. The first relates to their take on Confucianism. Confucian thinking is group-centered: every group is organized according to the family-hierarchy model (father, eldest son, other sons, mother, eldest dtr, other dtrs), where each person in the hierarchy owes allegiance to those above, and responsibility for the wellbeing of those below. A Japanese who does well honors the group, while one who does poorly shames the group, and it is the group that keeps everyone in line.
A Japanese lives in a series of concentric circles, with the family being innermost, then the widening circles of the business, the neighborhood, any hobby groups (such as joining a school of tea ceremony), the "clan" (intergenerational interfamilies), and then the widest circle, the nation-race.
But that is where the circles end, and anyone outside of the circles is gaijin, written as 外人. The second symbol means "person," but look at the first symbol--and here I am going to engage in a form of deconstructionism, though in this case I think it fits. Technically, the first symbol is made up of the rising moon on the left, and a tortoise shell on the right, meaning a diviner, someone whom you consult in the evening. But only a kanji scholar would "get" the connection. A more prosaic observation is that it looks like someone trying to push in a door, the handle of which is controlled on the inside--in other words, someone who wants to be let in. As far as most Japanese are concerned, there are only two types of people in the world, the Japanese and those who wish they could have been born Japanese, but who will (in this incarnation) have to suffer the indignity of not being Japanese.
The word "foreigner" in English means someone from another country: in English, an American is a foreigner in Germany, and a German is a foreigner in America. But gaijin doesn't mean this: it means a person who is not Japanese. I am a gaijin in Japan, but I am still a gaijin in America, and a Japanese does not become a gaijin upon landing on American shores, s/he is always a Nihonjin 日本人, a person 人 from the origin 本 of the sun 日.
This leads us to the first reason Japan doesn't apologize: according to its own brand of Confucianism, all non-Japanese are gaijin, not part of any Confucian group. There is no shame in mistreating a non-Japanese, unless the non-Japanese happens to be one's guest, and in WWII, none of the conquered people were considered guests. The only Japanese who apologize come in one of three flavors: those who do it for self-serving reasons, such as Japanese businesses wanting to do business overseas; Christians, who see all people as God's children; those Japanese whose Confucianism has expanded to include the whole world in the largest circle.
That is the first reason. For the second reason, look to Hiroshima.
From today's description of the bombing, of people wandering in the immediate aftermath: "It was a parade of wraiths, an evocation of Buddhist hell." If there is one thing the Japanese and the Americans agree upon concerning Hiroshima, it is that the bomb was payback--but if you dig deeper, you find that the agreement really isn't an agreement.
To Americans, Hiroshima is the counterbalance to Pearl Harbor: you hit us, well by God we'll hit you back so that you'll never hit us again. The proof of the result of such an act is an apology by the initial aggressor, that he shouldn't have done what he did, he's sorry, and he won't do it again.
But to the Japanese, Hiroshima is karma, in the strict Buddhist sense. It would take a long discussion to explain it in full, but karma is not only what happens to you because of bad things you do: it is also the expiation of those bad things, so that when you are finished with your karma, you are free to resume your trek towards nirvana.
In a awkward sense, America gave Japan an enormous gift on August 6, 1945, and again three days later: it gave Japan karma for all of the nefarious deeds the Japanese had done, so that while the Japanese had hurt others in a way never before seen in modern history, the Japanese themselves--and remember, all Japanese see themselves as part of the nihonjin family--had also suffered in a way never before seen in modern history, so now they were free to remove the shackles of militarism and continue as part of a peaceful and one-day prosperous Japan.
(One proof of this, by the way, is the 1956 movie Harp of Burma, about a Japanese soldier who becomes a Buddhist monk, remaining in Burma after the war as part of the expiation, spending his life burying the bodies of Japanese soldiers there.)
In short, they don't have to apologize to us, because we're not Japanese, and in any case they got their karma, handed to them on a B-29 platter.
Navy Hawaii Mars crashes
Thank you for doing this long series. I have not commented on it before, but I have read many of the articles and find them fascinating. My father served in Europe and even won a medal for bravery. Again, thank you for all of the work that you did to post these many many articles.
Bomb Assembly Kit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alberta
Groves sent Kirkpatrick to supervise construction on Tinian by the Seabees of the 6th Naval Construction Brigade. Four air-conditioned Quonset huts of a type normally used for bombsight repair were provided for laboratory and instrument work. There were five warehouses, a shop building, and assembly, ordnance and administrative buildings. Ramsey overcame the problem of how to ship through the San Francisco Port of Embarkation. The port wanted a detailed list of what was being sent so it could track it to ensure delivery, but what needed to be shipped was still subject to last-minute change. He simply designated everything as a “bomb assembly kit”. Three of these, one for Little Boy, one for Fat Man and one spare, were shipped to Tinian,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Camel
The commander of Project Alberta, Captain Deak Parsons, had four bomb assembly kits produced. These kits were fully contained facilities, which included a number of Quonset huts with air conditioning. Two were shipped to the Pacific island of Tinian, where the atomic bombs were assembled. One was kept as a spare at Wendover, and one was erected at Inyokern, where it was used to assemble the explosive but non-nuclear pumpkin bombs for testing.[9]
There is a discrepancy of where the spare went. I would suggest that both are true. The spare from Tinian was shipped back after the war?
Frequently the history for which we can all be most grateful is the history that doesn't happen.