World War II diaries disclose diverse emotions over Japan’s surrender
Samuel H. Yamashita, professor of history at Pomona College in Claremont, in his study on campus on Wednesday. Yamashita’s book called “Daily Life in Wartime 1940-1945,” is expected to be published in November by the University of Kansas Press. (Photo by James Carbone for the San Bernardino Sun)
By Jim Steinberg, San Bernardino Sun
Posted: 08/13/15, 6:58 PM PDT | Updated: 1 day ago
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Samuel H. Yamashita holds “Samurai” by Saburo Sakai,” a book he used as a reference for his book “Daily Life in Wartime 1940-1945.” (Photo by James Carbone for the San Bernardino Sun)
CLAREMONT >> Seventy years ago Friday, millions in Japan — factory and office workers in big cities, farmers in isolated rural communities — huddled around radios for what was to be a major announcement.
It was the first time most had ever heard Emperor Hirohito speak.
There was intense static in the broadcast for many, and the emperor spoke in an archaic version of the Japanese language, using verb tenses unrecognizable to the average citizen, said Samuel H. Yamashita, a professor of history at Pomona College.
But the message for 100 million Japanese citizens was nevertheless clear to all — Japan had surrendered.
Reactions varied widely across the nation among civilians and military personnel, said Yamashita, who has spent the last decade translating and studying published diaries of ordinary Japanese citizens from World War II and the years leading up to it.
His book, “Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940-1945,” is expected to be published in November by the University of Kansas Press.
Void in voices of ordinary Japanese
“I had been teaching (Japanese history) full time for 15 years, when in the mid-1990s I realized there was nothing available in English of the views of ordinary people,” Yamashita said.
At the time, he began searching for diaries, eventually collecting more than 150.
His two-decade project to bring the journals of ordinary Japanese during the war years into the English-speaking world “is a great idea,” said Hakihiro Sano, administrative secretary for the Japanese Chamber of Commerce of Southern California. “It brings insight into the thinking and emotions of Japanese people during World War II. It promotes understanding.”
Stories from a few of Yamashita’s diaries were the subject of an earlier book, “Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies,” published in 2005.
“The Jeweled Sound,” the last chapter of his new book, examines the wide range of emotions expressed in response to Hirohito’s surrender announcement. The title is a reference to the emperor’s voice.
One of the more detailed diaries obtained by Yamashita was written by Tsuchida Shoji, a Japanese army pilot.
As the war neared its end, Shoji had been waiting two weeks for his “special attack” orders, wartime Japanese-speak for a kamikaze suicide mission, Yamashita said.
“For a whole day I had no hope,” Shoji wrote in his journal, agonizing over “the pain of simply passing time idly. When I think about it, ours was a strange fate: A state that was an imperial country for 3,000 years is not a state today.”
Yamashita said that despite censorship, writings in diaries began to show some doubt, starting in 1943, that Japanese — especially women — realized their country might not win the war.
That became clear to more Japanese in October 1944 when the strategy of kamikaze attacks was known and a month later when bombings of the homeland began.
Initially these bombing runs focused on Japan’s industrial might, but in March 1945, low-altitude bombing runs with incendiary devices took aim at the residential sections of large cities.
At the time, Japanese citizens lived in homes made of wood.
“Those were truly hellish times for people living in the big cities,” Yamashita said.
Children expressed the most hostility at the war’s conclusion, he said.
For example, Nakane Mihoko, 9, wrote in her diary: “Watch out, you terrible Americans and British! I will be sure to seek revenge.”
Terada Miyoko, a female college student who had been mobilized to work in a factory and then transferred to the Imperial Headquarters because she spoke English, wrote in her diary:
“At long last, the great announcement that the war had ended was issued. On Aug. 6 the enemy dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. I understood that the magnitude of the damage pained His Majesty.
“The military war has ended, but the next war has begun. This time, we (students) will become the warriors and will have to fight,” she wrote.
“Responses of servicemen to the end of the war differed, depending on where they were on Aug. 15, whether in the home islands or overseas,” Yamashita writes in the new book.
“Their responses also reflected the values, sensibilities and even personalties of their officers and their relationship with the enlisted men they commanded. Although the officers often had to persuade their men to stop fighting, sometimes it was the enlisted men who defied their officers’ orders to keep fighting,” he wrote.
“Soldiers who had been bullied by their superior officers now started to bully them back,” wrote Nakahara Seiichi, who was drafted out of high school in 1945.
Seiichi’s military role was to become a living land mine, lying down on a beach and detonating the mine he and others were wearing as invading enemy tanks approached.
Cruelty by officers
In an interview, Yamashita said Japanese military officers were tremendously cruel to enlisted men, often punching them in the face, hitting them with a shoe or a stick.
“When hearing that the war was over, many enlisted men turned on their officers to vent their long-suppressed resentment and anger,” he wrote.
“In contrast, most of the adults on the home front readily accepted surrender. They had been driven to the edge of physical and mental collapse and were too hungry, tired, or week to resist,” Yamashita writes in “The Jeweled Sound” chapter.
The war period killed more than 2 million Japanese servicemen and 300,000 civilians.
Heading back to his remote village after the war, the former pilot Shoji recalled leaving his home in high spirits some time before.
On the train were soldiers’ bodies.
These men carried with them, when they left for war, the “expectations of the nation” he wrote in his journal.
Now they were “hollow figures tainted with defeat and returning to the end of their journey,” he said.
Reaching home at 5 a.m. after a long walk from the train, Shoji received a warm welcome from family.
But he would quickly realize that returning servicemen, “bearing the dishonor of defeat,” as he wrote in his diary, were not warmly welcomed, Yamashita writes in his new book.
Yamashita said the emperor spoke at noon Tokyo time, the precise time of the surrender.
That evening, at 8 p.m., Shoji was to have taken off for what should have been his kamikaze flight.
Upon returning home, several village residents told him that he was supposed to be dead, Yamashita said.
There was no joy that he had somehow survived.
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