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I Saw Tokyo Burning: An Eyewitness Narrative from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima
A SEASONED OBSERVER'S ACCOUNT OF JAPAN'S DEFEAT . . .
Tokyo was jubilant on December 8, 1941. News of the daring raid on Pearl Harbor brought millions of Japanese spilling into the streets of the sprawling city, waving the Rising Sun flag and toasting with sake the great victories and overwhelming might of Japan's triumphant military. Less than four years later, the island nation lay in ruins, its people homeless., its tinderbox cities destroyed in a holocaust of firestorm and atomic blast. Robert Guillain was there from beginning to end, and his account of the experience is one of the most fascinating documents to emerge from the Pacific War.
Tokyo was jubilant on December 8, 1941. News of the daring raid on Pearl Harbor brought millions of Japanese spilling into the streets of the sprawling city, waving the Rising Sun flag and toasting with sake the great victories and overwhelming might of Japan's triumphant military. Less than four years later, the island nation lay in ruins, its people homeless., its tinderbox cities destroyed in a holocaust of firestorm and atomic blast. Robert Guillain was there from beginning to end, and his account of the experience is one of the most fascinating documents to emerge from the Pacific War.
298 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1947
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About the author
Robert Guillain
21 books3 followersRobert Guillain was a French journalist who spent most of his professional career in Asia as correspondent for the French news agency Agence Havas (since renamed Agence France-Presse) and then for the French daily Le Monde which he joined in 1947.
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June 17, 2025
Robert Guillain was a journalist who worked in Japan for the Agence Havas news service during the Second World War. As such, he had a rare perspective on the conflict, for unlike his American, British and Dutch counterparts, as a French national he was not interned and repatriated after the Imperial Japanese Navy’s attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. This gave him the opportunity to witness the war in relative freedom from his bureau in Tokyo, a position afforded to few other Westerners.
This book is a product of that experience. It is far more than just a memoir, however, for while France was a participant in the conflict, their understandable focus on events in Europe left the war in Asia one unfamiliar to most of Guillain’s countrymen. His response to this is reflected in the narrative, which glosses over most of his personal experiences in favor of a narrative describing the political and social developments within Japan during the war. Given the secretiveness of the Japanese government and the limited information they provided to their citizens, much of this account is supplemented by postwar reporting and the revelations it produced. The synthesis Guillain produces from this conveys both the details of developments within the Japanese war effort and the opacity experienced by the population throughout much of it. In his narrative, theirs was a war in which its developments were sensed by them rather than known.
These sensations are made explicit from the start of the book. He begins by recounting the experience of the announcement of war with the United States. The guarded wariness with which Tokyo residents initially greeted the news was soon replaced by a euphoria fueled by the news of Japan’s succession of victories. As a professional journalist, Guillain assesses the media coverage of the war with an experienced eye, noting how information was framed for the public’s consumption. As the government downplayed or distorted the growing number of reverses as the war went on, he explains how it was possible for ordinary Japanese to piece together a rough sense of the course of the war, one aided at times by the more accurate reporting of the concurrent fates of their German and Italian allies.
Yet there was no more important measure of the war’s progress for the population than the growing deprivations and exactions imposed upon their lives. Guillain notes the evidence that could be found in their very appearance, in their undernourished faces and shoddy clothing, as more and more was demanded from them in service to the insatiable war effort. Nor was Guillain himself spared, as his descriptions of the thriving black market have an element of personal familiarity to them, as does his description of the omnipresent police surveillance under which he and the Japanese increasingly found themselves.
This oppressive atmosphere insulated Japan’s leadership from the consequences of their mismanaged war. Guillain devotes a considerable amount of his text to summarizing the battles among the various generals and admirals who made up the wartime government. Tojo Hideki is at the forefront of his narrative, and his heavy-handed efforts to manage the political scene are recounted in detail. Even after the fall of Saipan – the point at which many among Japan’s leadership recognized that the war was no longer winnable – Tojo made a last, desperate bid to hold onto power, only to discover the depths of his rejection by the military establishment.
Guillain shows that Tojo’s overdue departure did nothing to lessen the leadership’s determination to end the war on their own terms, however. This increasingly came at the cost of the nation’s future, as first university students then even younger boys were conscripted to die in suicidal attacks on the advancing American fleet. By this point, however, the Japanese people had an even more visible example of their declining fortunes, as American Superfortress bombers began appearing regularly in the skies over Japan. Guillain’s firsthand description of their attacks – including the devastating fire-bombing of Tokyo on 9/10 March 1945 – are among the best parts of the book, as he explains in terrifying detail the experience of the bombings and their impact on the Japanese people. His empathy for their suffering undoubtedly informs his reaction to horrors of the Hiroshima bombing, yet his own narrative makes it difficult to see how Japan would have surrendered when it did without it.
The author spent the final months of the war interned in Karuizawa with his fellow Westerners. As with the rest of his narrative, he summarizes these experiences only briefly in favor of his focus on recounting the overall development of the war for Japan. This relative omission is the most disappointing aspect of the book, as Guillain passes on an opportunity to describe the experiences of the French community in wartime Japan that he was ideally placed to recount. This absence is clearly by choice, however, as Guillain wrote the book he believed his audience was interested in reading. It’s a story that is all the more engaging for the author’s telling eye and elegant pen, which is ably conveyed by William Byron’s translation into a work that provides a perspective on the war that is too often absent from most English-language works. Because of this, it deserves far better recognition as an account of the conflict than it enjoys today.
This book is a product of that experience. It is far more than just a memoir, however, for while France was a participant in the conflict, their understandable focus on events in Europe left the war in Asia one unfamiliar to most of Guillain’s countrymen. His response to this is reflected in the narrative, which glosses over most of his personal experiences in favor of a narrative describing the political and social developments within Japan during the war. Given the secretiveness of the Japanese government and the limited information they provided to their citizens, much of this account is supplemented by postwar reporting and the revelations it produced. The synthesis Guillain produces from this conveys both the details of developments within the Japanese war effort and the opacity experienced by the population throughout much of it. In his narrative, theirs was a war in which its developments were sensed by them rather than known.
These sensations are made explicit from the start of the book. He begins by recounting the experience of the announcement of war with the United States. The guarded wariness with which Tokyo residents initially greeted the news was soon replaced by a euphoria fueled by the news of Japan’s succession of victories. As a professional journalist, Guillain assesses the media coverage of the war with an experienced eye, noting how information was framed for the public’s consumption. As the government downplayed or distorted the growing number of reverses as the war went on, he explains how it was possible for ordinary Japanese to piece together a rough sense of the course of the war, one aided at times by the more accurate reporting of the concurrent fates of their German and Italian allies.
Yet there was no more important measure of the war’s progress for the population than the growing deprivations and exactions imposed upon their lives. Guillain notes the evidence that could be found in their very appearance, in their undernourished faces and shoddy clothing, as more and more was demanded from them in service to the insatiable war effort. Nor was Guillain himself spared, as his descriptions of the thriving black market have an element of personal familiarity to them, as does his description of the omnipresent police surveillance under which he and the Japanese increasingly found themselves.
This oppressive atmosphere insulated Japan’s leadership from the consequences of their mismanaged war. Guillain devotes a considerable amount of his text to summarizing the battles among the various generals and admirals who made up the wartime government. Tojo Hideki is at the forefront of his narrative, and his heavy-handed efforts to manage the political scene are recounted in detail. Even after the fall of Saipan – the point at which many among Japan’s leadership recognized that the war was no longer winnable – Tojo made a last, desperate bid to hold onto power, only to discover the depths of his rejection by the military establishment.
Guillain shows that Tojo’s overdue departure did nothing to lessen the leadership’s determination to end the war on their own terms, however. This increasingly came at the cost of the nation’s future, as first university students then even younger boys were conscripted to die in suicidal attacks on the advancing American fleet. By this point, however, the Japanese people had an even more visible example of their declining fortunes, as American Superfortress bombers began appearing regularly in the skies over Japan. Guillain’s firsthand description of their attacks – including the devastating fire-bombing of Tokyo on 9/10 March 1945 – are among the best parts of the book, as he explains in terrifying detail the experience of the bombings and their impact on the Japanese people. His empathy for their suffering undoubtedly informs his reaction to horrors of the Hiroshima bombing, yet his own narrative makes it difficult to see how Japan would have surrendered when it did without it.
The author spent the final months of the war interned in Karuizawa with his fellow Westerners. As with the rest of his narrative, he summarizes these experiences only briefly in favor of his focus on recounting the overall development of the war for Japan. This relative omission is the most disappointing aspect of the book, as Guillain passes on an opportunity to describe the experiences of the French community in wartime Japan that he was ideally placed to recount. This absence is clearly by choice, however, as Guillain wrote the book he believed his audience was interested in reading. It’s a story that is all the more engaging for the author’s telling eye and elegant pen, which is ably conveyed by William Byron’s translation into a work that provides a perspective on the war that is too often absent from most English-language works. Because of this, it deserves far better recognition as an account of the conflict than it enjoys today.
February 24, 2016
This is an excellent book with lots and lots of information. I've put some of the most important things, in my opinion, below.
Japanese goofs right off
Japan was supposed to have declared war before their attack on Pearl Harbor, but due to problems at their embassy in Washington, DC, the declaration of war was not communicated to our government before the attack.
Japan's defeat was inevitable.
The author notes that “at the time, there was not a single foreigner living in Tokyo to whom that folly was not glaringly evident. Not one of the foreign observers whose painful privilege it was to watch the march of events closely failed to forsee from the very first day that the disproportion between the United States and Japan must sooner or later lead to an American victory.”
Attitude of the Japanese People
“...the Japanese citizen regained his self-confidence-more, he saw his victories as confirmation of his old notion that Ajapan was, after all, invincible. More than ever, Japan forgot that its invincibility was one of the legends taught it by its leaders.”
“Official propaganda..portrayed the war in facile imagery with a victory obligatory at each phase and, at each, a new hero...The fleet was called, with Homeric splendor, the 'invincible navy'; fliers were 'Japan's wild eagles', the dead, of course, were 'hero-gods.'”
Non-Japanese in the country during the war
“...not only was every white person living in Japan considered an active or potential spy, but every Japanese was expected to keep permanent watch on foreigners and report their every act to the police.”
“Gaijin's servants were forever being questioned by the police, who expected them to report on an employer's comings and goings, to take note of the visits he paid or received, listen to his telephone conversations (which in any case were tapped and often recorded by the police), learn his opinions, admit a police officer to the house and hide him, if necessary, in a place where he could see or hear the employer, or allow him to search the place in the tenant's absence.”
The Japanese government deceived its own people
“On the afternoon of May 9, 1942, Tokyo Radio announced with great fanfare that a major naval engagement had taken place in the previous two days in the Coral Sea....in a sensational communique, Commander Hiraide, the Japanese admiralty spokesman, announced a great victory.” Actually, it wasn't a victory. It was a failed invasion in which damage was heavy to both sides, but ultimately the invasion of New Guinea and Australia was blocked and the Japanese expansion was stopped.
“One month after the 'Japanese victory' in the Coral Sea, the admiralty announced a new triumph, off Midway Island.” This overlooked two things. First, Midway was definitely a loss, and a major one at that, for the Japanese. Secondly, the battle was North of the previous “great victory” of the Japanese, but no explanation was given to the Japanese people of why the fighting seemed to be going the wrong direction.
The author gives the statistics for the battle; the Japanese lost 3 aircraft carriers right off and the fourth was finished off by a sub. One heavy cruiser was sunk, 6 other vessels damaged, 300 Japanese planes destroyed, and 3,500 Japanese seamen and fliers were killed. The Americans lost 1 aircraft carrier, one destroyer, and 150 planes.
“...the truth about Midway was hidden from the Son of Heaven [the Emperor] himself. Information I received later indicated that the false reports used to trick the Japanese public were also given to the Emperor.”
An entire new term was coined by the Japanese for their defeat at Guadalcanal. The term was “backward deployment.” In other words, the Japanese forces were “advancing backwards.”
Yamamoto
The great Japanese admiral “in 1952...had insistently opposed war with the United States. The admiral...had declared in an argument with Tojo at the beginning of the war that the Japanese Navy would suffer its first defeats within a year.” He ended up being proved correct.
Women and Children in the war effort
“Children went to work in the factories at the age of twelve or thirteen, recruited by the government itself; boys were drafted into the labor service as soon as they finished grade school....Hundreds of thousands of women worked inf factories, especially in the aircraft plants.” Women even worked in the mines.
Balloon Bombs
Germany had its secret weapons, the V1 and V2 rockets. Japan had its own; its paper balloons. One fine day in 1944, press and radio, fresh from a campaign to develop scientific warfare, issued sensational details about the balloon bombs which, they said, were sowing panic all along the United States West Coast.
These amazing paper gadgets, thirty-three feet in diameter and inflated with hydrogen, were simply released into the wind on the coast of Japan; the honorable wind was requested to carry them to the United States, where they would release their charge upon the heads of the terrified Americans. Each carried a payload of some fifty pounds, half explosive and half incendiary; it was calculated that they would reach their destination in thirty hours, when they were detonated by a time fuse. The first 'attack on America' was made in December 1943 in reprisal for the Doolittle raid on Tokyo. Two hundred were released in February-March 1944, but the really massive ballon bomb offensive took place between November 1944 and March 1945, when 9,000 were cast off, at a cost of 10,000 yen each. According to figures released after the war, 90 per cent of them vanished at sea; those that did reach the American coast exploded over forests and mountains, far from populated areas. And what was the total number of this secret weapon's casualties for the entirety of the war? Six. [All civilians.]”
apanese propaganda leads to deaths
This is in relation to the fall of Saipan. “These ordinary people, including many women and children, had been terrorized by their official propagandists into believing tha the Americans were brutes of whom they could expect nothing but rape and murder. So most of the civilians hid in the caves that speckled the island's high cliffs. At the Americans' approach, many blew themselves up with grenades deep inside the caves or at the cave mouths. Mothers strangled their children with their own hands. Girls and woman, after donning their funeral clothes and ceremoniously arranging their hair at the edge of the sheer cliffs, threw themselves down before the eyes of American soldiers who watchid their bodies break up on the rocks or disappear into the ocean.
Could the War have ended earlier?
“highly placed people in the Koiso cabinet and outside of it seriously considered ending the war in the autumn of 1944... But the partisans of all-out war had a powerful argument handed to them by the Allies themselves; they knew that the Japanese surrender would have to be unconditional.” This was interpreted by many of the Japanese as meaning that their Emperor would have to go, maybe even be tried as a war criminal. They just couldn't accept that. I've seen this problem referred to in other books, too, where some people tried to pressure the U.S. Government into dropping its “unconditional” demand.
Kamikaze attacks and civilians
“The Imperial Staff announcement and the flamboyant comments that surrounded it were not designed merely to reveal the heroism of Japan's fliers; they were also a maneuver for combating defeatism in the government, and they kicked off a campaign to persuade the Hundred Million that everyone would shortly be called on to commit national suicide for the Emperor.”
Colonel Kingoro Hashimoto, leader of the youth brigades of the Imperial Rule Association, in a broadcast said “The time has come when, like the soldiers at the front, the people in the rear must also transform themselves into human bombs. The Hundred Million must all resolve to die for the Emperor!”
“From the Tokyo region to Kagoshima, on Kyushu...there was no one in that late spring of 1945 who did not know that the war was lost and defeat would be total. ...Yet the Hundred Million remained absolutely obedient to the leaders who had brought them to this. The propaganda ceaselessly inundating this docile herd remained unchanged. Indeed, the exhortations to national suicide had never been so clamorous. “
The Incendiary Bombing
In relation to the bombing of Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1944, the author says some official Japanese records estimated the dead and missing at 197,000.
More on Kamikaze attacks
“The damage inflicted by the kamikaze planes on the American fleet was heavy enough to worry the naval command.. Drydocks on the American West Coast soon were so overloaded with work that the most heavily damaged vessels were sent around to the Atlantic coast for repair.”
“At the end of May , the admiralty in Tokyo issued a drum-beating announcement of a new suicide weapon being used by navy planes at Okinawa...which were given the name of ohka (cherry blossoms). ... The Americans confirmed this later on. Japan's secret weapon, famous among Yankee soldiers as the baka bomb. ... Towed like a glider by a medium bomber, it was released just before it reached the battle area, propelled by three rocket engines until its pilot could dive into his chosen target at up to 550 miles an hour. The craft had no landing gear; it was on a one-way flight.”
[In the battle for Okinawa] “...naval losses to the kamikaze and ohka planes and standard Japanese bombers were greater than had been supposed. From the time they went into action until the atomic bomb fell, the kamikazes sand 36 ships, including 3 aircraft carriers, and damaged 369, among them 36 carriers of various classes, 15 battleships, 15 cruisers, 87 destroyers.”
[Referring to late in the war] “There was nothing voluntary about the program but its name now; the consent of future human bombs was no longer required. The most optimistic estimates gave Japan barely ten thousand planes; only three thousand were modern, the rest a sort of flying flea market of planets of every age and model. ... In southern Japan the navy was training men in great secrecy to handle other suicide weapons; torpedo launches that would explode with their occupants against the flanks of American battleships; diving rigs that would provide underwater protection for the coasts under attack and would enable the divers to dynamite enemy hulls.”
Underground Fortress
“North of Tokyo, in the Nagano Mountains in the heart of Japan, the last redoubt of future resistance was being organized...near the ruins of the castle of Sanada, hundreds of Koreans were at work on a shelter for the Emperor.
Against the use of the atomic bomb
“Eisenhower, especially, was vehemently opposed to using the bomb, declaring it 'completely unnecessary' because, he said, Japan was already beaten and ready to surrender. ... Three groups of scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners, appealed urgently against using the weapon; one of the appeals carried seventy-five very well known signatures. The appeals were intercepted by General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, and withheld from Truman.”
7 Arguments against the use of the atomic bomb
1. The bomb's power could have been demonstrated by dropping it, say, on a desert island on a lightly populated one close to the Japanese coast. This was proposed, notably by a number of scientists, but the idea was rejected by American military leaders.
2. Even without a demonstration, the Japanese nation could have been informed of the bomb's existence and its incredible power and warned of what Japan could expect if it continued the war. This was also turned down in the United States.
3. The bomb could have been used against a purely military target, thus at least sparing the civilian population. But U.S. Strategists deliberately chose a mixed objective; that is, a city where a single strike could hit both a military installation and a large, surrounding civilian population, for its terror effect.
4. The population of Hiroshima could have been told by radio, in leaflets, etc, to evacuate it within a specified period and advised to watch the destruction of their empty city from a distance.
5.Even after Hiroshima, Nagasaki might have been spared. The first bomb might have been excusable. The second was useless slaughter. Nagasaki added nothing to the wholly convincing lesson of Hiroshima.
6. Peace could have been pursued through the Japanese approach to the Soviet Union. Truman...could at least have opened negotiations through Moscow.
7. The phrase “unconditional surrender” could have been eliminated in the first place from the ultimatum to Japan. ... To the military extremists in japan, unconditional surrender meant the certain or probably abolition of Imperial rule and they used this as a convincing argument for continued resistance.
Japanese goofs right off
Japan was supposed to have declared war before their attack on Pearl Harbor, but due to problems at their embassy in Washington, DC, the declaration of war was not communicated to our government before the attack.
Japan's defeat was inevitable.
The author notes that “at the time, there was not a single foreigner living in Tokyo to whom that folly was not glaringly evident. Not one of the foreign observers whose painful privilege it was to watch the march of events closely failed to forsee from the very first day that the disproportion between the United States and Japan must sooner or later lead to an American victory.”
Attitude of the Japanese People
“...the Japanese citizen regained his self-confidence-more, he saw his victories as confirmation of his old notion that Ajapan was, after all, invincible. More than ever, Japan forgot that its invincibility was one of the legends taught it by its leaders.”
“Official propaganda..portrayed the war in facile imagery with a victory obligatory at each phase and, at each, a new hero...The fleet was called, with Homeric splendor, the 'invincible navy'; fliers were 'Japan's wild eagles', the dead, of course, were 'hero-gods.'”
Non-Japanese in the country during the war
“...not only was every white person living in Japan considered an active or potential spy, but every Japanese was expected to keep permanent watch on foreigners and report their every act to the police.”
“Gaijin's servants were forever being questioned by the police, who expected them to report on an employer's comings and goings, to take note of the visits he paid or received, listen to his telephone conversations (which in any case were tapped and often recorded by the police), learn his opinions, admit a police officer to the house and hide him, if necessary, in a place where he could see or hear the employer, or allow him to search the place in the tenant's absence.”
The Japanese government deceived its own people
“On the afternoon of May 9, 1942, Tokyo Radio announced with great fanfare that a major naval engagement had taken place in the previous two days in the Coral Sea....in a sensational communique, Commander Hiraide, the Japanese admiralty spokesman, announced a great victory.” Actually, it wasn't a victory. It was a failed invasion in which damage was heavy to both sides, but ultimately the invasion of New Guinea and Australia was blocked and the Japanese expansion was stopped.
“One month after the 'Japanese victory' in the Coral Sea, the admiralty announced a new triumph, off Midway Island.” This overlooked two things. First, Midway was definitely a loss, and a major one at that, for the Japanese. Secondly, the battle was North of the previous “great victory” of the Japanese, but no explanation was given to the Japanese people of why the fighting seemed to be going the wrong direction.
The author gives the statistics for the battle; the Japanese lost 3 aircraft carriers right off and the fourth was finished off by a sub. One heavy cruiser was sunk, 6 other vessels damaged, 300 Japanese planes destroyed, and 3,500 Japanese seamen and fliers were killed. The Americans lost 1 aircraft carrier, one destroyer, and 150 planes.
“...the truth about Midway was hidden from the Son of Heaven [the Emperor] himself. Information I received later indicated that the false reports used to trick the Japanese public were also given to the Emperor.”
An entire new term was coined by the Japanese for their defeat at Guadalcanal. The term was “backward deployment.” In other words, the Japanese forces were “advancing backwards.”
Yamamoto
The great Japanese admiral “in 1952...had insistently opposed war with the United States. The admiral...had declared in an argument with Tojo at the beginning of the war that the Japanese Navy would suffer its first defeats within a year.” He ended up being proved correct.
Women and Children in the war effort
“Children went to work in the factories at the age of twelve or thirteen, recruited by the government itself; boys were drafted into the labor service as soon as they finished grade school....Hundreds of thousands of women worked inf factories, especially in the aircraft plants.” Women even worked in the mines.
Balloon Bombs
Germany had its secret weapons, the V1 and V2 rockets. Japan had its own; its paper balloons. One fine day in 1944, press and radio, fresh from a campaign to develop scientific warfare, issued sensational details about the balloon bombs which, they said, were sowing panic all along the United States West Coast.
These amazing paper gadgets, thirty-three feet in diameter and inflated with hydrogen, were simply released into the wind on the coast of Japan; the honorable wind was requested to carry them to the United States, where they would release their charge upon the heads of the terrified Americans. Each carried a payload of some fifty pounds, half explosive and half incendiary; it was calculated that they would reach their destination in thirty hours, when they were detonated by a time fuse. The first 'attack on America' was made in December 1943 in reprisal for the Doolittle raid on Tokyo. Two hundred were released in February-March 1944, but the really massive ballon bomb offensive took place between November 1944 and March 1945, when 9,000 were cast off, at a cost of 10,000 yen each. According to figures released after the war, 90 per cent of them vanished at sea; those that did reach the American coast exploded over forests and mountains, far from populated areas. And what was the total number of this secret weapon's casualties for the entirety of the war? Six. [All civilians.]”
apanese propaganda leads to deaths
This is in relation to the fall of Saipan. “These ordinary people, including many women and children, had been terrorized by their official propagandists into believing tha the Americans were brutes of whom they could expect nothing but rape and murder. So most of the civilians hid in the caves that speckled the island's high cliffs. At the Americans' approach, many blew themselves up with grenades deep inside the caves or at the cave mouths. Mothers strangled their children with their own hands. Girls and woman, after donning their funeral clothes and ceremoniously arranging their hair at the edge of the sheer cliffs, threw themselves down before the eyes of American soldiers who watchid their bodies break up on the rocks or disappear into the ocean.
Could the War have ended earlier?
“highly placed people in the Koiso cabinet and outside of it seriously considered ending the war in the autumn of 1944... But the partisans of all-out war had a powerful argument handed to them by the Allies themselves; they knew that the Japanese surrender would have to be unconditional.” This was interpreted by many of the Japanese as meaning that their Emperor would have to go, maybe even be tried as a war criminal. They just couldn't accept that. I've seen this problem referred to in other books, too, where some people tried to pressure the U.S. Government into dropping its “unconditional” demand.
Kamikaze attacks and civilians
“The Imperial Staff announcement and the flamboyant comments that surrounded it were not designed merely to reveal the heroism of Japan's fliers; they were also a maneuver for combating defeatism in the government, and they kicked off a campaign to persuade the Hundred Million that everyone would shortly be called on to commit national suicide for the Emperor.”
Colonel Kingoro Hashimoto, leader of the youth brigades of the Imperial Rule Association, in a broadcast said “The time has come when, like the soldiers at the front, the people in the rear must also transform themselves into human bombs. The Hundred Million must all resolve to die for the Emperor!”
“From the Tokyo region to Kagoshima, on Kyushu...there was no one in that late spring of 1945 who did not know that the war was lost and defeat would be total. ...Yet the Hundred Million remained absolutely obedient to the leaders who had brought them to this. The propaganda ceaselessly inundating this docile herd remained unchanged. Indeed, the exhortations to national suicide had never been so clamorous. “
The Incendiary Bombing
In relation to the bombing of Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1944, the author says some official Japanese records estimated the dead and missing at 197,000.
More on Kamikaze attacks
“The damage inflicted by the kamikaze planes on the American fleet was heavy enough to worry the naval command.. Drydocks on the American West Coast soon were so overloaded with work that the most heavily damaged vessels were sent around to the Atlantic coast for repair.”
“At the end of May , the admiralty in Tokyo issued a drum-beating announcement of a new suicide weapon being used by navy planes at Okinawa...which were given the name of ohka (cherry blossoms). ... The Americans confirmed this later on. Japan's secret weapon, famous among Yankee soldiers as the baka bomb. ... Towed like a glider by a medium bomber, it was released just before it reached the battle area, propelled by three rocket engines until its pilot could dive into his chosen target at up to 550 miles an hour. The craft had no landing gear; it was on a one-way flight.”
[In the battle for Okinawa] “...naval losses to the kamikaze and ohka planes and standard Japanese bombers were greater than had been supposed. From the time they went into action until the atomic bomb fell, the kamikazes sand 36 ships, including 3 aircraft carriers, and damaged 369, among them 36 carriers of various classes, 15 battleships, 15 cruisers, 87 destroyers.”
[Referring to late in the war] “There was nothing voluntary about the program but its name now; the consent of future human bombs was no longer required. The most optimistic estimates gave Japan barely ten thousand planes; only three thousand were modern, the rest a sort of flying flea market of planets of every age and model. ... In southern Japan the navy was training men in great secrecy to handle other suicide weapons; torpedo launches that would explode with their occupants against the flanks of American battleships; diving rigs that would provide underwater protection for the coasts under attack and would enable the divers to dynamite enemy hulls.”
Underground Fortress
“North of Tokyo, in the Nagano Mountains in the heart of Japan, the last redoubt of future resistance was being organized...near the ruins of the castle of Sanada, hundreds of Koreans were at work on a shelter for the Emperor.
Against the use of the atomic bomb
“Eisenhower, especially, was vehemently opposed to using the bomb, declaring it 'completely unnecessary' because, he said, Japan was already beaten and ready to surrender. ... Three groups of scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners, appealed urgently against using the weapon; one of the appeals carried seventy-five very well known signatures. The appeals were intercepted by General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, and withheld from Truman.”
7 Arguments against the use of the atomic bomb
1. The bomb's power could have been demonstrated by dropping it, say, on a desert island on a lightly populated one close to the Japanese coast. This was proposed, notably by a number of scientists, but the idea was rejected by American military leaders.
2. Even without a demonstration, the Japanese nation could have been informed of the bomb's existence and its incredible power and warned of what Japan could expect if it continued the war. This was also turned down in the United States.
3. The bomb could have been used against a purely military target, thus at least sparing the civilian population. But U.S. Strategists deliberately chose a mixed objective; that is, a city where a single strike could hit both a military installation and a large, surrounding civilian population, for its terror effect.
4. The population of Hiroshima could have been told by radio, in leaflets, etc, to evacuate it within a specified period and advised to watch the destruction of their empty city from a distance.
5.Even after Hiroshima, Nagasaki might have been spared. The first bomb might have been excusable. The second was useless slaughter. Nagasaki added nothing to the wholly convincing lesson of Hiroshima.
6. Peace could have been pursued through the Japanese approach to the Soviet Union. Truman...could at least have opened negotiations through Moscow.
7. The phrase “unconditional surrender” could have been eliminated in the first place from the ultimatum to Japan. ... To the military extremists in japan, unconditional surrender meant the certain or probably abolition of Imperial rule and they used this as a convincing argument for continued resistance.
October 11, 2018
Author Guillain was a French correspondent in Tokyo, the German conquest of the north and ostensible neutrality of the south of the country allowing him and his countrymen to remain at large, albeit under police scrutiny, in Japan during WWII. His book combines an overview of the Pacific/Asian theatre of the war with personal reminiscences as well as some informed speculation about the mechanations of Japan's elites behind the scenes. The book ends with an attempt to explain how it was that the Japanese so peacefully accepted occupation after their surrender.
September 1, 2015
Doskonała książka- opis 2 wojny światowej na Pacyfiku z perspektywy francuskiego dziennikarze, który utknął w Tokio. Przejmujący, bezpośredni i niezwykle prawdziwy przekaz czynią z tej na poły historycznej na poły reporterskiej książki fantastyczną lekturę.
November 14, 2008
Reading this book has taught me more than I imagined it would.
Needing background for my book I not only got factual descriptions about Tokyo but an understanding of the Japanese government, military, and most importantly, the "Hundred Million" Japanese citizens living in Tokyo. Understanding some of the background leading up to WWII, the lack of information given to the people, and the horror of living in Tokyo has helped give me a platform upon which I can develop my story more accurately.
Needing background for my book I not only got factual descriptions about Tokyo but an understanding of the Japanese government, military, and most importantly, the "Hundred Million" Japanese citizens living in Tokyo. Understanding some of the background leading up to WWII, the lack of information given to the people, and the horror of living in Tokyo has helped give me a platform upon which I can develop my story more accurately.
September 26, 2010
A first-hand look at Tokyo during WWII from a Frenchman. His account of the underrepresented Tokyo fire bombings on March 9-10 is harrowing and eye-opening to Curtis LeMay's scorched earth philosophies. This one night of bombing by his B29s killed more than the nuclear bombs on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
August 21, 2021
The rating is lowered because of spelling/translation inconsistencies. Otherwise an amazing book that presents an eyewitness account of the Pacific war as reported in Japan.
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