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The Japanese themselves were torn by mixed emotions. In Hiroshima itself, some American prisoners of war who had survived the explosion hidden in a cellar were found and beaten to death. But the majority of Japanese viewed the disaster as they would a great calamity of nature.3 Kimura Yasuko later recorded that the bomb did not make her hate the Americans. In the two years before the bomb, life had been horrible and heartbreaking as city after city across Japan had been consumed by incendiary attacks.4 Some 3 million Japanese had been killed since the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and millions more had been wounded, bereaved or made homeless. The country was so utterly devastated that the incoming victors were astonished that it had held out for so long. The bomb finally ended that resistance. Some Japanese fainted when the high-pitched voice of Emperor Hirohito was heard over the radio, conceding defeat in stilted, formal Japanese. A few militarists and patriots committed suicide, while many other Japanese were shamed to the bottom of their hearts by their country’s defeat and awaited the coming of the Americans with trepidation. Others quietly rejoiced in the knowledge that the imperial house and the nation had at least survived. Hundreds of thousands of their young men would now escape almost certain death on the battlefields of East and Southeast Asia.

The first Allied witnesses to this recessional were some of the Allied prisoners of war who had been sent to toil in the mines and heavy industries of Japan. Constantine Constantinovich Petrovsky was a White Russian doctor who had escaped the revolution to Singapore via China, and, like so many ambitious and talented people in Asia, found a home in its cosmopolitan world. In 1939 he had volunteered to fight for the British Empire. His war took him to Europe, then back to Singapore, where he experienced the trauma of its fall in February 1942. With the rest of the garrison he was herded into the prison camp at Changi, then sent to work on the Burma–Siam railway; he survived its horrors only to be embarked on one of the ‘death ships’ to mine coal fifty or so kilometres away from Hiroshima: of the 50,000 who began this journey, 11,000 perished. On the morning of 6 August 1945 there was an air-raid warning, as there had been most days that summer, ‘and suddenly phew! Like earthquake. And black smoke… a column of this coming up like mushroom, spreading out, black and so on. I said “My God! They shot one plane, one bomb, they got oil tanks”… They were all shuddering.’ The next day the Japanese guards came and announced that everyone in Hiroshima was dead.5 The bomb had killed a microcosm of people caught up in the terrible conflict: prisoners of war, Koreans and Chinese labourers, students from Malaya on scholarships, and perhaps 3,200 Japanese American citizens who were stranded in the city after Pearl Harbor.6 Later, American planes flew over again, but this time they dropped food and medicines. Some of these supplies landed near Petrovsky’s mine. Petrovsky and his fellow prisoners of war passed their supplies to the Japanese, who suddenly had nothing to eat. They realized that something quite extraordinary had happened when they noticed that all the flies and the bed bugs had disappeared. The prisoners were put to work digging a trench. They were told that it was an air-raid shelter; only later did they realize it was to be their own grave: if the Americans invaded, they were to be lined up beside it and shot.7

Across their empire, the Japanese were still killing prisoners, and orders had been given in Taiwan, Borneo and elsewhere to exterminate whole camps. But there was, in the end, to be no mass slaughter.8 After the initial confusion, a strange mood of equanimity and freedom prevailed. Allied prisoners in Japan travelled without restraint, ‘commandeering’ cars and trucks, disarming Japanese servicemen on trains, entering houses in search of food and looking for women. There was an epidemic of venereal