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even spoke.’ Dr Michihiko Hachiya, who was among the bombed that morning and worked heroically to treat the wounded, observed that ‘one thing was common to everyone I saw—complete silence’. Kenzaburo Oe was a boy on the quiet island of Shikoku in August 1945. He became a writer, and discovered the victims of Hiroshima in 1963. (Oe, too, found and recorded silences from that day: the silence of those with terrible injuries, of those who had suffered unimaginable loss, of those who ‘raising both hands skyward and making soundless groans’, jumped into the (Ota River ‘as though competing with one another’—even the silence, jealously insisted upon, of those survivors who steadfastly refused to talk about their experiences that day, demanding silence as their right as victims.1

1. Japan in retreat

By August 1945 Japan’s military position was parlous. Since the reversal at Midway Island in June 1942, victories had been few and short-lived, stalemates generally the best that could be hoped for, and defeats had come

with greater frequency and often catastrophic results. The American and Allied conquests in the Pacific from late 1942 on—at Guadalcanal and New Guinea, Tinian and Saipan, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa— were, of course, devastating Japanese defeats. An old poem, set to music in 1937, began with the words ‘Umi yukaba’ (in English ‘Across the sea’); Japanese soldiers said or sang it to their families before they left for the front. By 1943 it had become a melancholy phrase of parting, and it introduced radio descriptions ‘of battles in which Japanese soldiers “met honorable death rather than the dishonor of surrender” ’. In mid-1943 the American General Douglas MacArthur launched Operation Cartwheel against Japanese forces in New Guinea. Beaten by Australian units at the coast town of Finschhafen, the Japanese retreated (a ‘fighting withdrawal’, they called it) toward the interior of the island. The Japanese main force crossed a steep gorge and blew up the suspension bridge over it, stranding thousands of their straggling comrades. Masatsugu Ogawa was one of those left behind. He recalled men dying in droves, their corpses stinking in the hot sun, stripped of their useful gear by the living and covered by so many worms they looked silver from a distance. Ogawa prayed that his artillery, much reduced, would not fire at the enemy, for one Japanese shell inevitably attracted hundreds in return. Men lost their minds; Ogawa and his fellow soldiers shot them to put them out of their misery. Of the 7,000 soldiers assigned to Ogawa’s 79th Regiment over the course of the campaign, 67 survived.2

Recognizing that Saipan would provide the Americans with airfields within a bomber’s distance of Japan, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo declared it ‘an impregnable fortress’ in the spring of 1944 and sent thousands of troops to reinforce it. Among them was Takeo Yamauchi, a Russian-language student and closet socialist who reluctantly accepted conscription and arrived at Saipan on 19 May. The Americans launched an air attack on 11 June and sent in the marines four days later. A squad leader, Yamauchi nevertheless had no appetite for battle, and when the armies clashed at close range he, along with several others, headed for the relative protection of the mountains to their rear. They encountered a fellow soldier from their squad, who started to tell them ‘glorified stories of bravery’. Yamauchi told the man to shut up. He wandered the island for days, doing his best to avoid having to fight as men died around him. Overwhelmed, discouraged, and hungry, he surrendered to US forces on 14 July. He was unusual. The Japanese government later estimated that, of the 43,682 men sent to defend Saipan, 41,244 died, along with some 14,000 civilians. The fall of the ‘impregnable fortress’ brought down Tojo’s cabinet.3

Emperor Hirohito now ordered his armies to raise the cost of America’s island campaigns, if nothing else buying time to prepare for the defense of the home islands. That is what General Tademichi Kurabayashi did on Iwo Jima