Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [352]
On the morning of the fifteenth, in Burma Lt. Hayashi Inoue was preparing to lead a local raid against British troops when he learned that the war was over. “I was overwhelmed with relief,” he said. “It was so obvious we were beaten. Each day for months, it had seemed unlikely that one would survive to see the next.” High in the hills of Luzon, Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita still presided at his headquarters. When the surrender was announced, an officer urged the chief of staff to sit with his commander through the night, to prevent him from killing himself. Yamashita reassured them: “Don’t worry, I won’t go to heaven alone—it would help no one. My duty is to get our soldiers home. Relax and go to bed.” A few days later, he assembled the staff of his headquarters, shook hands with each one, gave a final salute, then walked through the trees to give himself up to the Americans. He penned a last poem:
My soldiers have been gathered from the mountains
like wild flowers.
Now it is my turn to go,
and I do so gladly.
Likewise Lt.-Gen. Masaki Honda, who had fought Slim in Burma. At his headquarters in a village named Nangala he told his staff: “We must accept the emperor’s announcement. This is the end of the war. I ask you to continue to obey orders and to refrain from any violent action.” One of his officers, Maj. Mitsuo Abe, burst out passionately: “The Allies will destroy919 our heritage and wipe out the Japanese race. The Americans will occupy our country forever. You are our commander. You should commit seppuku—and if you dare not, I will show you how!” Honda, who was seated on the floor in Japanese fashion, calmly invited Abe to sit beside him. “You are a staff officer and thus supposed to be intelligent. Can’t you understand the emperor’s mind? We must bear our misfortunes with courage. Neither the old nor the young must kill themselves; that is not the way to save the nation. We must live on, and build the foundations of the new Japan.”
“The men all cried920 about the surrender,” said twenty-four-year-old Yoshiko Hashimoto, who had lost half her family in the March firebombing of Tokyo. “I too cried—but with relief.” Ryoichi Sekine, a Tokyo sixteen-year-old, experienced a sense of shame which his father did not share. Mr. Sekine senior said pragmatically: “Now we’re going to live in a new world921 in which the Americans will call the shots.” Yoichi Watanuki remembered hearing the triumphal blast of martial music which accompanied Tokyo Radio’s announcement of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, as an eight-year-old child on 8 December 1941. At school assembly later that morning, the headmaster made three hundred children each in turn mount his rostrum and declaim: “China, America and Britain are the enemies of Japan.”
Almost four years later, in the rural village to which the school had been evacuated, on 16 August 1945 Yoichi found himself summoned to assembly along with every other child, even though it was the holiday season. The same headmaster mustered his charges in the playground, then delivered a stern harangue. He said that the shame of defeat fell upon Japan’s people, who had failed its warriors. He ordered the children to kneel. Yoichi winced at the pain of the gravel beneath his bare knees. The children had to bow towards Tokyo and recite in chorus: “We apologise to the