A Curious Madness by Eric Jaffe

Author:Eric Jaffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

OKAWA KANEKO SAW her husband start to slip right around the same time. The couple bought a home in the Aiko district of Kanagawa prefecture just southwest of Tokyo. It was a very quiet place, set on a hill overlooking the river below and the mountains beyond, far back from the main street. There was a fine Buddhist temple just a short walk away. Still, Okawa Shumei struggled to find peace there. Kaneko noticed her husband becoming very moody. One minute he’d be in great spirits, and the next he’d be in terrible ones. He began to dress sloppily—a very uncharacteristic change, since he was normally so neat and proper in his manners and appearance. He was forgetting things he would normally remember. Whatever had troubled his mind at night was now also distracting him by day.

Everywhere he looked there was more misfortune for Japan. In late fall of 1944, shortly after Okawa’s talk in Sakata, MacArthur made a triumphant return to the Philippines, leading the invasion of Leyte, which resulted in yet another decisive American victory. By early March of 1945, the Allies had seized the Philippine capital of Manila, and later that month the British liberated Mandalay, in Burma. In the spring the Americans invaded the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, knocking on the doorstep of Japan’s main island. Japanese forces began to withdraw from China in May.

The heavy bombing of Tokyo also began in early March of 1945. American B-29s swept through the sky hundreds at a time and dusted the city with a deadly confetti of oil and phosphorus and napalm bombs. The attacks came every few days and made little if any effort to distinguish industrial military targets from civilian residential areas. Thousands upon thousands of Japanese were killed. Survivors struggled through the wreckage to find food, clothing, and shelter. In the coming weeks millions of people fled Tokyo for a glimmer of safety somewhere outside the city.

On May 24, 1945, hundreds of bombers laid waste to areas of the city just south of the imperial palace. Okawa heard the planes overhead. One of his first thoughts was whether they might strike the Okawa Juku academy in Meguro. He soon learned that the school’s main office, along with its records, had been reduced to a pile of ashes and rubble. The last hope of any greater Asianism rising up to rescue Japan faded for him like the final orange pulse of an ember.

The war that began for Okawa Shumei with a radio broadcast ended with another one. A strange voice crackled through the airwaves at noon on August 15, 1945. Like the rest of his countrymen, Okawa had never heard the Showa Emperor speak. In the previous ten days atomic bombs had eviscerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki; everyone knew the end was near, but it could only arrive with the emperor’s blessing. In his unprecedented recorded speech, Hirohito told the Japanese people that he’d agreed to accept the Allied terms of surrender. “Indeed,” he said,

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