PROLOGUE
Off the eastern coast of the Asian continent, five hundred miles from Shanghai and less than two hundred miles south of the Korean Peninsula, a long, narrow bay carves deeply into the western coast of Kyushu—Japan’s southernmost main island. At the head of this bay lies Nagasaki, acclaimed in Japan for its natural coastal beauty and for being the nation’s earliest Westernized city. In the four hundred years leading up to World War II, Nagasaki was unmatched in Japan for its exposure to European cultures, a result of the extensive amount of trade that took place at its port.
Prior to the late 1500s, Nagasaki was a secluded, loosely bound feudal village of farmers and fishermen, almost completely isolated from Japan’s industrial and commercial center in Kyoto. In 1571, however, Portuguese ships exploring the region made their way into Nagasaki’s harbor. As word spread about its prime location on Japan’s western coast with proximity to numerous Asian nations, more and more European and Chinese merchant ships arrived carrying never-before-seen guns, tobacco, clocks, fabrics, and spices. Within decades, Nagasaki grew to a city of fifteen thousand and became both the center for Japan’s foreign trade and the vanguard of the nation’s early modernization. The Europeans also introduced Christianity to Japan, and for a time Nagasaki was not only the country’s hub for Catholic missionary outreach but also the most diverse city in the region—where Portuguese, Spanish, British, Dutch, Chinese, and Japanese residents attended Buddhist, Shinto, and Catholic services at temples, shrines, and churches.
By the late 1500s, however, the powerful feudal lord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who was taking control of southern and western Japan and would later help unify the entire nation, became increasingly fearful that such deep infiltration of Christian ideology into Japanese society would result in political upheaval and an ultimate loss of power. In a preemptive strike, Hideyoshi initiated a brutal anti-Christian campaign. Churches were destroyed, and thousands of Christians were expelled, imprisoned, or executed. In Nagasaki, twenty-six foreign and Japanese missionaries and their converts were publicly crucified. Numerous Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines—including the city’s renowned Suwa Shrine—were built to reinvigorate traditional religious practices and to provide a means by which people who did not participate in them could be identified and persecuted. Japanese Christians fought back, leading to violent conflicts between Christians and non-Christians throughout the region. By 1635, the Tokugawa shogunate severed trade ties with Portugal and other Christian nations and imposed a long period of national isolation. Japanese citizens were prohibited from leaving the country, and foreigners were forbidden to enter.
Except in Nagasaki. As a means to preserve a portion of the economic benefits provided by foreign commerce, Japan’s rulers allowed Nagasaki to continue trade with China and the Netherlands—the latter in part because the Dutch had promised not to engage in Christian activities. For more than two centuries, Nagasaki served as Japan’s sole window to the outside world. With Chinese and Dutch ships arriving at their port, the people of Nagasaki were continually introduced to Asian and European arts, architecture, science, and literature.
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In the early to mid-1800s, Russia, France, Britain, and the United States began pressuring Japan to reverse its seclusion policies; in 1853, U.S. commodore Matthew Perry’s armed entry into Tokyo Bay forced Japan to formally acquiesce to Western demands and reopen the country to international trade and diplomatic relations. As this small island nation began its quest for political, economic, and military parity with the West, the next sixty years were defined by rapid industrialization, political transformation, and expansion of the Japanese Empire. Japan became a centralized political state for the first time, with its formerly titular emperor now strategically positioned at its head to strengthen the government’s authority over the newly unified nation. Rising Japanese leaders launched Japan’s first conscript army, established a national education system, and pushed for democratic reforms—including religious freedom, women’s rights, and universal suffrage. Over time, however, Shinto was sanctioned as the state religion and politicized to manipulate Shinto’s myths and traditions in order to promote concepts of Japanese racial exceptionalism and mandatory obedience to the emperor.
In an effort to achieve military and economic security, Japan emulated Western nations’ colonization of East Asian countries by waging short wars with Russia and China, seizing much-needed coal, iron, rubber, and other resources not available in its mountainous terrain. By the early twentieth century, Japan had colonized Formosa (Taiwan), gained territory in Manchuria and Russia’s northern islands, and annexed the entire Korean Peninsula, suppressing Korean language and culture. During World War I, Japan provided ships and military supplies to the Allies. When the war ended, Japan emerged as Asia’s first world leader, signified by its acceptance as one of the Big Five at the postwar peace conference at Versailles.
Nagasaki thrived. Its port expanded to accommodate increased international trade, and in 1855, a naval training institute was established, a precursor to the Imperial Japanese Navy. Two years later, the precursor to Nagasaki Medical College opened, the first school in Japan to educate physicians in Western medicine. The city dissolved its rules that had earlier confined Dutch and Chinese residents to tiny enclaves near the harbor, so that they, as well as Nagasaki’s British, French, Russian, and American residents, were free to live anywhere in the city. By the early 1900s, dams and reservoirs were built to secure an ample water supply, and an expanded railroad system and national road improved accessibility into and out of the city. Nagasaki had also fortified its emergency defense armaments in the event of an invasion, most particularly by Russia. In the fourteen years between 1889 and 1903, Nagasaki’s population nearly tripled from 55,000 to 150,000, making the city Japan’s seventh largest. After eleven generations of families practicing their faith in secret, thousands of Nagasaki Catholics came out of hiding. Numerous Catholic, Episcopal, and Presbyterian churches—as well as Japan’s first synagogue and a Masonic lodge—sprang up throughout the city. By the early 1920s, workers and volunteer parishioners had completed Urakami Church, the largest Catholic church in the Far East. With the establishment of the massive Mitsubishi Shipyard and Machinery Works, shipbuilding surpassed trade as the city’s dominant industry, and Nagasaki became the third-largest shipbuilding city in the world.
Nagasaki Harbor and environs, ca. 1920. The Nishinaka-machi Catholic Church can be seen in the foreground. (Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
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In 1926, during the period between the two world wars, twenty-five-year-old Hirohito Michinomiya was crowned emperor of Japan. Following the ancient tradition of assigning an era name (nengo) to each new emperor’s reign, the time of Hirohito’s rule was christened the Showa era (the era of enlightened peace). The first twenty years of Hirohito’s reign, however, were anything but peaceful. The emperor’s relationship to Japan’s military aggression remains a contested issue among historians, but it is inarguable that during his regime, the Japanese military carved out for itself a unique, nearly autocratic leadership role with power to control national policy. To minimize public dissent over Japan’s forced acquisition of neighboring countries’ resources and labor, ultranationalistic leaders introduced the concept of kokutai—defined as Japan’s national essence under the supreme guidance of a divine emperor. Patriotism was redefined as compulsory and unconditional loyalty to both emperor and state.
Japanese citizens began living under oppressive policies that restricted free speech and individual rights. Adults and children were required to free themselves of Western concepts such as democracy and individualism, and abide by kodo (the Imperial Way), by which they were duty-bound to pursue “moral excellence” as defined by the state. They were taught that because of the benevolent leadership of their godlike emperor, Japan was uniquely positioned to use its superior morality and power to unify and lead all of Asia and the entire world. Japan’s Home Ministry and other government departments established special police forces charged with monitoring the activities of civilians and military personnel who questioned or opposed national policy, a crime punishable by up to ten years in prison.
The Japanese military began new campaigns to expand the nation’s empire across Asia. The army invaded Manchuria, where it had maintained a presence since its victory over Russia in 1905, and subsequently colonized the region. The League of Nations protested this action, and in 1933, Japan withdrew as a member, hostile to this criticism and to perceived disdain from the United States and other Western nations over its quest for equal military, political, and social standing. Four years later, Japan invaded China to increase its access to natural resources needed both for domestic industrial production and its continued military actions in Asia. As the Japanese Imperial Army Air Forces implemented a massive strategic bombing campaign, Japanese army commanders and soldiers tore through Shanghai, Nanjing, and other Chinese cities, slaughtering, mutilating, or torturing millions of Chinese soldiers and civilians. In 1940, Japan invaded French Indochina and signed a military pact with Germany and Italy to secure the cooperation of the Axis powers in its bid to extend its military, political, and economic boundaries.
At home, the military government tightened its control. All political parties were dissolved, and the Imperial Rule Assistance Association was established—a national communication system that reached every Japanese citizen. In prefectures, cities, townships, and villages across the country, every neighborhood was divided into groups of five to ten households known as tonarigumi, which held mandatory monthly meetings to disseminate information from Tokyo, promote solidarity, and unify around the rigid ideals of kokutai and kodo. In their schools and neighborhood association meetings, adults and children were required to chant slogans such as “One hundred million [people], one mind” and “Abolish desire until victory.”
After years of advancing and holding positions in vast regions of China and the Indochina Peninsula, by 1941, Japan’s financial and military resources had worn thin. International protest embargoes led by the United States worsened the country’s situation by cutting off essential supplies of petroleum, aviation gasoline, and scrap metals. From Japan’s perspective, it had two options, neither of which offered potential for anything but the ultimate demise of its empire. The first was to end the embargo by complying with U.S. demands for Japan’s withdrawal from China and Indochina—an unthinkable choice in the context of Japan’s political, economic, and military ambitions for Asian dominance and economic independence from the United States. The second: to seize British, Dutch, French, and U.S. colonies in Southeast Asia and take possession of the region’s vast oil, rubber, and mineral resources—which would inevitably trigger a war of retaliation with these countries, most particularly the United States.
Japan chose the latter course—and made the additional decision to preempt any U.S. military response by attacking the United States first. On December 8, 1941 (Japan time), amid heightened economic and military upheaval, high-level political debate, and the government’s ever-increasing bellicose fervor that gave no value to individual life except in service to the nation, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, a U.S. naval station in Hawaii. A war between Japan and the United States and its allies had begun—a war that quickly spread throughout the entire western Pacific and ultimately led to the destruction of nearly every Japanese city.
Even as late as the summer of 1945, Nagasaki was, in large part, spared.
