Hiroshima's Last Witnesses and Japan's Nuclear Future

Summary

Podcast Summary:

Hiroshima's Last Witnesses and Japan's Nuclear Future
New Books Network | Host: Amy Chavez | Guest: MG Sheftal
Date: August 8, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of the Books on Asia podcast features author and professor MG Sheftal, discussing his oral history works on the Asia Pacific War: Hiroshima, the Last Witnesses and Nagasaki, the Last Witnesses, as well as his earlier book on kamikaze pilots. The discussion examines the creation of historical narratives, the Japanese experience of World War II, survivors’ stories, and Japan’s evolving cultural memory regarding nuclear warfare.

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Key Discussion Points

MG Sheftal’s Approach to Oral History

• Motivation & Oral History Methodology

  • Sheftal started oral history projects post-9/11, initially motivated by understanding the mindset behind suicide attacks, connecting it to kamikaze pilots ([01:34]).
  • While interviewing kamikaze survivors, he became more focused on understanding Japanese wartime culture and the psychological processing of trauma.
  • For Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his method involved speaking extensively with survivors (“hibakusha”), selecting stories from diverse social backgrounds to provide a broad and nuanced perspective.

• Quote:

  • “I realized I was onto much more important things, at least in terms of my specialty. That was a pretty deep dive into Japanese culture and the Zeitgeist of this archipelago in the 1930s, when they were children, in the 1940s, when they came of age during war, that was, in hindsight, really preparation for the big project, which was the atomic bomb thing.” – MG Sheftal [03:11]

Distinctiveness of Sheftal’s Books

• Humanistic Narrative Style

  • His books are noted for accessible, human-centered storytelling, avoiding the clinical or overly analytic tone of many academic works ([04:34]).
  • He deliberately chose to avoid sentimentality as the central focus, emphasizing relevance for contemporary readers ([05:32]).

• Multiple Voices and Class Perspective

  • Sheftal includes testimonies from people of varying social classes and backgrounds to challenge Western monolithic views of Japanese society.
  • He highlights prewar class distinctions and their lingering effects, which are seldom discussed openly in Japan today ([06:00]-[07:57]).

• Quote:

  • “Americans...have a very monolithic view of the Japanese. They don’t realize that there are things like class differences... education differences, whether their families come from samurai origins or peasant origins, and how that was still reverberating 70 years after the Meiji Restoration.” – MG Sheftal [05:58]

On Wartime Memory and Victimhood

• Victim Narratives and Agency

  • Discusses how Japanese citizens, especially survivors, perceive themselves as victims—often with no agency, particularly if they were children during the war ([09:14]).
  • Contrasts perspectives between WW2 veterans with agency (e.g., China campaign, kamikaze) and atomic bomb survivors, who experienced trauma as powerless noncombatants ([12:17]-[15:43]).
  • Reflection on how individuals create personal narratives to cope with trauma, referencing Viktor Frankl ([13:28]).

• Quote:

  • “A trauma in which you have had some kind of agency gives you something to work with... you feel some empowerment, even a small degree. And I think there’s some emotional rescue in that... Now...atomic bomb victims...the velocity and the momentum, the overwhelming power...completely eliminates any sort of agency.” – MG Sheftal [14:36]

Crafting the Hiroshima Narrative

• Official Narrative Postwar

  • The Peace Park narrative of “sacrifice for peace” was engineered to allow grief without inciting anti-American sentiment and to avoid trouble with occupation authorities ([17:31]-[21:09]).
  • Hiroshima’s messaging intentionally omits any focus on resentment or the military’s role as first responders, instead emphasizing a spirit of peace and reconciliation.

• Quote:

  • “The narrative that has ended up becoming...the accepted narrative, that the people of Hiroshima were sacrificed for the cause of world peace, the Hiroshima City Hall pretty much came up with that.” – MG Sheftal [21:06]
• • Psychological Necessity and Political Caution
  • Balancing grief and fear under occupation, the city’s leaders avoided criticism of the U.S. and even subsumed anger, hoping future generations might “read between the lines” ([21:12]).

Gruesome Reality and Cultural Amnesia

• First Responders and Grisly Details

  • Sheftal’s book insists on confronting the horror of the bombings, including the immediate aftermath, body recovery, and trauma—a reality often glossed over in sanitized narratives ([22:58]-[23:41]).
  • He hopes his visceral descriptions awaken readers to the true cost of nuclear war.

• Declining Remembrance and Historical Ignorance

  • Notes a reduction in Hiroshima/Nagasaki discourse in Japan’s media and culture, especially among youth, and suggests this is by design as nationalist and conservative elements seek to rehabilitate militarism for potential future rearmament ([28:31]-[30:33]).

• Quote:

  • “I believe that the powers that be see the legacy, the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a hindrance to Japan ever becoming a ‘normal country’ ever again... probably rather than overturning them, they're just hoping that they're going to be forgotten.” – MG Sheftal [28:31]

U.S. Strategy and Nuclear Policy

• War Crimes, Allied Plans, and Atomic Use

  • Sheftal discusses controversial Allied war tactics such as Operation Starvation (planned destruction of Japan’s food supply via bombing railways), the anticipated use of more atomic bombs, and disregard for the effects of fallout on U.S. troops ([24:46]-[25:50]).
  • Warns of how little was understood about nuclear consequences at the time.

• Quote:

  • “They were going to send in, literally send in the Marines an hour after they dropped those bombs on the beaches... not realizing about fallout.” – MG Sheftal [25:50]

• Contemporary Resonance

  • Draws parallels between WWII-era “imminent Armageddon” rhetoric and modern geopolitical tensions, expressing concern over Japan’s possible nuclear armament as the U.S. grows less reliable as an ally ([26:46]-[28:00]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I wanted this to hit people like a pipe, like a punch in the stomach.” – MG Sheftal [23:35]
• “Young people... can tell us all about which samurai warlord fought who at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1601, but they can’t tell us who was the last prime minister of Japan who surrendered to the Americans. They don’t know anything about it. By design. I think it’s by design.” – MG Sheftal [30:33]
• “It would behoove them to try to suppress talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki in current Japan as much as possible.” – MG Sheftal [28:00]

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• [01:34] – Origins of Sheftal’s oral history approach after 9/11
• [04:34] – How his interviewing approach developed into his atomic bomb survivor books
• [06:00] – Importance of class and social background in survivor testimonies
• [09:14] – Japanese narratives of victimhood and agency
• [13:28]-[15:43] – Psychological mechanisms for surviving trauma; atomic bomb survivors’ unique lack of agency
• [17:31]-[21:09] – Crafting the official Hiroshima Peace Park narrative under occupation
• [22:58]-[23:41] – Detailed account of first responders and aftermath in Hiroshima
• [24:46]-[25:50] – Allied war tactics, further atomic bomb plans, and ignorance of radioactivity
• [26:46]-[28:31] – Nuclear threats, contemporary politics, and fears of re-nuclearization
• [28:31]-[30:33] – Cultural and political efforts to diminish Hiroshima/Nagasaki’s significance

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Tone & Conclusion

The episode is deeply reflective and candid, mixing historical investigation with concern for the present and future. Sheftal’s language is direct—occasionally stark or graphic—seeking to confront the listener with the uncomfortable realities of history in order to underscore the vital importance of remembrance and the dangers posed by forgetting.

Final Message:
Reading Hiroshima, the Last Witnesses and Nagasaki, the Last Witnesses offers a fresh, unsettling, and necessary perspective on the atomic bombings—one that is urgent in both its historical and contemporary implications.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the new books network.

[B]

Welcome to the Books on Asia podcast. I'm your host, Amy Chavez, and today I am speaking with MG Sheftal. He has lived in Japan since 1987. He has a PhD in International Relations and Modern Japanese History from Waseda University in Tokyo. And since 2001, he has been a professor of Modern Japanese Cultural History and Communication at the Faculty of Informatics of Shizuoka University. He lives in Hamamatsu, Japan. Today we're going to talk about his series. I think it's a series of books about the Asia Pacific War and in particular the two books about the atomic bombs that ended the war. Those are Hiroshima, the Last Witnesses, and the other book is Nagasaki, the Last Witnesses.

[A]

So welcome, MG thank you for having me. It's nice to be here.

[B]

Thank you. It's been great. I really enjoyed your Hiroshima book. I'm halfway through the Nagasaki book and reading the Hiroshima book, I'm like, I've got to have this guy on the podcast. It was such an eye opener because we usually get kind of analytical looks at Hiroshima. I mean, we're, you know, there are so many books out there, but yours is special and we'll talk about that. I first wanted to ask you about your first book, which I haven't read yet, which is Blossoms in the Human Legacies of the Kamikaze. And that was also an oral history. Right, the same way your Hiroshima and Nagasaki books are.

[A]

Yes, yes. The format was basically the same. I began working on that book pretty much immediately after 911 happened. As a New Yorker, as a Manhattanite raised with the view of the buildings under construction, literally from my living room window, like many other people on the planet, I imagine I was thinking about what makes people want to hit the enemy so badly that they're willing to give up their lives to do it, not risk their lives as in, like a normal war, you go out there, well, I might not come home, mom, you know, and you go off to war and you put yourself in danger, but with a suicide attack, the Death rate is 100%. Right? So I thought about that mindset a lot, or what I imagined that mindset was. I realized that there were a lot of. At the time, this is 25 years ago, there was still a lot of Japanese World War II veterans still alive, including men who had been members of special kamikaze units. They'd gone through the same training. All the indoctrination, although not as much indoctrination, was needed for Japanese young people at the time, as is often suggested in other works. And as maybe as most Americans might believe. And they had only survived the war because the Emperor's surrender broadcast preempted their attack missions. So I knew that those guys were out there. I'd seen something on NHK some years earlier about them. I thought that by talking to them and getting a bit of a fix, if I could on their mindset, seeing if there was anything applicable to the 21st century situation, that that would be a worthy project for me to undertake. But that was the beginning motivation. Once I actually started talking to the guys, I kind of. I forgot all about the 911 stuff, and I realized I was onto much more important things, at least in terms of my specialty. That was a pretty deep dive into Japanese culture and the Zeitgeist of this archipelago in the 1930s, when they were children, in the 1940s, when they came of age during war, that was, in hindsight, really preparation for the big project, which was the atomic bomb thing.

[B]

And when was that first book published?

[A]

It was first published in 2005. There've been a couple of editions since then.

[B]

Okay, I know what. I have read that book. But when I looked up the book on Amazon, it said 2023. So maybe that was just the latest edition. So I thought, oh, that wasn't the book. But, yes, I have. Wow. I've read all three of your books. I'm so excited.

[A]

So you did read it?

[B]

Okay, I did, yeah. You sat down with, like, families and people who, you know, they talked about their sake cups and drinking before the mission.

[A]

And I was going to the Buddhist temple where they had memorial ceremonies for every month. I did that for several years, actually. I went up there to Tokyo almost every month to. To hang out with those people, for lack of a better term, and get to know them and win their trust, I guess. And the result was the book.

[B]

Amazing. And indeed, that's really good practicing ground, so to speak, for your Hiroshima and Nagasaki books. So let's get into your Hiroshima book now. I really admire your work because while you are an academic, your books are very accessible and they have a humanistic element. They're not completely analytic. And you speak with the witnesses of the bombs, the Hibakusha, as we call them in Japan, and you talk to them firsthand, relate their experiences in almost a colloquial style, and it makes the reader feel like you're in the same room.

[A]

That's what I'm going for.

[B]

Great. And it works fabulously. And you obviously have a knack for this. Type of storytelling.

[A]

There's been a lot of stuff on this. A lot of books have been written on this. A lot of the books in English tend to be out of necessity on the part of the researcher and writer. I think their lack of linguistic ability in Japanese, it tends to be from the American side.

[B]

Indeed. Yep. Yep. I understand that too.

[A]

Right. Or it's an academic thing. And also approaching it mainly from the American side. When hibakusha voices are heard in English language literature, it's usually a book that's centered on one person. So it gives you this single perspective. I don't mean to disparage anything like that, but it's extremely limited. It doesn't give you a great multiple sources of perspectives on what life was like at the time. And also those tend to be a little bit sentimental. You can't write something about human suffering without paying any attention to sentiment. Right. That. That would be monstrous. But I don't think you should make it the central theme of a book if you're trying to change someone's mind or get someone to relate with how things that happened 80 years ago are relevant now as well. So I wanted to get into the heads, so to speak, of the people I was talking to. But I didn't want it to just be one or two people. So I have multiple people who were from different social backgrounds, which find fascinating. Americans, I think, tend to have a very monolithic view of the Japanese. They don't realize that there are things like class differences and education differences, whether their families come from samurai origins or peasant origins, and how that was still reverberating 70 years after the Meiji Restoration. And they don't like to talk about that now. It's considered very taboo. But that was still very much in the air back then. People had maids live in maids, if you were from privilege, that affected how those people interacted with other Japanese, especially Japanese that they saw as being below their station. It even still colors their worldview today, which I found fascinating. I realized that I've never encountered anyone under the age of about 85 who still has that attitude.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So that's a vanished Japan. And some people would say, good riddance, goodbye, all that.

[B]

It depends on who you are.

[A]

But I'm fascinated that it existed and also fascinated that Japanese people don't like to talk about those things.

[B]

Right. Yes.

[A]

So I like to go into the crevices where the light's not shown very often, belong around down there and see what I can come up with. See what kind of light that can Shed on the Japanese Zeitgeist today.

[B]

Yeah, and I think that's what readers want. Also. I think those details are quite important and interesting.

[A]

I love the details.

[B]

Now, I live in the Seto Inland Sea, and I noticed you had interviewed someone from one of the Hibakusho's from Kasaoka. And I'm on one of the islands, one of the Kasaoka Islands. And we also had some people who were in Hiroshima City on the day of the bombing and who died due to radiation poisoning. And in 2016, one of my neighbors passed away who had worked at the Mizushima Aircraft Factory, which you mentioned, and when he was a junior high high school student that was bombed, but he happened to be home on the day of the bombing. Anyway, he did pass away at a ripe old age, which was nice. But probably everyone in Japan can tell similar stories about their neighbors or themselves if they're old enough to have lived through it. Right. Whether it's the incendiary bombings of so many cities or, you know, people were in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. And the Japanese people often say that they were victims of World War II. And I always thought that meant that they felt they were victims of their own repressive government. What do you think about that?

[A]

All right. I've been here long enough to have known several generations of Japanese who experienced World War II. I think this tendency to regard one's experiences as being a victimization is from a psychological standpoint, understandable considering that the people who are talking about these things now, Even if they're 90 years old now, they were only 9 years old when the war ended. From their standpoint, they had absolutely no agency in determining the course of, of what happened to them and the aftermath. They'll see this as something that the world of adults did to them. And being, perhaps understandably loathe to blame their own parents and their grandparents, they look to the other, the other set of adults responsible for this, which were the, you know, Curtis LeMay and his il. Their viewpoint of history, of the history that they lived through is pretty much limited to what they saw as small children. Right now, the older people. When I first came to Japan, and I always like to tell this to my students and get a rise or try to get a rise out of them. When I came to Japan in 1987, World War II was only 42 years in the past, the bombings, the fire bombings that had destroyed 70% of Japanese urban space in the span of half a year. When I came here, every person I walked past on the street or sat next to on the train or in a coffee shop or in Izakaya or had in my daytime old people a Cairo classes over the age of 50 had vivid memories of people who looked like me dropping bombs on them. I can't pinpoint the exact moment when I really. That really hit home for me, but once I realized it, I felt it a lot. And when I didn't have the Japanese ability to talk to people, to ask them questions and not know what people were saying about me when they were looking at me, and maybe with not particularly friendly facial expressions. And if they were of that age, of the wartime age, my mind usually explained that, oh my God, they're remembering the war or they're remembering when their house got burned down by incendiary moms, or remembering when their, their older brother got killed in the Philippines or whatever. And that not knowing and wanting to know was a very big motivation for me in putting in the, the hours and the days and the weeks and the months and the years into learning Japanese, especially into learning how to write, learning how to read, because I wanted to talk to these people while I still, still could. When I was able to speak Japanese, I began talking to war veterans in the Shizoku area. So this is still the late 80s, early 90s. Shizuoka was home to an infantry regiment, the 8th Infantry Regiment of the Imperial Japanese army, whose duties had primarily been in China. I was able to talk not only to World War II veterans, but to the Sino Japanese war veterans, the guys who'd been there in the 30s, the Nanking and all that stuff.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And they had a very different perspective, a very different agency narrative about what they had done and what had happened to them in the war. And I was astonished. I tried not to show my astonishment when I talked to them about this, but I was astonished when they looked back fondly on their China experience. And they laughed as they talked about mowing Chinese people down like lawn grass with a lawnmower. And I guess the empowerment that they felt from that, I don't know, I don't want to go too far into the, the psychological, psychological parts, but I start thinking about, are they all, you know, psychopaths? No, I don't think that's a Occam's razor would not, Would not hold up there. So that got me started thinking about, about the psychology of memory and about how cultures process terrible things that happened to them and terrible things that they did. And this is something I really, that really came home to me when I did the Kamikaze book was the realization or the suspicion that people make up narratives that help them wake up every morning with memories of what happened to them and what they did.

[B]

This is like Viktor Frankl, right? Said.

[A]

Yeah. Yes.

[B]

Very important concentration camps. Yeah. Survivors are the people who are able to come up with some way to process it.

[A]

You have to come up with something, otherwise you go crazy or you kill yourself or you just turn into a catatonic zombie. So most people come up with something that allows them to process these horrible experiences while maintaining some semblance of. Of identity stability and even mental stability. And this, of course, comes in really big with the. With the. The atomic bomb survivors and different from those China War veterans and different even from the kamikaze boys, and I call them boys because they were about 16 or 17 years old who, even though in reality they did not have much, if any, agency in what they were being ordered and prepared to do, the narrative at the time and the narrative that their war buddy organizations helped to knit together after the war was that they were heroes. They put on the uniform, they were ready to defend Japan. Agency.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And I think a trauma in which you have had some kind of agency gives you something to work with, I guess, if that's the right way to put it. You feel some. Some empowerment, even a small degree. And I think that there's some emotional rescue in that, in being able to feel that or tell yourself that that was the reality, even though maybe it wasn't. Now, these people with the atomic. The atomic bomb victims, even though all of the ones that I spoke to were doing war work, they were working in factories, making munitions and airplanes and whatnot. The velocity and the momentum, the overwhelming power of the trauma that they experienced because of that bomb completely eliminates any sort of agency on their part. So in a way it was. It was almost akin to being the victim of crime. The violation, I guess, that they would have felt even as they acknowledged that they were helping to prolong a war. It should have been ended years earlier once it became clear that they had lost. So they don't have any guilt or responsibility. Much, much responsibility.

[B]

Yeah. There is told what they were supposed to do.

[A]

Yeah. And there were kids, they had abs. They had no input. They couldn't even. They couldn't even offer an opinion about what had happened, what was happening. You got to go into some really big league cognitive distance gymnastics to be able to tell yourself that Japan's still winning the war. When the American bombers started flying overhead every night, either on their way to bomb your city or to bomb some other city nearby. But they were able to do this because the media was telling them this is all some big plan. And their teachers are telling them that and their parents are telling them, don't talk about that at home. And they never ever talk about it with their friends unless they're, you know, just parroting the phrases that, the slogans that they're drilled into their heads every day at the workplace.

[B]

Sure. And they're vulnerable, they're children. So they're doing what they think is, is right. This brings up a really important point, point that you brought up in the book, which I actually didn't know. Now, I've been to the Hiroshima Peace park many times, probably six times. But all those visits were when I first came to Japan and my Japanese wasn't so good then. And needless to say, even if it was, the explanations in English inside the museum weren't very good either because this was a long time ago, 1993 and on that was way before the tourist boom. While I could certainly see and feel and get an idea of everything that was happening, your book brought up the point. You said that Hiroshima had come up with a narrative to honor those who had, quote, sacrificed themselves for peace. And that was what the whole Peace park and memorial is about.

[A]

And I was like, maintain that narrative. Yeah. Which allows them to not hate America.

[B]

Right. How did that come about? And how does it kind of color the way the history of Hiroshima is looked at today?

[A]

I write about that at some length in the Hiroshima book is how the narrative was crafted. It was done pretty much on the fly, something necessitated by the conditions at the time. The country was in rubble, this population was half starved and all these giant golumphing blue eyed guys were stomping all over the archipelago, occupying it. So people felt some fear about the future, about what was happening to their communities in the present. But on the other hand, they also had an extreme emotional, psychological need to begin processing the grief that was still raw and powerful only months after the bombing. Right. Especially if they'd lost loved ones in the explosions. So on the one hand, they're afraid of offending the alien occupiers. And perhaps it was only natural to expect that American occupiers in Japan would behave towards their, their occupied subjects the same way that Japanese occupiers had behaved in China. Right. So, well, when you're, when you lose a war, when you lose a war and the foreign army comes in, they start, you know, tear the place upside down and they do what they want with the subjected population.

[B]

And they had been told that that would happen as well, didn't they?

[A]

Before they had done it themselves, like 30, 30 guy in his 30s or even 40s, living in Japan at the time, had probably done military service in China in the, in the 1930s, and they'd seen and perhaps many, many bad things there. So they had to balance their concerns and their fears about that against what must have been a need to try to take some kind of symbolic action, to begin processing the grief, the enormity of the grief and the trauma that they had just experienced. And the only options that were open to them at the time. Well, they couldn't start making weapons again and go to war with America to seek revenge. That wasn't on the table. They couldn't be overly critical of the people that now held the power over them. You know, I would think if I'd been there in their shoes, my natural response would have been, you know, how could you bastards have done something like this to women and children?

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

That wasn't done. And quickly it kind of like the word went out that you'd better watch what you say about that. Not only about the bombing, but about the occupation, about MacArthur, about the Americans in general. So in discursive analysis terms, their range of possible expression was extremely limited. It was narrow.

[B]

Right.

[A]

In order to avoid trouble with occupation forces, but also to, as I keep saying, process or begin processing what had happened to them, they had to thread a very narrow needle. And it seems that the Japanese pretty much came up with this by themselves. The narrative that has ended up becoming the so called official narrative, the accepted narrative, that the people of Hiroshima were sacrificed for the cause of world peace, the Hiroshima City hall pretty much came up with that.

[B]

It was a brilliant tactic, wasn't it?

[A]

Yes, right.

[B]

It really saved face, saved a lot of things.

[A]

Yeah, they saved face. And they, and they saved, they avoided trouble with the activation forces. And I don't know to what extent they were hoping that people in the future would be able to look between, read between the lines and say, well, you could see all the things that they weren't able to say. The vacuum in the narrative that they, that they had to come up with in 1945 and 46, you can read all kinds of things into that. Their rage, perhaps their sense, their desire for revenge, their moral outrage at the Americans. And that's that none of that is said and none of it certainly is carved in stone at the Hiyoshima Peace Park. But I wonder if they were hoping that in the future people would. Would come back to that. Perhaps not. Perhaps they thought that it was best for Japan to just let that go, to not hold on to any kind of resentment or hatred and. And push on. And since from the Japanese perspective, what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the worst things that America did to Japan, that makes those events extremely symbolically central to the experience of the war. And depending on how that trauma, even that humiliation is processed will determine how future generations of Japanese have relations with Americans. So maybe they were thinking about this all of a sudden. They said, let's just bury the hatchet, if you will. And they came up with this feel good narrative, which, as I noted in the book, completely omits the heroic role played by the Imperial Japanese army in acting as the only surviving first responders who were close enough to begin trying to pull people out of the rubble. There's not one mention of them in Heroes From a Peace park with all the other memorials.

[B]

That was really a great part of the book is going through those first responders and what they did and how they cleaned up Hiroshima rather quickly, actually, and what they did with all the bodies and.

[A]

Yeah. Oh, God.

[B]

How they were able to actually tag bodies and log, you know, who these people were. And I've read some reviews that have said that, you know, you kind of go into grisly detail, but I see it as the reality.

[A]

Right. I think the people that said that say that because they've never thought about this.

[B]

Well, of course not. And that's the thing. It's been glossed over for the most part.

[A]

And that's exactly what I wanted. I wanted this to hit people like a pipe, like a punch in the stomach.

[B]

It does.

[A]

I want people to be flattened by this the first time that they come face to face with it. I want people to come away from the reading experience thinking, my God, we can never ever allow anything like this to happen ever again.

[B]

I feel like also this indoctrination that we always hear about in Japan and the, you know, the kamikaze and this and that, I feel like every war on both sides, there's indoctrination or they couldn't get people to do these things. Right. So there were certainly many war crimes committed by the US as well. You go into a little bit more of that, I think, in your Nagasaki book because you talk about some of the actual war tactics that the Allies had planned to use on Japan if they didn't surrender after Hiroshima. Right. And so you bring up that there are no civilians in Japan. They came on, they told people there will be no hesitation about bombing civilians. And this was like their vision. Right. And that they had Operation Starvation where they were going to bomb the railway network to prevent the autumn harvest of rice.

[A]

Operation Starvation was already underway with the mining and the submarine blockade of the archipelago from receiving food stocks from the empire. But the final phase of the Operation Starvation was going to be taking out the rail networks which would have starved basically everyone between Tokyo and Osaka. Right. The whole megalopolis, the whole Pacific coast megalopolis would have been without rice in the winter of 45, 46. And just, just imagine.

[B]

And people were already starving. So it was just.

[A]

Yeah, they were on a thousand calories a day or something. Crazy. Yeah, yeah. The army was eating well, though. The army was eating well. The Navy was eating well. That's where all the dwindling food supplies were going to them and to stockpile. So they had ready for the fighting, the land campaign on the. On the archipelago.

[B]

I forgot to mention also that they had another 10 atomic bombs that they were planning on having ready by the time November, by the way.

[A]

November 1st. Right.

[B]

It's like, wow. And.

[A]

And just to show you how little they understood about radioactivity in the human body, they were going to send in, literally send in the Marines an hour after they dropped those bombs on the beaches and send them through the. Yeah. So taking advantage of the. Taking advantage of the disruption of the. Of the explosion and not realizing about fallout on those things. Imagine if that had happened.

[B]

I was in the beginning of your Nagasaki book, which was very compelling. It said that before the Nagasaki bomb, Fat man was dropped, you used these words to describe the war situation. Bluff and resolve were indistinguishable. This is between both sides. And that America was threatening imminent Armageddon. Now that just gives me chills because this was written before a certain president recently went online and said these things about another country.

[A]

Actually, it was written before he was reelected. And I was feeling somewhat more optimistic about the human condition at the time.

[B]

Yeah, a lot of this stuff is quite chilling. Even, you know, those years ago, supposed to be right. And a lot of the bluff and the no one really knows what anyone's doing and what they're actually saying and will they follow through with it. And your book also, it seems like a prescient warning with the current political climate in Japan and the relationship with the U.S. taiwan, China, the world. It's scary stuff, isn't it?

[A]

It is.

[B]

I was wondering then, because we also have all this other stuff going on. Like in 2024, the Nihon Hirankyo won the Nobel Peace Prize and then we have this going back and forth on whether to change Article 9 in the Constitution and their anti religion protests.

[A]

I think that's toast now with Trump.

[B]

Yeah, that's actually the peace constitution is what helped them refuse to go into Trump's war against Iran. There's so many good things about it, yet they feel at the same time that they have to be able to defend themselves since America is pulling away.

[A]

Yes, in Japan, I think there's. The people in power up in Tokyo are beginning to think that they're going to have to come up with something on their own now that they can't rely on America anymore, which means, God forbid, I think they're probably giving very serious thought to making their own nuclear weapons. Yeah, I think it would behoove them to try to suppress talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki in current Japan as much as possible.

[B]

Yeah, you're right.

[A]

The conservatives, Japanese conservatives. The Japanese right wing has been working hard to undo the ideological effects, as they see it, of decades of peace education in the 1950s, 60s and 70s into the 80s in Japan, which they see as having emasculated and hobbled Japan and made it permanently, you know, subservient to America or whatnot, unable to, you know, bring back that good old samurai mojo. And now with the looming possibility of Japan being strategic, geostrategically stranded to fend for itself in an uncertain future, I think it's probably ideological efforts are going to be made to wipe out the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the extent that that's possible. It can't be done overnight. Obviously it's not even a matter of years, but of at least decades, if not a generation or two. I believe that the powers that be see the legacy, the memory of Hiroshima and Nagaseki as a hindrance to Japan ever becoming a quote, unquote normal country ever again. That's a tough nut for them because those sites and those memories and those narratives are literally enshrined in the Japanese psyche. The roots are deep. They're 80, 70, 80 years old. Again, not something that's going to be undone overnight. And I think probably rather than overturning them, they're just hoping that they're going to be forgotten. Because I have felt and I believe I have seen drastic reduction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki type of content in entertainment media here, news discussions and whatnot. It was talked about a lot more when I first came here in the 80s yeah, sure.

[B]

And the young people don't, you know, don't even want to talk about it, really, because they're like, oh, that's a long time ago. It has nothing to do with it

[A]

because they don't have. They don't have the historical knowledge to talk about it. So it's just they can tell us all about which samurai warlord fought who at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1601, but they can't tell us who was the last prime minister of Japan and who surrendered to the Americans. They don't know anything about it. By design. I think it's by design.

[B]

Well, I really think that everyone should read both of your books, at least those two, if not the Blossoms in the Wind as well. The books are Hiroshima, the Last Witnesses and Nagasaki the Last Witnesses. Yeah. I hope everyone reads these books. It'll give you a completely different perspective. So, yeah, Thanks a lot.

[A]

I appreciate it.

[B]

Thanks for listening to the Books on Asia podcast. You can subscribe via Amazon, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Podbean, etc, or directly from the Books on asia website at www.booksonasia.net, where you can also sign up for our monthly newsletter. So remember to subscribe while you're there. And I'd like to give a shout out to our sponsor, Plum Rain Press, your book Gateway to East Asia. Visit their [e-mail].