Page 60 of Daikon
THE IDEA FOR DAIKON CAME to me many years ago.
I was reading about the Enola Gay and the Hiroshima mission, and it struck me how uncertain the first atomic bomb was.
It was experimental, not fully tested. The scientists who built it were confident it would work.
It had to work. It was physics. But the men tasked with delivering the weapon were not nearly so sure.
This possibility that the bomb might fail gave me the idea for a novel. It would proceed from the question: What would have happened if the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima failed to explode and the Japanese recovered it?
To imagine an outcome, I studied what was happening in Japan at the time, starting with William Craig’s The Fall of Japan, Thomas Coffey’s Imperial Tragedy , and Stanley Weintraub’s The Last Great Victory .
The main point of tension in those closing days of the war was between the hard-liners, particularly in the Imperial Army, who wanted to fight on, and those wanting to surrender.
Some of these hard-liners knew that the war was lost but rejected the terms of unconditional surrender.
They were determined to fight until the Allies relented and offered more favorable terms. Others, like Colonel Sagara in this story, believed that some sort of victory could still be achieved; that if they continued to fight they would eventually break the Americans’ spirit.
And if they didn’t, the Japanese people would all perish with honor, fighting to the last, “until we eat stones.” For the Sagaras in the Imperial Army, millions of Japanese dead was preferable to the disgrace of surrender.
For Noriko Kan, I borrowed elements from the real-life story of Iva Ikuko Toguri, aka Tokyo Rose, as revealed in Masayo Duus’s biography Tokyo Rose, Orphan of the Pacific , and in the declassified FBI files on Tokyo Rose.
The trouble Noriko encounters at NHK is drawn from an account in these FBI files of a Filipino staffer who had dalliances with some of the female Nisei workers, which caused feelings of jealousy.
For the Tokkō “Thought Police” (full name Tokubetsu Koto Keisatsu) and the Kempeitai military police: Richard H.
Mitchell, Janus-Faced Justice: Political Criminals in Imperial Japan ; and Raymond Lamont-Brown, Kempeitai: Japan’s Dreaded Military Police.
More than any other character in Daikon , Petty Officer Ryohei Yagi was inspired by a real person: Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune.
It is not widely known, but Mifune served for six years in the Japanese army.
He was drafted in 1939 in Manchuria, where he was born and grew up, and went off for training thinking it would be great fun.
It wasn’t. Mifune would describe what followed as “six months of getting beaten up. It was a nightmare.” He resolved to get out of the army as soon as his mandatory period of service was up.
But then the Pacific War started and any chance of being discharged disappeared.
Trapped in the army indefinitely, Mifune became rebellious and never rose above the rank of private first class—a Japanese version of Private Angelo Maggio in From Here to Eternity .
At the end of the war he was doing manual labor at Kumano Airfield, a kamikaze base on Kyushu, and taking farewell photographs on the side for the young pilots before they flew off to their deaths.
In later years, telling his son about his time at Kumano and the young pilots he knew there would reduce Mifune to tears.
The idea of making Yagi Korean came from my own affection for Korea, where I was born and grew up and about which I’ve written three books of history, starting with The Imjin War: Japan’s Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China .
The oil tanker Yagi served on, the Iro, was an actual ship, the details and movements of which are available online at http://www.combinedfleet.com/Iro_t.htm .
Background for Yagi’s encounter with the bomb came from U.S.
Naval Technical Mission to Japan Report O-06, “Japanese Bomb Disposal Methods,” which includes a translation of a firsthand account by Technical Lieutenant Kikuo Nishida, “Reports on the Bomb or Shell Disposal in the Japanese Navy,” October 1, 1945.
The atomic bomb plays such a central role in Daikon that it is almost a character unto itself.
I needed to visualize it in detail, its inner workings, to write about PO Yagi and Keizo Kan taking it apart and putting it back together.
Unfortunately, none of the books I consulted, starting with Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb , came anywhere near providing the depth of detail I needed.
Then I discovered John Coster-Mullen’s Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man .
Coster-Mullen’s book is not so much a narrative history as a compendium of research on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs gleaned from declassified documents, interviews, and deductions to fill in redacted gaps.
How big were the uranium rings? How many were there?
How much did they weigh? What color were they?
How were they held together? How long was the gun tube?
What did the initiators look like? It’s all in Coster-Mullen’s book, along with a wealth of photos, illustrations, and plans.
I could not have written Daikon without this invaluable source.
I was also fortunate to correspond with George “G. C.” Hollowwa, a radar weaponeer with the 509th Composite Group at Wendover, Utah.
“My specialty was weapon fuzing” was how Hollowwa described his role to me.
“I assembled approximately 10 to 15 test Little Boys and performed the in-flight test drops. I also assembled and drop tested an equal number of Fat Men.” Hollowwa shared with me a wealth of detail about the Hiroshima bomb and B-29s, and fielded such questions as, “Could the Hiroshima bomb have been a dud?”
There really was a Special Intelligence Unit in Tokyo that was monitoring the B-29s on Tinian, Guam, and Okinawa as described in Daikon —in particular the V600 “Special Task Planes,” which were the B-29s of the 509th Composite Group.
The Japanese network NHK aired a documentary on this subject in 2011 entitled Genbaku tōka ikasarenakatta gokuhi jōhō (“The Dropping of the Atomic Bomb: Top Secret Information That Wasn’t Used”).
Another useful source that contributed realism to Daikon are the maps of Japan made by the U.S.
Army in 1945–46 in the Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas ( https://maps.lib.utexas.edu ).
I relied on these maps heavily while writing this book, particularly the “Tokyo and Environs” map series, which shows detail down to individual buildings, extending out as far as Tama Airfield.
I was fortunate to have access through my alma mater Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, to the full run of the Nippon Times newspaper for the months of July and August 1945.
This was a valuable source for all sorts of details, and also contributed dialogue to the story.
When Kan is waiting for the train at Hiroshima station, for example, the speech broadcast over the loudspeaker is taken almost verbatim from a speech printed in the Times , as was the pep talk given by the commander to the kaiten trainees in chapter 11.
For the preface: “Beta Calutron Operations, June 24, 1944–May 4, 1947,” John Coster-Mullen, Atom Bombs , 286; “Transportation of Critical Shipments,” Memorandum from Major J.
A. Derry to Admiral W. S. DeLany, August 17, 1945, Atom Bombs, 284; Doug Stanton, In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors , 29; Lieutenant Haynes quoted in Richard A.
Hulver, A Grave Misfortune: The USS Indianapolis Tragedy , 14.
For the description of Tinian and the B-29 mission in chapter 1: Harlow Russ, Project Alberta: The Preparation of Atomic Bombs for Use in World War II (contains detailed maps of Tinian); Paul W. Tibbets, The Tibbets Story ; and Enola Gay crew member interviews in the Beser Foundation Archives.
On Japanese aircraft, in particular the Nakajima G8N Renzan: René Francillon, Japanese Aircraft of the Pacific War ; Robert C.
Mikesh, Japanese Cockpit Interiors (contains a photo of the Nakajima G5N cockpit, a close approximation to the Renzan’s).
To better imagine the interior of the Renzan, which is not well known, I studied the American B-17 bomber, from which the Renzan was largely derived.
On Project Fu-Go and the Japanese discovery of high-altitude, high-speed air currents blowing across the Pacific, later known as the “jet stream”: Ross Allen Coen, Fu-Go: The Curious History of Japan’s Balloon Bomb Attack on America ; Robert C.
Mikesh, Japan’s World War II Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America.
On kaiten (human torpedoes) and Hikari Special Attack Unit: Yutaka Yokota, The Kaiten Weapon; Michael Mair and Joy Waldron, Kaiten: Japan’s Secret Manned Suicide Submarine and the First American Ship It Sank in WWII.
On the kamikaze experience: Yasuo Kuwahara and Gordon T.
Allred, Kamikaze: A Japanese Pilot’s Own Spectacular Story of the Famous Suicide Squadrons ; Raymond Lamont-Brown, Kamikaze: Japan’s Suicide Samurai ; Ryuji Nagatsuka, I Was a Kamikaze: The Knights of the Divine Wind (who writes of the difficulty pilot trainees had with inferior “A-Go” fuel, which resulted in numerous deaths).