Page 61 of Daikon
On life in wartime Japan: Thomas R. H. Havens, Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War Two ; Samuel Yamashita, ed.
, Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese ; Eugene Soviak, ed.
, A Diary of Darkness: The Wartime Diary of Kiyosawa Kiyoshi ; Mary Kimoto Tomita, Dear Miye: Letters Home from Japan, 1939–1946 ; Women’s Division of Soka Gakkai, Women Against War: Personal Accounts of Forty Japanese Women ; Youth Division of Soka Gakkai, Cries for Peace: Experiences of Japanese Victims of World War II ; Frank Gibney, ed.
, Sensō: The Japanese Remember the Pacific War: Letters to the Editor of Asahi Shimbun ; the novels Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima and Grass for My Pillow by Saiichi Maruya.
On the atomic bombing of Hiroshima: John Hersey, Hiroshima ; Kenzaburo Oe, Hiroshima Notes ; Paul Ham, Hiroshima Nagasaki ; Charles Pellegrino, To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima ; Michihiko Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6–September 30, 1945 ; Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, Eyewitness Testimonies: Appeals from the A-Bomb Survivors ; Diana Wickes Roose, Teach Us to Live: Stories from Hiroshima and Nagasaki .
The appearance of pine root oil in the latter part of Daikon has a larger significance than might be immediately apparent.
The catalyst for the Pacific War was Japan’s need for oil, made pressing by the Western powers’ oil embargo.
The Imperial Japanese Navy temporarily neutralized American power in the Pacific with the attack on Pearl Harbor and made a thrust south, seizing the oil fields of Borneo and Sumatra to meet the nation’s energy needs.
But the Japanese advantage did not last. As the United States geared up for total war, the tide turned against Japan.
And as the Americans inexorably advanced on the home islands, methodically destroying Japanese shipping, oil supplies were choked off and the fuel situation became dire.
Numerous sources were investigated in Japan as possible alternate fuels, the most promising among them being pine tree roots.
A nationwide campaign was launched to exploit this resource with the slogan: “Two hundred pine roots will keep a plane in the air for an hour.” The result was environmental devastation, the land itself suffering in the final year of the war along with the people.
A staggering 14,000 squares miles of forest was cut down, much of it pine trees.
Hillsides were denuded and the resinous roots dug up—a massively labor-intensive job undertaken by armies of older men, women, and children.
These roots were then chopped up or sawed into pieces and boiled in stills to extract a crude oil that could be refined into gasoline.
Wholesale deforestation ceased with the end of the war, but the damage continued to play out with erosion and insect infestations.
It would take many years for the land to recover.
For all its shortcomings in cost and labor, aviation fuel refined from pine root oil was of high grade and its use in Daikon not so farfetched.
See, for example, U.S. Naval Technical Mission to Japan, “Japanese Fuels and Lubricants, Article 4, Pine Root Oil Program,” February 1946: “It has been definitely shown that an aviation gasoline of 91-95 octane number (with 0.15% lead) can be produced in yield of about 50% from pine root oil by means of high pressure hydrocracking.” (Lieutenant S.
Inaba, research period December 1944–August 1945, quoted in “Japanese Fuels and Lubricants, Article 4, Pine Root Oil Program,” 105.)
Two American air attacks against Japan are described in Daikon : the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of March 9–10, 1945, known as the Great Tokyo Air Raid.
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic attacks loom so large in our memory today that they have overshadowed the Great Tokyo Air Raid, which claimed 100,000 lives in one night and left one million homeless.
It was in fact the most destructive air raid in history.
In comparison, the immediate death toll at Hiroshima was in the range of 70,000 and at Nagasaki approximately 40,000, rising respectively to 140,000 and 74,000 in the coming months and years as victims died from their injuries and the lingering effects of radiation exposure.
(A useful source on the number of deaths caused by the bombs is Alex Wellerstein, “Counting the Dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , August 4, 2020.) Sources I used for the Great Tokyo Air Raid included Robert Guillain, I Saw Tokyo Burning ; Edwin Hoyt, Inferno ; and the firsthand accounts recorded in Haruko Toya Cook and Theodore F.
Cook, eds., Japan at War: An Oral History.
In this latter book I was particularly influenced by Kazuyo Funato’s account of finding her mother the morning after the air raid, Kazuyo’s baby brother no longer on her back.
“Father said, ‘What’s happened to Takahisa?’ My mother was silent…
‘You made it back, you made it back. That’s wonderful!
’ was all my father could say… Although Mother never expressed it in words, I think she had the most difficult time.
She had let the child on her back die. We don’t know if she left him somewhere, or whether he just burnt up and fell.
Once people who were trying to collect records on the Great Air Raid pleaded with us to ask her, but we couldn’t.
She’s now eighty-eight years old” (348–49).
This unfortunate woman Mrs. Funato is a real-life counterpart to the fictional character of Noriko Kan, unable to speak of the death of her daughter, Aiko.
Keizo Kan’s words upon reuniting with Noriko in chapter 32 were inspired by what Mr. Funato said to his wife when he found her the next day.
If so much death and destruction could be caused by conventional bombing, what purpose, if any, did the atomic bombs serve?
An argument in their favor is that they gave the Japanese a much-needed shock.
A fanatical mindset was prevailing in Japan not unlike what would later take hold in North Korea.
Japan’s military leaders were determined to continue the war and were prepared to sacrifice millions of lives to do so.
Massive civilian losses were acceptable to them.
And the Japanese people, convinced by government propaganda that the Americans would slaughter them en masse when they invaded, were ready to comply.
The awesome power of the atomic bombs knocked Japan off this path to destruction.
It pushed the Suzuki cabinet and the Supreme War Council to the point of crisis and prompted Emperor Hirohito, hitherto silent, to speak.
The Emperor’s unprecedented speech to the nation’s assembled leaders on August 14, 1945, was the first real expression of concern for the suffering of the Japanese people, who had not entered into the Imperial Army’s considerations at all.
The Emperor’s plea that they must “endure the unendurable” and surrender reduced everyone present to tears.
It silenced the hard-liners, broke the deadlock, and ended the war.
Had the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs not precipitated this chain of events, the war would have ground on and the death toll would have been staggering.
To begin with, the firebombing campaign against Japan that had already claimed so many lives would have continued, and with increased intensity.
By way of comparison, in the month of March 1945, which included the Great Tokyo Air Raid, a total of 13,800 tons of bombs were dropped on Japan.
By September 1945, with the war in Europe over and America’s full military might directed against Japan, U.S.
air forces were prepared to drop 115,000 tons of bombs every month.
Then there would have been the casualties in Operation Downfall, the Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands, slated to begin on Kyushu on November 1, 1945.
American casualty estimates varied but easily could have topped 200,000.
This in large part is why 85 percent of Americans at the time approved of the use of the atomic bombs—because they did not want any more of their men to die.
On the Japanese side, the death toll would have been vastly higher.
By way of comparison, 142,000 Japanese, including 42,000 civilians, were killed in the invasion of the small island of Okinawa earlier in the year.
The number of dead in the invasion of Kyushu would have dwarfed this.
And then there would have been the invasion of Honshu.
And then there would have been the mass starvation.
The Japanese people, already starving in August 1945, would have faced a full-blown famine going into the winter, with food production plummeting and the rail system for moving nutrition around largely in ruins.
Even with the war ending when it did, mass deaths from starvation were only narrowly averted by occupation forces bringing in massive amounts of food aid to get the country through the first difficult months.
Had the Pacific War continued into 1946, the number of Japanese killed outright or dead from starvation would have run into the millions.