Page 7 of Daikon
FOUR
THE AIR RAID SIREN HAD sounded thirty minutes before, but Lieutenant Colonel Shingen Sagara had not gone to the underground shelter.
He stood at his third-floor window in the War Ministry building, smoking a cigarette as he looked out.
The Defense Section of the Ordnance Bureau, which he headed, occupied four offices at the front of the building and thus afforded him a view of Tokyo, looking south.
He was watching the attack on the port area of Kawasaki in the distance, where black smoke was rising.
The Americans were striking now with aircraft from carriers cruising within sight of the coast—striking with impunity during daylight hours and meeting minimal resistance.
The sirens stopped. First to leave the building was an officer Sagara recognized from the Personnel Bureau, his uniform creased and sweat-stained as usual and worn with all the grace of a rice sack.
It irritated the colonel to see fellow officers dress without pride.
He himself kept a generous supply of shirts in his office.
In hot weather like this, he worked his way through two shirts a day, even three on occasion.
An officer in the Imperial Japanese Army had no excuse for a slovenly appearance.
He returned to his desk and sank into his chair.
The files and reports and memos heaped before him, which kept him working eighteen hours a day and sometimes longer, mainly concerned Operation Ketsu-gō, the defense of the homeland.
The Ordnance Bureau was under tremendous pressure to meet the targets for the stockpiling of munitions at forward units on Kyushu, where the Americans would logically begin their invasion following the monsoon season.
It was a difficult job, munitions production having been severely reduced by the air raids.
What was being turned out, moreover, was often held up due to the state of the train lines, which were coming under increasing attack now that Japan’s cities were mostly destroyed.
To make any progress against these myriad problems took all the colonel’s considerable organizational skills, together with a good deal of bullying, cajoling, and threats.
Stabbing his cigarette into the overflowing ashtray, the colonel noticed once again the document that had left his mind for a moment. Unconditional surrender. What an abomination! The very words increased his blood pressure and twisted his mouth into a frown.
It was a copy of the Allies’ Potsdam Declaration, received four days before and made public in the newspapers, in censored form, that very morning.
No real concessions were offered, only a demand for the emasculation and humiliation of the nation’s armed forces, coupled with the assurance of utter destruction if Japan failed to comply.
The whole thing was deserving of nothing but contempt.
But that was not what upset the colonel.
The Americans and the British were the enemy.
Such behavior was to be expected. Sagara’s anger was due instead to the rumor circulating at the War Ministry that morning that the Foreign Ministry was seeking Moscow’s help in mediating peace terms. This confirmed Sagara’s suspicions that Prime Minister Suzuki was being false with his assurances that the government would ignore the Potsdam Declaration.
The wily old fox was just trying to keep the Army quiet while he worked behind the scenes to bring the war to an end.
Weakness. That was what it was. The way ahead had become rocky, and the civilians, aided by a few misguided military men like Navy Minister Yonai, had lost all hope, all fiber, all spirit.
Prime Minister Suzuki, Foreign Minister Tōgō, Admiral Yonai, and Marquis Kido whispering treason into the Emperor’s ear—the entire lot of them were cowards.
A few setbacks and they were ready to lie down and expose their backs to stinking streams of American piss.
That would not be allowed to happen, of course, not with the war situation far from hopeless.
Yes, there had been strategic reverses and the Navy had been gutted, although the Army remained determined and strong.
Yes, Japan’s cities had been damaged, industrial output was down, and an enemy invasion was expected.
The course of events had not unfolded in an optimal manner.
But hopeless? No, certainly not hopeless.
Victory remained within grasp. By continuing to fight, by meeting the coming invasion and showing a willingness to absorb heavy losses, the enemy would become mentally exhausted and be ultimately forced to concede.
Colonel Sagara cast the maddening document aside, facedown this time, and began fanning himself against the rising heat of midday.
He had slept little the previous night, stretched out on a cot in his office.
And the night before that, he had gotten no rest at all.
It had left him fatigued and struggling to concentrate on the reports on his desk.
He would have to take another tablet to get the work done.
It was all leaving him run-down and haggard—enough to prompt even his wife, who hated him, to comment on his appearance when he visited his home a few days before to pick up clean clothes. And his mental state…
He opened a drawer, took out the little green bottle, and downed two of the tablets. It required two now to give him the boost that he needed.
Uran.
His mind went back to the word. He picked up the file he had requested from General Yasuda’s office, the final report on Project Ni-Go, now bombed into oblivion.
Sagara, as head of the Ordnance Bureau, had been aware of the research work being done at the Riken under Yasuda’s aegis, the effort to enrich uran—uranium—with a view to making some sort of powerful bomb.
That was why the cable from Hikari had caught his attention when he looked over the message center logbook the previous evening.
A bomb recovered from a B-29 that contained uran…
What were the Americans up to? Whatever it was, it demanded investigation.
If his aide, Captain Kunio Onda, returned with worthwhile information, he would telephone the Riken and summon the head of Project Ni-Go.
The tablets were taking effect now. The colonel was feeling energized—so much so that he was unable to sit still. He jumped up and returned to the window.
Still no sign of the motorcycle outside. Captain Onda had left on it earlier that morning, after Sagara had phoned the Special Intelligence Unit in Suginami district to inquire about B-29 activity over western Honshu the previous day.
“Ah,” replied the officer who headed the unit, “you mean the Special Task Planes.”
“The Special Task Planes?” Sagara had no idea what the officer was talking about. Then, when the man began to explain: “Not on the telephone. I’ll send someone over.”
The colonel rolled his head and shoulders, trying to ease the ache in his neck.
He could not remember injuring it. He lit another cigarette and returned to gazing out the window, smoking with one hand and fanning with the other.
The city spread before him at the base of the hill had been reduced to the flatness of a Go board, almost total destruction, its network of roads and train lines and snaking rivers laid bare.
The Ministry’s west-facing offices looked out over a similar vista.
So did the ones on the north of the building. So did the ones facing east.
Had Sagara been allowed to choose his own office, he might have taken one on the other side of the hallway, overlooking the secluded tranquility of the inner courtyard.
Instead, he had been assigned an outer office facing the devastation of the city.
The view had been disheartening at first, but in it Sagara had found inspiration.
For one could not help but notice that there were only two areas that had escaped damage in the air raids: the War Ministry compound atop Ichigaya Heights, where he was now standing; and, just visible off to the left, the Imperial Palace.
There was beauty and meaning in this, as Sagara reflected upon often and had emotionally expressed to his colleagues.
As the physical husk of Dai Nippon was burned away in the air raids, the Emperor in his palace and the Imperial Army at Ichigaya stood out ever more clearly as the essential beating heart of the nation.
This might never have occurred to him in an inward-facing office overlooking a cosseted garden and trees.
The throaty rumble of a motorcycle below. Colonel Sagara looked down, the cadence of his fan increasing, watching as Captain Onda dismounted from the Rikuo and straightened the khaki uniform he wore very well. The handsome young officer, seconded from the Army Air Service, had been a real catch.
Onda hurried toward the entrance, moving almost at a run.
“They’re based on Tinian,” began Captain Onda, closing the door and pulling a chair to Colonel Sagara’s desk. “The Special Intelligence Unit has been reporting on them to the General Staff Office since June, but nobody there seems to have taken any notice.”
Sagara knew the story only too well. Lack of interdepartmental cooperation, hidebound procedures, deskbound officers in blinders with the imagination of cows.
“Since early this year…”—Onda dug a map and some scribbled notes from his satchel and spread them on the desk—“since early this year the Intelligence Unit has been intercepting Morse code traffic from the American bombers on Guam and in the Northern Marianas. It’s encrypted, of course, so we don’t know what they’re saying.
But every signal from every aircraft has an identifying call sign that’s sent in the clear. From that alone, we’ve learned a lot.”