Massive Air Attack. Total war came to the Japanese homefront with terrible ferocity during the last year of battle. The greatest air raid of World War II took place over Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945, when American Army Air Corps B-29 bombers turned from strategic bombing by day to indiscriminate incendiary bombing by night, killing an estimated 100,000 people and incinerating residential and commercial wards. Two more attacks on Tokyo followed in April and May. Other large cities were hit with fire bombs—Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama, and Nagoya. In the last land battle of the war, April to June 1945, one third of the civilian population of Okinawa, perhaps as many as 130,000, lost their lives in military cross fire or forced suicides in caves. At the apocalyptic end, August 6 and 9, two of its cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were plunged into radioactive dust by atomic bombs. By August 15, Japan time, when the Emperor's recorded radio broadcast informed the Japanese people that the war had ended not necessarily to Japan's advantage, much of the country's urban areas—by one count sixty-six cities—had been reduced to rubble from fire bombs. Two were lost to atomic bombs. One estimate, probably too low, is that 660,000 civilians in an overall population of 74,000,000 died during the months of March to August 1945. Millions were homeless. An even greater loss of life had been avoided by evacuating children and women into the countryside. Another estimate is that Japan lost at least twenty-five percent of its financial and economic capital, a percentage close to that of Great Britain. Japan's farms and coastal villages, containing almost one-half of the population, largely escaped terror from the air, bombardment along the shore, or exploding mines in coastal waters. Nevertheless, rural Japan too suffered from losses of men in battle and declining income and morale. Contingency planning by the U.S. military for new forms of chemical and biological warfare on the Tokyo plain and countryside were aborted by Japan's acceptance of the Potsdam declaration on August 15, followed by the formal surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bar on September 2. Others who suffered and died on Japan's homefront included Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean forced laborers and American and Allied Prisoners of War and civilian internees.

Ashes of Defeat. Well before Japan experienced the enormous physical and spiritual devastation of its homefront in the last stage of World War II in the Pacific and East Asia, they had begun to learn the awful reality of total war and been forced to confront the probability of defeat—some would say unconditional defeat. Increasing numbers of bone boxes of the battlefield dead arrived home for ritual burial. There were dwindling food and medical supplies. Daily life was governed by a myriad of rules, regulations, and ration books. As in Britain, the Soviet Union, Germany, and China, civilians suffered on a massive scale. In the last months of the war, life was reduced to day-to-day survival. Few factories could operate. Places of amusement were shut down. And soon, American and Allied troops would arrive, beginning almost seven years of foreign occupation of Japan under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP).

Japan's military, too, had suffered immense losses on the battlefields of China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Island—almost 2 million dead huge numbers of wounded. Complaints were later to surface about brutal mistreatment of the ordinary Japanese soldier by officers and the high command. As Japanese defeats piled up in 1945, more and more Japanese prisoners of war were taken, though never in as large numbers as the U.S. military wished. With the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific War in August, hundreds of thousands of Japanese living in Manchuria, mainly military personnel, were taken off to forced labor camps in Siberia, where they remained many years. Tens of thousands died or have never been accounted for. Moreover, in the months immediately following surrender, seven million overseas Japanese, half military and half civilian., had to be brought back to Japan—home to a weakened economy and society barely able to incorporate repatriates into postwar life and forbidden to welcome veterans with public honors. In a great turnabout, the losses which Japan's aggression and drive for empire had inflicted upon Asian life and property were turned back upon itself into a steady flow of destruction and death. So much so that the enormous damage Japan had done overseas was pushed from public and private Japanese memories in the immediate aftermath of war and displaced by an overwhelming sense of despair and victimization. Japan was nevertheless fortunate in that much of its cultural patrimony and treasures, with the exception of castles (a favorite target of B-29s on their return runs to home bases) escaped extinction.

Censoring the Bomb. Previously, Japanese had been deprived of accurate news of the war's progress. Now, during much of the occupation period, 1945 to 1949, when Occupation censorship replaced previous military control of the mass media, few Japanese saw photographs, exhibits, or visual testimonies of the vast amount of bomb damage to their country, especially from atomic bombs. Japanese could look around their towns and cities, of course, or speak to each other about their shared plight. They were living in shacks, bombed out vehicles, remains of public buildings, or on the streets. They had to line up for food rations, scramble for trams and streetcars, and jam train stations. But it was difficult if not impossible for photographers and painters to bear witness. Fearing revenge, Occupation authorities confiscated Japanese photos, film footage, and medical records. They were hostile to criticism of General MacArthur, Occupation policies, or anything which, by their definition, might disturb public tranquility. Wartime Japanese military art was also confiscated as propaganda and removed from view. Even Japanese body parts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were brought back to the U.S. for study by U.S. Army pathologists.

Similar problems faced professional writers and ordinary people who wished to publish poems, fiction, or factual accounts of the atomic bomb experience. Although A-bomb survivors (known as hibakusha) managed to circulate some writings secretly or to hide materials, a great deal of the early A-bomb fiction, poetry, and non-fiction was either suppressed in entirety or was published with missing lines and deleted passages. Stories with fire bomb settings fared somewhat better in reaching print. Occupation censors apparently believed that the Japanese would see fire bombing as conventional warfare and something they had brought upon themselves. The first atomic bomb poems were written by Japanese in 1945-46, but were either stopped by censors, self=censored, or circulated secretly. The first short story to reach print, "Summer Flower," was by a professional writer and supervisor, Hara Tamiki, who had been in Hiroshima to visit the grave of his wife on the anniversary of her death. It appeared in a small literary magazine in 1947, possibly self-censored after rejection by a major journal. The first atomic bomb novel, Town of Corpses, also by an established writer and Hiroshima survivor, this time a woman, ōta Yōko, was published in 1948 but with major cuts. All of her subsequent writings were about Hiroshima. A fourteen year old survivor of Nagasaki, Hayashi Kyōko, would later devote most of her fiction to the Nagasaki experience of the atomic bomb. The majority of literature in this new genre was by women, which may help to account for the difficulty A-bomb authors faced in gaining recognition for their work from established literary critics.

In late 1949, after a difficult struggle with Occupation censorship officials, a dying Japanese medical doctor and prewar convert to the Catholic Church, Dr. Nagai Takashi, managed to publish a non-fiction work, Bells of Nagasaki. It was a factual account of the bombing of the hospital where he worked and the efforts made to save victims. Although he had lost his wife to the bomb, his children had been spared. The book, a best seller, contained photos of both blast and human damage at Nagasaki. These were among the first published images of the atomic bomb in postwar Japan, but at the insistence of Occupation censors, the publisher was forced to include an appendix—a translation of a U.S. military report. It was a graphic account, based on eyewitness testimonies, of the sack of Manila in March 1945 and the death of 100,000 Filipinos at the hands of Japanese who refused to surrender or accept Manila as an open city. The book, therefore, included photos of Manila as well as of Nagasaki. Americans, too, were subject to early postwar censorship of information about the atomic bombings. Although photos of the mushroom cloud, barren cityscapes, and blast damage appeared in such popular magazines as Life in the fall of 1945, reports on the effects of the human were slow to circulate in the mass media.

Protest. Two painters who were eyewitnesses to the early effects of the bomb in Hiroshima, husband and wife Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, began preliminary sketches in 1948 to bear testimony but were not finished with their first A-bomb murals until 1950. Even then, they feared the possibility of censorship and were cautious about public showings. Following the end of formal Occupation censorship, Japanese students at Kyoto University were responsible for the first public exhibits of A-bomb photos and drawings at a local department store in the summer of 1951. This was quickly followed in the fall by a larger collection of photographic evidence in a popular illustrated journal, Asahi Graph. Feature films remained under tight control. Only when the Occupation had ended did the first A-bomb feature film appear, I Live in Fear, directed by Kurosawa Akira and released in 1955. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial and Park were completed in 1955 as a permanent reminder of the blast. And, in the wake of worries about possible U.S. resort to atomic weapons during the Korean War, 1950-53, and the March 1954 nuclear dusting of a Japanese fishing vessel, Lucky Dragon, including the death of one of the fishermen, Japanese housewives collected tens of thousands of petitions protesting nuclear weapons. Japanese Mothers for Peace joined the international ban the bomb movement and demonstrated against the continued presence of U.S. troops in Japan, the creation of Japan's Self-Defense Forces, and the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.