White Flash/Black Rain: Women of Japan Relive the Bomb (1993)

Most of this book is in the form of poetry and haiku about the bomb, although there are some more traditional text discussions.

It also brings home just how effectively the Japanese propaganda worked, as school children spent time working for the war effort. One woman wrote that, in middle school in 1943, “In gym class we built straw dolls on the playground and stabbed them with bamboo spears, pretending they were enemies. The following year, we were mobilized to work in local governmental jobs at the central telephone department or savings department and such. There were no Sundays, no holidays.”

This is quite important in relation to the discussions about whether or not Japan itself should be invaded, or whether the atomic bomb would have to be used (or perhaps both.) There was some worry as to just what the civilian population would do, if they would actively resist the US soldiers just as their government had trained them to do. If that would have happened, casualties on both sides would have been very high.

One of the things that makes this so complicated, though, is to determine what part of the civilian mindset was actually full acceptance of the “one person, one soldier” idea where each civilian was to kill at least 1 US soldier, or how much was civilians acting like they would help kill soldiers but not really doing that if the situation actually arose.

That relates to the pressure put on people to behave the government wanted them to. “...if people mentioned the slightest complain or discontent about conditions, they were immediately threatened had harassed as disloyal traitors and rebels.” The Japanese secret police were very effective in their jobs.

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