Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War

by Susan Southard

At seven p.m. on August 14 in Washington (eight a.m. Japan time on August 15), President Truman held a press conference to announce the end of the war. The room was packed with White House correspondents and current and former Cabinet members. Two million people jammed New York City’s Times Square, and millions of others crowded into city centers across the country to celebrate the long-awaited conclusion to the nearly four-year global war that had claimed fifty to seventy million lives across the world.

Approximately 350 military personnel, including Army Minister Anami, expressed their sense of personal accountability for Japan’s defeat by committing seppuku, a ritual suicide by disembowelment using a short sword to slash one’s abdomen, formerly part of the samurai Bushido code of honor. Nearly 200 more officers and soldiers, and a few civilians, would kill themselves by October 1948.

“Life or death was a matter of chance, of fate, and the dividing line between the man being cremated and the doctor cremating him was slight.”