JAPAN: Blossom Time

The world was well aware last week of what the Japanese Army and Navy were doing far & wide, but it thought little about what life was like to the Japanese at home:

In Tokyo the air was softening. It was the time of year when people began to watch for the gentle pink and white rioting of cherry blossoms in the parks. On weekends families would swarm by thousands from the rickety alleys of the Asakusa and Honjo working-class districts, where they had nervously hung blackout shades in their flimsy houses. By foot or bus or train they would take to the parks—to Asakusa, with its booths of cheap souvenirs and its great red temple of Kwannon; to Uyeno, with its museums and galleries; or to Shiba, with its tree-shrouded tombs of the shoguns. To the shuffling crowds watching for the blossoms, the days would seem more hopeful than they had for a very long time.

For years the obedient, work-worn people had patiently wondered why, despite the boasts of the generals, the Empire was not triumphant in war; why the young men kept going to China and the pathetic boxes of their ashes kept coming back. But now it was almost unbelievably different. Already the people might look almost defiantly into the mild skies where the foreign bombers had been expected. Glorious had been Japan’s victories. Instead of being attacked from the air, Japan was driving the rich, vain, intolerable British and Americans from the Orient. The New Asia was coming to pass.

In the newspaper Yomiuri, Navy spokesman Captain Hideo Hiraide wrote that, since the conquest of Java, Japan seemed to have taken the defensive while the Allies were on the offensive. He warned that Japan would probably be attacked from the air, that it was too soon for her newly captured raw materials to be fully exploited, that transportation was a difficult problem.

But the people could partly discount his words as the wholly admirable caution of the brilliant Japanese naval command.

The Empire’s power was manifest. The war might be long, as Premier Tojo warned, but the tide of defeat had turned and was now a thunderous southward surge of victory. The Emperor had even deigned to show himself, astride his white horse, to receive the banzais of his subjects. In the parks of Tokyo, the people thrilled to brass bands blaring the fervent strains of Kimigayo:

Thousands of years of happy reign be thine;
Rule on, my lord, till what are pebbles now,
By age united to mighty rocks shall grow,
Whose venerable sides the moss doth line.