Tokyo

Tokyo appears as a city under sustained aerial attack and as the seat of Japan’s final wartime deliberations. The account sets its immense destruction against a consequential limit in Harry S. Truman’s written order: he named Tokyo, where the Imperial Palace stood, as a capital on which the atomic bomb should not be used.

Capital Under Air Attack

A Life report described aerial photographs taken after 300 B-29 bombers had swept destruction across Tokyo. In the fire raid of March 9–10, 1945, more than 100,000 people died. Further attacks followed as Japan continued to resist surrender: on May 23, five square miles of the city were destroyed, and thirty-six hours later another raid devastated sixteen square miles. Tokyo’s place in the account is therefore not simply that of a capital, but of a city repeatedly subjected to destructive conventional bombing.

The Atomic-Bomb Decision

As the bombing campaign continued, officials considered whether an atomic bomb could be demonstrated somewhere other than a city. The committee and its scientific panel rejected a harmless technical demonstration, judging that it would not reliably force surrender; the possibility that only one bomb would be ready and that it might fail added to their concerns. In his July 25 diary entry, Truman directed that the weapon be used against military objectives and ruled out Tokyo, which he identified as Japan’s new capital and the location of the Imperial Palace. His stated distinction between military targets and women and children sat uneasily beside the scale of destruction already inflicted on the city by conventional raids.

The Final Deliberations

On the morning Nagasaki was bombed, Japan’s Supreme Council for the Direction of the War was meeting in a bomb shelter outside the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The council was deadlocked, with three senior military commanders opposing surrender. After news of the bombing reached them, the meeting adjourned and reconvened that night with the Emperor in the Imperial Library. The Emperor decided that Japan must surrender, and the government accepted the Potsdam Declaration on the understanding that he would remain sovereign. Tokyo thus frames the account’s final turn from continued resistance to surrender, while the Imperial Palace and its nearby rooms mark the settings of that decision.