Main Body
President Nambara and the Argument that the Shōwa Emperor Should Abdicate
In which the author considers the war experiences of Tōdai’s medical students and the memories of those who were on campus and heard the emperor’s August 15 broadcast there. In contrast to the vast majority of Tōdai people who were stunned and stupefied by the defeat, one person stands out: Nambara Shigeru. The author discusses several of Nambara’s postwar speeches and the impact they had before turning to Nambara’s call for the Shōwa emperor to abdicate at an appropriate moment. He concludes by introducing the efforts of Nambara and a few Faculty of Law colleagues to hasten the end of the war.
The War Dead of the Tōdai Faculty of Medicine
In the last chapter, I wrote that to this day, even after the research of Tōdai officials, we still don’t where and how the called-up students died. A reader wrote me to report that a five-year study by the alumni association of the Faculty of Medicine turned up all the names of its war dead and the places they died and that a memorial engraved with all their names had been erected at the Yayoi Gate (across campus from the Main Gate). I went to see it.
According to that study, the war dead of the Faculty of Medicine numbered two hundred and thirty-two, and they died in all the war zones: Manchuria and China, of course, but also New Guinea, the Philippines, Guadalcanal, Burma, Attu, Iwojima, Okinawa, Siberia. Medics had to go absolutely everywhere. Simply by looking at that list and at the map of the places they died, one understands immediately how vast this war was. To my surprise, twenty-one of the dead died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the course of research, the report says, “many painful facts became clear.” The report gives the following examples: “One of the men was a medic on Etajima [the island in Hiroshima Bay that was the site of the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy], and just after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, he followed orders, entered the bombed area, and worked on the relief effort for several days; he died after the war, having returned to school. A second man, in Manchuria after the war ended, protested sharply on the way out of Manchuria against the Soviet army’s arrests of young women and was shot through the heart on the railroad tracks; trains ran over his corpse. There was also a doctor, recently graduated, last seen operating in a field hospital in an Okinawan tomb just before Okinawa fell.” Moreover, the writer of the report reflected: “To have to listen to superficial comments of new Japanese, who sing the praises of a peace (constructed atop the deaths of those who died in the war), in which they have all the food they can eat, that these war dead are dead merely because they chose to involve themselves in an evil war, makes my grief for these classmates deeper and stronger.”[1] It’s a fact that both today and in the past, many people voice such superficial words. Th