1967 movie “Japan’s Longest Day”

 1967 movie “Japan’s Longest Day”

In the movie “Oppenheimer” Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss says that using the atomic bomb was unnecessary because Japan was already defeated by that point in the war.

I address this argument in my ebook “An Engineer’s Account: Harlow Russ, Los Alamos, and the First Atomic Bombs” and conclude that if the Japanese were in fact already defeated by the end of July, 1945, they certainly weren’t prepared to acknowledge it.

The argument is often made that the U.S. should have detonated an atomic bomb on a deserted island as a demonstration of its awful destructive power rather than dropping it on a Japanese port city.

 However if the combat use of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima didn’t result in an immediate Japanese surrender it seems unlikely that a demonstration detonation on a deserted island would have.  In fact even the combat use of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki almost didn’t lead to a Japanese surrender, as documented in a 1967 Japanese-language film called “Japan’s Longest Day.”

Although unknown to most Americans, this highly-regarded docudrama has long been familiar to Japanese audiences. It’s a black-and-white movie about the very end of World War II in the Pacific that includes a number of famous Japanese actors, among them Toshiro Mifune.

 The “longest day” referred to is the time between Emperor Hirohito’s opting for unconditional surrender to the Allies as set out in the Potsdam Declaration following the detonation of the second combat atomic bomb on August 9 and the time his recorded surrender declaration was broadcast to the nation 24 hours later. 

 During this chaotic 24-hour period fanatical junior military officers attempted a coup. They came very close to assassinating the Emperor, overthrowing the military government, destroying the recording, and continuing the war, which, as Hirohito realized, would have been catastrophic for the Japanese people. The military plan the young officers endorsed, despite the two atomic bombs, was for everyone in Japan to fight Allied invading forces tooth and nail and for the military to kill civilians facing surrender or capture.

 One recent reviewer expresses it well when he says of these officers, “Their allegiance to the militaristic mantras of ‘honor and duty’ outweighed their loyalty to the Emperor himself.”

“Japan’s Longest Day” was remade in 2015 as “The Emperor in August”, also a Japanese-language film. These two films are of particular interest because they give a Japanese perspective on this chilling insurrection attempt, also referred to as the Kyujo Incident.

The image accompanying this post shows three scenes from “Japan’s Longest Day.” In the first Japan’s war cabinet meets with Emperor Hirohito in an Imperial Conference to debate whether or not to surrender to the Allies after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

In the second an Imperial Japanese Army officer murders the defenseless elderly head of the First Imperial Guards Division protecting Hirohito to prevent the Emperor’s planned surrender. In the third a detachment of Imperial Japanese Army troops opens fire on the compound of Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki in Yokohama, facing stiff resistance from the compound’s guards, in an attempt to kill him, seize control of the government, and continue the war.