Chapter 10: Gather Around the Radio

At noon on 15 August 1945 a recorded voice ended the war for many millions of people at the same moment. Before that voice could travel, however, it had to survive one dark night in the palace, and afterwards it still needed days to reach every distant army.

You will remember where we left the emperor late on the evening of 14 August. His decision had been made, and the cabinet had fixed the text of his words. Technicians from the broadcasting service were carrying their heavy recording machines into a room of the household ministry. The blackout was still in force, so they worked behind thick curtains by the light of small shaded lamps.

I want you to stay in that room with me for a moment, and to keep your eyes on the turning discs. Almost everything in this chapter depends on two sets of flat discs that were cut there before midnight.

The emperor read his words twice into a microphone before midnight.

At about twenty-five minutes past eleven that night, the emperor entered the room where the microphone stood waiting on its stand. He read the imperial rescript, which was written in the old and formal language of the court. The engineers listened through their headphones while the cutting needle moved across the turning disc. When the first reading was finished, the emperor asked whether it had been good enough. He was told that a few words had been faint, and so he read the whole text a second time. Each reading lasted a little more than four and a half minutes, and each one needed two discs, because a single side could not hold it. Shortly before midnight the work was done, and the emperor went back to his rooms. A chamberlain then placed the two sets of discs in cloth bags. He locked them in a small safe in an office of the empress's household, among shelves of ordinary papers, where few people would think to look.

You may find it strange that the end of a war was trusted to such fragile objects. Yet that is the way of many endings in this book: a paper in a tent, a pen on a school table, a disc in a safe.

So when the chamberlain turned the key, the Allies already knew the decision, because the message of acceptance had gone out through the neutral capitals some hours before. The people of the island empire, however, still knew nothing at all, and the ministers who had wept at the table that morning were still awake in their offices.

Young officers searched the dark palace for the recordings.

Not everyone in the capital was ready to let the war end. A small group of young staff officers in the war ministry believed with all their hearts that surrender would destroy their nation. They had spent the evening trying to win senior generals to their side, and the generals had refused. At about one in the morning the young men went to the commander of the guards division, whose soldiers protected the palace. He would not join them, and he was killed in his office. The officers then issued false orders in his name. By about two o'clock in the morning of 15 August, the guards had closed the palace gates and cut most of the telephone lines. They also held the broadcasting technicians in a guardhouse.

For several hours soldiers moved through the long corridors of the household ministry with flashlights. They opened doors and asked servants and chamberlains where the recordings were hidden. The chamberlains, still in their night clothes, answered politely that they did not know. The small safe among the papers was never opened. You can picture the scene without further detail: a dark building, boots on wooden floors, quiet men who gave nothing away, and behind one door the two cloth bags lying still.

Before dawn the commander of the eastern district army came to the palace himself. He spoke to the officers and men of the guards and showed them that their orders were false. The soldiers returned to their barracks as the sky grew light, and by about eight o'clock the palace was quiet again. In the same hours the war minister, who had refused to join the young officers but shared their grief, took his own life in his residence. Later that morning the leader of the young officers and one companion also ended their lives outside the palace, less than an hour before the broadcast.

When you read about these hours, I ask you to remember these men as you would remember the dead of any side. They were caught in the turning of a great machine that they could neither stop nor accept.

The broadcasting service told everyone to stand ready at noon.

At twenty-one minutes past seven that morning, the radio told its listeners that an important broadcast would be made at noon. Everyone across the island empire was asked to be ready to listen. In districts where the power was normally cut during the day, the electricity was switched on especially for that hour. Soldiers who had taken no part in the night's events stood guard while the discs were taken from the safe. The discs then travelled by car to the broadcasting building. One set was to be played and the other kept in reserve, the way a careful traveller keeps a second ticket in a different pocket.

In many towns the news of the noon broadcast spread by word of mouth. It passed from the station master to the post office, and from the post office to the village office and the farms. Teachers gathered their pupils in schoolyards, and foremen stopped the machines in the factories. Families without a radio walked to a neighbour's house, or to a shop that had placed its set in the doorway. In the hospitals nurses carried radios into the wards. In the barracks soldiers stood in lines in front of a single loudspeaker. Wherever you had been in the island empire that morning, you would have seen people gathering quietly toward a voice they had never heard.

An old valve radio in a repair shop showed me how long the waiting was.

Some years ago I walked into a small repair shop in a quiet side street. An old man with a magnifying lens pushed up on his forehead kept rows of radios from the 1930s and 1940s on wooden shelves. Their cases of dark wood and brown resin shone softly in the light from the window. He switched one of them on for me, and for what seemed a long time nothing happened. Then a low hum began, and the dial glowed orange. The valves at the back warmed slowly, like the boiler of an old locomotive gathering steam. Only after nearly half a minute did a voice come through, thin and far away.

I stood there and thought of the millions who had waited in front of such sets on that August day, hearing first the hum and then the announcer.

You might try to imagine that half minute for yourself. Picture a schoolyard full of children, or a factory hall where the great machines have just fallen silent. Everyone is standing, and nobody yet knows what they will hear. Many people had been told only that the emperor would speak. Some believed that he would call on them to fight to the very end, so the waiting itself was heavy with fear.

The recorded voice spoke for four and a half minutes at noon.

At noon the announcer said that this was a broadcast of the greatest importance, and he asked all listeners to stand. The national anthem was played. Then, for the first time in their lives, the people of the island empire heard the voice of their emperor. It was high and slow, and it used the formal language of the court. Many listeners, especially the young and the country people, could not follow its old words, much as you or I might struggle with a page of very old prayers. Reception was poor in many places, and the crackle of the sets swallowed whole phrases. In schoolyards and on factory floors people looked at one another, unsure whether the war was over or whether they had been asked to go on.

The rescript never used the word surrender, and it never spoke of defeat. It said that the war situation had developed not necessarily to their advantage. It said that the general trends of the world had turned against them, and that to continue would ruin their nation and harm all human civilization. Then came the sentence that people still remember. The emperor said that he had resolved to pave the way for a great peace for all the generations to come, by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.

If you read the full text aloud today in a careful translation, you will need about the same four and a half minutes.

After the recorded voice the anthem was played again. The announcer then read the text a second time in plain words and explained what had been decided. Only then did many listeners understand. The whole broadcast lasted about thirty-seven minutes.

The listeners bowed their heads in schoolyards and on platforms.

People who were there and later wrote about the hour describe silence more than anything else. In many schoolyards the children stood with bowed heads while their teachers wept. On railway platforms travellers stood beside their luggage as the station loudspeaker crackled overhead. In the countryside farmers knelt on the earth in front of the village office. Some people felt a grief so deep that they could not speak. Others felt a quiet relief that they were almost ashamed to show. Many felt both at once, the way a passenger on a long night train feels sadness and release together when the train at last slows into the station.

There were families who had lost their homes in the fires of the bombing, and parents who had lost sons on distant islands. Many did not know whether their fathers and brothers were still alive. For them the voice on the radio did not end the waiting. It only changed its kind, from fear of the next air raid to the long uncertainty of whether anyone would come home.

If you have ever stood in a crowd during a minute of silence, you know how many people can become very still together.

On 15 August 1945 that stillness spread across a whole nation within half an hour. In the late afternoon the prime minister, an old admiral who had accepted office in April only to bring the war to an end, handed the resignation of his cabinet to the emperor.

Find twelve noon on a clock face and turn it round the world.

Now draw a plain clock face on a sheet of paper and take up a pencil. First mark twelve noon on 15 August in the capital of the island empire, where the recorded voice was heard. Now remember that the eastern coast of the western ally kept its clocks on a wartime hour in 1945. It was thirteen hours behind. Move your pencil backwards around the dial until you find the hour on that coast.

You will find that it was eleven in the evening of 14 August, the day before. Now take one more step. On that eastern coast, at seven in the evening of 14 August, the president had already told reporters that the island empire had accepted the terms. At the same moment, at midnight in the island capital of the western Allies, the new prime minister spoke on the radio. Turn your clock again, and you will see that seven in the evening on that coast was eight in the morning of 15 August in the island empire. In other words, crowds in the Allied cities knew that the war was ending four hours before the people of the island empire heard their emperor. In the old capitals of the west, the noon broadcast fell at about four in the morning, while most people slept.

I think this exercise teaches you something that no single date can teach. An ending is not one moment but a wave, moving across the clock faces of the world and reaching each place at its own hour.

The Allied cities filled their churches as well as their streets.

On the evening of 14 August people in the cities of the western Allies poured into the streets, rang bells and sang. In many places the celebrations went on through the next day. Yet you would be wrong to see only joy in those hours. The churches were full of people who knelt quietly. Mothers held letters from sons who were still on ships or in camps far away. Many families thought of the prisoners held by the island empire, whose fate was still unknown.

For the Allied soldiers who were waiting on ships and islands for the landings planned for the autumn, the news meant above all that they would probably live. Many of them later wrote that they had sat in silence rather than cheered.

The order to cease fire travelled slowly to the distant armies.

The voice on the radio had reached the home islands, but the armies of the island empire were spread across a vast area. They stood from the cold plains of the north to the islands of the south, and many of their units could hear no broadcast at all. On 16 August the high command ordered all forces to stop fighting at once, except in self-defence. The distant commands were given until about 22 August, and in some places a few days longer, to bring every unit to a halt. On 17 August the emperor issued a second rescript, addressed directly to his soldiers and sailors, asking them to obey.

Many commanders feared that their men would not believe a radio message. For this reason three princes of the imperial family flew on 16 and 17 August to the great headquarters on the mainland of Asia and in the south, to carry the emperor's will in person. You can think of it as a signal passed down a very long railway line. Each signal box must wait for the light in the box before it to change before it can change its own.

On 19 August two aircraft painted white, with green crosses on their wings, carried a delegation of sixteen officers and officials to an island airfield. The deputy chief of the army staff led them, and there they changed to an Allied plane. They flew on to the headquarters of the supreme commander in the south, where they received instructions for the arrival of the occupation forces and for the surrender ceremony. They started home on 20 August. One of the white aircraft ran short of fuel and came down on a beach in the dark, but the officers reached the capital the next morning with their papers safe.

Fighting continued in the north for many days after the broadcast.

For people in the north, the broadcast of 15 August did not end the war. The army of the eastern ally, which had entered the war on 9 August, continued its advance across the plains of the mainland. The armies there did not lay down their arms until about 19 and 20 August. On 18 August troops of the eastern ally landed on the northernmost island of a long chain of islands, and fighting there lasted until 23 August. On the long island north of the home islands it continued until about 25 August. The remaining islands of the chain were occupied in the first days of September.

Many thousands of soldiers on both sides died in these last days, after the voice on the radio had spoken. Many civilians died or were lost as well, among them families trying to reach the ports and the last ships. I will not describe these days in detail. But I ask you to keep them in mind whenever you see 15 August written as the end of the war, because for these people the end came later and at a far greater cost. Your calendar and theirs did not show the same day.

Keep them in your silence too, and with them the soldiers of the eastern ally who fell in the same weeks, far from their own villages.

The great fleet entered the bay at the end of August.

On 20 August the blackout was lifted in the home islands, and lamps shone in windows at night without heavy curtains. Between 27 and 29 August the ships of the Allied fleet steamed slowly into the great bay below the capital. They turned and dropped anchor in long lines, while small boats went to and fro between them. On 28 August an advance party landed at an airfield near the capital to prepare for the occupation forces. On 30 August the supreme commander of the Allied powers landed there himself. He stepped down from his aircraft with a pipe in his hand and drove along quiet roads guarded by soldiers of the island empire.

If you had stood on a hill above the shore on those last nights of August, you would have seen the water full of quiet lights.

On the evening of 1 September the anchored ships lay with their lights burning on the dark water of the bay. On the battleship chosen for the ceremony, sailors were scrubbing the deck, and they carried a long table covered with green cloth to the place where the papers would be signed in the morning.