Word: anami
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...earth had happened to Hiroshima. Since the first reports seemed unbelievable, some Japanese leaders wanted desperately not to believe them. Others decided that even if Truman's announcement was true--that Hiroshima was hit with an atomic bomb--Japan should continue to fight. "I am convinced," War Minister Korechika Anami told his colleagues in the Cabinet, "that the Americans had only one bomb, after...
...questions of whether and how to end the war. One faction of three, headed by Prime Minister Suzuki and joined by Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo and Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, favored negotiating for peace on the most favorable terms still remaining; the other, led by War Minister Anami, argued that defeat and death would be more honorable than surrender and occupation and that Japan had no choice but to fight on. The debate continued in a Cabinet meeting that ran more than eight hours. At last, Suzuki told the deadlocked Cabinet that he would convene an Imperial Conference, a meeting...
...just after nightfall, in the summer of 1945. Workers scurry home through darkened streets still littered with the charred rubble of the spring fire-bomb raids. The Cabinet sits late, pondering the accumulating evidence of Japan's almost certain defeat; but the diehards, led by War Minister Korechika Anami, want to fight to the last breath. Suddenly, air-raid sirens wail. In the sky, just short of the city, two Superfortresses wheel, and a single huge projectile drops through the dark toward the bay. A mile above the water, it detonates...
...General Anami was a military mystic. He once called on Japan's soldiers "to defend the Imperial land even after death with your souls." When he heard the news of his son's death in battle, his only visible emotion was to crush a flower bud in his hand. He held out against surrender. Before committing harakiri, he wrote a farewell to his Emperor ("I humbly beg . . . pardon ... for my great sins") and a poem...
There is a right and a wrong way to commit harakiri. In the case of General Anami and Vice Admiral Onishi, it is presumed that they donned the usual ceremonial robes, knelt on a dais, surrounded by friends and officials. When the jeweled hara-kiri dagger had been handed to them, they would have made many bows to the Emperor. Then they would have plunged the razor-like dagger into the left side below the waist, at the same time drawing it toward the right. They would thus have fulfilled the hara-kiri command: to die with honor, when...