I've read something I find kind of curious about concerning the atomic bombs. It's pretty well known that the reaction to the bombings was shockingly calm, among the survivors, with them and the authorities supposedly staying professional and orderly in the face of such unimaginable destruction, and as such is sometimes seen as representative of wider Japanese spirits and societal attitudes. However, I have also heard recently that in the wake of the surrender, especially in Nagasaki , there was a breakdown in order as disillusioned soldiers and police abandoned their posts and took the opportunity to engage in looting of the remains of the city, and that this was common in the country at this time.
In light of that I'm kind of curious as to what exactly Japanese society looked like as they organised their surrender and the occupation by American forces began, did the social structures that kept the country together through years of war in the face of certain destruction start to fray when the existential threats and national goals that might have helped bind people together passed by? Was there a major return of former soldiers from the overseas conquests, and did this cause any issues? How were Japanese authorities, either military or civilian, perceived by the population in light of having lost the war and having claimed for years it was a fight to the death or total destruction for the whole nation? Were shortages in food and fuel common and how were handled? Did Crime become rampant? I have heard that the Yakuza really became an institution post-war when they had lots of listless, demobbed soldiers to draw upon.
Sorry if this is a bit broad, but I hear a lot about the extreme positions Japan found itself in, especially at the end of the war, as well as people living under bombings, shortages and preparations for invasion in the last few months of 1945 that it recently struck me I don't really know anything about how the country reacted in the immediate aftermath to all of this.
Japan was and is a very organized place. Even what the Japanese characterize as "disorganized" -- is still pretty organized by other people's standards. Its astonishing just how cohesive and effective Japanese civil governance remained, even as physical structures of civilization came crashing down. There's good evidence that Japan's prior historical experience with devastating earthquakes, together with their very effective bureaucratic state and habits of civil society made them an almost uniquely resilient society to the physical and social stresses of war.
One of the templates for recovery from the War was the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. This devastating quake, killing something more than 100,000 people, tested civil society. Although not a war, in every other respect the Kanto quake was at the scale of an atomic bombing, and posed many of the same recovery challenges. Japanese have had a history of political disorder after quakes before, and after the Kanto earthquake riots broke out attacking Korean workers, with all manner of rumors being spread about Koreans. Japanese authorities rapidly asserted control, declaring martial law.
The effect of the Kanto earthquake was to stimulate a distinctively Japanese disaster preparedness culture. Japanese -- then and now-- don't just have public service announcements, there's a deep awareness "disaster may strike, buildings may crumble, fires may break out-- and here's where you go and what you do when that happens". There was also a curious moral judgement -- that disaster was a judgment of heaven, something deserved; and while it may seem perverse, this moral lens contributed to resilience, a social reflex that disaster is something like the gods saying "work harder". Episodes of disorder did occur in Japan in 1923 and 1945-- like the riots against the Koreans -- but Japanese government and civil society responded quickly and effectively.
So when Japan was bombed and defeated, the material conditions of life were terrible. People were starving. Water supplies were contaminated. Huge human losses had been suffered. But when you read personal accounts of people who were, for example, schoolchildren, in the period, what's really striking is the resilience. Lots of memoirs read something like "since our own school was closed, we moved in with cousins and started XYZ middle school" -- everywhere you get the impression that the State infrastructure was continuing to work, with whatever ad hoc arrangements were required. Nobel laureate Shimomura Osamu has this to say in his brief autobiography
We saw a single B-29 going from north to south towards Nagasaki, about 15 km away. I thought that its course was unusual. The B-29 dropped two or three parachutes and I heard sporadic gunshots. Watching carefully, I saw no people attached to the parachutes. Within a few minutes, another B-29 followed the first one, and a siren sounded the “all clear” signal. We returned to our factory building.
At the moment I sat down on my work stool, a powerful flash of light came through the small windows. We were blinded for about 30 seconds. Then, about 40 seconds after the flash, a loud sound and sudden change of air pressure followed. We were sure there was a huge explosion somewhere, but we didn’t know where. The sky was rapidly filling with dark clouds, and when I left the factory to walk home, about three miles away, a drizzling rain started. It was black rain. By the time I arrived home, my white shirt had turned gray. My grandmother quickly readied a bath for me. That bath might have saved me from the ill effects of the strong radiation that presumably existed in the black rain.
[snip]
The student mobilization ended, but I was not sure if my school record would allow me to enter a college. To receive some guidance, I visited my Isahaya school a week after the end of the war. Attached to the main gate were several sheets of large paper, on which numerous names were written. About half of the names were crossed off. Apparently the school was being used to accommodate the injured people of Nagasaki, who were listed on the papers.
"To receive some guidance, I visited my Isahaya school a week after the end of the war." I've always thought that that might be the "most Japanese sentence ever". Shortly after having been covered in atomic bomb fallout, Shimomura is visiting his school -- where he hadn't been for more than a year-- to receive "some guidance" about further studies! That qualifies as an economical description of just how robust Japan's civil society was, even under the most dire circumstances.
Shimomura obtained entrance to a Pharmaceutical College, and his description of life there, and the impact of wartime experience is again by turns studious, stoic and heroic
Most of the pharmacy students lived in the dormitory, and they were always hungry due to an extreme shortage of food. I lived at home, and we owned farm land, so I was very lucky concerning food. Despite great effort by the professors, the resources and equipment at the pharmaceutical college were poor. We had a lot of difficulty carrying out experiments. Instruction in analytical chemistry and physical chemistry seemed fine, but I learned very little organic chemistry. In experiments on organic synthesis, we often set fire to solvents, due to poor technique and poor glassware. But many of us were experienced firefighters due to growing up in wartime, and we had no problem putting the fires out.
The police and courts continued enforcing the law, national school examinations were sometimes delayed, but there was never any permanent disruption of the systematic order of Japanese civil society
One of the more ironic visual symbols of Japanese resilience is the surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri-- note in the photographs that the Japanese diplomats and military leaders are in full formal dress, impeccably clean. In a nation that had been bombed into submission-- they were able to come up with pristine top hats and tails; the Japanese are actually more sharply dressed than the American victors.
The Japanese never stopped trying to rebuild and repair damage _during_ the war-- and that was with bombs falling on them and huge shortages of just about everything. Macarthur arrives in Tokyo August 30 with the end of the war; the bombs stopped falling, and supplies started flowing . . . in other words, there was an immediate reduction in challenge and increase in resources.
So a system which was already coping remarkably well with an exceptionally dire situation now found the situation less dire, and the resources more plentiful. People who'd had little to eat got more food. Building materials became available. Workers were released from defense production and the military.
Repatriation of soldiers was complex and sometimes slow, as Japan had essentially no autonomous sea transport capacity. Japanese armies surrendered where they were, a few of the soldiers (and a great deal of the munitions) finding their way into other armies including those armies of China, Korea and Vietnam, and also the British Army, often under assumed names. The US arranged some repatriatriations, others were ad hoc, but these difficulties meant that it was more a steady flow of veterans being repatriated, rather than one single arrival.
Sources:
Most important English language secondary source on the topic is John Dower's Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II [1999]. If you want "one book" to introduce you to the subject, this is what you'll want to read. Won the Pulitzer Prize (among many others); Dower has command of an array of sources few will ever access, has deep detail on social history as well as political drama. Highly recommended.
The US gathered great amounts of information about Japanese conditions and governance, through SCAP (Macarthur's Office), and this is conveniently English language-- there are of course very large Japanese archival sources, only a few of which are available in English (or online)
Occupation and Reconstruction of Japan, 1945–52
Foreign Relations of the United States
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945v06
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945v07
particularly
Occupation and control of Japan
for the Kanto Earthquake and Japanese systems for dealing with disaster, see:The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Culture of Catastrophe and Reconstruction in 1920s Japan
Mountbatten's Samurai: Imperial Japanese Army and Navy Forces under British Control in Southeast Asia, 1945-1948 -- nice account of what happened to some of the surrendered Japanese forces in SE Asia. There are many such stories, none involving huge numbers of people, but collectively reflecting a rather idiosyncratic "returning veteran" experience.
One short memoir that I like to recommend is 2008 Nobel laureate Shimomura Osamu's account -- he was school age during the war, his "A Wartime Childhood" is useful and moving reading. Note the matter of factness of it . . . there are all kinds of horrors, but no one deviates from "doing what you're supposed to be doing", and no one gives up.