Hi. I'm writing a novella set in Japan during the 1945 occupation of Japan. I'm after any information or sources for this. Questions I currently have:
How did the executives get to Japan, plane or boat? What kind of plane or boat?
How destroyed were the cities? Especially Tokyo. I know most of the cities were bombed, but how badly?
What was the general feeling at the time? Was it hostility? Was there alot of aggression? Or was it just a gratitude of it being over?
How did the Americans treat the locals and vice-versa?
What kind of quarters did the Americans stay in? What did they eat? What was the typical day for an executive with General Macarthy?
What was the communication like? Was English spoken at the time? Or were there translators?
Any information is helpful.
Even recommendations for documentaries or even films set in Thai era would be useful.
Cheers!
I can speak to a couple of the questions, but to be honest if I were to answer everything above to the fullest extent I would end up writing my own history book so I will do a couple that I am feeling up to right now. Maybe I come back to it, maybe I don't.
What was the general feeling at the time? Was it hostility? Was there alot of aggression? Or was it just a gratitude of it being over?
This depends on the age and demographics of the person you are asking about.
Having focused my undergrad research of wartime women's diaries (including a little bit of post war) I can tell you socio-economic status played a big role. I worked with one diary of a young woman who was mobilized to work in an ammunition factory. During the early parts of the war she had been a precocious women's college student from a relatively good background. She hated the war and hated the fact that her teachers read her diary to check for instances of dissident thought and was glad to be done with it. There is an amazing entry where she writes something along the lines of "What do the teachers think we are, middle schoolers?" which I loved. I had another girl's diary who wrote about being deeply saddened by the fact that the war was lost, but glad that the war ending meant she might be able to eat something other than the occasional potato (rationing near the end of the war was very very strict).
One thing you might find fascinating about this is the fact that there was a HUGE amount of dogma and anger expressed in the diaries of children. For more information read books by Samuel Yamashita like Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese or Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940-1945. However, some stand outs that I still remember are kids writing about stabbing the first American they see with a bamboo spike.
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How destroyed were the cities? Especially Tokyo. I know most of the cities were bombed, but how badly?
I am not a military historian by any means, so you will want to look into the extensive writing about this. You're going to want to read the following for full facts and figures as well as some pretty in depth history on the bombing raids on Tokyo: Target Tokyo, Embracing Defeat, and War Without Mercy. However, the level of destruction of cities depended on which city you are talking about. Tokyo was devastated by fire bombings and I don't need to talk about Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Kyoto was left untouched by bombings. My new home of Osaka was, at least in the numbers I still remember, more than 30% destroyed. To put it to you this way, the Japanese word used by some of the history professors I studied with was ηΌγη which means scorched earth.