First edition, published a little over a month after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this is the first account of the bombings written for a Japanese audience. Importantly, it appeared the day before censorship was fully implemented by the occupying government and full Allied control was exerted over the press.
The pamphlet was printed by the official Japanese news agency, Domei Tsushin, and was soon followed by a second equally rare work on the Potsdam Declaration (“Potsudamu sengen”), both issued just before the Domei was formally disbanded by the Allied occupation forces.
Takei Takeo (1910–1981, not to be confused with the animator), whose early career saw him work as a translator, was fluent in English, which he apparently learnt while imprisoned for some of his left-leaning journalism). He and a col- league were in a position to listen to Allied radio broadcasts, and this text is based on these broadcasts, namely Truman’s formal announcement of the dropping of the atomic bomb. In a surprising and cruel twist, his family later claimed that his full and frank account led to Takeo himself being painted as something of an apologist. Japanese library catalogues list him as the author or translator of a curiously diverse group of works on jurisprudence (1937), the US White Paper on diplomacy by Alsop and Kintner (1940), a Japanese edition of the French adventurer Gontran de Poncins’s Kabloona on life in the Arctic (1941), quite apart from a history of Islam (1942) and a study of Fichte (1943). His postwar career is less certain, but he did publish work on Marx (1967) and a translation of Dornemann’s biography of the Weimar-era German Communist politician Clara Zetkin (1969), presumably suggesting he became more overtly political.
The dropping of the atomic bomb not only hastened the end of the War in the Pacific, but ushered in a new age for humanity. An uncensored account written by a Japanese journalist for a Japanese audience is of real importance.
Provenance: Maggs Bros., U.K.
OCLC locates two copies in Japan and one in the NLA. Furthermore, it’s not in the benchmark catalogue of the Gordon W. Prange collection of postwar Japan at the University of Maryland. A small edition was reprinted in 1995 for the fiftieth anniversary, edited by his wife and with a memoir by his son.
Takei, Genshi bakudan fukkoku: Naki otto ni ai o komete [trans. Atomic Bomb Reprint: With Love for My Late Husband] (Tokyo, 1995).
