Recycled: Atago Hill, rebel suicides, roasted pigeon. From Toranomon. In the middle of Golden Week. 5/6/2022.
A street performer had set up under the railway overpass at Yurakucho. He was juggling long, dull knives. When he got down, he gave a heartfelt speech about the life of a busker. Two police officers watched as he solicited donations.
I had no need to go to Ginza was too busy. Golden Week daytrippers had filled it to bursting. I walked toward Toranomon, through Hibiya Park, cutting back around Mikasa Hill to avoid the southern gate. There is always an excuse to allow hawkers to set up around the fountain and sell deep-fried spiral potatoes. The rest of the park was green and dark and quiet.
I took the elevator to the top of Atago Hill.
I had walked around it many times over the years and never gone up. But I had read a few weeks before the story of a group of young nationalists that seized the hill in the middle of August of 1945.
Unlike Mikasa Hill, built from landfill after digging out the ponds of Hibiya Park, Atago Hill deserves its designation. It is hard to get a sense of how high it rises, since it is blocked from view and has its views blocked by the surrounding apartment towers. It has been absorbed into the Atago Green Hills development by Mori Building Company, who built most of this part of town.
It is easy to see why the ten men chose Atago as their last stand.
I expected the shrine at the top to be deserted. I was surprised to see a line-up of sixty or seventy worshippers. This is a shrine for success. This is a shrine for luck. It is a shrine like any other.
I knew that there was a monument on Atago Hill to the rebels. I couldn’t find it. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for.
There were ten men on the hill. They were led by Iijima Yoshio, a friend of Kodama Yoshio, who was active in nationalist youth groups for a while. The nine other men on the hill were between the ages of nineteen and thirty-five.
They had heard the Emperor’s broadcast on August 15th, announcing Japan’s surrender. They refused to believe it was real. When he heard that there was a coup underway, led by the Ministry of War and rebel factions within the Imperial Japanese Army, Iijima Yoshio led his men in an assault on the home of Interior Minister Kido Koichi, a supporter of negotiated surrender. When their attack and the coup itself proved to be a failure, Iijima Yoshio and his men retreated to Atago Hill with weapons and explosives. On the 17th, the police surrounded them.
I don’t know exactly how Atago Hill would have looked in 1945. The stairs up to the top are the same. The northern approach might have already been paved for cars. But it would be a good place to fight from.
Kodama Yoshio was called to intervene. That was on the 22nd of August. The political fixer, occasional heroin smuggler, and future CIA asset climbed the hill and informed Iijima that the Emperor had surrendered of his own free will. He told them it was time to give up. He told them that it was all for nothing.
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