Senkichi Awaya: the lost mayor of Hiroshima

Senkichi Awaya was sitting in his dining room at the mayor’s residence in Hiroshima as the clocked ticked round to 8.15am on 6 August 1945. His teenage son Shinobu, and granddaughter Ayako, refugees from a devastated Tokyo, had joined him for breakfast. His wife, Sachiyo, had walked across the courtyard to the rear of the residence to retrieve some fruit from the store next to the shrine where the family prayed daily. It was then, as the first of only two atomic weapons ever to be used in wartime detonated, that a blinding flash of brilliant light filled the room. A fireball struck the city and the front of the Awayas’ home, situated around a kilometre from Ground Zero, was swept away in a crescendo of violence and heat.

Senkichi, Shinobu and Ayako were among the 70,000 people who died instantly when ‘Little Boy’ – dropped from the B-29 bomber Enola Gay – exploded above Hiroshima. Over the days that followed, the death toll rose towards 120,000 as those who had been severely wounded died without medical care. In a city where 26 of the 29 hospitals had either been flattened or rendered useless, there was simply nowhere for the casualties to go and, because nine out of ten of all the city’s doctors and nurses had died, nobody to treat them anyway.

The city of Hiroshima became a dystopian nightmare. Even those emergency workers who survived inevitably struggled to care for themselves, let alone offer support to others. Tens of thousands of survivors made their way out of the city and into the surrounding mountains seeking shelter. But it was days before officials began a concerted rescue operation. In the meantime, survivors started to collapse with mysterious symptoms of vomiting, diarrhoea and internal bleeding. The city’s people were experiencing the horrors of radiation poisoning.

Within this wider story, Senkichi Awaya is a man curiously absent, seemingly lost to history. You will not find his name among the myriad of books relating to the Pacific conflict, or the Second World War more generally. Watch movies or documentaries and the mystery continues. Few academics and museum directors, even in Japan, have heard of him. Nevertheless, Senkichi Awaya was the mayor of Hiroshima from February 1943 onwards. Research Awaya’s family biography in the archives of the National Diet Library in Tokyo, and you begin to realise his story is a key to unlocking a deeper understanding of the Japanese civilian experience of the war. This is because, like so many in Japan, he lived through an era of industrialisation and modernisation that was ultimately undermined – or perhaps interrupted might be a better word, considering Japan’s postwar economic success – by nationalist and reactionary forces within the country.

The drive to modernity

Senkichi Awaya was born in 1893, the second son of a middle-class, upwardly mobile family, who lived in the port town of Sendai, 220 miles to the north-east of Tokyo. This was a time when Japan, a cocooned and feudal society until the middle of the 19th century, had opened itself to trade with the wider world. An urgent drive towards modernity shaped the development of Sendai, as it also did hundreds of towns and cities across the Japanese home islands of Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu.

A key element of this story was the coming of the railway. The Awayas’ hometown benefited from the railway connection to Tokyo, bringing the town’s inhabitants economic prosperity as well as cultural ties to the capital. The Awaya family joined the country’s new professional classes, which placed a value on elite education and western culture. Eisuke Awaya, Senkichi’s father, rose to become a senior bureaucrat in one of the largest foreign-owned railway companies, which were busy building lines criss-crossing the country. The Awayas can be seen in photographs dressed in formal Sunday attire, the kinds of clothes you might associate with attending an afternoon concert in London’s Hyde Park or strolling along the Seine in Paris. The family were patriotic and, like the rest of Japanese society, devoted to the Meiji dynasty of rulers, associated with Japan’s shift from isolationism into modernity. Thanks, in part, to the influence of his mother, Senkichi was a deeply committed Christian.

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Behind this image of familial contentment, however, lay a troubled household. Eisuke Awaya was a workaholic, often away on business for weeks at a time, and when he was at home he could be a stern disciplinarian. He also displayed another western trait of business, a taste for alcohol. Perhaps this explains why Senkichi never enjoyed the close bond with his father that he shared with his mother. It would be she who would endow him with his devotion to public service, a love of family and of country.

Despite the dysfunction at home, Senkichi grew tall and wiry. He sported a pencil-thin moustache, dressed in the Edwardian style and excelled at his academic studies. As he went through the education system, Japan’s industrial and economic transformation was in the process of achieving in four decades what western countries such as Germany had taken a century to do. Japan also expanded and modernised its military, with its leaders ominously displaying ambitions to become a global power.

Senkichi graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1919 and embarked on a career as a civic administrator serving the Ministry of Home Affairs. His first post was within agriculture and based in Hiroshima Prefecture. He was 25 years old and developing the skills required for a top-level administrator who would play an integral part in the growing empire, both at home and abroad. He had been marked down as a safe pair of hands to handle important roles in key cities throughout the home islands.

In 1926, Hirohito became emperor of Japan. The early years of his reign would see the country sinking into a military dictatorship, as economic hardship, political instability and nationalistic fervour produced a lurch to the far right.

Senkichi, like every other Japanese person, was now deemed a ‘subject’ rather than a ‘citizen’. These were dangerous times, when many Japanese political leaders’ careers either soared or were cut short by intrigue, betrayal or assassination. Senkichi successfully rode this wave, while still adhering to his principles and faith, in itself a remarkable achievement. To judge by his writings, he was a patriot but no zealot, a man who believed in Japan finding its natural leading role in east Asia.

In his late twenties, Senkichi was chosen over more experienced candidates to become Hiroshima Prefecture’s superintendent of police and chief of Security Division. He had by now come under the influence of prewar Japan’s biggest pacifist, the Christian philosopher Uchimura Kanzō, an evangelist who had been one of the first scholars to benefit from late 19th-century education policies influenced by the United States. Fundamental to Kanzō’s teaching was to question the role of organised religion and to emphasise instead following one’s own Christian beliefs. Senkichi and his family became devotees, attending Bible study classes led by Kanzō on several occasions when they travelled to Tokyo, or when he was giving lectures around Hokkaidō Prefecture, where Senkichi was also assigned for part of his career. These experiences influenced the young administrator for the rest of his life and career.

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He ascended the ladder, gaining management experience and overseeing larger budgets. Like his father before him, he travelled the length and breadth of Japan’s main islands as he balanced work with marriage, his faith and bringing up a large family.

In 1931, Japanese forces invaded Manchuria and, in doing so, set the country on a war footing that didn’t end until August 1945. The leaders of the imperial Japanese armed forces now held sway over all aspects of life in the country, including the police. Senkichi, as head of the Osaka police, was dragged onto the national stage in 1933 when one of his officers arrested a Japanese soldier over a minor traffic dispute. The case became bound up with questions around who had the greater power: the home ministry or the army. Indeed, Senkichi had told his men: “If the army is His Majesty’s army, then the policemen are also His Majesty’s policemen. There is no need to apologise.” Although the dispute was resolved after months of legal wrangling, Senkichi was marked out for demotion. As Japanese forces ran amok in the Pacific, he fell ill with cellulitis and took early retirement in 1942.

Senkichi was dragged onto the national stage when one of his officers arrested a soldier

His final duty

However, events deemed that Japan needed Senkichi’s stoicism and flair for command. In early 1943, as the tide of war was turning against Japan in the Pacific, he was offered the position of mayor of Hiroshima. With US naval forces battling across the central Pacific towards Japan, senior figures in government and the military knew an invasion could occur, and Hiroshima was a central military hub for supply and distribution. Senkichi accepted the job and relocated from the family home in Tokyo, leaving his wife and children. Although he didn’t know it, the role represented his final civic duty to Japan.

“Father is thinking only about the government office,” he wrote to his daughter Yasuko. “He is thinking about the big job that will benefit Hiroshima. The important thing is to always keep your mind clear and be ready to face whatever comes your way.”

Situated in the south-western part of Honshu Island, Hiroshima was the seventh-largest city in Japan. It was constructed just above sea level, on a broad, fan-shaped delta, with seven tributaries pouring out to Hiroshima Bay. Hiroshima had been a garrison city since the late 1880s. The naval port of Ujina nearby was the assembly area for troops from all over Japan as they shipped out to war zones in China and into the Pacific following the attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.

By the spring of 1945, such expansionism was long past. American naval power had placed a stranglehold on Japanese merchant shipping. The American force of B-29 Superfortress bombers, based 1,500 miles out in the Pacific on purpose-built airbases on the Marianas Island chain, had destroyed Japan’s manufacturing capacity and infrastructure. The firebombing campaign across the country ultimately reduced 66 Japanese cities to ashes, including the cataclysmic raid on Tokyo on 9–10 March that killed more than 100,000 civilians in a single night.

Senkichi’s family survived this apocalypse, and he asked his wife and eldest son to relocate to Hiroshima. “The enemy will return,” he wrote to them. “That is the nature of war. You and the children must come here. It is possible that we will all die in the battles to come. If that is to happen, I wish us to die together as one family.”

It is possible that we will all die in the battles to come. I wish us to die together as one family

His four other children were moved out into the country for safety. In Hiroshima, the authorities were busy with defensive preparations. The Second General Army, under Field Marshal Hata (1879–1962), a veteran of the war in China and a confidant of the emperor, assumed the pivotal role of resisting any American assault in the south, which was expected later in the year.

As head of municipal services throughout the city, Senkichi had to work with Hata and his team. “With a spirit of sacrifice, discharge your duties,” he urged his workers, “and show yourself at your best in the decisive battle as governmental employees of the empire.” In practice, showing “your best” meant enforcing new rationing, pulling down thousands of dwellings to act as fire breaks, and turning a blind eye to the tens of thousands of children being coerced into working in armament shops and factories. The country was being readied for what was termed ‘National Suicide’. This was the hope that inflicting as many casualties as possible on the invaders would mean they were forced to offer more favourable terms rather than push for an unconditional surrender.

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For the people of the Japan, the immediate future appeared grim indeed. Yet Senkichi, in his letters at least, still found grounds for optimism. “It’s 10 o’clock at night. I should go to bed soon, otherwise it will be bad for my health,” he wrote to Yasuko. “Tomorrow morning will be another beautiful day, with the morning sun reflecting off the surface of the river. That’s what I think about when I go to bed these days.”

No tools for the fight

At Hiroshima City Office, 60 officers were on duty 24/7. Hiroshima was divided into 24 sectors, with all city employees trained on evacuation procedures and then allocated to a specific sector. Like the rest of the country, Hiroshima had not envisaged coming under aerial attack and there were hardly any purpose-built air raid shelters. There was also a lack of tools to fight a major fire. Senkichi’s fire chief confided to him that, despite the efforts to create firebreaks, the city would ultimately be burned out. Fires would spread and conjoin. Then it was only a matter of time.

But even this bleak assessment of what lay ahead proved optimistic. When it was dropped over the city on the morning of 6 August 1945, Little Boy essentially destroyed 5 square miles of the heart of Hiroshima. The blast had the force of up to 15,000 tonnes of TNT, raising the temperature at Ground Zero to several thousand degrees, resembling the surface temperature of the sun.

Three days later, Nagasaki was struck in a similar manner and with equal destructive consequences by a plutonium bomb that killed 40,000–70,000 people. As President Truman had warned, a rain of ruin was falling from the air. On 15 August, Emperor Hirohito addressed his people for the first time on the radio to announce the country’s surrender. The war was lost.

A nation’s defeat

The destruction of Hiroshima mirrored the fate of Japan itself over the previous months of the Pacific conflict as all parts of Japan were overwhelmed by bombing raids. Anywhere between 300,000 and 900,000 civilians had perished over the first six months of 1945 – more than the total number of deaths suffered by the country in the previous three years of war combined. Now imperial Japan suffered the ignominy of surrendering even before her enemy had stepped foot on her sovereign soil. Amid this national shame, much as Hiroshima’s ruin was a symbol of the country’s defeat, the fate of one Japanese family can be seen as a metaphor for the country’s rise and fall.

The dead mayor’s surviving daughters, Yatsuko and Motoko, travelled to Hiroshima to care for their stricken mother who had initially survived the blast, only to die from radiation exposure. A week later, the daughters boarded another train. In their baggage, they carried four boxes: the ashes of their parents, younger brother and Motoko’s own daughter. They arrived back in the capital on 10 September for the surviving family to bury their ashes. Their Christian community welcomed the family as the city and the country came to terms with their total defeat. Within two months, Motoko was also mourning the loss of her sister. Yasuko died in a Tokyo hospital from radiation sickness on 24 November 1945. Caring for her mother, she had unwittingly spent too many days close to the centre of Hiroshima.

Including the atomic cities, more than 40 per cent of Japan’s urban areas had been turned to ashes, making more than 8.5 million civilians homeless. When the Allies moved in to occupy Japan under the stewardship of General Douglas MacArthur, they were confronted with a gargantuan task. More than 1.5 million returning Japanese military personnel had to be rehabilitated, destroyed cities had to be rebuilt, a new democratic system of government had to be instituted. This necessitated the dismantling of the old regime. And as a product of that regime, Senkichi Awaya was pushed to the side, and then entirely forgotten.

Iain MacGregor’s latest book is The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb, and the Fateful Decision to Use It (Constable, 2025)

This article is in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine