That "Workers Unite" thing you have is actually a poster exhorting everyone to stand together to repel the foreign invaders, using
anything they have as a weapon. Of course, this would have been tantamount to mass suicide had it actually happened. My own dear, sweet, kind, lovable and deeply lamented tiny mother-in-law was a young woman at the time and they were training to use naginata (traditional weapon, essentially a knife with a six-foot handle) to repel an invasion. They would have been mown down like ripe hay. You don't bring knives to a gunfight. She also helped paste together the incendiary balloons launched against the West Coast and which killed some people on a Sunday School picnic. I let her go to her grave thinking the balloons all fell in the ocean.
I recently spent some time flipping through our local newspaper from the last few weeks before the end of the war. It is the actual paper, not microfilm, and the decades have blurred the articles to the point of being illegible in many cases, but the headlines are still interesting. There is a mix of stories about huge flights of B-29s bombing even the small towns in the countryside and of P-51s strafing things (with impunity, I might add). One of the things they strafed was the same train line my daughter rode to high school....chilling to contemplate.
But mixed in among the articles indicating total air superiority on the part of the Allies were articles about the Kamikaze slamming their bodies into enemy ships, about a bureau being set up to fully mobilize the schoolchildren into the war effort, about this being the time for people to stoically endure all things...and how we're still going to
win this war!
By this point, the handwriting on the wall had to be pretty clear. It is hard to believe anyone could look around them and remain in either ignorance or denial; the war was being brought to their very doorsteps and with a vengeance they were powerless even to meaningfully
resent, much less
repel.
I stumbled across a small advertisement at the bottom of one of the pages from an edition a couple of weeks before the end of the war. It is small, but it speaks
volumes. It is from a small business in Ashikaga City and is advertising their line of
wooden guns, exhorting everyone to make sure they have their wooden gun and be ready to stand together to repel the coming invasion with them. It sounded so asinine I did something I almost never do, which was to look something up...
wooden gun...to make sure I wasn't missing something. It was as I had originally interpreted, though, just a long stick shaped like rifle. A stick. Just a damned
stick. How could
anybody, regardless of how brainwashed or deluded they may have been by years of carefully controlled media and internal propaganda look at such an advertisement made entirely in earnest and
not realize that the war was utterly and irretrievably lost and that they were now bound together in what was intended to be in a very real and literal way on the level of the
individual a mass suicide pact?
Here is the advertisement:
I have photos of some of the other articles referenced if they would help your project.
The paper referenced is the Ryomo Shimbun, a local paper servicing the southeastern portion of Gunma Prefecture and Ashikaga City in
Tochigi Prefecture, north of Tokyo at the edge of the Kanto Plain.