Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

  One day before American troops landed on Okinawa, while rumors were circulating in high court circles of an imminent cabinet change, Konoe allegedly remarked to his secretary, Hosokawa, that soon “the army will increasingly brandish the notion of fighting to the death. But Kido[’s]…mind is completely set on [Chief of the General Staff] Anami. Considering our kokutai, unless the emperor assents to it, we can do nothing. When I think of the madmen leading the present situation, I can’t help but feel weary of life.”21

  Konoe at that moment may well have included Hirohito among the “madmen.”

  On April 5, three days after Hirohito ordered an end to peace maneuvers in China through an ex-Kuomintang official (one Miao Ping [My Hin], whom Koiso strongly supported), and five days into the Battle of Okinawa, the emperor and Prime Minister Koiso parted ways.22 Blaming Koiso for Japan’s succession of military defeats from Leyte to Iwo Jima, Hirohito brought down his cabinet. Hirohito now chose his former grand chamberlain and trusted adviser, seventy-eight-year-old retired Adm. Suzuki Kantar, to lead a new government. At that time neither the emperor nor Suzuki was considering any policy change that might lead to ending the war. It was only after the Battle of Okinawa had been fought and horribly lost, leaving huge sections of more than sixty Japanese cities leveled by American incendiary air attacks, that Hirohito indicated his desire for peace and started looking for ways to end the war.

  In Kido’s diary the first clear indication that the emperor would be asked to think seriously of an early peace appears on June 8, 1945, when Kido prepared his own “Draft Plan for Controlling the Crisis Situation.” It was a pivotal moment. This was after the Imperial Palace had been inadvertently bombed, all hope of saving Okinawa had been lost, and on the day that the Supreme War Leadership Council adopted the “Basic Policy for the Future Direction of the War.”23 Fighting in Europe had ended. Japan was now completely alone. Kido’s “plan,” a nebulous one, called for seeking the Soviet Union’s assistance as a go-between so that Japan could obtain more leverage in negotiating with its enemies. By drafting it Kido indicated that he had ended his long honeymoon with the military hard-liners. By accepting it Hirohito indicated that he was at last ready for an early peace.

  With the empire collapsing around him, Hirohito entered a period of high tension and emotional depression. In mid-June, shortly after hearing from Kido about the status of the underground bunker in the mountains of Matsushiro, Nagano prefecture, that had been constructed for transferring him and the Imperial Headquarters, he became sick and was forced to cancel his scheduled activities.24 Only with great effort did he fulfill a promise to visit his mother on the afternoon of June 15. On June 22 Hirohito himself finally informed the Supreme War Leadership Council directly of his desire to commence diplomatic maneuvers to end the war. According to Kido’s summary, the emperor told the assembled war leaders that the decision at the imperial conference on June 8 “concerned the leadership of the war.” Now he wanted them “quickly to complete concrete studies concerning the conclusion of the war, without being confined to the former [decision], and bring it to a realization.” He also added that they were not to lose the chance for peace by being overly cautious.25 But neither Hirohito nor anyone else in the room was thinking of immediate capitulation. They were thinking only of an early peace and committing themselves just to that.

  In early July, after Soviet ambassador Jacob Malik had broken off his inconclusive talks in Japan with former prime minister Hirota, Hirohito for the first time, showed a keen interest in expediting direct negotiations with the Soviet Union by dispatching a special envoy to Moscow. But neither the emperor nor the Suzuki government ever devised a concrete plan on the basis of which the Soviets could mediate an end to hostilities, assuming the Soviets were ever interested in doing so, which they were not. In the Japanese approach to war termination, negotiation with the Soviets to guarantee the emperor’s political position and the future of the monarchy was always accorded more importance than the search for peace to end the killing and suffering.26

  From April 8, 1945, until its capitulation, the Suzuki government’s chief war policy was “Ketsug,” a further refinement of the “Shsang” (Victory Number 3) plan for the defense of the homeland.27 Its defining characteristic was heavy reliance on suicide tactics, and the manufacture of weapons solely for the purpose of suicide missions using massive numbers of kamikaze “special attack” planes, human torpedoes shot from submarines, dynamite-filled “crash boats” powered by truck engines, human rocket bombs carried by aircraft, and suicide charges by specially trained ground units. While preparations for Operation Ketsu went forward, on June 9 a special session of the Imperial Diet passed a Wartime Emergency Measures Law and five other measures designed to mobilize the entire nation for that last battle.

  The same day the emperor (who had not yet begun working to end the war) issued another imperial rescript in connection with his convocation of the Diet, ordering the nation to “smash the inordinate ambitions of the enemy nations” and “achieve the goals of the war.” Concurrently the controlled press waged a daily die-for-the-emperor campaign, a campaign to promote gratitude for imperial benevolence, and, from about mid-July onward, a campaign to “protect the kokutai.”28

  Americans countered with their own propaganda designed to break Japan’s will to fight. B-29s dropped scores of millions of leaflets, written in Japanese, announcing in advance the next scheduled target for B-29 attack or urging surrender while utilizing the emperor to attack the militarists. Leaflets bearing the letterhead of the chrysanthemum crest attacked the “military cliques” for “forcing the entire nation to commit suicide” and called on “everybody” to “exercise their constitutional right to make direct appeals [for peace] to the Emperor. Even the powerful military cliques cannot stop the mighty march for peace of the Emperor and the people.”29 Seven million leaflets alone revealed the terms of the “joint declaration” issued by the governments of the United States, Great Britain, and China.30 “Today we come not to bomb you,” they said. “We are dropping this leaflet in order to let you know the reply by the government of the United States to your government’s request for conditions of surrender…. It all depends on your government whether the war will stop immediately. You will understand how to quit the war if you read these two official notifications.”31

  Pressed by imperial edicts to continue their preparations for the final homeland battle and to think only of victory, now assaulted from the air by the American psychological warfare campaign in addition to bombing, the Japanese people complied as best they could. During late July and August, when the nation’s prefectural governors, police chiefs, and officers of the “special higher police” submitted to the Home Ministry reports on the rapidly deteriorating spirit of the nation, there was not a single reference in their nearly two thousand pages of reports to any popular inclination to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration.32 Even immediately after the American dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, and the Soviet declaration of war on the eighth, people generally clung to the hope of a final victory, and thus to the belief that their “divine land” was indestructible. Mobilized in the service of death, the collective memory of the “divine winds” (kamikaze) that would save Japan helped to maintain the will to fight on.33

  American intelligence analysts, meanwhile, watched all these main island preparations. They saw how the Japanese had fought and died on Okinawa—thousands almost daily for eighty-two days—and how the whole nation had become enveloped in the imagery of national salvation through mass suicide. When political leaders in Washington said that the Japanese were likely to fight to the death rather than surrender, they were not exaggerating what the Japanese government and its mass media were saying.

  I

  Mindful of the mistakes that had been made in dealing with imperial Germany at the end of World War I, but concerned above all to maintain a high degree of patriotic fervor and international cooperatio
n in the fight against the Axis, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill had relied on abstract war slogans and, after the first full year of war, the goal of “unconditional surrender.” Their policy of no negotiated termination of the war aimed at smashing the fascist states and then putting new, nonfascist political entities in place. The objective was military occupation and postwar political and social reform—always the two together. The philosophies of fascism and militarism were to be uprooted totally, and the conquered nations democratized, reborn as peace-loving capitalistic societies.

  Roosevelt had stated, at Casablanca in January 1943, that the Allies would punish the leaders of the fascist regimes but not destroy their peoples. But until they had won total victory over the Axis, he and Churchill steadfastly resisted pressures to clarify the meaning of their simplifying formula. Needing Soviet military power, yet keenly aware of Stalin’s distrust of them for not yet opening a second front in Europe to relieve the hard-pressed Red Army, Roosevelt and Churchill had ample reason for displaying an uncompromising attitude toward the enemy states.34 Their determination to make this the last total war, plus the imperatives of holding the antifascist alliance together, strengthened their resolve to eschew any formal contractual offers if made by the leaders of the aggressor nations, and to retain a free hand to occupy and reform those nations after destroying their military power and toppling their governments.

  Roosevelt also projected his Wilsonian idealism into “unconditional surrender” and saw it as a means of realizing a liberal international order. The unconditional surrender formula, which sought to achieve reforms in the postsurrender period, stated the basic precondition for building a new world order after fascism had been vanquished.35 In the case of Japan, it essentially assured the Allies the supreme authority to exercise powers in the Japanese homeland “beyond those given a military occupant by international law.”36

  After the German army signed unconditional surrender documents with the Allied forces on May 7 and 8, 1945, and the Third Reich, in the words of the American journalist William L. Shirer, “simply ceased to exist,” Japan alone remained in the war.37 At that point, with the Battle of Okinawa still raging, newly installed President Truman declared on May 8 that Japan’s surrender would not mean the “extermination or enslavement of the Japanese people.”38 His remark suggested that future occupation measures would not be enforced in a vindictive spirit. But because it left the unconditional surrender principle unaltered, the former ambassador to Japan and leader of the “Japan faction” within the State Department, Joseph Grew, pressed the president to make public a clear definition of the term so as to persuade the Japanese to surrender.

  Grew, a conservative Republican, saw Emperor Hirohito as the man who held the key to Japan’s surrender. He was the “queen bee in a hive…surrounded by the attentions of the hive.”39 At various times before and during the war, he described the emperor as a “puppet” of the militarists, a constitutionalist, and a pacifist. Grew had enormous confidence in the influence on policy of those whom he termed the “moderates” around the Japanese throne. In the spring of 1945, with the final collapse of the Japanese empire approaching, Grew, who had always moved in high court circles and knew nothing about the Japanese body politic, was willing to allow these individuals “to determine for themselves the nature of their future political structure.”40

  In his memoirs, published in 1952, long after President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes had rejected his efforts to include in the Potsdam draft declaration a clause guaranteeing the position of the imperial house, Grew wrote:

  The main point at issue historically is whether, if immediately following the terrific devastation of Tokyo by our B-29s in May, 1945, “the President had made a public categorical statement that surrender would not mean the elimination of the present dynasty if the Japanese people desired its retention, the surrender of Japan could have been hastened…. From statements made by a number of the moderate former Japanese leaders to responsible Americans after the American occupation, it is quite clear that the civilian advisers to the Emperor were working toward surrender long before the Potsdam Proclamation, even indeed before my talk with the President on May 28, for they knew then that Japan was a defeated nation. The stumbling block that they had to overcome was the complete dominance of the Japanese Army over the Government…. The Emperor needed all the support he could get, and…if such a categorical statement [by Truman] about the dynasty had been issued in May, 1945, the surrender-minded elements in the Government might well have been afforded…a valid reason and the necessary strength to come to an early clear-cut decision…. Prime Minister Suzuki [Kantar]…was surrender-minded even before May 1945, if only it were made clear that surrender would not involve the downfall of the dynasty.41

  Immediately Grew met fierce opposition from his colleagues in the State Department—the “China crowd”—who argued that to keep the emperor and guarantee the future existence of the monarchy was to compromise on the very essence of Japanese fascism.42 They—Dean Acheson, poet and future Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, and James Byrnes—were aware of Grew’s earlier misjudgments of Japan’s political situation and his tendency to be protective of the emperor and Japan’s conservative “moderates.” They certainly did not want to treat Japan and its emperor, whom they saw as central to the Japanese philosophy of militarism and war, more leniently than Germany and by so doing leave an undesirable impression, at home and abroad, of appeasement. These bureaucratic disagreements reflected a lack of clarity at the highest levels in Washington as to what the American war aims were. More important, they highlighted the interrelationship, during the spring and summer of 1945, between wartime goals and postwar policies.

  The Potsdam Declaration was issued on July 26, 1945, in the form of an ultimatum aimed at hastening Japan’s surrender.43 At Potsdam, Truman had yielded to Churchill’s advice and clarified the terms for implementing the unconditional surrender principle. To save Japan’s leaders from their own folly, the president agreed to issue the “terms of unconditional surrender” before Japan surrendered, and to soften the fourth term of the declaration by permitting “Japanese military forces, after being completely disarmed…to return to their homes.”44

  The Japanese government read the declaration and was informed that if it fulfilled certain unilateral obligations (“our terms”), which the victorious powers would impose after the Japanese government had proclaimed “the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces” and furnished “proper and adequate assurance of their good faith in such action,” Japan would then be allowed to retain its peace industries and resume participation in world trade on the basis of the principle of equal access to raw materials. “The alternative for Japan,” the declaration concluded, “is prompt and utter destruction.” It gave no warning about the atomic bomb. Article 12 stated, “The occupying forces of the Allies shall be withdrawn from Japan as soon as these objectives have been accomplished and there has been established in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people a peacefully inclined and responsible government.” Deleted from this article, however, was the phrase that Grew insisted on having: “this may include a constitutional monarchy under the present dynasty.” Consequently the status of the emperor was not guaranteed, and the policy of unconditional surrender remained intact.

  The Japanese government received the declaration on July 27 and showed no intention of accepting it. On the contrary, the Suzuki cabinet first ordered the press to publish the Dmei News Service’s edited version and to minimize the significance of the declaration by not commenting on it.45 Next, on July 28, at the urging of Army Minister Anami Korechika, Chief of the Naval General Staff Toyoda Soemu, and others, Prime Minister Suzuki made Japan’s rejection explicit by formally declaring, at an afternoon press conference, that the Potsdam Declaration was no more than a “rehash” (yakinaoshi) of the Cairo Declaration, and that he intended to “ignore” it (mokusa
tsu). Underlying Suzuki’s statement was Hirohito’s resolve to continue the war, and his unrealistic expectations about negotiating through the Soviet Union. If Hirohito, who read the newspapers daily, had been displeased or even concerned about the impression of intransigence that Suzuki and his cabinet were conveying to the world, Kido probably would have mentioned it in his detailed diary of his conversations with the emperor. He didn’t. Kido knew that Hirohito was still waiting for the Soviet reply to Japanese peace maneuvers, unable to make up his mind whether to surrender or continue fighting for more favorable terms.

  Also on July 28, when the allegedly moderate senior statesman Navy Minister Yonai, was asked by his secretary, Rear Admiral Takagi, why the prime minister had been allowed to make such an absurd statement, Yonai replied: “If one is first to issue a statement, he is always at a disadvantage. Churchill has fallen, America is beginning to be isolated. The government therefore will ignore it. There is no need to rush.”46

  “No need to rush” directly contravened Article 5 of the Potsdam Declaration (“We shall brook no delay”) and was a position that further supported the contemporary Western idea that, as of July 28, the Japanese, following the leadership of their emperor, had neither reversed their decision nor loosened their will to fight to the finish, while making vague overtures for peace on a separate track.47 Suzuki’s intention was not misunderstood.

  The Americans now accelerated their preparations for the use of atomic bombs and for an invasion of southern Kyushu—termed Operation Olympic—scheduled to begin on November 1. At 8:15 A.M. on August 6 a single B-29 destroyed much of the undefended city of Hiroshima, immediately killing an estimated 100,000 to 140,000 people and taking the lives (over the next five years) of perhaps another 100,000.48 At the center of the explosion a “light appeared 3,000 times brighter than the sun,” and a fireball formed, emitting thermal radiation that “instantly scorched humans, trees, houses. As the air heated and rushed upward, cold air flowed in to ignite a firestorm…. [Hours later] a whirlwind whipped the flames to their peak until more than eight square miles were virtually in cinders. Black, muddy rain, full of radioactive fallout, began to drop.”49