Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

  Two days later, citing as a pretext Japan’s rejection of the Potsdam Declaration, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan.50 On August 9 the United States dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, immediately killing approximately 35,000 to 40,000 people and injuring more than 60,000.51 That same day, in a nationwide radio report on the Potsdam Conference, President Truman gave full expression to the vengeful mood of most Americans:

  Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.52

  Meanwhile in Tokyo, during the crucial interval between the Potsdam Declaration and the August 6 atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Hirohito himself said and did nothing about accepting the Potsdam terms. Twice, however, on July 25 and 31, he had made clear to Kido that the imperial regalia had to be defended at all costs.53 The three sacred objects—consisting of a mirror, curved jewel, and sword—symbolized the legitimacy of his rule through the northern court, and were integral to his sense of being the occupant of the throne by divine right. He wanted to protect them by having them brought to the palace. Fixated on his symbols of office when the big issue was whether to accept immediate capitulation, Hirohito was unprepared to seize the moment and end the war on his own.

  Prime Minister Suzuki, after his initial rejection of the Potsdam ultimatum, also saw no need to do anything further. His Cabinet Advisory Council, composed of the president of Asano Cement, the founder of the Nissan consortium, the vice president of the Bank of Japan, and other representatives of the nation’s leading business interests who had profited greatly from the war, met on the morning of August 3. They recommended acceptance of the Potsdam terms on the ground that the United States would allow Japan to retain its nonmilitary industries and participate in world trade. Suzuki replied to them at a cabinet meeting that afternoon. According to Minister of Agriculture and Commerce Ishiguro Tadaatsu, Suzuki’s friend and defender, Suzuki told the head of the Cabinet Intelligence Bureau and advisory council member Shimomura Kainan:

  For the enemy to say something like that means circumstances have arisen that force them also to end the war. That is why they are talking about unconditional surrender. Precisely at a time like this, if we hold firm, then they will yield before we do. Just because they broadcast their declaration, it is not necessary to stop fighting. You advisers may ask me to reconsider, but I don’t think there is any need to stop [the war].54

  So for ten days, while Hirohito kept himself relatively secluded, the Potsdam Declaration was “ignored.” The bombs were dropped, and Soviet forces invaded along a wide front from northern Manchuria to Korea. Then Foreign Minister Tg Shigenori, not a dove by any stretch of the imagination, persuaded the emperor that the declaration in itself really signified conditional surrender, not unconditional, though he probably had his own doubts about that interpretation. With that sticking point out of the way, Hirohito, strongly assisted by Kido, took the gamble and authorized Tg to notify the world that Japan would accept the Allied terms with only one condition, “that the said declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.” The next day, August 11, Secretary of State Byrnes replied to this first surrender communication by alluding to the subordination of the emperor’s authority to the supreme commander of the Allied Powers, thereby leaving intact the vitally important principle of unconditional surrender. However, since Byrnes did not clearly answer the Japanese on the emperor’s future status, his reply could also be seen as hinting that the emperor’s position might be maintained after surrender.

  At that point another dispute erupted among the leaders in Tokyo over the meaning of the Byrnes reply, forcing Hirohito to rule once again, on August 14, in favor of acceptance. Afterward he went before a microphone and recorded his capitulation announcement, which was broadcast to the Japanese nation at noon on August 15. By then victor and vanquished had entered into a noncontractual relationship based on the unconditional surrender principle, and the main concern of the moderates had already shifted to divorcing him from both his actual conduct of the war and the unrealistic thinking and failed policies that had brought Japan to defeat.

  Why did Japan’s top leaders delay so long before finally telling their people that they had “bow[ed] to the inevitable” and surrendered without negotiation? If Grew and the critics of unconditional surrender had had their way in May, June, or even July and had cut a deal on the issue of guaranteeing the dynasty, would Japan’s leaders then have surrendered immediately? Or was there not more to this issue than meets the eye?

  II

  The conventional treatment of Emperor Hirohito’s role in ending the war presents Japan’s request for Soviet mediation—the Hirta Kti–Jacob Malik talks—and the secret messages that Foreign Minister Tg sent to Ambassador Sat Naotake in Moscow, as serious attempts to surrender. Yet the participants in these peace overtures, which went on through June, July, and early August, perceived them as a tactic that would merely delay the inevitable capitulation. Only Hirohito, anguishing over the prospect of losing sovereignty, and the army high command had inflated expectations about the Soviets.

  After the war, the emperor advanced a short and misleading explanation of these Soviet negotiations:

  We chose the Soviet Union to mediate peace for two reasons: All other countries had little power. Therefore, even if we had asked those countries to mediate, we feared they would be pressured by the British and Americans, and we would have to surrender unconditionally. By comparison the Soviet Union had both the power and the obligation that came from having concluded a neutrality treaty.

  Because we did not think the Soviet Union was a trustworthy country, it was first necessary to sound them out. Consequently, we decided to go ahead with the Hirota-Malik talks, in which we said that if they allowed us to import oil, we would not mind giving them both southern Karafuto and Manchuria.55

  Hirohito failed to mention how limited Japan’s territorial concessions to the Soviets were for staying out of the war compared to what the Allies were offering Stalin for coming into it.56 Neither did he mention earlier efforts, under Foreign Minister Shigemitsu, to promote peace between the Soviets and the Nazis.57 Japan’s Soviet policy had aimed at maintaining “tranquillity” in relations with Moscow, promoting a Nazi-Soviet peace, and setting the Allies against one another. That policy had begun to change during 1943, and by late 1944—after he had learned that Stalin had labeled Japan an “aggressor state”58—Hirohito had approved a vague proposal for sending a special envoy to Moscow. By the time the Suzuki government decided to ask for Soviet good offices in ending the war, Soviet policy had shifted from maintaining neutrality to awaiting the right moment to attack Japan. But Hirohito paid no attention to the recent history of Japan-Soviet relations. He misread the evidence because it conflicted with his goal of negotiating an end to the war that would guarantee an authoritarian imperial system with himself and the empowered throne at the center.

  Continuing with his postwar explanation of Japan’s overtures to Moscow, the emperor added: “However, even when it came to the beginning of July [1945], there was no answer from the Soviet Union. For our part, we had to decide this matter prior to the Potsdam Conference…. For that reason, I consulted Suzuki and decided to cancel the Hirota-Malik talks and negotiate directly with the Soviets.”59

  Leaving aside the fact that Ambassador Malik, not the emperor, effectively ended the talks, Hirohito in early July did indeed become more concerned about negotiating an end to the war that would preserve the imperial prerogatives. Around July 12 he and Kido began pushing to open secret direct negotiations with the Soviets by sending Prince Konoe to Moscow as the emperor’s special envoy. A few days earlier
, however, in a July 9 report to the throne, former foreign minister Arita Hachir had pointed out that, “There is almost no chance of our bringing Chungking, Yenan, and the Soviets to our side, or of using them to improve our position…. [I]f we try to do this, we will merely be wasting precious time in a situation where every minute counts.” Judge the big picture coolly and rationally, pleaded Arita in his audience with the emperor, for “merely to call for absolute victory will produce nothing.” In order to make “the divine land…imperishable,” we must “bear the unbearable.”60

  More important, since June 8 Ambassador Sat in Moscow had been telling Tg it was unimaginable that the Soviets would ever help Japan.61 On July 13 Sat warned Tg that although “we are overawed that the dispatch of a special envoy is the imperial wish,” it would not mean anything at all to the Soviets, and would only cause trouble for the imperial house, “if the Japanese government’s proposal brought by him is limited to an enumeration of previous concepts, lacking in concreteness.”62

  On July 20—one day after Sat had notified Tokyo that the Soviets had indeed refused to accept the special envoy “on the grounds that the mission is not specific” (just as he had been saying they would all along), the ambassador sent his most emotional telegram yet to Tg, summing up his feelings about the whole situation. Sat (like Arita on July 9 and Prince Konoe since February) urged immediate surrender because the state was on the verge of being destroyed. “[T]his matter of protecting the national polity [kokutai],” Sat emphasized, could be considered as “one of a domestic nature and therefore excluded from the terms of a peace treaty.”63 In other words there was no need for Japan to insist on securing a foreign guarantee of its monarchy: The kokutai, meaning for him the emperor’s prerogatives, could be saved without delaying surrender, and restored later when Japan once again became independent.

  Nevertheless, at Hirohito’s insistence, Tg persisted, telling Sato that Japan could not reveal its peace plan in advance and that he should concentrate on learning Soviet intentions and getting them to accept Prince Konoe as the emperor’s special peace envoy. On August 2 Tg sent another message to Sat telling him that the emperor, the prime minister, and the military leaders were “placing their hopes on this one matter. Although you may have your own opinion, understand this situation and somehow stimulate the Soviet side to accept our special envoy.”64 After receiving Tg’s message, Sat cabled the Foreign Ministry again urging acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration.65

  Neither Sat nor retired foreign ministers Shigemitsu Mamoru or Arita Hachir believed that the war could be ended through the good offices of the Soviet Union. Foreign Minister Tg himself doubted it. But in compliance with the wishes of the emperor, who wanted his imperial prerogatives to be guaranteed internationally, Tg kept trying and would not agree to direct negotiations with the Allied governments even when the president of the Cabinet Intelligence Bureau, Shimomura Kainan, visited his residence on August 4 and pleaded: “It is not enough to deal only with the Soviet Union. There is no hope if we continue like this. Somehow, by backdoor channels, we must negotiate with the United States, Britain, and China.”66

  Tg sent his last message to Sat, still asking him to discover the attitude of the Soviet side, on August 7. But by then Stalin knew about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. When American ambassador Averell Harriman met him in the Kremlin on the evening of August 8, Stalin said that “he thought the Japanese were at present looking for a pretext to replace the present government with one which would be qualified to undertake a surrender. The bomb might give them this pretext.”67 Caught off guard by the news of the American destruction of an entire Japanese city, Stalin had decided to enter the war formally the next day, a week earlier than previously scheduled, and a week earlier than President Truman had anticipated.68 By dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Truman inadvertently deepened the Soviet dictator’s suspicion of the United States, thereby contributing to the onset of the Cold War.

  As the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s messages to Moscow were intercepted and decoded by U. S. intelligence and read, at least in part, by Truman, it has been argued that the president could—and should—have backed away at least somewhat from the unconditional surrender formula. But those messages clearly were always too tentative and vague to be taken for serious attempts at negotiating an end to the war.69

  Even the letter that the Foreign Ministry had already prepared for Konoe’s projected (but never realized) secret mission as the emperor’s special envoy is reported to have aimed mainly at obtaining a Soviet guarantee of the future of the throne and its current occupant.70 Preservation of the kokutai was the vital goal, the single condition for peace. Furthermore, the “emperor’s letter” implied that the war had been generated spontaneously, like a natural disaster, and that in so far as the United States and Britain insisted on unconditional surrender, they, not Japan, were the obstacle to peace.

  Unable to decide to end the war unless the future of the throne and the all-important prerogatives of its occupant were absolutely guaranteed, the Suzuki cabinet and the Supreme War Leadership Council never framed a peace maneuver from the viewpoint of saving the Japanese people from further destruction. They waited, instead, until their foreign enemies had created a situation that gave them a face-saving excuse to surrender in order to prevent the kokutai from being destroyed by antimilitary, antiwar pressure originating from the Japanese people themselves. The bomb, followed by the Soviet declaration of war, gave them the excuses they needed. This is why (as Tanaka Nobumasa pointed out) Yonai Mitsumasa could say to Adm. Takagi Skichi, on August 12, that

  I think the term is perhaps inappropriate, but the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war are, in a sense, gifts from the gods [teny, also “heaven-sent blessings”]. This way we don’t have to say that we quit the war because of domestic circumstances. I’ve long been advocating control of our crisis, but neither from fear of an enemy attack nor because of the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war. The main reason is my anxiety over the domestic situation. So, it is rather fortunate that we can now control matters without revealing the domestic situation.71

  Similar reasons of political expediency also account for Konoe’s calling the Soviet participation in the war “a godsend for controlling the army,” and why Kido regarded both the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry as “useful” “elements for making things go smoothly.”72 An incipient power struggle was going on, making it immaterial to the persons involved whether one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand people died, so long as their desired outcome was gained: an end to the war that would leave the monarchy intact, available to control the forces of discontent that defeat would inevitably unleash. In the final scene of the war drama, as in earlier scenes, the Japanese “moderates” found it easier to bow to outside pressure than to act positively on their own to end the war.

  Yet another example of ruling elite thinking about surrender terms was the “Essentials of Peace Negotiations” (wahei ksh no yry), a document drafted by Konoe and his adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Sakai Kji, after Konoe had reluctantly accepted his mission to Moscow.73 The “Essentials,” which appear never to have circulated, stipulated the preservation of the emperor system (including most of the imperial prerogatives) as the absolute minimum condition for peace. The document defined the “original” or “essential homeland” as including the southern half of the Kurile Islands but showed a willingness to concede to the enemy all overseas territories, including Okinawa and the American-occupied Bonin Islands, as well as the southern half of Sakhalin. The “Essentials” also accepted complete disarmament for an unspecified period of time, thereby compromising on the matter of demobilizing and disarming the armed forces.

  More significant, an “explanation” attached to the “Essentials” noted that “the main aim is to secure the imperial line and maintain the political role of the emperor. In the worst case scenario, however, transfer of the throne to a successor might be unavoidable. If this should happen
it must take a spontaneous form.” Konoe and Sakai were also prepared to “return to politics predicated on minpon seiji” or “the people-under-the-emperor.” They used this Taish-era term to mean “democracy” at a time when the Japanese people viewed democracy as the culture of the enemy. Significantly, even Konoe did not dare to seek the emperor’s approval of his attached “Explanation.”74

  In maneuvering for a “peace with honor” that would protect the throne, Konoe and Sakai also revealed their willingness to send some of their fellow countrymen into forced labor in lieu of material reparations if cutting a deal required it. Thus the “Essentials” declared that “We shall demobilize the military overseas in the places they are stationed, and endeavor to repatriate them. If that is impossible, we shall consent to leaving some of them where they are for awhile.” Their explanation of this item noted: “We consent to offer some labor as reparations.” Clearly the idea of interning Japanese POWs at forced labor for the Soviet economy (later implemented by the Russians in Siberian work camps) was not exclusively a Soviet notion but actually originated with men in the emperor’s entourage.75