III
The twin psychological shocks of the first atomic bomb and the Soviet entry into the war, coupled with Kido’s and the emperor’s concern over growing popular criticism of the throne and its occupant, and their almost paranoiac fear that, sooner or later, the people would react violently against their leaders if they allowed the war to go on much longer—these factors finally caused Hirohito to accept, in principle, the terms of the Potsdam Declaration.76
At the first meeting of the six constituent members of the Supreme War Leadership Council, from 10:30 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. on August 9, Army Minister Anami Korechika, Chiefs of Staff Umezu Yoshijir representing the army and Yonai representing the navy, and Tg representing the Foreign Ministry were supposed to have discussed acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration. Instead they debated whether to try to surrender with conditions: one condition, preservation of the kokutai, or four?
After Suzuki had addressed the gathering about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the Soviet attack, Yonai, according to the account of Navy Chief of Staff Toyoda, was the first to speak and to frame the issue in terms of four conditions. “Let’s start to talk,” he began. “Do we accept the Potsdam Declaration with no conditions…? If not, and we want to insist on attaching hopes and conditions, we may go about it this way. First, preservation of the kokutai, and then for the rest, the main items in the Potsdam Declaration: treatment of war criminals, method of disarmament, and the matter of sending in an army of occupation.”77 Thus the participants extracted what they considered to be the unclear points of the Potsdam Declaration and made them the basis for their discussions.
The army insisted on four conditions.78 These were, first, preservation of the kokutai, considered by all as something distinct from the Potsdam Declaration. The other conditions were, second, assumption by the Imperial Headquarters of responsibility for disarmament and demobilization; third, no occupation; and finally, delegation to the Japanese government of the punishment of war criminals.79 The army equated the kokutai with the emperor’s right of supreme command. Its self-serving desire to have autonomous war crimes trials was predicated on the belief that the Allies would use such trials to indict the military on political grounds. Hence the army leaders wanted to preempt the work of any international tribunal by conducting their own trials—exactly as the uninvaded and unrepentant Germans had done after World War I.80
Supporting the military’s views at cabinet meetings during the day were three civilian members of the Suzuki cabinet: Justice Minister Matsuzaka Hiromasa, Home Minister Yasui Tji, and Minister of Health Okada Tadahiko.81 At the imperial conference that night (it lasted into the early morning hours of the tenth), Foreign Minister Tg held that the sole surrender condition be preservation of the kokutai. And throughout the discussion “preservation of the kokutai” meant for Tg preservation only of the Imperial House or dynasty, not the continuation of Hirohito’s reign.
This was not what it meant for the others. Hiranuma, also a supporter of one condition, had a very different interpretation of the kokutai, one in which the “emperor’s sovereign right to rule the state [did] not derive from national law.” Accordingly Hiranuma insisted that “Even if the entire nation is sacrificed to the war, we must preserve both the kokutai and the security of the imperial house.”82 Stated differently, there was no completely unified understanding of what the kokutai meant; the debate on one condition versus four was really about the future form of the Japanese state and concealed the competition for future political power that was already under way.
It is doubtful whether the emperor and Kido initially sided with Tg and opposed the four conditions of the senior military leaders. The more likely inference is that both men still sympathized with the diehards, military and civilian alike, who preferred to continue the suicidal war rather than surrender immediately and unconditionally. This may be why, on August 9, Konoe had Hosokawa Morisada go to Navy General Headquarters and urge the emperor’s brother Prince Takamatsu to press Hirohito (via Kido) to accept the Potsdam terms, and why, later that afternoon, Konoe also enlisted the help of diplomat Shigemitsu Mamoru in persuading Kido to change his stand on four conditions. At the urging of Takamatsu and Shigemitsu, Kido did indeed shift to Tg’s position.83
Credit for ending the war must also be given to the younger generation of bureaucrats who assisted the court leaders: Kido’s secretary, Matsudaira Yasumasa; Suzuki’s secretary, Sakomizu Hisatsune; Tg’s and Shigemitsu’s secretary, Kase Toshikazu; and the assistant to Navy Minister Yonai, Rear Admiral Takagi. Not only were these men instrumental in pressing the emperor’s top aides to accept the Potsdam terms, they also played a major role behind the scenes, after the surrender, in shielding the emperor from the consequences of defeat.84 The desire to protect the emperor would thereafter limit and distort how the entire process of surrender was depicted. Matsudaira even managed to get the false official version of the emperor’s role in the war inserted into The Reports of General MacArthur.85
The manufacture of historical memory of the end of the war began in Tokyo at the imperial conference held in the early morning hours of August 9–10. There the emperor, who had belatedly joined the “peace camp” in June by calling for an early though not yet an immediate surrender, and had thereafter vacillated, formally accepted the Potsdam Declaration, in a speech to his ministers scripted for him by Kido. Shortly before the conference opened, Suzuki asked for and received special permission from the emperor to have Hiranuma, representative of ultraconservative opinion, attend.86 Sakomizu, who knew beforehand that the forty-four-year-old emperor was going to give a speech that night, came to the midnight meeting prepared to document it. He wrote up the emperor’s words in smooth, businesslike language.
Many months later the emperor himself recounted what was most relevant to understanding the motivation for his “sacred decision” (seidan) at the Supreme War Leadership Council meeting on the night of August 9–10. Past 2:00 A.M., with the meeting deadlocked over whether to accept the Potsdam Declaration, Suzuki:
expressed his wish that I should decide between the two opinions…. Although everybody agreed to attach the condition of preserving the kokutai, three—Anami, Toyoda, and Umezu—insisted on adding three further conditions: not to carry out an occupation with the aim of securing specific surrender terms, and to leave disarmament and the punishment of war criminals to us. They also insisted that negotiation on these matters was still possible at the present stage of the war. But four people—Suzuki, Hiranuma, Yonai, and Tg—argued against them, saying there was no room to negotiate.
I thought by then that it was impossible to continue the war. I had been informed by the chief of the Army General Staff that the defenses of Cape Inub and the Kujkuri coastal plain [in Chiba prefecture] were still not ready. Also, according to the army minister, the matériel needed to complete arming the divisions that would fight the final battle in the Kant region could not be delivered until September. How could the capital be defended under such conditions? How was a battle even possible? I saw no way.
I told them that I supported the Foreign Ministry’s proposal. Hiranuma’s revision of the Foreign Ministry’s original draft, concerning the phrase “the position of the emperor in the national law,” was accepted, but later on that proved to be a mistake. In any case, this meeting decided to accept the Potsdam Declaration based on my decision and arranged to send a telegram to that effect through Switzerland and Sweden…. The main motive behind my decision at that time was that if we…did not act, the Japanese race would perish and I would be unable to protect my loyal subjects [sekishi—literally, “children”]. Second, Kido agreed with me on the matter of defending the kokutai. If the enemy landed near Ise Bay, both Ise and Atsuta Shrines would immediately come under their control. There would be no time to transfer the sacred treasures [regalia] of the imperial family and no hope of protecting them. Under these circumstances, protection of the kokutai would be difficult. For these reasons, I thought at the time that I
must make peace even at the sacrifice of myself.87
In this speech the emperor claims that his army minister told him that the capital could not be defended. Ever since June, however, he had known full well that continuation of the war was increasingly problematic. Why had he waited so long before making a policy decision to surrender immediately? And why, if Suzuki had wanted only one condition, and a real majority existed rather than a deadlock, didn’t they end the war by majority decision, with Hirohito ratifying their decision after the fact?
The emperor already knew before Hiroshima was bombed that his cabinet was divided on accepting the Potsdam terms. He also knew that only he could unify government affairs and military command. Why, then, had he waited until the evening of the ninth—that is, until after yet another act of tremendous outside pressure had been applied—to call the Supreme War Leadership Council into session?88
In justifying his decision to surrender, Hirohito counterposes Hiranuma to the military hard-liners but then criticizes him for influencing the wording of the telegram that the Foreign Ministry sent to the Allies conditionally accepting the Potsdam Declaration. Yet Hiranuma joined the council, and the cabinet meeting that followed, precisely to ensure expression of the Shintoist, right-wing view of the kokutai. At the meetings on August 9–10, it was Hiranuma, not Tg, who voiced the sense of the majority on the fundamental need, which was to guarantee the theocratic view of the kokutai rather than Tg’s secular, cultural view. At the time Hirohito supported Hiranuma and made no objection to that majority sentiment because he believed himself to be a monarch by divine right.
No discussion of Hirohito’s speech should overlook his omission of the questioning of his responsibility for the defeat. Gen. Ikeda Sumihisa and Adm. Hoshina Zenshir attended the August 9–10 meeting, and both later claimed that Privy Council President Hiranuma raised the matter. In Ikeda’s account Hiranuma turned to Hirohito in the early morning hours of August 10 and said quietly, “Your majesty, you also bear responsibility [sekinin] for this defeat. What apology [mshiwake] are you going to make to the heroic spirits of the imperial founder of your house and your other imperial ancestors?” Hoshina, Chief of the Naval Affairs Department of the Navy Ministry, has Hiranuma saying virtually the same thing: “His majesty bears responsibility for reporting to the founder of his house and his other imperial ancestors. If he is not clear about this [matter], then his responsibility is grave.”89 Thus, at the August 9–10 Imperial Conference, Hiranuma may have raised with Hirohito the question of his atonement for the lost war. One wonders whether they did not also discuss the question of his abdication.
Once the emperor had made his “sacred decision,” a cabinet conference deliberated on Tg’s one condition. At Hiranuma’s suggestion they agreed to reformulate their acceptance to read: “with the understanding that the said declaration does not comprise any demand that prejudices the prerogatives of his majesty as a sovereign ruler [tenn no kokka tji no taiken].” Thus the kokutai concept of the right-wing ideologue Hiranuma emerged as the consensus, while Tg’s more rational view that the imperial dynasty, not Hirohito, should be preserved, was ignored.
In effect this amounted to an affirmation that the emperor’s rights of sovereignty, including his all-important right of supreme command, antedated the constitution and had been determined by the gods in antiquity, just as stated in the preamble to the Meiji constitution.90 The Suzuki government was still fighting to maintain a view of the kokutai that included the emperor’s political, military, and diplomatic prerogatives; and despite all that had happened, it was asking the Allies to guarantee the emperor’s power to rule on the theocratic premises of state Shinto.91 It was certainly not constitutional monarchy that the Suzuki cabinet sought to have the Allies assure, but rather a Japanese monarchy based on the principle of oracular sovereignty, with continued subjecthood or shimmin status for the Japanese people, and some postsurrender role for the military. In their extreme moment of crisis, the kokutai meant to them the orthodox Shinto-National Learning view of the state and the retention of real, substantial political power in the hands of the emperor, so that he and the “moderates” might go on using it to control his majesty’s “subjects” after surrender.92
If the conservative Joseph C. Grew and the “Japan crowd” had gotten their way and the principle of unconditional surrender had been modified in advance, it is highly unlikely that Japan’s postsurrender leaders, now the “moderates” around the throne, would ever have discarded the Meiji constitution and democratized their political institutions. Grew and those who took his position had very little understanding of the Japanese body politic, no faith in the capacity for democracy of ordinary Japanese people, and certainly no desire whatsoever to see the social foundations of the monarchy dismantled.
Secretary of State Byrnes’s reply of August 11 to Japan’s first surrender offer reiterated, but in no way compromised, America’s basic unconditional surrender principle. Byrnes’s note stated that “the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state” had passed into the hands of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers; the emperor was to order all Japanese military authorities at home and abroad “to cease active operations and to surrender their arms;” it deliberately left unclarified the future status of both the emperor and the imperial institution. It was upon Japan’s acceptance of an intact unconditional surrender principle, and of an uncertain status for the emperor, that the absolute authority of General MacArthur would be predicated and the institutional reforms of the early occupation period based.
To make the Byrnes note more palatable to Hirohito, the army leaders, and Hiranuma, Vice Foreign Minister Matsumoto Shinichi (after discussions with Tg), and Chief Cabinet Secretary Sakomizu resorted to mistranslation of several key words in the English text.93 In the operative sentence, “From the moment of surrender, the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers,” Matsumoto changed “shall be subject to” [reizoku subeki] to read “shall be circumscribed by” [seigen no shita ni okareru].
His change may have helped the still deeply divided Hirohito to accept peace. The next day, August 12, Hirohito informed the imperial family of his decision to surrender. When Prince Asaka asked whether the war would be continued if the kokutai could not be preserved, Hirohito replied “of course.”94
At this point an attempt by a small group of middle-echelon officers in Tokyo to reject Byrnes’s reply forced Hirohito to repeat his sacred decision on August 14. These last-minute coup attempts at the palace and at Atsugi air base did not amount to much and were aborted. Hirohito’s decision of August 10 had totally demoralized the military bureaucrats at Imperial Headquarters and stripped them of the will to fight. Once Army Chief of Staff Umezu had explained to his subordinates that the emperor “had lost all confidence in the military,” those in favor of fighting to the finish abruptly gave up.95
IV
At no time did the Japanese military ever exercise “complete dominance” over the political process or the conduct of the war, as Grew had maintained. As the war dragged on after the fall of the Tj cabinet, the senior leaders of the army and navy became increasingly beholden for their positions of power to the court group and the moderates around the throne. Not only were the latter closer to Hirohito; they also operated information exchanges, designed to obtain information for the emperor, which were more effective than the army’s network of internal intelligence sources.96
At the end of the war as at its beginning, and through every stage of its unfolding, Emperor Hirohito played a highly active role in supporting the actions carried out in his name. When he is properly restored in the overall picture as supreme commander, the facts become abundantly clear: Neither (a) American unwillingness to make a firm, timely statement assuring continuation of the monarchy, as Grew had argued for, nor (b) the anti-Soviet strategy in the stance of Truman and Byrnes, who probably preferred use of th
e atomic bombs over diplomatic negotiation, were sufficient in and of themselves to account for use of the bomb, or for Japan’s delay in surrendering. Rather, Emperor Hirohito’s reluctance to face the fait accompli of defeat, and then to act decisively to end hostilities, plus certain official acts and policies of his government, were what mainly kept the war going, though they also were not sufficient causes for use of the bomb. In the final analysis, what counted on the one hand was not only the transcendent influence of the throne but the power, authority, and stubborn personality of its occupant, and on the other the power, determination, and truculence of Harry Truman.
From the very start of the Asia-Pacific war, the emperor was a major protagonist of the events going on around him. Before the Battle of Okinawa he had constantly pressed for a decisive victory. Afterward he accepted the need for an early but not an immediate peace. And then he vacillated, steering Japan toward continued warfare rather than toward direct negotiations with the Allies. When the final crisis was fully upon him, the only option left was surrender without negotiation. Even then he continued to procrastinate until the bomb was dropped and the Soviets attacked.
Generally speaking, it is true that any demand for surrender without prior negotiation has some retarding effect on the process of ending a war. But in this case it was not so much the Allied policy of unconditional surrender or “absolute victory” that prolonged the Asia-Pacific war, as it was the unrealistic and incompetent actions of Japan’s highest leaders. The wartime emperor ideology that sustained their morale made it almost impossibly difficult for them to perform the act of surrender. Knowing they were objectively defeated, yet indifferent to the suffering that the war was imposing on their own people, let alone the peoples of Asia, the Pacific, and the West whose lives they had disrupted, the emperor and his war leaders searched for a way to lose without losing—a way to assuage domestic criticism after surrender and allow their power structure to survive.
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 53