Blinded by their preoccupation with the fate of the imperial house, and committed to an optimistic diplomacy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, those leaders let pass several opportunities to end their lost war. Hirohito and his inner war cabinet—the Supreme War Leadership Council—could have looked reality in the face and acted decisively to sue for peace during February, when Prince Konoe made his report and both he and Foreign Minister Shigemitsu warned the emperor that the Neutrality Treaty offered no protection; the Soviet Union would not hesitate to intervene militarily in the Far East once the situation turned favorable in Europe. Military intelligence officers also alerted them to the likelihood of the Soviet Union entering the war against Japan by midsummer. By then the home islands had only been bombed on a small scale, but they knew for certain that the bombing of their cities would only intensify over time.
Their second missed opportunity came in early June, when the showdown Battle of Okinawa had been lost, when government analyses indicated that the war effort could soon continue no longer, and when General Umezu unveiled for the emperor the bleak results of his personal survey of the situation in China.97 Considering that Foreign Minister Molotov had earlier notified Tokyo on April 5 that the Japan-Soviet Neutrality Pact would not be extended, and that the Germans had surrendered unconditionally on May 7–8, leaving Japan completely isolated, this certainly would have been a most opportune moment for them to have opened direct negotiations with the United States and Britain.
Instead, the Supreme War Leadership Council took two dangerous courses: preparations for a final battle on the homeland, and efforts to gain Soviet assistance in ending the war by offering Stalin limited territorial concessions. With Hirohito’s approval the six constituent members of the council agreed to return to the situation that had existed prior to the Russo-Japanese War, while retaining Korea as Japanese territory and making south Manchuria a neutral zone. Before these negotiations could even begin, the council members adopted an infallible formula for wasting time. They authorized former foreign minister Hirota to confer with Ambassador Malik in order to discover the “intentions” of the Soviet leaders.98
Their third missed opportunity was July 27–28, when the Potsdam Declaration arrived and the Suzuki cabinet, after careful deliberation, twice publicly rejected it. At that time no member of the “peace faction” came forward with a proposal for accepting the Potsdam terms. Pinning their hopes on Konoe’s not-yet-arranged mission to Moscow, the emperor and Kido delayed surrender and allowed the war to go on. During this interval between their receipt of the Potsdam Declaration on July 27 and the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, the emperor and Kido waited and waited for a response from Moscow—a response that Ambassador Sat and others repeatedly stated would never come. Only after Hiroshima had been bombed did the emperor say, “We must bow to the inevitable;” now “is a good chance to end the war.” More than ten thousand Japanese people died from conventional air raids during this eleven-day interval.99
The Japanese “peace” overtures to the Soviets, which had followed Germany’s capitulation, were vague, feeble, and counterproductive. They certainly never constituted a serious attempt to negotiate an end to the war.100 The thinking behind those maneuvers never progressed beyond decisions reached by the inner cabinet in mid-May 1945. As Konoe rightly suspected it would, the emperor’s attempt to end the war via Moscow turned out to be a complete waste of time, and amounted to an imperial decision to postpone facing reality.
Would Japan’s leaders have surrendered more promptly if the Truman administration had “clarified” the status of the emperor prior to the cataclysmic double shocks of the first atomic bomb and Soviet entry into the war? Probably not. On the other hand, they were likely to have surrendered in order to prevent the kokutai from being destroyed from within. The evidence suggests that the first atomic bomb and the Soviet declaration of war made Hirohito, Kido, and other members of the court group feel that continuation of the war would lead to precisely that destruction. They knew that the people were war-weary and despondent and that popular hostility toward the military and the government was increasing rapidly, along with popular criticism of the emperor himself. More particularly, Kido and Hirohito were privy to Home Ministry reports, based on information from governors and police chiefs all over the country, revealing that people were starting to speak of the emperor as an incompetent leader who was responsible for the worsening war situation.
At this critical moment the court group’s very strong sense of internal threats had undoubtedly gone on hair-trigger alert. When the emperor back in February had said, “What worries me is whether the nation [could] endure” long enough to achieve victory, he was not so much expressing concern for the suffering of his subjects as fear that their suffering would result in social turmoil—in short, revolution. At that time he had been speaking of the ordinary, war-normal hardships of food shortages, air raids, burning cities, destroyed homes, and general discomfort as well as the ever-present death of loved ones. The atom bomb carried the infliction of death, pain, and suffering to unimaginably higher levels, and therefore also the threat from within. Of course there might have been only one bomb. But suddenly a second mushroom cloud rose; another city almost vanished. Yet the danger provided an opportunity: Hirohito now could save his suffering people from more suffering by surrendering, and at the same time shed responsibility for having led them into misery and assume an air of benevolence and the mantle of caring. Hirohito did indeed care. Not primarily for the Japanese people, however, but for his own imperial house and throne.
On July 16, the day of the successful American test of the first atomic bomb, Stalin, sensing what was about to happen, placed an urgent phone call to the commander of the Soviet Far Eastern forces, Marshal A. M. Vasilievsky, to ask how preparations for the campaign against Japan were progressing and whether he could move up the planned date by ten days. Vasilievsky replied that more time was needed to concentrate troops and needed supplies. Perhaps, if Stalin had been able to open war against Japan before the United States dropped the atomic bombs, the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been avoided. Or, if Japan had accepted the Potsdam Declaration on July 26, both the atomic bombs and Soviet entry into the war might have been avoided.101
Truman, at a White House meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on June 18, had given the go-ahead for the invasion of Kyushu, with all that entailed in terms of high casualties and the logistics and manpower to sustain the operation into Spring 1946, when the invasion of Honshu was scheduled.102 The recent Battle of Okinawa was on everyone’s mind at that time, and Truman commented that “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other” was possible.103 By the time he arrived at Potsdam, American battle casualties for the Kyushu invasion, scheduled to begin November 1, 1945, were projected as 22,576 killed, wounded, and missing during the first thirty days, increasing by nearly 11,000 during the next thirty days.104
It is not known if Truman was troubled by the massive American conventional bombing of Japanese noncombatants—actions that qualified as atrocities. But he was concerned with high American casualty projections. For him the alternative to dropping the atomic bombs would have been to wait for the effects of the Soviet ground attack in Manchuria and Korea, combined with the conventional bombing and shelling of the home islands, to become intolerable to Japan’s leaders. Armed with a new doomsday weapon, however, Truman lacked the patience and foresight to wait. Japan’s leaders, on the other hand, caught in the grip of a failed and endangered ideology, were willing to sacrifice huge numbers of their own people in order to maintain their and their monarch’s power. It was partly to destroy that psychology—or, in the words of Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall, spoken in 1957, “shock them [the leaders] into action”—that Truman and Marshall justified the dropping of the atomic bombs.105
V
Hirohito’s staging of the seidan on the night of August 9–10, his repeat performance of it on the morning of the fou
rteenth, and finally, the dramatic radio reenactment of the seidan on a national scale, with the whole nation participating, at noon on the fifteenth—these events reinforced his charisma while preparing a new role for him in the drama called postwar that now would begin.
After the Hiroshima bombing, Hirohito delayed for a full two days before telling Kido, shortly before 10 A.M. on August 9, to “quickly control the situation” because “the Soviet Union has declared war and today began hostilities against us.”106 Kido immediately communicated with Prime Minister Suzuki, who began arrangements for the Imperial Conference held later that night. Following the seidan of August 10, chief cabinet secretary Sakomizu took charge of drafting the “Imperial Rescript Ending the War” on the basis of Hirohito’s words. Assisted by two scholars of the Chinese classics, Kawada Mizuho and Yasuoka Masahiro, Sakomizu labored for over three days before submitting a version of the rescript to the Suzuki cabinet, which modified and approved it after six hours of contentious discussion on the night of August 14. Hirohito immediately signed it. Shimomura and Kido then persuaded him to record the suitably opaque final version for broadcast to the nation.
On the night of August 14 the Suzuki government notified the United States and other Allied governments that it had accepted both the Potsdam Declaration and the Byrnes letter of August 11. Hastening the emperor’s actions in the climactic moment of the unconditional surrender drama was the American psychological warfare campaign. When a leaflet dropped from B-29s came into Kido’s possession on the night of August 13 or the morning of the fourteenth, he met the emperor and explained the danger. The latest enemy leaflets were giving the Japanese people both the government’s notification of surrender on one condition and the full text of Brynes’s reply to it. If this continued, it would undermine the imperial government’s reliance on secrecy to conceal from the nation the true nature of the lost war and the reasons for the long delayed surrender. Given Kido’s and the emperor’s worry about growing signs of defeatism, including criticism of the throne, they had to take immediate action to prevent people from acting on their own initiative. Hence the second seidan.107
At noon on August 15, the Japanese people gathered around their radio speakers and heard for the first time the high-pitched voice of their emperor telling them: “Our empire accepts the provisions of their Joint Declaration.” There was no explanation of what those provisions were, but his next words went on to concede defeat, albeit indirectly, without ever using the word, and to seize the high moral ground from the Allies by declaring that he was acting to save “human civilization” from “total extinction” by “pav[ing] the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come.” Hirohito also reiterated—just as his war rescript stated—that the aim of the war had been national “existence and self-defense,” and he expressed regret only to the puppet and collaborationist regimes in Asia that had been Japan’s allies.
In an emotionally powerful and astute last paragraph, the emperor revealed, but did not state, the real goals of his decision to end the war. He, who had made the war meaningful and valid for the people of Japan, wanted to obfuscate the issue of accountability, prevent expressions of strife and anger, and strengthen domestic unity centered on himself.
Having been able to safeguard and maintain the structure of the imperial state, we are always with ye, Our good and loyal subjects, relying upon your sincerity and integrity. Beware most strictly of any outbursts of emotion that can engender needless complications, or any fraternal contention and strife that may create confusion, lead ye astray and cause ye to lose the confidence of the world. Let the entire nation continue as one family from generation to generation, ever firm in its faith of the imperishability of its divine land, ever mindful of its heavy burden of responsibilities, and of the long road before it.108
Hirohito’s surrender rescript was the first text to redefine his new national image as a pacifist, antimilitarist, and completely passive onlooker in the war—none of which he had ever been. It cleverly underscored both his “benevolence” and his assertion of imperial sovereignty while obscuring his earlier reluctance to act concretely, on his own initiative, to end the war. But for those who heard the rescript, it was a shocking experience, a bolt from the blue that caught them totally unprepared. To ensure correct understanding of the message, which was written in obscure court style, radio announcer Wada Shinken reread the entire rescript in ordinary language. A cabinet announcement followed, condemning the United States for use of the atomic bombs in violation of international law, and the Soviet Union for declaring war against Japan. Thereupon Wada made these comments:
We ourselves invited a situation in which we had no choice but to lay down our arms. We could not live up to the great benevolence of the emperor, but he did not even scold us. On the contrary, he said that whatever might happen to himself, “I can no longer bear to see my people die in war.” Before such great benevolence and love, who among us can escape reflecting on his own disloyalty.109
Wada ended by reiterating the purpose of the imperial message: “Since the situation has developed this way, the nation will unite and, believing in the indestructibility of the divine land, put all of its energies into rebuilding for the future.” As the special surrender broadcast drew to a close, a news commentary on the Potsdam Declaration again encouraged the audience to accept defeat, display the proper moral attitude, and face reality “with a strong sense of self-reproach…. Everyone must bear in mind that if we start blaming one another, it will lead to economic, social, and moral confusion that will destroy the imperial nation.”110
The Japanese government, having accepted the Potsdam Declaration and the negative moral judgment it had rendered on all of Japan’s modern wars, was thereby obligated to pursue the issue of war criminality. The imperial rescript and accompanying news commentaries of August 14, however, were chiefly concerned with maintaining order while preserving the monarchy and the official ideology. The war in China was not mentioned; aggression was ignored; troops were praised for their loyalty. Diffusing the accountability of the decision makers, the notion was planted that “the entire nation should share responsibility.”
In the weeks and months that followed, vast amounts of secret materials pertaining to Japanese war crimes and the war responsibility of the nation’s highest leaders went up in smoke—in accordance with the August 14 decision of the Suzuki cabinet. Meanwhile the media, and the cabinet of Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko, which succeeded Suzuki’s on August 17, represented the emperor to the nation as the benevolent sage and apolitical ruler who had ended the war. The surrender-broadcast “ritual” confirmed Hirohito’s inherent power to create a radically new situation. Now the Japanese people could return to peaceful economic pursuits, ever mindful that their emperor had saved them—and the rest of the world—from further destruction by atomic bombs.111
The very naming of this event was determined by the wartime needs of the ruling group, and ever since has impeded a deeper understanding of it. Hirohito’s “sacred decision” both described and legitimized his act of ending the war by casting it in the most morally acceptable light. The device of the seidan shielded from criticism Hirohito’s actions in the events of August 9–10, 14, and 15. At the same time those actions were tailored to fit the preexisting imperial narrative of his reign. The last seidan clearly served multiple political and memorializing functions.
The imperial rescripts announcing the seidan also abetted conflicting assessments of the atomic bombs’ effect in hastening the conclusion of the war. The emperor’s rescript of August 14 never used the word “surrender” and registered indirectly (with a single, vague phrase) Germany’s defeat and the Soviet Union’s entrance into the war, saying that “the general trends of the world have all turned against [Japan’s] interest.” It was unequivocally clear, however, in using the atomic bombs to portray Japan as victim and savior: “Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, whose destructive power is quite incalculable;
it has taken many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, [that bomb] would result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation—even the total extinction of human civilization.”
Obviously Hirohito sought to justify his decision to surrender by citing the dropping of the atomic bombs. The broadcast of his August 14 rescript became Japan’s first official, public confirmation of the bombs’ effectiveness. Whether the emperor and his advisers ever really believed that, however, is unlikely. For three days later, on August 17, Hirohito issued a second “Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors” in all war theaters of Asia and the Pacific, ordering them to cease fire and lay down their arms. This time, addressing only his military forces, he stressed the cause-and-effect relationship between Soviet entrance into the war and his decision to surrender, while conspicuously omitting any mention of the atomic bombs.
Now that the Soviet Union has entered the war against us, to continue…under the present conditions at home and abroad would only recklessly incur even more damage to ourselves and result in endangering the very foundation of the empire’s existence. Therefore, even though enormous fighting spirit still exists in the Imperial Navy and Army, I am going to make peace with the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, as well as with Chungking, in order to maintain our glorious national polity.112
The less-known August 17 rescript to the army and navy specified Soviet participation as the sole reason for surrender, and maintenance of the kokutai as the aim. Dissembling until the end—and beyond—the emperor stated two different justifications for his delayed surrender.113 Both statements were probably true.
PART 4
THE UNEXAMINED LIFE, 1945–1989
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 54