CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE OPERATIONS and Plans Division of the War Department in Washington wrote on 7 August: “Undoubtedly the biggest question908 in [ Japanese] minds is how many atomic bombs have we and where are we going to drop the next one…We had a rumor that Suzuki had been made Premier to make peace. If this was true, either there were strings to his appointment or else conditions have changed. Japanese propaganda since the [Potsdam] proclamation has obviously been guided by those ‘self-willed militarists’ against whom [it] was aimed.” This was not far from the mark.
It remains cause for astonishment that, even in the wake of the atomic bombs and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, the political stalemate in Japan at first appeared unbroken. The military party, dominated by the war minister, Anami, and other service chiefs, argued that nothing had changed: resistance to the death was preferable to accepting the Potsdam Declaration; Japan could still successfully oppose an invasion of the homeland. Admiral Toyoda, the naval chief, fancifully suggested that world opinion would prevent the U.S. from perpetrating another “inhuman atrocity” with atomic bombs. Some civilian politicians were now willing to accept Potsdam, but with familiar conditions: there should be no occupation of Japan, and the Japanese must try their own alleged war criminals. Most ministers, however, cared about only a single issue: retention of the position of the emperor, though there were endless nuances about how this demand should be articulated. There is no doubt that some genuinely feared the spectre of “red revolution” in Japan, of a dramatic and terrible explosion of popular wrath in the wake of defeat, if the stabilising influence of the emperor was removed.
Throughout 9 August, at meetings of the cabinet and Supreme War Council and at the Imperial Palace, these matters were debated. Within the government and service departments, the terms of dispute quickly became known, and provoked frenzied intrigue. Junior officers at the War Ministry, in particular, were appalled by the notion of surrender, and pressed their superiors to have no part of such a betrayal. Vice-Admiral Onishi, begetter of the kamikaze campaign and now deputy chief of naval staff, begged Anami not to yield to the peacemakers. News of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki appears to have made astonishingly little impact on the leadership one way or another, save that it fulfilled the American purpose of emphasising that “Little Boy” was not a unique phenomenon. Anami speculated wildly that the Americans might possess as many as a hundred atomic weapons.
That evening of the ninth, the “Big Six” members of the Supreme War Council found themselves called to an “imperial conference” in the palace. There, they were told, Hirohito would announce a “sacred decision.” The summons reflected fevered efforts by the peace party, in conversations that afternoon between Prince Konoe, Mamoru Shigemitsu and the lord privy seal, Marquis Kido. At first, Kido was aghast at the notion of involving the throne in a matter of such delicacy. “You are advocating a direct decision from the emperor,” he told the politicians. “Have you ever thought what embarrassment such a course might cause His Majesty?” The peacemakers, however, knew that only the emperor’s personal support might make it possible to overcome military resistance to surrender. They pressed their point. After a forty-minute private conversation between emperor and lord privy seal, the substance of which was never disclosed, Kido returned to report Hirohito’s assent to an “imperial conference.” The service chiefs agreed to attend, and to hear the “sacred decision,” knowing full well what this would be. Most privately recognised that Japan was beaten. Yet still they ducked and weaved, to escape overt complicity in an outcome which their peers and subordinates would deem a betrayal. Slim of Fourteenth Army was surely right when he observed that while Japan’s commanders were physically brave men, many were also moral cowards.
The imperial conference began ten minutes before midnight on 9 August. The text of the Potsdam Declaration was read aloud. Foreign Minister Togo tabled a one-condition draft, proposing Potsdam’s acceptance provided that no change was demanded “in the status of the emperor under the national laws.” War Minister Anami continued to preach defiance, supported by his military colleagues. Soon after 2 a.m. on 10 August, however, Prime Minister Suzuki rose, bowed to the emperor, ignored a protest from Anami and invited the emperor’s decision. Hirohito, still seated at the table, leaned forward and said: “I will express my opinion. It is the same as that of the foreign minister.” It was necessary to “bear the unbearable.” Hirohito spoke harshly of the chasm between the military’s past promises and performance. Suzuki said: “We have heard your august Thought.” Hirohito then left the room. Everyone present, including the military proponents of continued belligerence, signed a document approving the imperial decision.
Yet the war party was successful in introducing into the Togo draft a significant amendment. This accepted Potsdam “on the understanding that the Allied Declaration would not comprise any demand which would prejudice the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.” It was almost inevitable that a phrase open to far-reaching interpretations would be rejected by the United States. Even at this late and terrible hour, in Tokyo resistance to capitulation persisted. As Japan’s conditional acceptance of Potsdam was transmitted to the world, within the service ministries desperate intrigue continued. Junior officers were plotting a coup. The civilian politicians feared for their lives.
On 10 August, Japanese military headquarters in Shanghai signalled China Army HQ in Nanjing in some bewilderment. Local Chinese were celebrating Allied victory, its staff reported, cheering in the streets and letting off fireworks. Nationalist radio was reporting that Japan had accepted the Potsdam terms. What were Japanese forces supposed to do? In private, Nanjing staff officers readily recognised that the war was lost, and had started to address the logistical problems of getting a million soldiers and 750,000 civilians back to Japan. No one, however, was ready openly to concede this. Nanjing answered Shanghai: “Ignore it all909909. Japan has accepted nothing. We fight on.”
That same morning of the tenth, when Truman heard news of the Japanese pronouncement, he summoned Byrnes, Stimson and Forrestal to the White House, where they were joined by Leahy, the president’s chief of staff. It is an indication of Stimson’s curious absence of expectation that any historic climax was imminent that he was due to leave on vacation that day, until he learned of the Japanese message. All those at the White House save Byrnes favoured immediate acceptance. No quibble, they thought, was worth delaying peace. But the secretary of state, still the most powerful influence on the president, said that he was troubled by the Japanese condition. “Unconditional surrender” had always been the demand, indeed a national slogan, of the United States. He argued that to modify this now, when the U.S. was using atomic bombs and Russia had entered the Japanese war, would seem incomprehensible to the American people. Byrnes was perfectly amenable to preserving Hirohito’s role. He was merely determined that the world should perceive the throne’s survival as the fruit of American magnanimity, not Japanese intransigence.
Truman approved a note drafted by the State Department at Byrnes’s behest, which was sent to London, Moscow and Chongqing on the afternoon of 10 August. This stipulated that “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,” and that “the ultimate form of government of Japan shall be…established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.” The British responded immediately, making their only significant intervention. They argued that it was wrong to insist, as the Americans proposed, that the emperor should personally sign the surrender terms. Probably mistakenly, Byrnes accepted this. He ignored Chiang Kai-shek’s dissent.
On the tenth also, Truman told the cabinet he had given orders that no further atomic bombs should be dropped on Japan without his explicit authority. It is reasonable to speculate that, in the days since 6 August, a sense of the enormity of the consequences of Hiroshima had darkened the mood of celebration with which the president greeted the first news. He was not alone in this. “Along with a thrill of power and the instinctive pleasure at the thought of Japan cringing in abject surrender, America’s deep-rooted humanitarianism has begun to assert itself,” the British Embassy in Washington suggested to the Foreign Office in London on 11 August, “and this secondary revulsion910 has been very marked in private conversation, although it has not yet appeared in the press…There is a good deal of heart-searching about the morality of using such a weapon, especially against an enemy already known to be on his last legs.”
Truman, however, was determined to maintain pressure on Japan. He rejected the urgings of Stimson and Forrestal to halt conventional bombing. Between 10 and 14 August, LeMay’s Superfortresses maintained their attacks on Japan’s cities, killing 15,000 people. Technical preparations continued for the release of further atomic bombs, should these prove necessary. A third weapon would be ready for delivery on 19 August. If Tokyo remained obdurate, U.S. assistant chief of staff Gen. John Hull debated with Colonel Seeman of the Manhattan Project the relative merits of dropping more bombs as they became available, or holding back to “pour them all on in a reasonably short time911,” in tactical support of an invasion. Gen. Carl Spaatz, USAAF strategic bombing supremo, opposed continuing firebomb attacks. This was not, however, for humanitarian reasons: he simply preferred to conserve American lives and effort until the nineteenth, then drop a third atomic weapon on Tokyo.
In Moscow, Stalin perceived that peace was very near, and hastened to complete his treaty with the Chinese Nationalists. By its terms, Moscow recognised Chiang Kai-shek as his country’s sole legitimate ruler. However, the Soviet leader sought to introduce a clause whereby Chiang would introduce “national unity and democratisation.” The Nationalist delegation rejected this out of hand. Stalin asked: “Don’t you want to democratise China? If you continue to attack Communists, are we expected to support [the] Chinese government? We have no wish to interfere, but [it would be] hard for us to support [you] morally when you fight Communists.” The Nationalists remained implacable. Stalin shrugged: “Very well. You see how many concessions we make. China’s Communists will curse us.” But agreement on other issues remained elusive. Only at 3 a.m. on 15 August was the “Treaty of Friendship and Alliance” between the USSR and China finally signed.
That night of the tenth in Moscow, Foreign Minister Molotov told Harriman, the U.S. ambassador, that in the absence of Japanese unconditional surrender, the Soviet thrust into Manchuria would continue. As ever, Tokyo’s stubbornness suited Soviet convenience. More dismaying, the Soviets now abruptly asserted that they expected a share in the occupation of Japan, including the appointment of their own supreme commander to serve jointly with MacArthur. Harriman responded furiously, saying that this was an outrageous demand, when Russia had only been in the Japanese war for two days. The Soviets eventually backed off, and accepted MacArthur’s appointment as SCAP—Supreme Commander Allied Powers.
On 11 August the Byrnes note was dispatched to the Japanese government. It reached Tokyo in the early hours of the twelfth, provoking bitter disappointment among the peace party. Togo, the foreign minister, was at first disposed to abandon his commitment to bow to Washington. Only with the utmost reluctance did Suzuki and Togo finally agree to accept Byrnes’s terms. The most surprising reactions came from some of the military. Deputy Chief of Staff Torashiro Kawabe declared that it was now too late to draw back from surrender, or to question the emperor’s decision. He wrote in his diary: “Alas, we are defeated. The imperial state we have believed in has been ruined.” Kawabe’s superior, Gen. Yoshijiro Umezu, was nicknamed “the ivory mask.” He recognised that the war was lost. Toyoda, the naval chief, was similarly resigned. In contradiction to such private realism, however, in the presence of others all three persisted in holding out for conditions. Fearful of their own junior officers, they satisfied their “honour” by submitting a note to the emperor asserting that acceptance of the Byrnes note amounted to acceding to “slave status” for Japan. Hirohito sharply rebuked them, asserting that his own mind was made up. The nation must rely upon American good faith.
The army’s general staff drafted its own defiant response for the Supreme War Council to send to the Americans, asserting Japan’s determination to continue the war. Fantastically, it also emphasised Japan’s refusal to declare war on the Soviet Union, apparently in the hope that Russian mediation still offered a prospect of better terms. This document was never dispatched, of course, but staff officers continued to plot a coup to forestall surrender. Kawabe was told of their intentions, and equivocated. Anami listened to an outline of the coup plan, neither approved nor disapproved, but made suggestions for refining its execution. He agreed to the mobilisation of some units which could secure the Imperial Palace and arrest civilian ministers. Anami’s personal position had become further complicated the previous day, when Tokyo papers published in his name an exhortation to Japan’s soldiers to fight on, “even if we have to eat grass, chew dirt and sleep in the fields.” This display of bellicosity was in reality issued by junior officers without Anami’s knowledge. He refused to renounce the statement, however, because it reflected his personal convictions.
Signals were received from a succession of officers in the field, urging that the nation should fight on. Old Gen. Yasuji Okamura, directing Japan’s armies in China, cabled: “I am firmly convinced that it is time to exert all our efforts to fight to the end, determined that the whole army should die an honourable death without being distracted by the enemy’s peace offensive.” Field Marshal Terauchi spoke for his command: “Under no circumstances can the Southern Army accept the enemy’s reply.” Even by the standards of the Japanese military, in those days the conduct of its leaders was extraordinary. They seemed to care nothing for the welfare of Japan’s people, everything for their perverted concept of personal honour and that of the institution to which they belonged. They knew that continued military resistance was futile. Yet they deluded themselves that they not only could, but must, pretend otherwise. Anami told Kido that the army was utterly opposed to accepting the Byrnes note. Among the civilian politicians, some continued to claim that they could endorse no terms which rendered the emperor subordinate to the supreme Allied commander.
Hirohito himself, however, declared that he was satisfied by Washington’s assertion that the Japanese people could choose their own form of government. There is significant evidence that he was more affected than his senior officers by the atomic bombings—he quizzed Kido closely about their effects. At 3 p.m. on 12 August, the emperor summoned the men of his family, thirteen princes, to an unprecedented meeting at the palace, at which he explained the situation. All agreed to accept his judgement, including his youngest brother, Prince Mikasa, who had betrayed an earlier peace move to the military. Suzuki, after further vacillation, rallied with Togo to support acceptance of Byrnes’s note. Yonai, the navy minister, with considerable courage summoned Admirals Toyoda and Onishi, and sternly reprimanded them for questioning the emperor’s will. Yonai confided to a colleague: “The atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war are, in a sense, God’s gifts.” They offered substantive reasons to end the war.
All through 13 August, meetings of the military and civilian factions continued. Hirohito, having embarked hesitantly on the path to surrender, progressively increased the energy of his interventions to secure this. He appears to have exercised private pressure on all the military chiefs to forestall a coup. At 3 p.m., after further sessions of the Supreme War Council and cabinet, Togo reported to the emperor that the war and peace parties were deadlocked. Anami begged the prime minister to delay two days before reconvening the imperial conference—he obviously wanted time to rally the military against surrender. Suzuki refused. A naval doctor attending the ailing prime minister said: “You know that Anami will kill himself?” Suzuki said: “Yes, I know, and I am sorry.”
The drama of those days, the constant proximity of disaster, almost defies belief. Only a chance encounter with a Tokyo journalist enabled the peacemakers to prevent the military plotters from broadcasting on national radio an announcement that Japan would fight on. Anami spent hours listening to pleadings from the colonels and majors planning their coup. He still refused to join them, presumably because a wooden-headed interpretation of honour prevented him from taking up arms against the emperor, while precluding him from frustrating the conspirators.
Two days had passed, in which Japan remained silent while the world waited. “The days of negotiation912 with a prostrate and despised enemy strained public patience,” the British embassy in Washington reported to London: “Although the responsible press united in support of the [Byrnes] reply to the Japanese surrender offer…the general public were and still are much less tolerant of discredited deities…The man in the street seemed keener to hear about Admiral Halsey riding on Hirohito’s white horse, as he had boasted he would, than to listen to explanations about the problems of administering Japan.” More Japanese died under air bombardment. The Russians swept on across Manchuria.
On the morning of 14 August, at the Imperial Palace Kido was woken by an aide who showed him a leaflet, one of hundreds of thousands showered on Tokyo during the night by B-29s. This gave the text of the emperor’s letter of 10 August accepting Potsdam, and the Byrnes response. Neither document had hitherto been seen by the Japanese public. Kido told Hirohito that he feared the propaganda bombardment might precipitate action by the coup plotters. He proposed to force the pace: there should be an unprecedented meeting of all twenty-three members of the cabinet and Supreme War Council, at which the emperor would announce his decision to accept the Byrnes note. Soon after ten, the leaders of Japan began to arrive, taking their places in silence on rows of chairs in the cramped basement shelter, awaiting Hirohito. At 10:50, the meeting began. The military representatives expressed their familiar objections to surrender. The prime minister did not trouble to invite the peace party to rehearse its arguments. He simply invited the emperor’s decision.
Hirohito said he was convinced that Japan could not continue the war. He believed the Allies would retain the kokutai. He asked everyone present to respect his decision to accept the Byrnes note, and urged the military and naval leaders to persuade their subordinates to do so. He announced his intention to broadcast personally to the Japanese people, to help them accept the shock. He instructed the government to prepare an Imperial Rescript ending the war. Most of his listeners wept. Suzuki rose, thanked the emperor and apologised for the cabinet’s failure to reach agreement, which had made imperial intervention necessary. Some post-war scholars have sought to argue that the Byrnes note enabled Japan to quit the war on contracted terms rather than by unconditional surrender, and thus that American stubbornness on the point—prompting the atomic bombs—was spurious. To dismiss this claim, it is necessary only to notice that the leaders of Japan were in no doubt that they submitted at America’s mercy and pleasure, which is why so many resisted.
That night of 14 August, junior officers from the Army Ministry, led by Maj. Kenji Hatanaka and Lt. Col. Jiro Shiizaki, staged their coup. It was a feeble adventure, which could nonetheless have had disastrous consequences. First, the two officers and their supporters rushed into Anami’s office on the war minister’s return from the imperial conference. When he said that he could not support them, adding that “those who disobey will do so over my dead body,” the conspirators burst into tears. Army chief Umezu gathered his staff around his own person, making it almost impossible for the rebels to pass orders to outlying units. His vice-chief secured the signatures of every leading military figure, including Anami, on a document committing them to accept the emperor’s sacred decision. Senior soldiers began burning documents, a process that continued apace through the weeks which followed, in all Japan’s key ministries and headquarters.
Around 4 p.m., Hatanaka and Shiizaki slipped into the compound of the Imperial Palace. They successfully convinced Col. Toyojiro Haga, commanding the 2nd Imperial Guard Regiment protecting Hirohito, that he should join their plot, on the understanding that it enjoyed the army’s support. At 11 p.m. the Imperial Rescript, signed by every member of the cabinet, was dispatched to Berne and Stockholm, for onward transmission to the four Allied governments. In his office, Hirohito read the text aloud to a phonograph. Two duplicate records were then secreted in a safe in the empress’s office, for broadcast next day. Even as the recording was being made, Hatanaka and Shiizaki drove to the headquarters of the Imperial Guard Division close to the palace, to incite its commander to join their plot. When he refused, Hatanaka drew a pistol and shot him dead. He then forged an order for all seven Imperial Guard regiments to rally to the emperor’s “protection.” This bluff was at first successful. Troops deployed to cut Hirohito’s communications with the outside world.
Hatanaka and Shiizaki themselves hastened back to the palace, and began searching for the records of the imperial broadcast. They interrogated the radio technicians and court chamberlains, but were unable to find either the disks or Marquis Kido. Had they done so, much harm might have ensued. Any delay in the imperial broadcast would have cost lives. The mutiny might have spread. Kido and the emperor himself are thought to have hidden themselves during the hours in which angry and frustrated rebels roamed the palace corridors. Around 1:30 a.m. another plotter, Anami’s brother-in-law Masashiko Takeshita, called at the war minister’s house to plead once more with him to join the coup. A farcical scene ensued. Anami invited him in and said: “I am going to commit seppuku. What do you think?” Takeshita said he had always assumed that this would be Anami’s chosen course. He certainly would not attempt to dissuade him. Abandoning his responsibilities to the other coup plotters, Takeshita sat down to drink sake with the doomed man. In the distance, they could hear the concussions of bomb explosions. In response to Spaatz’s urging that the Twentieth Air Force should lay on “as big a finale as possible,” 821 B-29s were attacking Japan that night.
Soon after 3 a.m., troops of Eastern Army arrived at the palace, informed the Imperial Guard soldiers that their orders had been faked, and quickly restored order. Realising that the coup had failed, one plotter, Col. Masataka Ida, drove to Anami’s house to report the news. The war minister invited Ida, also, to join him for a farewell drink. There were more tears and embraces. At 5:30 a.m., Anami donned a white shirt given to him by Hirohito, seated himself on the floor facing the Imperial Palace, thrust a short sword into his left abdomen, and made the proper cross and upward cuts. He then severed his own carotid artery. As blood sprayed across the testament before him, Takeshita asked: “Do you want me to help?” Anami said: “No need. Leave me alone.” When his brother-in-law found the general still breathing a few minutes later, he took the sword and finished him off. The only mitigation for Anami’s contemptible conduct of his own life and death is that he never betrayed the doings of the peace party to the fanatics. Later that morning, Hatanaka and Shiizaki shot themselves.
Given the mind-set of Japan’s armed forces, what was remarkable was not that a coup was attempted, but that only a tiny handful of officers chose to participate. For all their anger, and a significant number of suicides in the days to come, the overwhelming majority of soldiers acceded to the emperor’s will. If this indicated the strength of Hirohito’s influence, it also seems unlikely that it could have been effectual save in the new circumstances created by Soviet entry into the war and the atomic bombs. So powerful was the culture of self-immolation fostered by Japanese militarism over a generation that the instincts of many officers demanded continuing the war, however futile such a course.
Even had Japan chosen to reject the Byrnes note, it is most unlikely that an American invasion of the home islands would have been necessary. The Soviets were within days of reaching the Pacific coast and establishing themselves in the Kuriles. LeMay’s B-29s were preparing to launch a systematic assault on Japan’s transport network, against negligible opposition, which would quickly have reduced much of the population to starvation. Historians have expended much ink upon measuring the comparative influence of the atomic bombs against that of Soviet intervention in persuading Japan to surrender. This seems a sterile exercise, since it is plain that both played their parts. “For Japan’s civilian politicians913,” asserts Japanese historian Kazutoshi Hando, “the dropping of the atomic bombs was the last straw. For the Japanese army, it was the Russian invasion of Manchuria.”
Considering the plight of civilians and captives, dying in thousands daily under Japanese occupation, together with the casualties that would have been incurred had the Soviets been provoked into maintaining their advance across mainland China, almost any scenario suggests that far more people of many nationalities would have died in the course of even a few further weeks of war than were killed by the atomic bombs. Stalin would almost certainly have seized Hokkaido, with his usual indifference to losses. Robert Newman suggests914 that 250,000 deaths would have occurred in every further month the war continued. Even if this is excessive, it addresses a plausible range of numbers. Starvation and LeMay’s fire-raisers would have killed hundreds of thousands more Japanese by the late autumn of 1945. Such an assertion does not immediately render the detonations of the atomic bombs acceptable acts. It merely emphasises the fact that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by no means represented the worst outcome of the war for the Japanese people, far less for the world.
Those who seek to argue that Japan was ready to surrender before Hiroshima are peddlers of fantasies. The Tokyo leadership was indeed eager for peace, but on terms rightly unacceptable to the Allied powers. Even after Nagasaki, the peace party prevailed only by the narrowest of margins. While evidence remains fragmentary and inconclusive, Richard Frank is surely right to argue that a critical, if unacknowledged, element in Japanese thinking was awareness that they had lost the chance of a “decisive battle for the homeland.” The hopes of the military were pinned upon exploiting an opportunity to defeat a U.S. amphibious assault. Now Japan faced devastation, starvation and probable Soviet invasion, without the need for America to expose its soldiers to the desperate defenders of Kyushu.
It is sometimes suggested that the U.S. would have lost nothing by making explicit its willingness to permit the Japanese people to keep their emperor. However, in the context of Japan’s conduct in Asia since 1931, the tens of millions of deaths for which Japanese aggression was responsible, it is hard to perceive any good reason for Truman to have modified his demand for the enemy’s unconditional surrender. Byrnes’s judgements withstand the tests of history. If there was a strand of triumphalism in American conduct, why should there not have been? The U.S. and its allies had been obliged to expend immense blood and treasure to frustrate the ambitions of a brutal fascistic aggressor. At any time, by acknowledging defeat Japan could have secured peace, escaped the atomic bombs. The fact that its leaders did not do so reflected their own irrational choice, rather than American obduracy. Why should the sensibilities of such men as Anami, Toyoda, Umezu and their subordinates have been indulged, when at last their bloody pretensions were brought to naught?
The emperor himself will never cut a sympathetic figure in Western eyes. Hirohito presided over a society which had brought misery upon many nations. If he was not a prime mover, throughout the war his preoccupation with the preservation of the imperial house caused him to treat Japan’s militarists as honourable men and legitimate arbiters of power, to applaud their successes and acquiesce in their excesses. Yet there was a redemptive quality about his conduct in those last days. Albeit belatedly, he displayed a courage and conviction which saved hundreds of thousands of lives. To a man of such instinctive diffidence, his role was entirely unwelcome, but he fulfilled it in a fashion which commands some respect. It is sometimes argued that the Allies were mistaken not to remove Hirohito from his throne in August 1945; that failure to do so allowed the Japanese people to deny the iniquity of the crimes committed in his name, as many do to this day. Nonetheless, whatever his faults in years past, through Hirohito’s actions in August 1945 the imperial house worked a passage to its own salvation.
At 7:21 on the morning of the fifteenth, Japan’s radio network began to broadcast repeated calls for every listener to tune in at noon, to receive a personal message from the emperor. Following the National Anthem, Hirohito’s squeaky tones, speaking in old Japanese almost incomprehensible to many of his subjects, delivered his reading of the Rescript:
After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and actual conditions obtaining in Our Empire today, We have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure. We have ordered Our Government to communicate to the Governments of the United States, Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union that Our Empire accepts the provisions of their Joint Declaration.
He then delivered an exposition of his nation’s past conduct which has become familiar to posterity, together with a circumlocution tortured even by Japanese standards, that the war situation had evolved “not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” He lamented America’s employment of “a new most cruel bomb.” He appealed to the armed forces to accept his decision, concluding: “Cultivate the ways of rectitude; foster nobility of spirit; and work with resolution so as ye may enhance the innate glory of the Imperial State and keep pace with the progress of the world.” Hirohito’s archaic phrases represented a self-serving caricature of Japan’s recent history, yet they sufficed for their immediate purpose.
That afternoon, the Suzuki cabinet resigned. The elderly Prince Higashikuni reluctantly accepted the premiership. At 7 p.m. on 14 August Washington time, before a dense throng of politicians and journalists, Harry Truman read the announcement of Japan’s unconditional acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration. He then sent a message to the Pentagon and the Navy Department, for onward transmission to American field commanders, ordering the cessation of all offensive operations against Japan. Early in 1943, an editorial in Collier’s magazine borrowed its headline from Cato’s Roman curse upon Carthage: “Delenda est Japonia.” Now the American curse seemed fulfilled. Japan was extinguished.