Suzuki then said, “The Imperial decision has been expressed. This should be the conclusion of the conference.”65 Hirohito stood and left the chamber. There was no dissent. The single-condition document was signed by every member of the SWDC, including Anami, Umezu, and Toyoda. Suzuki summoned the full cabinet to another emergency meeting, where the ministers ratified the decision unanimously. Togo’s foreign ministry began drafting a formal surrender note to be conveyed to U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes through the neutral European capitals of Bern and Stockholm. It was transmitted at seven o’clock that morning, Tokyo time. Japan would accept the Potsdam Declaration, it said, “with the understanding that the said declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.”66
Having slept not at all, General Anami returned to the grand white art deco–style army ministry at Ichigaya. He summoned his section chiefs and staff to a briefing at 9:00 a.m. In a muted, solemn voice he told of the emperor’s decision. The counteroffer was on its way to the Allies, he said, and depending on the response, the army would either fight on or accept the Potsdam terms with the proviso that the kokutai would be retained. This shocking news was met by a rumble of angry murmurs. One young officer leapt to his feet and asked, “Is the Army Minister actually considering surrender?” Anami responded by smashing a table with his swagger stick. The army must remain unified and disciplined during this crisis, he said: “I have no excuse to offer for the fact that peace has been decided upon. However, those of you who are dissatisfied and wish to stave it off will have to do it over my dead body.”67 That last remark was no mere figure of speech, and every man in the room knew it.
In acquiescing to the Potsdam terms, Hirohito had calculated that he must sacrifice the army and navy in order to save the core essence of the kokutai (the emperor-centered “polity” or political structure). In its future postwar incarnation, the kokutai would be stripped of its traditional military carapace. What remained would be a more purely religious model based upon State Shinto and the continuity of the imperial ancestral line. In a postwar account, the emperor explained that he had feared for the safety of the Ise and Atsuta Shrines. If an invasion force should come ashore in Ise Bay and capture the two holy places, the enemy would gain control of the imperial regalia—the three sacred objects or treasures of Shinto—in which case, “it would be difficult to preserve the national polity.”68 This religious belief may well have roused Hirohito and other leading figures in the royal family and the imperial household. If the military had to be sacrificed to protect the ancient Shinto traditions, so be it. Pursuant to the emperor’s sacred decision, the army and navy would be not only disarmed and demobilized but actually extirpated. Its leaders would be hauled before international war crimes tribunals, probably to be imprisoned or hanged.
But that was not the worst of it. Most galling to the army leaders was the knowledge that the emperor had plainly stated that he no longer believed their promises. General Umezu, in despair, told General Kawabe that “since very long ago, the emperor had already lost all hope about the results of military operations. He has lost all faith in the military.”69 In a long, anguished entry in his diary, Kawabe lamented this humiliating state of affairs, but admitted that the emperor’s criticism was a “picture of reality.” It was true that the army had no real hope of repelling the impending invasion of the homeland, and the generals had refused to face up to Japan’s hopeless predicament. Kawabe wrote: “I was bound by the feeling, ‘I do not want to surrender. I do not want to admit I am defeated, even in the face of death.’ With that feeling I only directed the final operations in this war.”70
The chastened Kawabe pledged to do his utmost to persuade the rank-and-file of the army to acquiesce in the emperor’s decision. But it was not clear that discipline could be maintained. During the final five days of the Pacific War, the political situation in Tokyo was explosive. Mid-ranking officers in the army and even the navy maneuvered to scuttle the peace talks, and laid the groundwork for a general revolt and coup d’état. The contending hawks and doves vied to disseminate their views through the domestic and even the international news media. Officials at the foreign ministry arranged to have an international wire announcement (in English) radioed by the Domei News Agency, under the headline “Japan Accepts Potsdam Proclamation.”71 Furious army officers then attempted to seize Domei’s shortwave broadcasting equipment. On the evening of August 10, the army ministry released, in Anami’s name, a rousing message exhorting the troops to “fight the sacred war to defend to the last this land of the gods. Even though we have to eat grass and chew dirt and lay in the field we must fight to the bitter end, ever firm in our belief that we shall find life and death.”72 Privately, Anami informed overseas army headquarters that truce negotiations were underway, but until they bore fruit, the troops must fight on “even in the face of complete annihilation.”73
Plotters drew up lists of names. Cabinet officials who were known to have supported the peace party would be arrested or assassinated. The surrender was teetering on a knife’s edge. There was talk of occupying the imperial palace and declaring martial law, perhaps even taking the emperor into “protective custody.” A bomb was thrown over the front gate of Foreign Minister Togo’s official residence. Meanwhile, the peacemakers knowingly risked their lives to bring the war to an end. Hisatsune Sakomizu was preparing a draft imperial rescript for the emperor’s seal, and Kido was planning an unprecedented broadcast by the emperor announcing the end of the war. And yet, at the end of the day on August 11, no word had been received from the Allied governments. Should the one condition be rejected, Japan would fight on to its own utter destruction. The diplomat Toshikazu Kase later wrote of those tense days: “The clock ticking out each second seemed to be spelling out the suspended doom of the empire now about to crumble.”74
THE JAPANESE NOTE ARRIVED in Washington by several routes. First, the American codebreakers intercepted and broke the message between Tokyo and Bern, and rushed it up the chain of command. The Domei shortwave radio message arranged by Japanese diplomats arrived in the small hours of the morning of August 10. (This message made headlines in the United States and throughout the world, and counterbalanced the toxic impression given by Anami’s more bellicose statement to the army.) Later that afternoon, the formal message was received in the U.S. State Department via the Swiss Embassy.
Secretary Stimson received word as he was being driven to an airfield to board a plane that would take him to the Adirondack lakes region of upstate New York, where he would enjoy a well-earned summer vacation. The car turned around and took him back to the War Department. As he read the Japanese note asking for assurances regarding the emperor, Stimson reflected, “It is curious that this was the very single point that I feared would make trouble.”75 In his diary, he wrote that political demands in America to punish the emperor were now a threat to the hope of a bloodless victory over Japan. A clear majority of the American people wanted Hirohito held accountable for his role in the war. In a Gallup poll conducted in May 1945, 33 percent of Americans favored the execution of the emperor; 11 percent said that he should be imprisoned, and 9 percent said that he should be exiled. Stimson remarked that such views were found even in higher circles of government, “mostly by people who know no more about Japan than has been given them by Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Mikado.’ ”76
Truman summoned his military chiefs and state-war-navy secretaries to the White House. They convened in the Oval Office at nine o’clock. The arguments were largely a recap of the debates that had occurred three weeks earlier in Potsdam. Secretary of State Byrnes was concerned that accepting the note would amount to a retreat from the ultimatum for unconditional surrender: “I cannot understand why now we should go further [toward conciliation] than we were willing to go at Potsdam when we had no atomic bomb, and Russia was not in the war.” He warned of political consequences for Truman. Accepting the Japanese condition, he said, woul
d mean “the crucifixion of the president.”77
Leahy and Stimson were ready to accept the Japanese condition on its face. Retaining the emperor, said Leahy, was a small price to pay for a quick end to the war. “I had no feelings about little Hirohito, but was convinced that it would be necessary to use him in effecting the surrender.”78 Stimson agreed, adding that time was running against the Allies, because the Soviet footprint in Asia was expanding by the hour. The Red Army’s onslaught dictated that the Americans take a more pragmatic approach to these last rounds of negotiations, said Stimson, because “it was a great importance to get the homeland into our hands before the Russians could put in any substantial claim to occupy and help rule it.”79 The more territory the Russians swallowed on the northern borders of China, the more assistance Moscow might later provide to Mao Zedong’s communist guerillas in the nascent Chinese Civil War. Russian ambitions in Korea were a growing concern; there was even talk of putting a U.S. amphibious force ashore in Inchon. The Soviets were openly demanding a role in the occupation of Japan, perhaps by adopting a multinational occupation authority, as in Germany. The future of Asia, it could be said without exaggeration, depended on the fastest possible resolution of the standoff between Tokyo and Washington.
A brainstorm by Jim Forrestal solved the impasse. The Allies need not accept or reject the Japanese proviso at all, he said; they could simply make an “affirmative statement” setting out their views on the emperor’s subordinate status. Such a statement would ignore the Japanese condition while implicitly reassuring the Japanese that Hirohito would be left on his throne.80 The suggestion was adopted. The key passage of Byrnes’s reply stated: “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, who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms.” As for the future form of the Japanese government, it would be established “by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.”81 The singular term “Supreme Commander” was chosen deliberately, to emphasize that the occupation would be run by a single officer rather than by an Allied coalition. On that same day, President Truman confirmed the decision that everyone had expected for months: Douglas MacArthur would serve as supreme commander for the Allied powers (SCAP) in occupied Japan.
Stimson and Forrestal recommended a moratorium on bombing while negotiations proceeded. Stimson cited a “growing feeling of apprehension and misgiving” among the American people about the atomic bomb. Truman agreed to order a halt to the atomic bombings—in any case, the third weapon would not be ready until later in the month—but he ruled that the conventional bombing campaign would continue “at its present intensity” until Japan finally capitulated.82
Thanks to the shortwave radio broadcast arranged by the doves in Tokyo, the world now knew that Japan had sued for peace. While the cabinet and military chiefs were huddled with the president, a crowd gathered outside the White House gates, and a clamor of jubilant shouting and car horns was heard from Pennsylvania Avenue. Radio news bulletins carried stories of similar public celebrations in cities across the United States. In territories throughout the Pacific, servicemen fired their weapons into the sky. Allied warships sounded their whistles and let fly with starshells, flares, tracer fire, and antiaircraft rounds. In Hagushi Anchorage off Okinawa, the air was so thick with celebratory flak that several sailors were killed.83 The marine flyer Sam Hynes remembered it as a “hysterical, frightening night, a purging of war’s emotions.”84 Those ashore with an instinct for self-preservation retreated to their foxholes or trenches. The local naval base commander signaled the fleet: “All firing of antiaircraft weapons for celebrative purposes will be discontinued on receipt this msg.”85
The Third Fleet was off northern Japan, where it had been hitting targets throughout the region. On the Yorktown, the captain announced the news over the loudspeaker system, and “cheers rose from the blackness on the flight deck where crews were respotting planes.”86 On the Missouri, Halsey and his staff were watching a technicolor musical starring the synchronized swimming star Esther Williams. A communications officer approached from behind and whispered the news into Carney’s and Halsey’s ears. Halsey waved him away, saying: “Let’s just watch the picture.”87 Having received no orders to cease offensive operations, the mighty fleet continued south toward Tokyo, where it was scheduled to launch another big strike on August 12.
BYRNES’S REPLY WAS BROADCAST to Tokyo by a commercial radio station in San Francisco. It was received before dawn on August 12. Arriving early to his office at the foreign ministry, Togo mulled it over with his deputies. It was not ideal, they agreed, but it could be worse. The emperor would become a subordinate partner to the occupying force. Under a somewhat labored interpretation of the clause, it might be understood as a pledge not to arrest, depose, or otherwise molest Hirohito or his family. The translators attempted to take the sting out of the Byrnes note, softening the English phrase “subject to” to a Japanese phrase meaning “under the restriction of.”
In the various power centers of Tokyo—the IGHQ, the ministries, the Imperial Palace—Japanese leaders pored over the note and debated its meaning and merits. August 12 was a long and chaotic day. Some who had been steadfast members of the peace camp now entertained doubts, and vacillated. Baron Kiichirō Hiranuma, a reactionary former prime minister, argued that accepting the American terms would obliterate the kokutai. He did not like the stipulation that the government would be determined by the “freely expressed will” of the Japanese people, which he regarded as an invitation to “subversive activities calculated to overthrow monarchical government.”88 Briefly, on the morning of the twelfth, it appeared that Prime Minister Suzuki and Navy Minister Yonai, who had been Togo’s only dependable allies on the Big Six, would be swayed by these objections. In a meeting of the SWDC that morning, and in a later meeting of the full cabinet, the familiar deadlocks reemerged. Several ministers wanted to ask the United States for a “clarification” of the terms concerning the emperor. Togo countered that any such response risked a rupture in negotiations, in which case Japan would be destroyed. He implied that he would resign rather than send another temporizing note to Washington.
In the period between the first surrender offer on August 10 and the final capitulation on August 15, the tone of the Japanese newspapers was vacillating and uncertain. The acceptance of the Potsdam terms had been broadcast to overseas audiences in English, but the same report did not appear in the NHK domestic broadcasts. Anami’s fight-to-the-finish message, which had been on the airwaves only one hour after the surrender offer, was prominently featured in both print and radio reports on August 10 and 11.
The army ministry at Ichigaya was a volcano. Rebellion was brewing among the younger radical officers. They spoke openly of a coup d’état. Among the firebrands, plans were afoot to take control of the Imperial Guards and seal off the imperial compound. They would arrest or assassinate the doves in the cabinet, declare a military dictatorship, occupy the foreign ministry, and seize control of all radio stations. Meanwhile, a stream of telegrams arrived from senior army commanders overseas, urging against surrender. General Yasuji Okamura, supreme commander of the China Expeditionary Army, said that it was unthinkable that his undefeated forces would surrender to their inferior Chinese foes.89 Army hotheads tried to release a statement over the forged signatures of the high command, calling for an intensification of the war on all fronts. Alerted to the ruse, the Cabinet Information Board intercepted and suppressed the document before it was released to the press.
Lieutenant Colonel Masahiko Takeshita, brother-in-law to Army Minister Anami, pitched plans for a rebellion to Anami, Umezu, Kawabe, and other senior army figures. The leaders listened and equivocated, neither accepting nor rejecting the proposals. The tepid response encouraged the rebel leaders to proceed in the hope that they could later win the support of the high command. Anami, grasping at straws, ask
ed the foreign minister whether any hope remained of recruiting the Soviet government to mediate with the Allies. (It was now three days since the Red Army had attacked, and it was already deep into Manchuria.) General Kawabe had little sympathy for the plotters, concluding that “more harm will be done than good to kick and struggle at this point.”90 He was evidently still somewhat dazed by the revelation that the emperor had lost faith in the army.
Prime Minister Suzuki told a subordinate that there was no time to lose, because of the rapid advances of the Red Army. “If we miss today, the Soviet Union will take not only Manchuria, Korea, Karafuto [South Sakhalin], but also Hokkaido. This would destroy the foundations of Japan. We must end the war when we can deal with the United States.”91
The army and navy chiefs of staff, General Umezu and Admiral Toyoda, took the extraordinary step of submitting a joint letter to the emperor. Acceptance of the surrender terms spelled out in the Byrnes note, they warned, “may lead to a situation that cannot be controlled. . . . It is very awful to say this, but this means that it will reduce this imperial nation to a vassal status that we should never accept.”92
To address themselves directly to the throne in such a manner was a scandalous breach of protocol, and would have ended their careers in ordinary circumstances. By imposing his will on the government, however, Hirohito had already abrogated an even more important protocol. A furious Yonai hauled Toyoda into his office and upbraided him. But it is an open question whether the two chiefs were really determined to avert surrender, or whether they were only “going through the motions,” as Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has suggested, to “allay the dissatisfaction of radical officers.”93 The Umezu-Toyoda note stipulated that “we hereafter will reach a complete agreement of our opinions with the government and then we will ask for your majesty’s decision.”94 The final clause signaled that they would obey the emperor’s final command, whatever it might be.
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