The emperor was steadfast. Having rendered his opinion on August 9, he now acted to bring the curtain down on the last act of the Pacific War. In a series of private conferences at the palace, he informed Kido, Suzuki, Togo, the jushin, the royal princes, and other members of the ruling circle that he found the Byrnes note acceptable and did not wish to extend negotiations.
But the cabinet was divided, so another “sacred decision” was necessary. As news of the emperor’s views circulated through the ruling circle, the possibility of chaos seemed very real. At any moment the government could fall, which would make surrender impossible. If Anami resigned, as seemed likely, the army could then refuse to name another army minister and no succeeding cabinet could even be formed. Before Hirohito could issue an imperial rescript ending the war, the countersignatures of all cabinet ministers were needed. If even one minister should refrain from signing the document, a mass resignation of the government would have followed. In other words, it was not enough to have the emperor decide for surrender; it was necessary that the entire government, including the army, fall in line behind Hirohito’s decision. As evening fell on August 13, that scenario seemed unachievable.
Nothing could save the possibility of surrender except concerted action on behalf of the peace party, working together with the emperor. The formal Byrnes note was expected at any time. (The news had been received by radio broadcast, but the formal note would not be delivered to the foreign ministry via the Swiss legation until the morning of August 14.) But the two chiefs of staff declined to sign a document authorizing the prime minister to convene an imperial conference. This presented a procedural obstacle. Finally, on the morning of the fourteenth, Suzuki acted to circumvent this problem by prevailing upon the emperor to call a conference on his own authority.
Finally, by these means, the full cabinet was summoned to the Imperial Palace at 10 a.m., where they crowded into the cramped basement bomb shelter. They waited stiffly until 10:50 a.m., when the emperor entered and took his seat. He wore a military uniform and white gloves. Prime Minister Suzuki stood and summarized the arguments for and against accepting the Byrnes note, and told the emperor that despite long efforts, the cabinet had failed to obtain a consensus. Suzuki then asked the three hardliners to summarize their view. Umezu, Anami, and Toyoda each spoke briefly. They wanted to ask the Americans for a more definite guarantee of the emperor’s status, and if the answer was deficient, to fight on to the end. Suzuki then turned directly to the emperor and asked for his decision.
To no one’s surprise, Hirohito made his second and conclusive intervention into the broken decision-making machinery of the militarist regime. In comparison to the scene three days earlier, his remarks this morning were firm, direct, and to the point. The emperor spoke directly to the three holdouts. “It seems to me that there is no other opinion to support your side,” he said. “I shall explain mine. I hope all of you will agree with my opinion. My opinion is the same as the one I expressed the other night. The American answer seems to me acceptable.”95 The Byrnes note provided sufficient guarantee for the continuation of his imperial line. Several ministers were now sobbing openly. Hirohito instructed the military leaders to do their utmost to maintain discipline in the ranks. The emperor asked his cabinet to draft an imperial rescript announcing the surrender, and said he was willing to read it over the air in a national radio broadcast. When the emperor had finished speaking, Suzuki stood and apologized for the cabinet’s failure to obtain a consensus.
There was no open dissent. Every member of the cabinet affixed his signature to the decision—including Anami, Umezu, and Toyoda—and the cabinet secretary began work on the rescript. The rest of the afternoon was consumed in forming a consensus around the wording of the rescript. The foreign ministry cabled a note in Togo’s name to Switzerland and Sweden, for transmittal to the Allied governments. It accepted the Potsdam Declaration on the basis of Byrnes’s note.
Throughout the day, army insurgents were mulling about in the grand entrance hall and the basement of the army ministry at Ichigaya. Even after the emperor had settled the question, they continued to plot a military takeover. No action was taken to arrest them, and the plotters openly lobbied and even threatened the army brass. Vice Admiral Onishi, recently appointed vice chief of the Naval General Staff, was the highest-ranking figure among the would-be rebels. In vain, he attempted to persuade his colleagues that surrender was unthinkable. Often, he was reduced to tears as he urged his case. He said that the only honorable way forward was to use suicide tactics on a mass scale. He appealed to Yonai, who sternly rebuked him; to Umezu, who gave him no hope, and to Anami, who seemed personally sympathetic but refused to commit himself. Onishi directly lobbied every leading figure in the military and the government, and even several princes of the royal family.
An hour after the emperor’s final decision, rebel officers attempted to distribute a counterfeit order from the IGHQ to army commands overseas, calling for a new offensive against the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China. General Umezu’s loyalists managed to intercept this message before it was broadcast over commercial radio. That was fortunate, as it might have sent a misleading impression to the Allies.
Umezu was a rock, and wielded his authority to enforce discipline. He disseminated a slogan to convince the army to lay down arms: “Obey the Imperial Will without fail.”96 But Anami appeared to waver. He polled the various players in the army ranks, leaving some with the impression that he might be tempted to join a plot. The major regional army headquarters in the capital, the Eastern Army, would have to back the revolt if it was to have any chance of succeeding. But the Eastern Army would not support the contemplated coup d’état unless directly ordered to do so by the army minister. The order would have to be in writing, and signed by Anami himself. But Anami was unwilling to put his signature on a document that contradicted the emperor’s clear will, to say nothing of the several other documents that Anami had already signed.
The Japanese refer to the attempted coup d’état on the last night of the Second World War as the “Kyuˉjō Incident.” Ringleaders Kenji Hatanaka and Jirō Shiizaki, officers at the army ministry, led a battalion of rebels into the Imperial Palace. Lying brazenly, Hatanaka and Shiizaki told the commander of the Second Imperial Guard Regiment that the top brass had ordered the palace sealed off from the outside. The guards, believing that a broader revolt was afoot, agreed to comply with their instructions pending the arrival of the Eastern Army. But Lieutenant General Takeshi Mori, commander of the guards, smelled a rat. Refusing to join the plot, he was shot dead in cold blood. The confederates then forged an order in General Mori’s name and sealed it with Mori’s official stamp. The document instructed the Imperial Guards to occupy the palace, seal off communications with anyone outside the moats, and “protect” the emperor against unspecified threats.
In the palace itself, the imperial stenographer was putting the finishing brushstrokes on the Imperial Rescript on Surrender. The emperor’s seal was fixed to the document, making it official. Shortly before midnight, Hirohito entered a soundproof bunker under the palace, where a team of NHK technicians had set up recording equipment. The emperor read the surrender rescript into a microphone. The recording was four minutes and forty-five seconds long; the English translation, broadcast overseas the same day, totaled just 652 words. Only one take was needed. The technicians transferred the recording onto two vinyl records, which were pressed on the spot and deposited in a safe under the palace.
With the Imperial Guards behind them, the coup leaders occupied the palace and cut the phone lines. Persuaded that the Eastern Army was on its way, the guards closed the gates and cut off all automobile and foot traffic into and out of the walled compound. The rebels searched the catacombs under the palace, arresting and interrogating staff members at the points of bayonets. They searched for Marquis Kido, the lord privy seal, but could not find him. They also failed to find the phonograph recordings. With an air r
aid blackout in progress, the lights were doused and the searchers had to use flashlights. The search parties did not know the layout of the underground labyrinth of passageways and bunkers, and found it difficult to interpret the archaic signs marking the locations of various rooms.
Meanwhile, other coconspirators spread out through Tokyo and Yokohama. The aged Prime Minister Suzuki, who had survived an assassination attempt nine years earlier, was warned moments before his would-be killers arrived. He exited by a side door and took refuge in a neighbor’s house. In frustration, the intruders machine-gunned his office and set it afire. Rebels went to Anami’s official residence and attempted to convince the army minister to join their coup. When Anami refused, they did not bother to assassinate him; he already intended to take his own life by ritual disembowelment. Baron Kiichirō Hiranuma’s home was also invaded; like Suzuki, he escaped shortly before the arrival of the rebels. Other detachments occupied the major radio stations, intending to intercept the emperor’s surrender recording before it could be broadcast to the nation.
As dawn approached, Hatanaka and Shiizaki realized that their options were limited. No general or admiral had committed to support the revolt. Even Admiral Onishi, who had been the most passionate advocate of fighting to the end, had given up the cause and was preparing to take the samurai’s way out. General Shizuichi Tanaka, commander of the Eastern Army, was determined to put the rebellion down. A full division of well-equipped troops surrounded the Imperial compound and sealed off the bridges spanning the moat. The exhausted ringleaders, outgunned and outmaneuvered, knew that their bid had failed. At 8:00 a.m. they gave themselves up. Hatanaka begged to be permitted to broadcast a ten-minute appeal over the radio, but was refused. He and Shiizaki were not arrested, perhaps because it was understood that they would take their own lives. For the next several hours, the two men roamed around Tokyo, distributing leaflets explaining what they had done and why. Shortly before the emperor’s broadcast went on the air, both shot themselves.
Without the support of the military leadership, the rebellion had been stillborn. If either Anami or Umezu had backed it, they might have convinced Tanaka to join them. If all three had supported it, it is difficult to see how it could have failed. But the officers at the top of the command ladder obeyed the emperor, and they acted to maintain discipline down the ranks. Whatever trials and hardships defeat might bring, they judged that it was necessary to remain united as a nation.
The army fanatics had tried to bully the entire nation into fighting a final battle to the death of all—national gyokusai—as so many Japanese soldiers had fought on innumerable Pacific islands. But the people of Japan did not want such a fight. Nor did the civilian ministers, the royal family, the court, the jushin, or the emperor. In the end, not even the top ranks of the army leadership wanted it. In the days to follow, between the surrender and the arrival of occupation troops, there were scattered flare-ups, in Tokyo and on military bases around the country, typically involving groups of mid-ranking officers who occupied public installations or distributed leaflets claiming that the emperor’s broadcast had been faked. But no senior military or civilian official joined in attempting to reverse the emperor’s sacred decision.
AT 7:00 P.M. THAT EVENING, an NHK radio announcer instructed all Japanese to be near a radio at noon the following day: “At noon tomorrow, August 15, an important broadcast will be made. This will be an unprecedented broadcast and the 100 million subjects must listen honestly and solemnly without fail.”97 Subsequent bulletins added that the broadcast would include “the Jeweled Sound of His Imperial Highness.”98 In order to ensure that every citizen could hear it, electrical power would be provided to neighborhoods that would normally be blacked out. In anticipation of the momentous broadcast, all musical programming ceased at 10:00 p.m. on the fourteenth. It would not resume until after the emperor had been heard.
As the coup attempt was in its last throes, one of the two vinyl phonographs was delivered to NHK, Japan’s national broadcasting corporation. An hour before the scheduled broadcast, the record was in the hands of the broadcast engineers. Troops of the Eastern Army had taken control of the streets around NHK headquarters. Both the coup plotters and the authorities knew that once the emperor’s voice went across the airwaves, there would be no turning back, and no revolt could possibly succeed.
Throughout Japan, on the morning of August 15, citizens spoke to one another in low voices, speculating over the meaning of the forthcoming broadcast. Some had heard that foreign monarchs often spoke on the radio, but no such thing had ever occurred in Japan. Very few Japanese had ever heard the name Hirohito; the emperor was known simply as “tenno.” How could they even imagine the “jeweled sound” (gyokuon) of the man-god’s voice? A small bank run began in certain regions, as rumors spread that the banks would stop honoring withdrawals. Some suspected that the end of the war was at hand, but many others assumed that the broadcast would be for the purpose of declaring war on Russia. Perhaps the emperor would exhort his subjects to fight to the end. Beginning at dawn, air raid sirens wailed almost continuously, and waves of U.S. carrier planes appeared over Tokyo—Halsey’s Third Fleet had launched one of its largest strikes of the war. “As before, we had no way of knowing how things really stood,” recalled Michio Takeyama. “We knew only what we saw and heard within our own narrow radius. In fear amid the chaos, we could only conjecture and surmise from the rumors, yet we could tell from the newspapers that something was afoot.”99
In outlying rural communities, there might be only one radio in a village, so the entire community gathered in an outdoor space—a street, a park, a school playground. In the cities, neighborhood associations connected radios to loudspeakers. Friends and neighbors gathered in private homes. Many workers came home so that they could listen to the broadcast with their families. In factories, in offices, in schools, in military barracks, the Japanese gathered around the radios, solemn and reverent, with heads bowed and hats in hand. Some knelt, murmuring timorously: “Please let us hear.” The NHK transmitted dead air, punctuated occasionally by solemn announcements confirming that the special broadcast would begin at noon.
At 11:59 a.m., air raid sirens churned briefly, and then fell silent. The audiences listened with breathless intensity. The streets fell dead silent. In many places, the summer cicadas warbled loudly, and people cocked their heads to hear. At the NHK studios in Tokyo, a technician dropped the needle on the phonograph, and then stood and bowed his head.
A voice came across the airwaves. It was faint, reedy, and tremulous. Many found it difficult to follow amid a hiss of static. It began, “To Our good and loyal subjects.”
After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the 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.100
The language was archaic, an obscure dialect of the ancient Japanese imperial court. Even highly educated Japanese found the speech cryptic and perplexing; those who had received less schooling were completely baffled. Akio Morita, a young navy lieutenant and future cofounder of the Sony Corporation, found the language difficult to comprehend. But he knew it was the emperor as soon as he heard the voice, “and even though we couldn’t follow the words exactly, we knew what the message was, what he was telling us, and we were frightened and yet relieved.”101 To naval aviator Takeshi Maeda, “it seemed like the cicadas stopped making noise momentarily.”102 The emperor continued:
Despite the best that has been done by everyone—the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of Our servants of the State, and the devoted service of Our one hundred million people—the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general t
rends of the world have all turned against her interest. Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.103
The phrase “not necessarily to Japan’s advantage” has been lampooned as an understatement. A previous draft had more accurately stated that “the war situation went daily from bad to worse.”104 The army ministry had insisted on softening that language. The point had been debated at length by the cabinet on the afternoon of August 14. Even in the throes of defeat, the army was determined to take some of the sting out of its humiliation.
In the United States and Allied nations, where translations of the message were published the following day, many were angered by a tone they regarded as self-righteous and even defiant. Hirohito had suggested that Japan’s motives in waging war had been pure and just, for “self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia,” and that it had never been Japan’s purpose to “infringe on the sovereignty of other Nations or to embark on territorial aggrandizement.” In the emperor’s telling, his decision to surrender was a gallant gesture of self-abnegation and altruism.
At the conclusion of the broadcast, many Japanese were dumbstruck and tearful. They bowed deeply to their neighbors, then returned wordlessly to their homes. A few gathered and whispered to one another. Those who had understood more of the archaic dialect translated for their neighbors. In private musings, in conversations or in diary entries, many Japanese expressed deep concern for the emperor’s feelings. They felt collectively responsible for having caused him sorrow and anxiety. Many were moved by the clear indication of “His Majesty’s compassion.”105 Navy maintenance officer Hachiro Miyashita found that he could not eat, could not speak, and could not concentrate on his work. He passed the day in a catatonic stupor. Elsewhere, there were outbursts of anger. One man said that he and his neighbors felt “the horror of being defeated”—but even worse, they shared “the inexpressible horror of being the citizens of a defeated country.”106 A fifth grader who had been evacuated to the country made the mistake of telling his classmates: “Now that the war is over, we’ll be able to go home.” Several other boys set upon him and beat him, shouting: “You traitor! We swore we would do all we could here until the day of victory!”107 Parents who had lost sons in the war were furious that their sacrifice had been rendered meaningless. If ending the war was so easy, if the emperor wielded the power to simply call it off, why hadn’t he acted earlier? “Your Majesty,” one said, “because of this my sons have all died in vain, a dog’s death.”108
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