Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (122 page)

The same day the emperor (who had not yet begun working to end the war) issued another imperial rescript in connection with his convocation of the Diet, ordering the nation to “smash the inordinate ambitions of the enemy nations” and “achieve the goals of the war.” Concurrently the controlled press waged a daily die-for-the-emperor campaign, a campaign to promote gratitude for imperial benevolence, and, from about mid-July onward, a campaign to “protect the
kokutai
.”
²⁸

Americans countered with their own propaganda designed to break Japan's will to fight. B-29s dropped scores of millions of leaflets, written in Japanese, announcing in advance the next scheduled target for B-29 attack or urging surrender while utilizing the emperor to attack the militarists. Leaflets bearing the letterhead of the chrysanthemum crest attacked the “military cliques” for “forcing the entire nation to commit suicide” and called on “everybody” to “exercise their constitutional right to make direct appeals [for peace] to the Emperor. Even the powerful military cliques cannot stop the mighty march for peace of the Emperor and the people.”
²⁹
Seven million leaflets alone revealed the terms of the “joint declaration” issued by the governments of the United States, Great Britain, and China.
³⁰
“Today we come not to bomb you,” they said. “We are dropping this leaflet in order to let you know the reply by the government of the United States to your government's request for conditions of surrender…. It all depends on your government whether the war will stop immediately. You will understand how to quit the war if you read these two official notifications.”
³¹

Pressed by imperial edicts to continue their preparations for the
final homeland battle and to think only of victory, now assaulted from the air by the American psychological warfare campaign in addition to bombing, the Japanese people complied as best they could. During late July and August, when the nation's prefectural governors, police chiefs, and officers of the “special higher police” submitted to the Home Ministry reports on the rapidly deteriorating spirit of the nation, there was not a single reference in their nearly two thousand pages of reports to any popular inclination to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration.
³²
Even immediately after the American dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, and the Soviet declaration of war on the eighth, people generally clung to the hope of a final victory, and thus to the belief that their “divine land” was indestructible. Mobilized in the service of death, the collective memory of the “divine winds” (
kamikaze
) that would save Japan helped to maintain the will to fight on.
³³

American intelligence analysts, meanwhile, watched all these main island preparations. They saw how the Japanese had fought and died on Okinawa—thousands almost daily for eighty-two days—and how the whole nation had become enveloped in the imagery of national salvation through mass suicide. When political leaders in Washington said that the Japanese were likely to fight to the death rather than surrender, they were not exaggerating what the Japanese government and its mass media were saying.

I

Mindful of the mistakes that had been made in dealing with imperial Germany at the end of World War I, but concerned above all to maintain a high degree of patriotic fervor and international cooperation in the fight against the Axis, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill had relied on abstract war slogans and, after the first full year of war, the goal of “unconditional surrender.” Their
policy of no negotiated termination of the war aimed at smashing the fascist states and then putting new, nonfascist political entities in place. The objective was military occupation
and
postwar political and social reform—always the two together. The philosophies of fascism and militarism were to be uprooted totally, and the conquered nations democratized, reborn as peace-loving capitalistic societies.

Roosevelt had stated, at Casablanca in January 1943, that the Allies would punish the leaders of the fascist regimes but not destroy their peoples. But until they had won total victory over the Axis, he and Churchill steadfastly resisted pressures to clarify the meaning of their simplifying formula. Needing Soviet military power, yet keenly aware of Stalin's distrust of them for not yet opening a second front in Europe to relieve the hard-pressed Red Army, Roosevelt and Churchill had ample reason for displaying an uncompromising attitude toward the enemy states.
³⁴
Their determination to make this the last total war, plus the imperatives of holding the antifascist alliance together, strengthened their resolve to eschew any formal contractual offers if made by the leaders of the aggressor nations, and to retain a free hand to occupy and reform those nations after destroying their military power and toppling their governments.

Roosevelt also projected his Wilsonian idealism into “unconditional surrender” and saw it as a means of realizing a liberal international order. The unconditional surrender formula, which sought to achieve reforms in the postsurrender period, stated the basic precondition for building a new world order after fascism had been vanquished.
³⁵
In the case of Japan, it essentially assured the Allies the supreme authority to exercise powers in the Japanese homeland “beyond those given a military occupant by international law.”
³⁶

After the German army signed unconditional surrender documents with the Allied forces on May 7 and 8, 1945, and the Third Reich, in the words of the American journalist William L. Shirer,
“simply ceased to exist,” Japan alone remained in the war.
³⁷
At that point, with the Battle of Okinawa still raging, newly installed President Truman declared on May 8 that Japan's surrender would not mean the “extermination or enslavement of the Japanese people.”
³⁸
His remark suggested that future occupation measures would not be enforced in a vindictive spirit. But because it left the unconditional surrender principle unaltered, the former ambassador to Japan and leader of the “Japan faction” within the State Department, Joseph Grew, pressed the president to make public a clear definition of the term so as to persuade the Japanese to surrender.

Grew, a conservative Republican, saw Emperor Hirohito as the man who held the key to Japan's surrender. He was the “queen bee in a hive…surrounded by the attentions of the hive.”
³⁹
At various times before and during the war, he described the emperor as a “puppet” of the militarists, a constitutionalist, and a pacifist. Grew had enormous confidence in the influence on policy of those whom he termed the “moderates” around the Japanese throne. In the spring of 1945, with the final collapse of the Japanese empire approaching, Grew, who had always moved in high court circles and knew nothing about the Japanese body politic, was willing to allow these individuals “to determine for themselves the nature of their future political structure.”
⁴⁰

In his memoirs, published in 1952, long after President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes had rejected his efforts to include in the Potsdam draft declaration a clause guaranteeing the position of the imperial house, Grew wrote:

Immediately Grew met fierce opposition from his colleagues in the State Department—the “China crowd”—who argued that to keep the emperor and guarantee the future existence of the monarchy was to compromise on the very essence of Japanese fascism.
⁴²
They—Dean Acheson, poet and future Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, and James Byrnes—were aware of Grew's earlier misjudgments of Japan's political situation and his tendency to be protective of the emperor and Japan's conservative “moderates.” They certainly did not want to treat Japan and its emperor, whom they saw as central to the Japanese philosophy of militarism and war, more leniently than Germany and by so doing leave an undesirable impression, at home and abroad, of appeasement. These bureaucratic disagreements reflected a lack of clarity at the highest levels in Washington as to what the American war aims were. More important, they highlighted the interrelationship, during the spring and summer of 1945, between wartime goals and postwar policies.

The Potsdam Declaration was issued on July 26, 1945, in the form of an ultimatum aimed at hastening Japan's surrender.
⁴³
At
Potsdam, Truman had yielded to Churchill's advice and clarified the terms for implementing the unconditional surrender principle. To save Japan's leaders from their own folly, the president agreed to issue the “terms of unconditional surrender”
before
Japan surrendered, and to soften the fourth term of the declaration by permitting “Japanese military forces, after being completely disarmed…to return to their homes.”
⁴⁴

The Japanese government read the declaration and was informed that if it fulfilled certain unilateral obligations (“our terms”), which the victorious powers would impose
after
the Japanese government had proclaimed “the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces” and furnished “proper and adequate assurance of their good faith in such action,” Japan would
then
be allowed to retain its peace industries and resume participation in world trade on the basis of the principle of equal access to raw materials. “The alternative for Japan,” the declaration concluded, “is prompt and utter destruction.” It gave no warning about the atomic bomb. Article 12 stated, “The occupying forces of the Allies shall be withdrawn from Japan as soon as these objectives have been accomplished and there has been established in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people a peacefully inclined and responsible government.” Deleted from this article, however, was the phrase that Grew insisted on having: “this may include a constitutional monarchy under the present dynasty.” Consequently the status of the emperor was not guaranteed, and the policy of unconditional surrender remained intact.

The Japanese government received the declaration on July 27 and showed no intention of accepting it. On the contrary, the Suzuki cabinet first ordered the press to publish the D
mei News Service's edited version and to minimize the significance of the declaration by not commenting on it.
⁴⁵
Next, on July 28, at the urging of Army Minister Anami Korechika, Chief of the Naval General Staff Toyoda Soemu, and others, Prime Minister Suzuki made
Japan's rejection explicit by formally declaring, at an afternoon press conference, that the Potsdam Declaration was no more than a “rehash” (
yakinaoshi
) of the Cairo Declaration, and that he intended to “ignore” it (
mokusatsu
). Underlying Suzuki's statement was Hirohito's resolve to continue the war, and his unrealistic expectations about negotiating through the Soviet Union. If Hirohito, who read the newspapers daily, had been displeased or even concerned about the impression of intransigence that Suzuki and his cabinet were conveying to the world, Kido probably would have mentioned it in his detailed diary of his conversations with the emperor. He didn't. Kido knew that Hirohito was still waiting for the Soviet reply to Japanese peace maneuvers, unable to make up his mind whether to surrender or continue fighting for more favorable terms.