Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (130 page)

In effect this amounted to an affirmation that the emperor's rights of sovereignty, including his all-important right of supreme command, antedated the constitution and had been determined by the gods in antiquity, just as stated in the preamble to the Meiji constitution.
⁹⁰
The Suzuki government was still fighting to maintain a view of the
kokutai
that included the emperor's political, military, and diplomatic prerogatives; and despite all that had happened, it was asking the Allies to guarantee the emperor's power to rule on the theocratic premises of state Shinto.
⁹¹
It was certainly not constitutional monarchy that the Suzuki cabinet sought to have the Allies assure, but rather a Japanese monarchy based on the principle of oracular sovereignty, with continued subjecthood or
shimmin
status for the Japanese people, and some postsurrender role for the military. In their extreme moment of crisis, the
kokutai
meant to them
the orthodox Shinto-National Learning view of the state and the retention of real, substantial political power in the hands of the emperor, so that he and the “moderates” might go on using it to control his majesty's “subjects” after surrender.
⁹²

If the conservative Joseph C. Grew and the “Japan crowd” had gotten their way and the principle of unconditional surrender had been modified in advance, it is highly unlikely that Japan's postsurrender leaders, now the “moderates” around the throne, would ever have discarded the Meiji constitution and democratized their political institutions. Grew and those who took his position had very little understanding of the Japanese body politic, no faith in the capacity for democracy of ordinary Japanese people, and certainly no desire whatsoever to see the social foundations of the monarchy dismantled.

Secretary of State Byrnes's reply of August 11 to Japan's first surrender offer reiterated, but in no way compromised, America's basic unconditional surrender principle. Byrnes's note stated that “the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state” had passed into the hands of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers; the emperor was to order all Japanese military authorities at home and abroad “to cease active operations and to surrender their arms;” it deliberately left unclarified the future status of both the emperor and the imperial institution. It was upon Japan's acceptance of an intact unconditional surrender principle, and of an uncertain status for the emperor, that the absolute authority of General MacArthur would be predicated and the institutional reforms of the early occupation period based.

To make the Byrnes note more palatable to Hirohito, the army leaders, and Hiranuma, Vice Foreign Minister Matsumoto Shinichi (after discussions with T
g
), and Chief Cabinet Secretary Sakomizu resorted to mistranslation of several key words in the English text.
⁹³
In the operative sentence, “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,” Matsumoto changed “shall be subject to” [
reizoku subeki
] to read “shall be circumscribed by” [
seigen no shita ni okareru
].

His change may have helped the still deeply divided Hirohito to accept peace. The next day, August 12, Hirohito informed the imperial family of his decision to surrender. When Prince Asaka asked whether the war would be continued if the
kokutai
could not be preserved, Hirohito replied “of course.”
⁹⁴

At this point an attempt by a small group of middle-echelon officers in Tokyo to reject Byrnes's reply forced Hirohito to repeat his sacred decision on August 14. These last-minute coup attempts at the palace and at Atsugi air base did not amount to much and were aborted. Hirohito's decision of August 10 had totally demoralized the military bureaucrats at Imperial Headquarters and stripped them of the will to fight. Once Army Chief of Staff Umezu had explained to his subordinates that the emperor “had lost all confidence in the military,” those in favor of fighting to the finish abruptly gave up.
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IV

At no time did the Japanese military ever exercise “complete dominance” over the political process or the conduct of the war, as Grew had maintained. As the war dragged on after the fall of the T
j
cabinet, the senior leaders of the army and navy became increasingly beholden for their positions of power to the court group and the moderates around the throne. Not only were the latter closer to Hirohito; they also operated information exchanges, designed to obtain information for the emperor, which were more effective than the army's network of internal intelligence sources.
⁹⁶

At the end of the war as at its beginning, and through every stage of its unfolding, Emperor Hirohito played a highly active role in supporting the actions carried out in his name. When he is prop
erly restored in the overall picture as supreme commander, the facts become abundantly clear: Neither (
a
) American unwillingness to make a firm, timely statement assuring continuation of the monarchy, as Grew had argued for, nor (
b
) the anti-Soviet strategy in the stance of Truman and Byrnes, who probably preferred use of the atomic bombs over diplomatic negotiation, were sufficient in and of themselves to account for use of the bomb, or for Japan's delay in surrendering. Rather, Emperor Hirohito's reluctance to face the fait accompli of defeat, and then to act decisively to end hostilities, plus certain official acts and policies of his government, were what mainly kept the war going, though they
also
were not sufficient causes for use of the bomb. In the final analysis, what counted on the one hand was not only the transcendent influence of the throne but the power, authority, and stubborn personality of its occupant, and on the other the power, determination, and truculence of Harry Truman.

From the very start of the Asia-Pacific war, the emperor was a major protagonist of the events going on around him. Before the Battle of Okinawa he had constantly pressed for a decisive victory. Afterward he accepted the need for an early but not an immediate peace. And then he vacillated, steering Japan toward continued warfare rather than toward direct negotiations with the Allies. When the final crisis was fully upon him, the only option left was surrender without negotiation. Even then he continued to procrastinate until the bomb was dropped and the Soviets attacked.

Generally speaking, it is true that any demand for surrender without prior negotiation has some retarding effect on the process of ending a war. But in this case it was not so much the Allied policy of unconditional surrender or “absolute victory” that prolonged the Asia-Pacific war, as it was the unrealistic and incompetent actions of Japan's highest leaders. The wartime emperor ideology that sustained their morale made it almost impossibly difficult for them to perform the act of surrender. Knowing they were objectively
defeated, yet indifferent to the suffering that the war was imposing on their own people, let alone the peoples of Asia, the Pacific, and the West whose lives they had disrupted, the emperor and his war leaders searched for a way to lose without losing—a way to assuage domestic criticism after surrender and allow their power structure to survive.

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 dan
gerous 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.
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