No Surrender to the USA!
Tokyo, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Gaza, and the Politics of Surrender (Part Three)
This is the third of a four-part series; click here for part one and here for part two.
The following lines by Richard Overy in his book Rain of Ruin are crucial for understanding the Japanese reluctance to surrender (and will also be pertinent to our discussion of Gaza):
One of the problems for historians who are keen to demonstrate the direct cause and effect of the bombing of Japan in securing surrender is to grasp the nature of the culture, social values, and political behavior of the Japanese Empire and its leaders. For all Japanese efforts to imitate and learn from the West in the seventy-five years since the founding of the Meiji era in 1868, Japan remained a fundamentally different society and polity from the enemies it faced in the Second World War.
He continues:
There is no clearer evidence of that difference than the willingness of Japanese servicemen to fight to the death rather than surrender and to attempt suicide if capture was unavoidable. This resulted from a system rooted in worship of the emperor as the father of his people and a living god. Soldiers, sailors, and airmen had an obligation to die defending him; the dead becoming “warrior-god” (gunshin). This imperial policy was defined as kokutai, invoking both the imperial system and the national body, something like “sacred homeland.”
After the war ended, on September 6, 1945, Emperor Hirohito told Prince Akihito (who was president of Japan from 1989 to 2019): “If we had continued the war, I would not have been able to protect the Three Sacred Treasures of the Imperial House, and [more] people would have been killed, I swallowed by tears and tried to save the Japanese race from extinction.” The imperial house (koto) was responsible for safeguarding the Three Sacred Treasures (mirror, sword, and jewel), the symbols of imperial Japan and Japanese civilization. According to the 1868 constitution, the emperor was the supreme sovereign and military commander in chief, but everyday politics and military affairs were the responsibility of the cabinet and the high command. The emperor was able to intervene in decision-making with a “sacred decision” (seidan), but this rarely happened.
Overy writes: “Surrender was in this culture a foreign concept, and Japan had never had to do it.” It was forbidden to talk about surrendering. The term “end the war” (shushen) was forbidden; instead, the euphemism “change of direction” was deployed. This was accompanied by propaganda that denied the reality of military losses, for example the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines in October 1944, where the Japanese navy suffered crippling losses, was hailed as a triumph by the media.
Another reason talk of surrender was taboo is that ostensibly, even in the second half of 1945, Japan’s situation didn’t seem so bleak. It still controlled most of its colonial territory and recent conquests in China and Southeast Asia; it still had millions of soldiers. Nor had a single enemy soldier set foot on the home islands. “Capitulation had no precedent,” Overy writes, “and to achieve it required a political process centered on the emperor and his willingness or not to give his “sacred decision” with all its constitutional complexities…Japan was in many ways a parallel universe in which a clear demand for surrender could not easily be accepted even in the face of a terminal military crisis.” However,
the Japanese war effort was shot through with divisions, between navy and army over issues of strategy, between different army factions over the nature of the state and economy, and between those of the elite who wanted peace and those who would fight on. The difficulty was not to break down the mythical suicidal union of leaders and led, but to create conditions that would allow a consensus for capitulation to emerge from an otherwise disunited and uncertain leadership.
In other words, it’s not quite true that the Japanese weren’t ready to end the war; rather, the faction that did seek an end to the war was not yet strong enough. Key figures in the army wanted to fight to the bitter end, even if this meant national suicide, while the Emperor wanted peace. Both sides, however, insisted on preserving the kokutai.
Japan’s army began preparing for the event of an invasion in autumn 1944, finalizing their plans by spring 1945. This included 5,000 aircraft for suicide attacks; while as mentioned in the previous piece, the population was expected to use whatever they could to fight the enemy. The Japanese were dismissive of Germany’s surrender (“they gave up like cowards because they were spiritually flawed,” read one newspaper editorial), and every soldier and civilians was expected to kill at least one American before being killed themselves. Despite these preparations, though, even before the bombing of Tokyo, “finding a way to circumvent military intransigence and end the war one way or another was a serious ambition for the peace faction among Japan’s political and military leadership.” This contradicts the view that Japan was only willing to surrender once the atomic bombs were dropped. But the firebombing and the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki certainly hastened the process.
In July 1944, the daily war journal at Imperial General Headquarters read: “we can no longer direct the war with any hope of success…henceforth we will slowly fall into a state of ruin.” In late August 1944 navy minister Adm. Yonai Mitsumasa began asking leaders “what needs to be done to end the war,” and in February 1945 Hirohito met with senior advisers to discuss how the war could be ended. These efforts intensified with the Tokyo firebombing in March, when it was understood that Japan would lose territory. The priority, instead, was on “how to preserve the imperial reign [koto] and cultivate [the] future of the Yamato race.” There was, though, opposition to Japan’s military leaders being tried as war criminals and disarmament, two non-negotiable Allied demands. Because of this, the peace faction understood that only an imperial seidan would end the war.
For their part, the Americans were divided on the future of the imperial system and whether Japan needed to relinquish Korea and Taiwan, both of which had been acquired before World War I. Many saw the Emperor as a source of stability, but the Potsdam Declaration was unclear over his future. Matters were now coming to a head with the ongoing bombing, defeat on Iwo Jima, the loss of Okinawa (hailed as a victory by the Japanese media because of the losses inflicted on the Americans), and fears of an invasion of Kyushu. There was also a fear of famine, as the average supply of 1,600 calories per day was insufficient considering the population’s long working hours. There was antiwar graffiti for the first time, and even some anti-Hirohito slogans. One communique read: “The Emperor is greatly concerned over the mounting calamity and sacrifices of the people of the belligerent powers as a result of the recent war…He is extremely reluctant to permit the increased shedding of blood…and he desires that peace should be restored as soon as possible for the sake of humanity.”
Overy argues that the die was cast even before Hiroshima:
for the peace party, three months of effort to find a formula that would allow “termination of the war” [shusen] rather than “capitulation” [kofuko] – a linguistic distinction chosen to avoid the term surrender, unacceptable to the army – was now in the final stage, atomic bomb or not. The Potsdam Declaration had the effect of defining what the “sacred decision” would have to be.” It was now impossible to avoid territorial losses, war crime trials, disarmament, and American occupation.
Despite this, Hiroshima did not immediately end the war: “The impact of the bomb on the Japanese leadership was less direct and less significant than Truman (and most later historians) assumed.” At first, the Japanese didn’t even believe it had been an atomic bomb, but “a normal bomb of incredible power.” Part of the reason for this disbelief might have been the fact that, in some of the earlier bombing raids, the urban destruction was even greater than in Hiroshima. After the war, the Japanese prime minister said that the bomb was “an additional reason” to end the war, but not the only one. A fear of Soviet invasion was also critical. Overy writes: “Fear of communism, anxiety about domestic stability, the threat of bombing, conventional as well as atomic, the poor level of defensive preparations, and the priority to try to preserve the kokutai from Allied elimination. There seems no reason to assume that just one of the ingredients in this cocktail of dangers was regarded as decisive. They all mattered.”
On August 9, the same day the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the Emperor made the “sacred decision” to “bear the unbearable…for the sake of the nation,” because he wanted to avoid the whole country being “reduced to ashes.” He decided to accept the Potsdam Declaration on condition that it maintained the “prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.” On August 13 Truman suggested a third bomb on Tokyo, due to the slow pace of the negotiations, but there were no bombs available. Negotiations were concluded on August 14 with a decision to “terminate the war,” i.e. no mention of defeat or surrender. A military coup was foiled, while nine leading generals and admirals committed seppuku.
The firebombing and dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki undoubtedly played a role in these developments, but there were other factors as well. Overy explains: “The atomic bomb on Hiroshima was just one factor in the cocktail of existing pressures on the Japanese leadership, and the detailed report on the raid arrived in Tokyo only after the initial seidan had been promulgated…the equation “bombing equals surrender” in the end begs too many questions.”
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America has never apologized for Hiroshima and Nagaski and has continued to argue that it was a legitimate action that helped bring the war to an end, one that – in George H.W. Bush’s words – “spared millions of American lives.” Obama is the only American president to have visited Hiroshima. The Soviets, meanwhile, insisted that their invasion of Manchuria and threat to invade the home islands was more significant, a claim that is still debated to this day.
Discussion of the bombings was discouraged in Japan after the war, due to a fear that there would be criticism of the Japanese war effort. A United States Strategic Bombing Survey poll soon after the war found that only 19 percent of interviewees from Hiroshima and Nagasaki resented the atomic bombings (nationally the figure was 12 percent), while 35 percent thought they were Japan’s fault. Subsequently, the Japanese government agreed that there would be no claims for reparation for the bombing, while claims for compensation were also refused within Japan, in case it encouraged claims from those who suffered under Japanese colonialism.
By 1970, though, 38 percent of those polled expressed resentment at the American decision to drop the bomb, with only 19 percent blaming the Japanese leadership. Today, the divide in Japan is between “memories of the bombing as a direct consequence of Japan’s disastrous war of aggression and memories of Japanese victimization in a war fought to free Asia from Western imperialism.” Next week, in the final part of this series, I’ll examine what we can learn from these events about the failure to end the war in Gaza, the ethics of war, and the politics of surrender.