The end of the Second World War - Hirohito's Surrender Broadcast

On the 15th August 1945, the people of Japan dutifully turned to their radios. It had been announced the day before via all NHK stations that the Emperor would make an address to the nation. At exactly noon, a man's thin, regal voice came over the airwaves, in an archaic Japanese that many listeners found difficult to understand. The subject of this message, however carefully packaged and presented, was blunt: the war was unwinnable, and he was ending it, today.

Emperor Hirohito's broadcast was not live; the message had been pre-recorded the night of the 14th. The events that led to the recording have been widely reported in scholarly works and in popular culture; the decision to end the war was not taken lightly. The attempt by some members of the Imperial Japanese Army to prevent its broadcast is a subject that runs through the long and complex history of military coups in Japan and the samurai code that motivated the men who attempted to stop the Emperor from stopping the war.

The Second World War was effectively over with Hirohito's announcement. From its beginnings in the Mukden Incident of 1931, Japan's war spread through its annexation of Manchuria, intervention in the Chinese Civil War, and leaped east and south toward the colonies of Western nations in Southeast Asia and across the Pacific. On the front foot militarily from the very beginning, Japan did not see fit to unify its combatant commands or share plans between the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. Japanese units were not rotated back home for recuperation, or to train the next generation of soliders and sailors.

There was no attempt at honest analysis of the losses, which were completely overshadowed by the stunning victories, particularly the capture of Singapore and Manila. In time, these losses would continue to snowball as Japan, frozen between tradition and stubbornness, refused to adapt or quit. In this historian's opinion, the Pacific War was probably over at Midway, likely over at Guadalcanal, and definitely over at Saipan. Everything that came after was unnecessary loss.

The defeat of the Imperial Japanese Navy at Midway was not thouroughly discussed or analyzed to find weaknesses or areas of improvement; the effect on the Navy's Air Service would never be overcome. At Guadalcanal, Japan allowed itself to be drawn in to a quagmire, fighting a war of attrition and ultimately retreating; this battle looks like the larger war in microcosm and only exacerbated the deep distrust between the Army and Navy. On Saipan, the final defense line was breached, and the home islands fell within range of American bombers. Japanese civilians, in the Central Pacific since 1914, then experienced war for the first time; the shadow of things worse yet to come elsewhere in the empire, and in the home islands.

Some of the battles we study the most occured after the war was unwinnable for the Japanese. The recapture of Guam and the Philippines, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the atomic bombings all occured after the loss of Saipan. The Tokyo firebombing, which saw more Japanese dead than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, occurred after Saipan fell. Japan could have surrendered and didn't. Why this is, and what this fighting was supposed to accomplish, is quite outside the scope of this blog, although there are some great readings out there on the topic of the samurai code and ethics that informed the decision-making in the Japanese high command.

Between the summer of 1944 and 1945, by my rough math some 600,000 Japanese died; mostly civilians that had nothing to do with the war. Many others were pressed into uniforms and sent to die for Japan; in the caves of Iwo Jima, on the decks of the Super Battleship Yamato, and in the starved and sputtering factories of Hiratsuka and Omura. All this, in the name of the Emperor.

It is not my place to determine what role Hirohito played in the outbreak, spread, and loss of the Pacific War. What he knew, how much he knew, and his power to change or redirect the events is a topic of intense debate throughout Japan, and it's unlikely we'll ever know the full truth of how much influence he actually wielded over his armed forces. What the historical record shows is that the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were separate from the decision-making body of the Japanese Diet and the office of the Prime Minister. The ministers of the Army and Navy had direct access to the Emperor, who as a constitutional monarch had little political power to circumvent their plans.

As the front line began to constrict in China and the South and Central Pacific, these ministers began to take decisions in a vacuum, each seeing the other as a hinderance to winning a victory that that by the summer of 1944 was impossible. No better example exists of the full failure of the Army and Navy to protect their charge, the Japanese people, than their inabilty to defend the home islands from American bombing raids. From April to August 1945, most of these were unopposed.

It is also the case that a series of military coups in Japan that stretched back to the beginning of the Meiji Restoration defined the power of the Emperor and the Diet in terms of what they would be allowed to do, not what the constitutional framework required of them. There's an argument that Hirohito would have been replaced and a willing participant put on the throne had he pushed back too hard, and this isn't conjecture or an apologist's argument but rather a sober look at the state of civil-military relations in early 20th-century Japan. In fact, a key stipulation of the Japanese government was that the imperial system remain in place post-surrender; whether or not that was Hirohito was left purposely vague.

Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War, in single-page formatting

During his broadcast, the Emperor pointedly did not say the word surrender, saying only that the government had been directed to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. He did say that the war was not going in Japan's favor, and that the use of the atomic bomb meant that the entire country would be destroyed with no hope of success. Later, a second broadcast went out, clarifying some of the more difficult points for the population and specifying that the Emperor did indeed order his armed forces to surrender.

Within three weeks, the USS Missouri would be anchored in Tokyo Bay, receiving the Emperor's military representatives and their signatures on the surrender document. The occupation began immediately, and with it, a golden chance for Japan to emerge from the ashes of war with a new system, led by bold new faces, eager to improve and move past the old traditions that had led to war and destruction. I leave it to you all to decide whether or not this endeavour was successful. This historian thinks, perhaps not. Herbert Bix and John Dower did the best writing on this topic that I've seen.

Japan endures; perhaps not as it could have been, which is democratic with a diverse range of thought, or should have been, with a tolerance for the outside world, and certainly not as it was intended to be, a leader in a new Asia. Many things have changed in Japan since the Emperor recorded his broadcast 80 years ago today; but the hard fact remains that the conditions that led to the outbreak, spread, and end of the Second World War endure as well, and we should not forget it. On this 80th anniversary, let's mourn the dead, consider the helpless, and remember that it's incumbent upon us to ensure nothing like the Second World War can ever happen again.