A History of Japan: From Stone Age to Superpower (65 page)

On 6 August an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. It was the first time such a weapon had been used in the history of the world. It caused around 90,000 deaths immediately or shortly afterwards.
¹⁰⁷
Possibly as many again died from the bomb’s effects in subsequent years. More than 80 per cent of the city’s buildings were destroyed. The lack of a prompt positive response by the Japanese resulted in a second bomb being dropped on 9 August, this time on Nagasaki. This resulted in a further 50,000 fatalities immediately or shortly afterwards, and more than 30,000 in later years.

The day before Nagasaki the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, and attacked Manchuria almost immediately. This was another ominous blow.

Unless it was prepared to see its own total destruction as a nation, Japan now had no realistic alternative but to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. A top-level meeting was convened the evening of the 9th. Some did prefer destruction to surrender, others wanted to fight on for a while in the hope of better terms, others were ready to give in. Hirohito was prepared to accept the Declaration provided the imperial institution could be retained intact. The Americans, informed of this via Swiss and Swedish go-betweens, refused to give an unqualified assurance, but did allow for the emperor to rule subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces and the will of the Japanese people.

At another meeting on the 14th, to discuss the American response, there was again indecision. Following a request from Suzuki, Hirohito cast the decisive vote, remarking that Japan would have to ‘bear the unbearable’.
¹⁰⁸

His decision was not well received by all as the news leaked out. A number of lower-ranking military officers tried unsuccessfully to prevent the emperor from recording his ‘surrender speech’ for broadcasting to the nation on the following day. Some 500 military personnel were to choose suicide rather than openly defy the emperor. These included several top military leaders such as Vice-Admiral Onishi Takijir
(1891–1945), the man who had conceived the idea of
kamikaze
pilots. Onishi was one of a number who wanted to obtain better surrender terms by a dogged defence of the homeland.

On the 15th the emperor’s speech was broadcast over the radio to his people, to advise them of the unfortunate situation. It was the first-ever imperial radio broadcast and the first time the vast majority of his subjects had ever heard him speak. His refined and archaic court language was so removed from everyday speech that many simply did not understand what he was saying, and had to rely on the interpretation of others. Even those who did understand the language did not always understand his meaning, for his terms were vague and did not explicitly refer to ‘defeat’ and ‘surrender’. Instead he referred to the ‘war situation having developed not
necessarily to Japan’s advantage’, and made it seem as though Japan had decided to stop fighting in order to save humankind from the threat of destruction by the west, not because Japan was defeated.
¹⁰⁹

Eventually, however, the message came across – Japan had lost the war. The formal signing of the Instrument of Surrender took place some weeks later, on 2 September, on board the USS
Missouri
in T
ky
Bay. It followed an imperial edict earlier that day formally authorising the signing of the surrender and commanding Japanese subjects to honour it.
¹¹⁰

In its 14 years of warfare, starting with the Manchurian Incident in 1931, Japan had suffered almost three million military casualties and more than half a million civilian casualties. The majority of all casualties occurred in the four years of the Pacific War. All the sacrifice had been in vain for Japan, which suffered its first defeat in a war (as opposed to an individual battle) and was now to suffer its first foreign occupation in the history of the Yamato state. There are some in Japan and elsewhere who claim the defeat was somehow unfair due to the use of atomic bombs, but such a view simply masks the reality that even in terms of conventional warfare Japan was thoroughly beaten.
¹¹¹

In a letter to his son Akihito dated 9 September 1945, Hirohito attributed defeat to an underestimation of Britain and America, to overreliance on spirit as opposed to science, and to arrogant military leaders who only knew how to go forward.
¹¹²

Japan had become a major world power but its ambitions had grown too great. S
seki had been right. The frog had inflated itself till it burst. The proud Japan of Meiji was now in a humiliated position under Hirohito. In one sense it was lucky to be in any position at all, for not a few among the Allies wanted to see the total destruction of the nation.
¹¹³
Even the humanitarian Roosevelt, it seems, had entertained thoughts of effectively breeding the Japanese race out of existence.
¹¹⁴

Hirohito may rightly have blamed an excess of Japanese spirit for its fall. But it would now take an enormous strength of spirit for the nation to rise again to become a respected power.

Review of Part Five

The fragile democracy that started to appear in the late Meiji period had a brief heyday during the Taish
period. However, it was soon displaced by the ever-present authoritarianism – authoritarianism of an increasingly aggressive military nature. Japan was confident after its successes in Meiji, when it had so rapidly achieved world power status, and had even acquired colonies of its own through military strength. It continued down that same road with such ambitious intensity that it ended up in confrontation with the Allied western nations – much as it traditionally disliked engaging a more powerful foe.

There were undoubtedly certain external factors partly prompting Japan’s behaviour. One particular stimulus was westerners’ rejection, on racist grounds, of the Japanese as real equals. The imperialist policies of the western powers themselves also gave Japan the message that seizing territory was how world powers behaved.

Nevertheless, a major motive for their ambitious course of expansionist action was a basic Japanese belief in their own destiny as a superior race. This was strengthened by indoctrination, and was reflected in the ideas underlying the
Kokutai no Hongi
,
musubi
, the pan-Asianist ‘liberation’ of Asia from the western imperialists, and so forth.

The military grew increasingly impatient to demonstrate Japanese superiority. Overseas, they deliberately tried to provoke incidents, and at times succeeded. At home, they interfered in politics, not hesitating to assassinate where necessary. They also helped turn an improving economy towards a controlled war effort. And they controlled the emperor, obtaining his ‘authorisation’ usually by his omission to speak out against their behaviour.

Not content with its gains in Asia, Japan was prepared to take on the greatest of all powers, the United States and Britain. It hoped these would be occupied by the war in Europe, allowing it to make greater gains before moving towards a peace proposal. A quick decisive blow would also teach the arrogant powers a lesson.

However, Japan’s own successes counted against it. The ease of its early victories – victories it attributed to its spiritual superiority – made it want to continue the war instead of going ahead with its idea of proposing peace and ‘quitting while ahead’. That same ease had turned its frustration towards westerners into contempt, which in combination with its ideas of its own superiority resulted in acts of brutality that also hardened western resolve against it. This would have made any early move for peace difficult anyway.

The war into which Japan was now almost fatalistically locked soon turned against it. Overblown ambitions rapidly deflated, finally shrinking to a hope that a tenacious defence of the homeland would persuade the Allies to allow it a reasonably generous conditional surrender. This was not to be. America had developed atomic weaponry, which would cost far
fewer Allied lives than an invasion of Japan. Japan was warned, but hesitated. When it became the world’s first nuclear victim, it realised the pointlessness of continued resistance, and capitulated unconditionally. Its ambitions were now in tatters.

The main developments in this fateful period for Japan are summarised in
Table 5.1
.

Key values and practices of the day were in many ways an intensification of earlier ones. They are summarised in
Table 5.2
.

If Japan had been able to moderate its ambitions, and also swallow a little pride by enduring the racist rebuffs from the west, the history of the twentieth century may have been different. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Table 5.1
   Key developments from end Meiji to end War