This, in turn, created a quandary for the Japanese, producing the same three-three split as before, with the moderates arguing that preservation of the imperial institution could be read into the American note while the hardliners demanded an explicit guarantee. Ultimately, the dispute was resolved on August 14 with a second extraordinary direct intervention by the emperor imploring the hardliners to submit. Unwilling to contradict his lord and master, Anami gave in, and that afternoon, as the emperor began preparing a radio message announcing the surrender, the army minister broke the news to his devastated staff:

Three hours ago the emperor commanded that Japan accept the enemy terms. The army will obey the emperor’s command. He offered to come here and speak to you himself. I replied that that would not be necessary. The army, I said, will, like the rest of the country, obey the emperor’s command … No officer in the army will presume to know, better than the emperor and the government of the country, what is best for the country … The future of Japan is no longer in doubt, but neither will it be an easy future. You officers must realize that death cannot absolve you of your duty. Your duty is to stay alive and do your best to help your country along the path to recovery—even if it means chewing grass and eating earth and sleeping in the fields.

 

Despite Anami’s orders, some fanatical junior officers refused to accept capitulation and launched a coup to prevent it. The army minister had known about their plot for days, even flirted with leading it, but had ultimately backed away. That night, the plotters made one last approach to get him to join them, but in vain. Around 2 a.m., shots rang out in the imperial palace. Anami, getting drunk with the messenger, remained calm. He predicted that without his participation the coup attempt would fail, and he was right: although the plotters penetrated the palace and killed some guards, they never managed to capture the emperor or destroy the two hidden recordings of his surrender message, set for broadcast at noon. 

At 4 a.m., having guaranteed the emergence of a world he could not bear to live in, Anami violated his own order. He put on a loose white shirt that the emperor had given him as a present years before, drew his short sword from its lacquered sheath, and committed ritual suicide. Eight hours later, gathered around radios across Asia, the Japanese people and armed forces heard their ruler’s voice for the first time. “Despite the best that has been done by everyone,” they were told, “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” As a result, the throne had “resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.” Within three weeks, the war in the Pacific was over.

The Real Bad Guys

Unlike the final acts of most wars, which languish in relative historical obscurity, the Pacific endgame of World War II has received a vast amount of attention. The main historiographical debates have generated more heat than light, however, because most of the work has been hobbled by an excessive focus on the American side of the conflict, an anachronistic obsession with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a simplistic, apolitical conception of what war termination involves.

The debate about whether dropping the bomb was necessary to head off an invasion of the home islands, for example, makes sense only in retrospect, when so many people felt so bad about the bomb’s use and focused on it in isolation from the rest of the conflict. Viewed in prospect, by people knowledgeable about and charged with responsibility for the war effort in general, the question was not about necessity but about expected utility—might it help convince the Japanese to surrender?—and the answer was clearly yes. (This is the unstated backdrop to Truman’s “crybaby” comment about Oppenheimer in the film.)

Given what other terrible miseries were being inflicted and suffered, the bomb did not stand out as much from the background of events then as it does now, and not nearly enough to make it a dramatic exception to the rule of fighting the war with whatever tools were at hand. Postwar guilt over the infliction of mass noncombatant deaths attached itself to the atomic bombings rather than the incendiary bombings less because of any significant moral difference between them than because the latter occurred routinely during the war while the former coincided dramatically with its end. At the time, the bomb and other strategies were understood as complementary and not mutually exclusive—as can be seen from the post-Nagasaki discussions over tactical use, when the American military leadership considered integrating the next available atomic bombs into the invasion planning.

American behavior during the Pacific War was shocking and the human results of its strategies were sickening. But Japanese and Russian behavior was worse, both at the micro and the macro level, toward every category of population—occupied peoples, prisoners of war, and even their own combatants and citizens. Every month in 1945 until the war’s end, for example, Japanese forces caused the deaths of 100,000-250,000 noncombatants across Asia, and the bloodletting was finally stopped by the surrender. 

The possibility that the atomic bombs might induce a Japanese surrender prior to Russian entry into the war was indeed an added attraction for the American leadership in general, and an important consideration for some officials, but Russian policy was far more cold-blooded. Stalin ordered the Soviet invasion of Manchuria sped up to be sure his forces were in a position to reap the spoils of peace and he kept them fighting for weeks longer in order to seize more territory. Hearing news of Japan’s capitulation, Truman immediately ordered his forces to suspend offensive operations; Soviet forces not only continued their advances but stepped up the pace. And the human cost of these little-studied final Soviet operations dwarfed those of the atomic bombs: following their entry into the war, Stalin’s forces captured about 2.7 million Japanese nationals, of whom 350,000-375,000 ended up dead or permanently missing. 640,000 Japanese prisoners of war seized by the Soviets in August 1945 were sent to slave labor camps in the USSR.

The Emperor Debate

Given what happened after the bombs were dropped, the notion that a demonstration strike would have produced a Japanese surrender seems fanciful. And regarding the much-debated question of whether it was Hiroshima and Nagasaki or Russian entry that did the trick, there is no way to know for sure, since they happened nearly simultaneously and counterfactuals depend heavily on subjective assumptions about the psychology of a few key individuals under great stress. Either might have produced a comparable result by itself, and other factors might well have intervened to head off an invasion even if neither had occurred. Like a patient with multiple organ failure, Imperial Japan was dying from several causes simultaneously; which one finished the job was largely a matter of chance. In the end, the bomb was used when it became available for use; it was a chance that happened while Japan was still in the war, but Germany wasn’t.

As for the emperor’s decision, finally, what the Americans thought of as a question of the emperor, the Japanese thought of as a question of their kokutai, generally translated as “national polity.” Just what this term meant in practice, however, was never clear—or rather, was contested. 

In its final decade, Imperial Japan could legitimately be viewed from any of several vantage points: as a homogenous society bound together by ethnicity, history, and geography; as a religious or ideological community bound together by particular beliefs; and as a political regime with a particular set of institutions and procedures. The concept of kokutai jumbled all these together into one emotionally resonant whole, symbolized in the person of the semi-divine emperor, representing his people and regime and claiming direct descent over thousands of years from the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami. At issue in the summer of 1945 was not simply how the Pacific War could be ended, but how much this concept could and should be deconstructed and what would happen if it were.

On the American side, this meant pondering how deep the roots of Japan’s aggression lay and hence what kind of reforms would be necessary to eliminate them. On the Japanese side, it meant determining whether kokutai was at root about people, ideas, or institutions. Despite what they occasionally claimed, no Japanese leaders seemed to care about their people qua people; all were ready to sacrifice countless lives of ordinary Japanese to protect their ideological, religious, or political visions. The hardliners in the cabinet, and the fanatics in the military ranks below them, defined kokutai as essentially a mystical conception of autonomous Japanese statehood, with sovereign authority contained in and represented by the emperor. From this perspective, both occupation and democracy were inconsistent with it, and so the only options in 1945 were a true compromise settlement or a full-scale fight to the death. That is why the cabinet hardliners argued for continuing to fight even after the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry, and why their zealous junior colleagues launched a coup attempt to save the emperor from his own decision to surrender.