The Imperial Conference of 6 September

On Saturday 6 September 1941 the most important men of the Japanese state gathered in the Imperial Palace in Tokyo: the prime minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoe; the ministers of foreign affairs, war, the navy, finance and home affairs; the head of the Planning Board; the chiefs and vice-chiefs of the army and navy general staffs; and the president of the Privy Council, Yoshimichi Hara. Emperor Hirohito listened to the proceedings. By the Japanese count it was the sixth conference held in the monarch’s presence (御前会議, gozen kaigi) since such meetings had been revived in 1938, and one of the most important in the history of the empire. It adopted a document entitled “Essentials for Carrying Out the Empire’s Policies” (帝国国策遂行要領, Teikoku kokusaku suikō yōryō), which for the first time tied the negotiations with the United States to a deadline and, once that deadline passed, to a decision for war.

It is often said that the conference decided Japan would go to war with the United States if the oil embargo was not lifted. That is a simplification. The document did not mention the embargo as the sole condition, nor did it concern the United States alone. It stipulated that Japan would complete its preparations for war with America, Britain and the Netherlands by the end of October, would at the same time try to achieve its aims through negotiation, and, if by the beginning of October there was no prospect of its “minimum demands” being met, would immediately decide on war. Among those demands, the restoration of trade and oil supplies was only one of several. The most important concerned China: Washington and London were to stop supporting Chiang Kai-shek and not hinder Japan from ending the war on its own terms. Nor was the decision to go to war itself taken on 6 September. It was taken only at the subsequent conferences, on 5 November and 1 December.

From embargo to deadline

The road to this conference ran through two months in which Japanese policy fell into a trap of its own making. On 2 July 1941 the previous Imperial Conference had decided to move into southern Indochina, “not shrinking” from war with Britain and the United States. The Americans, who were reading Japanese diplomatic traffic, knew of this almost at once. When at the end of July Japanese troops began landing around Saigon, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt froze Japanese assets, and from 1 August American oil exports to Japan effectively ceased. The Dutch East Indies followed Washington’s lead. Japan, which imported most of its oil from the United States, began living off its reserves. The chief of the Navy General Staff, Admiral Osami Nagano, reported to the Emperor at the end of July that they would last about two years, and in the event of war a year and a half.

From then on time was reckoned differently in Tokyo. The navy, growing weaker with every month without fuel, wanted to know whether it should prepare for war. On 16 August it presented the army with a draft of a new policy line: to carry out war preparations without committing to war, to negotiate at the same time, and to resort to force only if diplomacy found no way out. The Army General Staff replied that this could not be done. The navy’s preparations largely came down to putting the fleet on a war footing, whereas the army had to mobilise hundreds of thousands of men and ship them south, and that could not begin without a clear decision by the state. The dispute ended in a compromise of words. The draft agreed by the two general staffs on 30 August contained a phrase about preparations carried out “with the resolve not to shrink from war”, and also a deadline: the preparations were to be complete in the second half of October, and the decision for war was to be taken if the negotiations had produced no result by the beginning of October.

The summit that was to solve everything

Konoe was looking for a way out elsewhere. At the beginning of August he decided to meet Roosevelt in person. He hoped that in a face-to-face meeting he could reach an agreement that the diplomats had been unable to achieve, and then, invoking the Emperor’s will, impose it on the army. The navy minister, Admiral Koshirō Oikawa, backed the plan without reservation; the war minister, General Hideki Tōjō, agreed on condition that the prime minister would not resign if the talks failed and would go to them prepared for war. The ambassador in Washington, Admiral Kichisaburō Nomura, put the proposal to Secretary of State Cordell Hull on 8 August. Roosevelt, who had just returned from his meeting with Winston Churchill off Newfoundland, where the Atlantic Charter had been proclaimed, handed Nomura a warning against further expansion on 17 August, but at the same time showed interest in a meeting. He suggested Juneau in Alaska. On 28 August Nomura delivered to him a personal letter from Konoe, in which the prime minister proposed that the two leaders should first discuss all the disputed questions of the Pacific from a broad perspective and leave the details to officials. The President received the letter very favourably and even spoke of three days of talks.

Hull was sceptical. He believed that a meeting without prior agreement on principles would end either in an embarrassing failure or in a “second Munich”, and that Konoe himself lacked the power to keep his promises. His view prevailed. On 3 September Roosevelt replied that he supported the meeting in principle, but that first the two sides had to reach agreement on the fundamental questions. The basis was to be the four principles that Hull had been repeating to Nomura since the spring: respect for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of all nations, non-interference in their internal affairs, equality, including equality of commercial opportunity, and no change in the status quo in the Pacific except by peaceful means. For Japan this meant above all the question of withdrawing its troops from China and of its attitude to the Tripartite Pact.

On that same 3 September, before Roosevelt’s reply was known in Tokyo, the government and Imperial General Headquarters met at a liaison conference. They adopted a new proposal for the Americans, prepared in the Foreign Ministry, and the draft “Essentials for Carrying Out the Empire’s Policies”. According to Japanese sources the meeting lasted about seven hours. Nagano argued that Japan’s raw materials were dwindling while its opponent was growing stronger, so that a chance of victory existed now but would disappear with time. The chief of the Army General Staff, General Hajime Sugiyama, explained that mobilisation and the movement of troops took time, so preparations could be complete at the earliest by the end of October, and the decision should be taken as soon as possible. At Oikawa’s request, however, the last point was softened. The decision for war was to be taken not simply when the negotiations failed to produce a result, but when “around the beginning of October” there was no “prospect” of Japan’s demands being met. Officers of the Army General Staff wrote in their secret diary that the draft had thus been “gutted”, and that an even bigger dispute awaited them in October.

“The Pacific is even bigger”

On 5 September Konoe presented the draft to the Emperor. According to the notes of the prime minister and of the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Kōichi Kido, Hirohito was troubled that the first point spoke of preparations for war and only the second of diplomacy. He asked whether the order could not be reversed, and when the prime minister replied that the order did not signify importance, he demanded that the chiefs of both general staffs come to see him that same evening. The conversation with Sugiyama has gone down in history. When the general assured him that operations in the South Pacific would be over in about three months, the Emperor reminded him that as war minister in 1937 he had promised a swift end to the “China Incident”, which four years later was still going on. Sugiyama explained that the interior of China was vast. Hirohito retorted that if China was vast, the Pacific was even bigger. Nagano later said that he had never seen the Emperor so angry.

The navy chief of staff came to Sugiyama’s aid. According to Konoe’s notes, he compared Japan to a gravely ill patient who, left untreated, faced a slow death, while an operation, though dangerous, offered a chance of recovery. The general staffs, he added, wanted negotiations and recommended the operation only as a last resort. The Emperor asked them both whether diplomacy took precedence over war. Both confirmed that it did. The draft remained unchanged. Before the conference Kido advised Hirohito not to speak about the text itself, but to make sure that the president of the Privy Council asked the key questions, and at the end to call himself for cooperation towards successful negotiations.

The conference in the palace

The conference of 6 September followed an established ritual. The participants knew the text that was to be adopted and read out, one after another, statements prepared in advance. Konoe described the situation: the United States, Britain and the Netherlands were putting ever greater pressure on Japan, the Soviet Union remained an unknown quantity, and the empire’s strength was ebbing away. Nagano said on behalf of the navy that Japan was growing weaker by the day while its opponent was arming ever faster. He added that a war with America would probably be long and that the empire had no means of forcing it to surrender, which made it all the more important to seize raw materials and strategic positions in the south quickly. Sugiyama presented the army’s plans, the foreign minister, Admiral Teijirō Toyoda, the state of the negotiations, and the head of the Planning Board, General Teiichi Suzuki, the state of the reserves, above all of oil.

The documents prepared for the participants explained why the preparations were to be complete in the second half of October in particular. They gave three reasons. The oil reserves would last two years at most, so the capacity to wage war was diminishing with every month. The American fleet and air force were growing rapidly, and from the autumn of 1942 the US Navy would outstrip Japan’s. Finally, large operations in the north were impossible in winter, so the war in the south had to be decided during that time, in order to be ready by spring for a possible reckoning with the Soviet Union, which was at that moment tied down by the war with Germany.

Next came the questions from Yoshimichi Hara, who as president of the Privy Council spoke at such conferences in effect on the Emperor’s behalf. He observed that the text gave the impression that war came first and diplomacy second, and asked whether it was to be understood to mean that the government and the general staffs should above all seek an agreement and resort to war only when all other means had been exhausted. The navy minister, Oikawa, replied on behalf of the government that this was indeed how the document was to be understood. The chiefs of staff remained silent.

Then something happened that custom did not provide for at such conferences. The Emperor, who usually listened to the proceedings in silence so as not to bear personal responsibility for the decisions, spoke. According to Sugiyama’s notes, he said that Hara’s question had been apt and that he regretted that the representatives of the high command had not answered it. He then read out a poem by his grandfather, Emperor Mutsuhito, written in 1904 on the eve of the war with Russia:

All the seas of the four quarters are brothers, so I think –
why then do the winds and waves rise up so stormily?

(四方の海　みな同胞と　思ふ世に　など波風の　立ち騒ぐらむ, Yomo no umi / mina harakara to / omou yo ni / nado namikaze no / tachisawaguramu). He added that he often read these words in order to be guided by the late Emperor’s love of peace.

Nagano assured him that the high command fully shared the navy minister’s answer and had not spoken only because it considered that answer to express its own position as well. Diplomacy took precedence, and arms would be used only if there was no other way. Sugiyama joined in these assurances. The text, however, was adopted without a single word being changed.

What was decided

The document adopted had three points. The first stated that the empire, “in order to secure its self-existence and self-defence”, with the resolve not to shrink from war with the United States (as well as Britain and the Netherlands), would complete its war preparations by about the end of October. The second, that in parallel Japan would exhaust diplomatic means towards the United States and Britain to obtain its demands. The third, that if by around the beginning of October the negotiations offered no prospect of those demands being met, Japan would immediately decide on war with those countries. In matters other than the south, policy was to remain unchanged, and in particular the formation of a joint American–Soviet front against Japan was to be prevented.

An annex listed the “minimum demands”. The United States and Britain were not to interfere in the way Japan ended the war in China, were to close the Burma Road and stop giving Chiang Kai-shek military and economic aid. They were not to strengthen their forces in the Far East or establish bases in Thailand, the Netherlands East Indies, China or the Soviet Far East; they were to recognise Japan’s special relationship with Indochina, restore trade and supply Japan with the raw materials it needed “for its self-existence”. In return Japan was prepared to promise that it would not advance by force from Indochina into neighbouring countries other than China, would withdraw from Indochina once a “just peace” had been established in the Far East, and would guarantee the neutrality of the Philippines. Japanese historians judge that such terms were unacceptable to Washington and that meeting them would have meant recognising Japan’s conquests in China.

Dinner with the ambassador

That same evening Konoe invited the American ambassador, Joseph Grew, to dinner at a friend’s private house. The meeting was held in secret, because contacts with the Americans were dangerous: in mid-August an extreme nationalist had shot the minister of state and former prime minister Kiichirō Hiranuma, who was regarded as a supporter of an understanding with America. The only others at the table were the embassy counsellor, Eugene Dooman, and the prime minister’s secretary, Tomohiko Ushiba. The conversation lasted three hours. According to the memorandum Grew drew up that same night, Konoe assured him that he, and therefore the Government of Japan, “conclusively and wholeheartedly” accepted Hull’s four principles as the basis for rebuilding relations. He gave assurances that the war and navy ministers supported his proposals, and that a full general and a full admiral, as well as the vice-chiefs of staff, would accompany him to the meeting with the President. He urged haste, because in six months or a year, with resentment over the sanctions growing at home, he would no longer be able to guarantee anything.

Konoe did not tell the ambassador about the decision taken that morning in the palace. Grew, who had long been arguing to Washington that Konoe was the only man capable of restraining the Japanese military, warmly supported the summit. Also on 6 September, in Washington, Nomura handed Hull a new Japanese proposal, which had already been passed to Grew in Tokyo on 4 September. In it Japan promised that it would not advance by force from Indochina, that it would itself judge its obligations under the Tripartite Pact should America enter the war in Europe, and that it would withdraw its troops from China “as soon as possible”, but only after concluding an agreement with China. In return the United States was to halt its military preparations in the Far East, not hinder Japan in China and lift the freezing of assets. On 10 September Hull replied that the proposal narrowed the existing talks rather than advancing them.

Place in the war

The Emperor Meiji’s poem did not stop the preparations. The conference of 6 September set a clock running that from then on measured out the time left to Japanese diplomacy, and the army and navy began preparing for war in the south: planning the conquest of Malaya, the Philippines and the Netherlands East Indies, and in the navy also an attack on the American fleet in Hawaii.

The negotiations made no progress, because neither side was willing to give way on the issue on which everything depended: the presence of Japanese troops in China. On 25 September the Japanese passed another proposal to Grew, and the army and navy demanded a decision from the government by mid-October at the latest. On 2 October Hull replied that a meeting of the leaders made no sense until the two sides had agreed on principles. On 12 October, at a conference at Konoe’s villa in Ogikubo, the foreign minister, Toyoda, said openly that the decision of 6 September had been reckless, but Tōjō rejected any concessions over China and reminded them that a resolution adopted in the Emperor’s presence could not be broken. On 16 October Konoe resigned, and two days later Tōjō became prime minister. Kido conveyed to him the Emperor’s wish that the resolution of 6 September be treated as void and the matter reconsidered from scratch. The review changed nothing. On 5 November another Imperial Conference adopted a new version of the “Essentials”, this time with a decision for war and a deadline for the negotiations set at midnight on 1 December. This time the Emperor remained silent. On 26 November Hull presented the Japanese with a note that Tokyo regarded as an ultimatum, on 1 December an Imperial Conference decided to begin the war, and on 7 December 1941, Hawaiian time, Japanese carrier aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor.

After the war the conference of 6 September became one of the main arguments in the dispute over Hirohito’s responsibility. The Emperor himself, in an account dictated to courtiers in 1946, presented the Meiji poem as proof that he had wanted peace, and claimed that as a constitutional monarch he could not reject a decision put before him by the government and the high command. Some historians, such as Herbert Bix, point out that Hirohito knew of the war plans, questioned the military about them and did not use his authority to stop them, and that his intervention was a reproach, not an objection. Others stress that this was the only time before August 1945 that the Emperor broke his silence at such a conference, and that his words were understood as a clear injunction to give diplomacy priority. One thing is certain: from 6 September 1941, success in the negotiations with Washington and the decision for war were bound together in Japanese policy by a rigid deadline, set by the needs of the general staffs and not by the calculations of the diplomats.