Japan accepts the Potsdam Declaration with a reservation

On 10 August 1945 the Japanese government agreed officially for the first time to end the war. That morning the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo sent a note through Switzerland and Sweden declaring that Japan was ready to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration of 26 July – “with the understanding that the said declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler”. In the evening, Tokyo time, the Dōmei news agency broadcast the text of the note abroad in English, and on the morning of 10 August, Washington time, American monitoring stations were the first to pick it up. The Japanese public was told nothing at the time – the Japanese learned of the surrender only from the Emperor’s broadcast five days later.

The decision was taken during the night of 9–10 August at a conference in an air-raid shelter within the grounds of the Imperial Palace, when, after many hours of fruitless deliberation, Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki asked Emperor Hirohito to settle the dispute. The Emperor backed the Foreign Minister and came out in favour of accepting the declaration with only one reservation. Japanese tradition calls this decision the seidan, the “sacred decision”. The Allied reply – the note of 11 August from Secretary of State James Byrnes – neither accepted nor rejected the Japanese condition outright, which opened another three days of dispute in Tokyo.

Two shocks

All summer Suzuki’s government had counted on Soviet mediation and had responded to the Potsdam ultimatum only with the word mokusatsu. Within four days the situation changed fundamentally. On 6 August the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima; on the evening of 8 August the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, and just after midnight the Red Army struck Manchuria. The hope of Soviet mediation, on which all of Tokyo’s diplomacy had rested until then, was gone.

On the morning of 9 August the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, the so-called Big Six, met: Prime Minister Suzuki, Foreign Minister Shigenori Tōgō, War Minister Korechika Anami, Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, the Army Chief of Staff Yoshijirō Umezu and the Navy Chief of Staff Soemu Toyoda. During the meeting news arrived that a second bomb had fallen on Nagasaki. None of those present any longer claimed that the war could be won; the dispute was about the terms on which it would end. Tōgō, supported by Suzuki and Yonai, wanted to accept the declaration with a single reservation – the preservation of the Emperor’s position. Anami, Umezu and Toyoda demanded four conditions: in addition to the inviolability of the throne, that the Japanese should disarm and demobilise their own forces, that any war criminals should be tried by Japanese courts, and that Japan should not be occupied or that the occupation should be kept to a minimum. Tōgō argued that the Allies would not accept such an offer and that the talks would be broken off. The council was split evenly, three against three.

In the afternoon, from 2.30 p.m., the full cabinet considered the matter. According to participants’ accounts, Anami repeated there information extracted from a captured American fighter pilot that the United States had a hundred atomic bombs and would soon attack Tokyo; in reality a third bomb could have been ready in the first good weather after 17 or 18 August. The meeting was adjourned at 5.30 p.m. without a decision, and a second session, from 6 to 10 p.m., also failed to reach agreement. The cabinet took its decisions unanimously, and the resignation of the War Minister would have brought it down – this was how the army could block any decision.

The conference in the shelter

After the second cabinet meeting Suzuki and Tōgō went to the Emperor. The Prime Minister proposed convening an Imperial Conference, which began shortly before midnight on 9 August in the cramped, stuffy air-raid shelter beneath the Obunko palace library. Besides the Big Six it was attended by the President of the Privy Council, Kiichirō Hiranuma, while the Chief Cabinet Secretary, Hisatsune Sakomizu, and the heads of the Army and Navy Military Affairs Bureaus took the minutes. A key role behind the scenes was played by the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Kōichi Kido, who had for months been urging the Emperor to end the war and had agreed with him beforehand that in the event of deadlock the sovereign would speak.

Suzuki set out both positions, and the ministers and chiefs of staff repeated their arguments. Hiranuma put a series of questions to the military about the state of the country’s defences and the food supply for the population, pointing to the threat of internal unrest. It was also he, according to historians (including Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and Richard B. Frank), who forced through a change in the wording of the reservation itself. Tōgō’s draft had said that the declaration should contain no demand for a change in “the status of the Emperor under national law”. Hiranuma insisted on a formula referring to “the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler” (in Japanese, to the Emperor’s authority to rule the state). The difference was not cosmetic: the first version concerned the preservation of the throne and the dynasty, the second the Emperor’s retention of real sovereign power – in practice, of the existing political system. Hasegawa regards this amendment as fundamental, because it was precisely this that Washington was bound to reject.

At around 2 a.m., by now on 10 August, Suzuki rose, approached the throne and asked the Emperor for a decision – an unprecedented step, since constitutionally the sovereign approved the government’s decisions rather than settling disputes. According to the notes of those present, Hirohito said that continuing the war meant the annihilation of the nation and the prolonging of bloodshed, recalled that the promised fortifications on the Kujūkuri coast were still not ready, and remarked that the military’s plans had too often failed to match reality. He admitted that the thought of disarming loyal soldiers and of punishing those who had served him was unbearable to him, “but the time has come to bear the unbearable”. Finally, he declared that he accepted the Foreign Minister’s proposal. After the Emperor withdrew, the cabinet approved the decision towards morning; Anami and the other military men complied.

Historians differ over what had the greater effect on the Emperor and his entourage. Some, like Frank, regard the atomic bombs as the decisive factor; others, like Hasegawa, point to the Soviet entry into the war, which deprived Tokyo of its last diplomatic hope and raised the fear of revolution. Within the court circle itself there was also open talk of fear of internal unrest. Most scholars agree that the decision resulted from the combination of both shocks with the country’s hopeless military and economic situation.

The note through Bern and Stockholm

On the morning of 10 August Tōgō sent telegrams to the legations in Switzerland and Sweden, the neutral states that represented the interests of the belligerents. The minister in Bern, Shun’ichi Kase, was to hand the note to the Swiss government for the United States and China, and the minister in Stockholm, Suemasa Okamoto, to the Swedish government for Great Britain and the Soviet Union. The same day Tōgō received the Soviet ambassador, Yakov Malik, who had come to deliver the declaration of war formally, and informed him of Japan’s decision.

The note recalled that a few weeks earlier Japan had asked the Soviet government to mediate in restoring peace, and stated that the Emperor, wishing to spare humanity the calamities of war, desired its speedy end. The Japanese government was therefore ready to accept the terms of the declaration issued at Potsdam by the heads of government of the United States, Great Britain and China, later joined by the Soviet government, with the reservation concerning the Emperor’s prerogatives. The government asked for an “explicit indication” on this point.

Because the diplomatic channel was slow, the ministry decided to make the text of the note public by radio at the same time. On the evening of 10 August, Tokyo time, the Dōmei agency transmitted it in English in Morse code to foreign recipients – according to some accounts precisely to forestall any intervention by the military censors. Monitoring stations in the United States picked up the message at about 7.30 a.m. on 10 August, US Eastern time. The official text was later delivered to the State Department by the Swiss chargé d’affaires in Washington, Max Grässli.

In Japan itself the message was contradictory. On 11 August the newspapers published a statement by the head of the Information Bureau, Hiroshi Shimomura, warning in vague terms that the country faced the worst possible situation, and alongside it a proclamation to the army by War Minister Anami calling for a fight to the end, “even if we have to eat grass and sleep in the fields”. The proclamation had been issued by officers of the War Ministry and Anami approved it after the event; those in favour of ending the war feared that the Allies would read it as a rejection of the terms.

The debate in Washington

On the morning of 10 August President Harry Truman gathered at the White House Secretary of State Byrnes, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal and his chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy. Stimson and Leahy were in favour of accepting the Japanese condition. Stimson had argued for months that keeping the Emperor would make surrender easier, and that only his order could induce millions of soldiers scattered from Manchuria to Indonesia to lay down their arms; Leahy considered the question of the Emperor secondary compared with the cost of prolonging the war. Stimson also proposed halting the bombing while notes were being exchanged, which the President did not accept at the time.

Byrnes was opposed. According to the diary of his aide Walter Brown, he feared that accepting a condition that went beyond Potsdam would be seen at home as a concession to Japan, and asked why the United States should go further than in the declaration now that it had the atomic bomb and the USSR was in the war. Forrestal suggested a middle course: to reply in the affirmative but to word the terms so as not to accept the Japanese reservation outright. Truman instructed Byrnes to prepare such a text. In the afternoon, at a cabinet meeting, the President announced that no more atomic bombs could be used without his express order; according to the diary of the Secretary of Commerce, Henry Wallace, he said that the thought of killing another hundred thousand people, “all those kids”, was too horrible for him.

The Byrnes note

Byrnes’s draft was sent on 10 August to London, Moscow and Chongqing. The British government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee agreed, asking only that the Emperor should not have to sign the instrument of surrender in person but should authorise the government and headquarters to do so – the amendment was accepted. Chiang Kai-shek also agreed. Moscow made the most difficulty: during the night of 10–11 August Vyacheslav Molotov told the US ambassador, Averell Harriman, that the USSR wanted a say in the choice of the Allied supreme commander, or even two commanders. Harriman flatly refused, and a few hours later Molotov announced that Joseph Stalin agreed and that it had only been a proposal for consideration.

The note, dated 11 August, reached Tokyo through Switzerland. It did not answer the question of the Emperor’s prerogatives directly. It stated that from the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese government to rule the state would be “subject to” the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, who would take such steps as he deemed proper to effectuate the surrender terms. The Emperor was to authorise the government and Imperial General Headquarters to sign the terms and to order all armed forces, wherever located, to cease hostilities and surrender their arms. Prisoners of war and civilian internees were to be transported quickly to places of safety, and Allied forces were to remain in Japan until the purposes of the Potsdam Declaration were achieved. Finally: “The ultimate form of government of Japan shall, in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration, be established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.”

The text was deliberately ambiguous. It did not abolish the monarchy and implicitly assumed that the Emperor would continue to exercise authority – albeit subordinated to the occupier – but it gave no guarantee. The Japanese first heard it on American radio from San Francisco just after midnight on 12 August. A dispute over the translation broke out at once. The Foreign Ministry rendered “subject to” with a phrase meaning “to remain under the limitation of”, while the military read it as “subordination” and argued that the note meant the end of the imperial system. According to historians’ accounts, Foreign Ministry officials, wanting to gain time, held back the official text, which arrived from Bern on the evening of 12 August, and recorded its receipt only on the morning of 13 August. Anami, Umezu and Toyoda demanded a further enquiry to the Allies; even Suzuki briefly leaned towards rejecting the note, until Tōgō and Kido persuaded him otherwise.

A pause in the bombing

The acceptance of the Japanese offer did not mean a ceasefire. On 10 August aircraft from the carriers of Task Force 38 attacked northern Honshu, and B-29s bombed targets in the Tokyo area. On 11 August the Superfortresses did not take off because of the weather, and the press interpreted remarks by the commander of the Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, General Carl Spaatz, as heralding a ceasefire. So that a resumption of the raids would not be read as breaking off the talks, Truman ordered strategic bombing to be suspended. When no answer came from Tokyo and radio intercepts pointed to increased troop movements, the President ordered it to be resumed. On 13 August B-29s dropped leaflets over Japan carrying the text of the Japanese note and Byrnes’s reply – this was how the public, and the armed forces too, learned of the negotiations, which in the view of many scholars hastened the decision. On 14 August more than a thousand aircraft carried out the last great raids of the war.

Significance

The note of 10 August was Japan’s first official admission that it had lost the war and the effective beginning of its surrender. Its single condition was not accepted by the Allies, but neither was it rejected – Byrnes’s reply left the question of the Emperor to be settled later. The dispute over its meaning divided the Japanese leadership once more, and on 14 August Hirohito had to settle it in person a second time, this time in favour of accepting the terms without reservation. Some army officers would not accept this decision and tried to prevent it by force.

In retrospect both positions of 10 August proved partly right. The military were right that the Byrnes note did not guarantee the survival of the old system: the constitution of 1947 stripped the Emperor of sovereign power and made him “the symbol of the State”. Those in favour of surrender were right that the Allies had no intention of overthrowing the dynasty. The Americans decided to govern occupied Japan through the Emperor and the government, and Hirohito remained on the throne and did not face the international tribunal in Tokyo.