JOHN DOWER

Embracing Defeat

Japan in the Wake of World War II

It was August 15, 1945, shortly before noon. What followed would never be forgotten.

Aihara Yu was twenty-eight years old then, a farmer's wife in rural Shizuoka prefecture. Through the decades to come, the day would replay itself in her memory like an old filmstrip, a staccato newsreel in black and white.

She was working outdoors when a messenger arrived breathless from the village. It had been announced that the emperor would be making a personal broadcast at noon, he exclaimed before rushing off. Everyone was to come and listen.

The news that America, the land of the enemy, had disappeared into the sea would hardly have been more startling. The emperor was to speak! In the two decades since he had ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne, Emperor Hirohito had never once spoken directly to all his subjects. Until now the sovereign's words had been handed down in the form of imperial rescripts — as printed texts, pronouncements humbly read by others.

Half a century later, Aihara could still recall every detail. She rushed to the village, repeating over and over to herself a line from the Imperial Rescript on Education, which everyone knew by heart from daily recitation during their school years. "Should any emergency arise," it went, "offer yourselves courageously to the State." She knew the country's situation was desperate and could only imagine that the emperor was going to exhort every Japanese to make even greater efforts to support the war — to be prepared, indeed, to fight to the bitter end.

The villagers had gathered around the single local radio over which the single state-run station was received. Reception was poor. Static crackled around the emperor's words, and the words themselves were difficult to grasp. The emperor's voice was high pitched and his enunciation stilted. He did not speak in colloquial Japanese, but in a highly formal language studded with ornamental classical phrases. Aihara was just exchanging puzzled glances with others in the crowd when a man who had recently arrived from bombed-out Tokyo spoke up — almost, she recalled, as if to himself. "This means," he whispered, "that Japan has lost."

Aihara felt all strength drain from her body. Before she knew what happened she found herself lying face down on the ground. Others who collapsed around her — as she later pictured the scene — lay on their backs. The emperor's voice was gone, but the radio droned on. An announcer was speaking. One of his sentences burned itself into her mind, where it would remain for the rest of her life: "The Japanese military will be disarmed and allowed to return to Japan."

With this, Aihara Yu experienced a flood of hope. Her husband, who had been drafted into the army and sent to Manchuria, might soon return! All that day and through the night, she prayed, "Please, my husband, don't commit suicide." Japanese fighting men had been indoctrinated to chose death over surrender, a path Aihara feared her husband might take as a proper and moral response to this extraordinary moment.

For three years, Aihara continued to pray for her husband's return. Only then did she learn that he had been killed in a battle with Soviet forces five days before she was summoned from the fields to hear her sovereign's voice. The war had, after all, permanently shattered her life.1

Euphemistic Surrender
The millions of Japanese who gathered around neighborhood radios to hear that broadcast were not "citizens" but the emperor's subjects, and it was in his name that they had supported their country's long war against China and the Allied Powers. In Japanese parlance, it had been a "holy war"; in announcing Japan's capitulation, the forty-four-year-old sovereign faced the challenge of replacing such rhetoric with new language.

This was a formidable challenge. Fourteen years earlier, in the sixth year of his reign, Emperor Hirohito had acquiesced in the imperial army's takeover of the three Chinese provinces known collectively as Manchuria. Eight years previously, Japan had initiated open war against China in the emperor's name. From that time on, Hirohito had appeared in public only in the bemedalled military garb of commander in chief. In December 1941, he issued the rescript that initiated hostilities against the United States and various European powers. Now, three years and eight months later, his task was not merely to call a halt to a lost war, but to do so without disavowing Japan's war aims or acknowledging the nation's atrocities — and in a manner that divorced him from any personal responsibility for these many years of aggression.

It was Hirohito himself who first broached the idea of breaking precedent and using the airwaves to speak directly to his subjects. The text of his announcement, not finalized until close to midnight the previous night, had been composed and delivered under great pressure. Much intrigue was involved in recording and then hiding it from military officers opposed to a surrender. Despite its chaotic genesis, the rescript emerged as a polished ideological gem.2

Although many shared Aihara Yu's difficulty in comprehending the emperor's words, his message (which was simultaneously transmitted to Japanese overseas by shortwave radio) was quickly understood by everyone. Sophisticated listeners such as the Tokyo man in her village explained the broadcast to their puzzled compatriots. Radio announcers immediately summarized the rescript and its import in everyday language. Newspapers rushed out special editions reproducing the emperor's text accompanied by editorial commentary.

Like insects in amber, lines and phrases from the broadcast soon became locked in popular consciousness. The emperor never spoke explicitly of either "surrender" or "defeat." He simply observed that the war "did not turn in Japan's favor, and trends of the world were not advantageous to us." He enjoined his subjects to "endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable" — words that would be quoted times beyond counting in the months to come.

With this rescript, the emperor endeavored to accomplish the impossible: to turn the announcement of humiliating defeat into yet another affirmation of Japan's war conduct and of his own transcendent morality. He began by reiterating what he had told his subjects in 1941 when Japan declared war on the United States — that the war had been begun to ensure the survival of Japan and the stability of Asia, not out of any aggressive intent to interfere with the sovereign integrity of other countries. In this spirit, Hirohito now expressed deep regret to those countries that had cooperated with Japan "for the liberation of East Asia." With reference to the recent atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the emperor went on to present Japan's decision to capitulate as nothing less than a magnanimous act that might save humanity itself from annihilation by an atrocious adversary. "The enemy has for the first time used cruel bombs to kill and maim extremely large numbers of the innocent," he declared, "and the heavy casualties are beyond measure. To continue the war further could lead in the end not only to the extermination of our race, but also to the destruction of all human civilization." By accepting Allied demands to end the war, the emperor declared it was his purpose to "open the way for a great peace for thousands of generations to come."

He then proceeded to offer himself as the embodiment of the nation's suffering, its ultimate victim, transforming the sacrifices of his people into his own agony with a classical turn of phrase. When he contemplated those of his subjects who had died in the war, the bereaved kin they left behind, and the extraordinary difficulties all Japanese now faced, he exclaimed, "my vital organs are torn asunder." For many of his listeners, this was the most moving part of the broadcast. Some confessed to being overcome by a sense of shame and guilt that, in failing to live up to their sovereign's expectations, they had caused him grief.

To evoke such emotions in August 1945 was an impressive accomplishment. Close to 3 million Japanese were dead, many more wounded or seriously ill, and the country in ruins as a consequence of the war waged in the emperor's name, yet it was his agony on which his loyal subjects were expected to dwell. That this was the first time the emperor had spoken directly to the public made the appeal all the more effective. Perhaps he was indeed not just a symbol of their suffering, but the most conspicuous victim of the lost war. Certainly his subjects could imagine that previous imperial exhortations to fight and sacrifice had not reflected his true intentions, but had been extracted by evil advisers. Only now, as sentimental royalists would soon put it, were people actually hearing the sovereign's true voice. It was "as if the sun had at long last emerged from behind dark clouds."3

Although the emperor reaffirmed his faith in "the sincerity of my good and loyal subjects" and assured them that he

would "always be with" them, he also admonished them not to fall out among themselves in the chaos and misery of defeat. It was essential to remain united as a great family, firmly believing in "the invincibility of the divine country" and devoting every effort to the reconstruction of a nation that would preserve its traditional identity while keeping pace with "the progress and fortune of the world."

Behind these brave but nervous words lay a gnawing fear of future revolutionary upheaval in defeated Japan — a dire prospect the emperor had been warned about for months. This was, then, not merely the official closing statement of a lost war, but the opening pronunciamento of an urgent campaign to maintain imperial control as well as social and political stability in a shattered nation.4

Responses to the emperor's broadcast varied greatly. Some residents of Tokyo did make their way to the imperial palace, still standing amid a ruined cityscape. (U.S. policy makers had excluded this as a bombing target, although part of it had been inadvertently destroyed anyway). Photographs of them kneeling on the gravel in front of the palace, bowing in sorrow for having failed to live up to the emperor's hopes and expectations, later were offered as a defining image for the moment of capitulation.

This was, in fact, a misleading image. The number of people who gathered before the imperial residence was relatively small, and the tears that ordinary people everywhere did shed reflected a multitude of sentiments apart from emperor-centered grief: anguish, regret, bereavement, anger at having been deceived, sudden emptiness and loss of purpose — or simple joy at the unexpected surcease of misery and death. Kido Kořichi, the lord keeper of the privy seal and Emperor Hirohito's closest confidant, captured the palpable sense of relief in a diary entry in which he noted that some people were actually cheering in front of the palace. It was clear, he observed with some ambivalence, that they felt a great burden had been lifted.5

As Aihara Yu's prayers indicated, it did not seem unreasonable to anticipate that great numbers of Japanese might chose death over the dishonor of defeat. Through the long years of war, fighting men had been forbidden to surrender. There was no greater shame than this, they were told. As the war drew closer home, civilians had also been indoctrinated to fight to the bitter end and die "like shattered jewels," as the saying went. In the wake of the emperor's words, however, the number who actually chose the jeweled path was fewer than had been imagined. Several hundred individuals, most of them military officers, committed suicide — just as many Nazi officers did on the capitulation of Germany, where there never had existed a comparable cult of patriotic suicide.6

Indeed, at the official level, the most notable immediate response to the momentous broadcast of August 15 was pragmatic and self-serving. Military officers and civilian bureaucrats throughout the country threw themselves frenetically into the tasks of destroying their files and disbursing vast hoards of military supplies in illicit ways. Although the emperor's broadcast put an end to the American air raids, it was said, with a fine touch of hyperbole, that the skies over Tokyo remained black with smoke for days to come. Bonfires of documents replaced napalm's hellfires as the wartime elites followed the lead of their sovereign and devoted themselves to obscuring their wartime deeds.