Road to Surrender

Road to Surrender

Tokyo

August 14–15, 1945

Lord Kido knows right away that the game is up. For the past several days, the people of Japan have been kept in the dark about their government’s anguished internal debate over surrender. Now the silence is broken. The privy seal’s sense of alarm only grows as he reads several other leaf lets that have drifted down onto the streets of Tokyo—and, he can be sure, many other cities as well. The American propaganda prints, in full, the text of Japan’s August 10 offer to surrender with the sole condition of keeping the emperor, and Washington’s response, received on August 11, that the emperor must be “subject to” the Supreme Allied commander. Kido knows that these incendiary pieces of paper could spark a coup by dissident army officers, which could erupt into civil war and anarchy. He hastens to seek an audience with the emperor.

In consensus-minded Japan, and especially at the palace, little happens quickly, but Hirohito is aware that time has run out. The emperor has been vitalized by the desire to survive American atomic bombs and the suicidal fanatics in his own army, and he wants to save what is left of his country. He wants to convene the top leaders of government for a second seidan, at which he will accept Washington’s surrender terms and finally, once and for all, end the war and preserve the nation. Prime Minister Suzuki proposes a meeting to begin in about four hours’ time, at one p.m. No, says the emperor. Sooner. Right away. He does not want to give the military time to organize a coup.

Hirohito has been hearing rumors, and they are all true. The plotters are planning to launch their coup at ten a.m.—to cut off the palace, isolate the emperor, arrest the “Badoglios,” declare martial law, and fight to the end. There has been some wild talk of storming the obunku and killing everyone (except the emperor, who will be “protected”) with machine guns before taking their own lives with hand grenades. But the calmer discussion still centers on recruiting War Minister Anami to the cause, in the expectation that the army high command will fall in behind him.

Anami, at this moment, is finishing breakfast with Field Marshal Shunroku Hata, commander of the army for the defense of western Honshu and Kyushu. Hata has just returned from Hiroshima. He reports that white clothes serve perfectly well to protect people from atomic rays and that sweet potato roots are growing healthily just one inch beneath the blasted ground. Anami excitedly exclaims, “You must tell the emperor!”

Reality intrudes when Anami returns to headquarters. His brother-in-law, Colonel Takeshita, and his fellow plotters are buzzing about, but they are suddenly silenced by General Umezu, the army chief of staff, who says, flatly, that he will not support a coup. Umezu tells Anami that launching a coup in defiance of the emperor would just split the army and start a civil war. Anami appears to accept this judgment from “the Iron Mask,” an impassive operator known for his unflappability.

That should be the end of it, since the coup cannot succeed without men who report directly to Umezu, including the commanders of the Eastern Army and the Imperial Guard. But then Umezu seems to soften. . . . He suggests he is not absolutely opposed to the coup. Or at least that is what Takeshita and his men choose to hear. It is hard to know. Anami himself remains opaque and cheerful.

In makeshift government offices around the burned-out palace this morning, staff are witnessing the strange spectacle of cabinet ministers borrowing neckties, coats, and even pants from their aides in a scramble to don the appropriate formal wear for the hastily arranged audience with the emperor, now scheduled for ten-thirty a.m. Through the vaultlike gates of the obunku they go, two dozen once-proud, now-anxious men summoned to surrender an empire that has terrorized Asia and the Pacific for more than a decade. The obunku is the only steel-reinforced concrete building on the palace grounds, but its underground shelter might as well be a sauna. In the moist August heat, moisture drips from the walls.

The emperor, dressed in his military uniform, enters; the ministers bow low. Premier Suzuki apologizes, yet again, for a failure to reach consensus. One last time the admirals and generals reprise their arguments to fight to the end, “even at the cost of a hundred million lives” (ichioku gyokusai, “death in battle of the hundred million,” a common patriotic slogan). The emperor grasps the hilt of his sword and speaks. “I have listened carefully,” he says, “but my own opinion has not changed.”

Hirohito announces that he “agrees with Foreign Minister Togo” that the Allies will preserve Japan’s imperial system. He feels sorry for the military, but the Japanese people must be saved. He quotes from his grandfather Emperor Meiji, who, a half century earlier, at the time of a far lesser humiliation—an intervention by Western powers that forced Japan to give up a peninsula in Manchuria—uttered the words, “We must bear the unbearable.” Pointedly, Hirohito adds, “The War and Navy ministers have told me there is opposition within the Army and Navy; I desire that the services also be made to comprehend my wishes.” And just to make sure they do not distort his words, he announces that he will go on the radio—unheard of!—to speak to the nation.

The reaction in the room is convulsive. Two ministers slide from their seats onto the floor, gasping and keening. Most weep. As they leave, “each of us in his own thoughts wept again,” Togo will recall in his memoirs.

Afterward a lunch of whale meat and black bread is served. No one eats except for Prime Minister Suzuki, who seems surprisingly well rested and robust, despite his old age; Taoist passivity has been good for his constitution.

Anami seems to be in a near-delusional state. He pulls aside his aide, Maj. Saburo Hayashi, into a bathroom and babbles excitedly that there is a U.S. Navy fleet with a huge landing force in Tokyo Bay. If we attack them with everything we have, says the war minister, we will get much better peace terms. Incredulous, Hayashi stares back at his superior. The U.S. Navy force is just rumor, he says.

Anami returns to Ichigaya Heights, where the War Ministry is thronged with agitated officers. Colonel Takeshita is after him to resign from the Supreme War Council, thereby bringing down the whole government and creating a chaotic situation that can be resolved only by a military takeover. For a moment, Anami seems tempted. He says, “Bring me ink and a piece of paper.” Then he thinks better of it.

He is—perhaps always has been—committed to the emperor. “The emperor has spoken his decision, and we have no choice whatever to obey it,” Anami tells the hotheads surrounding him. He straightens and glowers. “Anybody who disagrees,” he says, “will have to do so over my dead body.” The most fervent of the coup plotters, Anami’s “pet” disciple Colonel Hatanaka, lets out a wail.