Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [114]
The Soviet decision to abandon the Neutrality Pact, in a year’s time or immediately, came as a blow to the Japanese leadership’s wishful thinkers, who had previously imagined that their nation could, by concentrating solely on defending the home islands against the Americans, wear the enemy down and win improved surrender terms. Soviet involvement against them meant disaster. The new situation encouraged the quickening of‘peace feelers’ undertaken by an assortment of Japanese officials in a variety of European capitals. (Since the Americans had cracked Japanese codes and the Japanese knew it, ‘secret’ discussions with European diplomats were intended for American ears.) Foreign Minister Togo directed Ambassador Sato to try to persuade the Russians to stay out of the war, then went behind Sato’s back to instigate private discussions between the Soviet ambassador in Tokyo Iakov Malik and former prime minister Koki Hirota, with an eye toward possible Soviet mediation. Japanese representatives in Stockholm, Bern, and at the Vatican attempted to pursue with diplomatic counterparts the definition of unconditional surrender. None of these efforts bore fruit. Stalin was by now bent on war with Japan as soon as his armies were ready and satisfactory arrangements made with the Chinese. The multi-splendored peace feelers spread throughout Western Europe were never authorized by the cabinet or the Emperor and were renounced when discovered.9
The ‘peace faction’ did assert itself more and more as summer arrived. Talks with the Russians grew frantic; even as Stalin, through Molotov, put Sato off, the Emperor himself decided that Soviet mediation was essential and dispatched to Moscow Fumimaro Konoe, the respected former prime minister whose advisers and friends had been drafting position papers calling for significant Japanese concessions. By late June, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has written, Japan had reached ‘the crucial moment when Hirohito became actively involved in the effort to terminate the war’. The Emperor was deeply worried about the preservation of the ‘national polity’, or kokutai, meaning largely his own position in postwar Japan. The nation experienced a flurry of acts of lese majeste, ongoing since the beginning of the war but increasingly troubling to the authorities by 1945. A Home Ministry report noted then that ‘antiwar thoughts and feelings finally have come to the point where they even curse and bear resentment against His Majesty’. Hirohito was derided, in letters, comments, and graffiti, as a ‘fool’ (baka), ‘stupid fool’ (bakayaro), and ‘big stupid fool’ (daibakayaro), or even ‘Little Emperor’. When Hirohito toured Tokyo following the first great B-29 raid in March, he claimed to find no diminution of popular morale. But an aide had noticed that the vacant expressions of those picking through the rubble ‘became reproachful as the imperial motorcade went by... Were they resentful of the emperor because they had lost their relatives, their houses and their belongings?’ That he felt compelled to ask the question was itself significant.10
And yet, despite a certain degree of realism about Japan’s situation, a growing understanding that the Soviets were no friends and the Americans unyielding in their demand for unconditional surrender, the cabinet, as a group, would not let go its insistence on negotiating terms for the nation’s capitulation. While Hirohito (in mid-June), his advisers, and key members of the cabinet sought Soviet help to bring the war to an end, they were not prepared during June and July to accept the American conditions for doing so. From Moscow, Sato, ever the realist, implored his superiors ‘to make the great decision’ to surrender unconditionally. ‘If the Japanese Empire is really faced with the necessity of terminating the war,’ he wrote to Togo on 12 July, ‘we must first of all make up our own minds to terminate the war.’ ‘I send this