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By Root 1104 0

support, however, the revolt never had a chance of success: most of the army remained loyal, and within hours the insurgents had been routed and the leaders committed suicide. Anami shared glasses of sake with several associates, then used his sword to open his belly in ritual seppuku. Ignorant of these events, the following afternoon Dr Hachiya in Hiroshima, along with millions of other Japanese, strained to hear, through the static of the record, their Emperor entreating them to accept defeat. Hachiya felt confused and betrayed by what the Emperor said. Robert Guillain, a French journalist living in a village outside Tokyo, reported that few understood their sovereign’s stilted words and waited for the radio announcer to explain what he had said. ‘Then,’ wrote Guillain, ‘it was over’:

They had understood, and the sobbing broke out. The knots of people dissolved in disorder. Something huge had just cracked: the proud dream of greater Japan. All that was left of it to millions of Japanese was a true sorrow, simple and pitiable—the bleeding wound of their vanquished patriotism. They scattered and hid to weep in the seclusion of their wooden houses.

In the United States, the reaction to the news was a good deal more celebratory.49

11. Explaining Japan’s surrender

Lurking at the back of this story is that same fraught question: what was it that compelled Japan to surrender on 14 August 1945? Was it the atomic bombing of Hiroshima? Of Nagasaki? The combination of the two, which by their rapid occurrence in succession raised Japanese fears that the United States had more atomic bombs on the way and an ongoing willingness to use them? Were the bombs less important than the Soviet decision to declare war on Japan? Or would Japan have surrendered before the end of 1945, as the US Strategic Bombing Survey would have it, even in the absence of the atomic bombs, Soviet intervention, or the prospect of imminent invasion by US military forces? Needless to say, historians and other analysts have divided sharply over the answers to these questions. Understandably so—there is much at stake here. If the atomic bombs, either or both, caused Japan to capitulate, then they arguably saved lives, especially (but not only) American lives, and thus justified the scientific effort and government expense and soothed any moral qualms Americans might have felt about their use. Of course, on the other hand, if the Japanese surrendered for reasons other than the use of the bombs against them, then the Truman administration could stand accused of visiting stark and needless cruelty on a people, on a world, that was lurching toward peace without them. ‘It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing,’ as Dwight Eisenhower would put it after the war.

Was it? As with all critical historical questions, the answer is complicated. It is rare to find in the record what detectives and historian-detectives call a ‘smoking gun’, a clear expression of cause from a figure in a position to provide one. There is no evidence, for example, that Emperor Hirohito turned to Kido at a crucial moment and said, ‘It is not about those bombs— we cannot have the Russians capturing our soldiers and occupying our land.’ (Even if that statement were discovered in the record, one suspects that historians would question its provenance or subject it to several interpretations.) There is consensus that the views of the Emperor were the key to ending the war, especially as the positions of the members of the Supreme War Council hardly changed between 5 and 14 August. It is true that Yonai’s position was sometimes mysterious, that Suzuki’s wavered briefly after the Byrnes Notes had arrived, and that Anami, while steadfast in opposition to unconditional surrender, significantly refused to support a military coup against his emperor. But it was Hirohito, ghosted by Kido and doubtless influenced by Togo and others, who decided on the 14th that enough was enough. At the first imperial conference on 9-10 August, recall, the Emperor sought to end the war because its continuation