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could ‘only mean destruction for the nation and prolongation of bloodshed and cruelty to the world’.50 That could mean atomic bombs, a Soviet invasion, or an invasion by the Americans; Hirohito also criticized the military for its lack of preparedness to defend the beaches east of Tokyo. Just before the second imperial conference on the 14th, Hirohito told three senior army officers: ‘The military situation has changed suddenly. The Soviet Union entered the war against us. Suicide attacks can’t compete with the power of science. Therefore, there is no alternative but to accept the Potsdam terms,’ as explicated or confused by the Byrnes Note. Ending the conference itself with his decision to surrender, Hirohito added little to what he had said four days earlier, only that he believed the American proposal would assure the preservation of the kokutai. More revealing was the Emperor’s speech to the nation the following morning. He observed that ‘the enemy has for the first time used cruel bombs to kill and maim extremely large numbers of the innocent, 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.’ Here was an obvious— not ‘oblique’, as Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has it—reference to the atomic bombs. Ending the war was by Hirohito’s account a ‘magnanimous act’ designed to save not just the Japanese but all humankind from immolation.51

Above all, the Emperor was interested in maintaining his position and in protecting his people from further disaster. His second interest was the servant of his first, for by the summer of 1945 popular disillusionment with Hirohito’s rule was growing, fed by the extraordinary vulnerability of common citizens to American bombs. It was bad enough when incendiary bombs burned Tokyo in March 1945; the sullen reception that greeted Hirohito as he toured the damage spoke volumes about the public’s mood. The police reported on multifarious acts of lese majeste, including someone who said: ‘After having let Tokyo get burned down like that, to hell with His Imperial Highness.’ Intellectuals were more and more disaffected. No one knew how the dazed survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would feel about the Emperor and the government generally, but their reaction was unlikely to be good. Even more ominous was the attitude of the military, which, as events proved, found it enormously difficult to concede defeat. The army and navy seemed willing to fight to the last civilian before capitulating, at least as long as the losses came by attrition. The result of the military’s recklessness could be its own strengthening at the expense of civilian leadership, or rising popular anger over sacrifices demanded without any hope of success. But the shocks administered by the atomic bombs and Soviet entry gave the Emperor good reason to terminate the war; it was harder after 9 August to seek terms. ‘So long as one feels there is any chance left, it is very difficult to say that the chance to quit [has come],’ said Toyoda after the war. In his view, Soviet intervention put an end to hope. Earlier, Yonai had told an aide, ‘the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war are, in a sense, gifts from the gods. This way we don’t have to say that we have quit the war because of domestic circumstances.’ A joke that circulated through Japanese political circles after the war had it that the atomic bomb was ‘the real kamikaze’, delivering the country from further humiliation and death.52

The shocks of August thus gave the Emperor a convenient out, the opening he needed to justify acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration. It may be nothing more than a historian’s common sense to suppose that the infliction of death on many thousands—no one yet knew even roughly how many—by a mere two bombs was, along with Soviet intervention, decisive in ending the war. Given the mix of evidence available, and in the absence of any ‘smoking gun’, common sense may be the best measure possible.

12. Assessing