Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [347]
Hirohito himself, however, declared that he was satisfied by Washington’s assertion that the Japanese people could choose their own form of government. There is significant evidence that he was more affected than his senior officers by the atomic bombings—he quizzed Kido closely about their effects. At 3 p.m. on 12 August, the emperor summoned the men of his family, thirteen princes, to an unprecedented meeting at the palace, at which he explained the situation. All agreed to accept his judgement, including his youngest brother, Prince Mikasa, who had betrayed an earlier peace move to the military. Suzuki, after further vacillation, rallied with Togo to support acceptance of Byrnes’s note. Yonai, the navy minister, with considerable courage summoned Admirals Toyoda and Onishi, and sternly reprimanded them for questioning the emperor’s will. Yonai confided to a colleague: “The atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war are, in a sense, God’s gifts.” They offered substantive reasons to end the war.
All through 13 August, meetings of the military and civilian factions continued. Hirohito, having embarked hesitantly on the path to surrender, progressively increased the energy of his interventions to secure this. He appears to have exercised private pressure on all the military chiefs to forestall a coup. At 3 p.m., after further sessions of the Supreme War Council and cabinet, Togo reported to the emperor that the war and peace parties were deadlocked. Anami begged the prime minister to delay two days before reconvening the imperial conference—he obviously wanted time to rally the military against surrender. Suzuki refused. A naval doctor attending the ailing prime minister said: “You know that Anami will kill himself?” Suzuki said: “Yes, I know, and I am sorry.”
The drama of those days, the constant proximity of disaster, almost defies belief. Only a chance encounter with a Tokyo journalist enabled the peacemakers to prevent the military plotters from broadcasting on national radio an announcement that Japan would fight on. Anami spent hours listening to pleadings from the colonels and majors planning their coup. He still refused to join them, presumably because a wooden-headed interpretation of honour prevented him from taking up arms against the emperor, while precluding him from frustrating the conspirators.
Two days had passed, in which Japan remained silent while the world waited. “The days of negotiation912 with a prostrate and despised enemy strained public patience,” the British embassy in Washington reported to London: “Although the responsible press united in support of the [Byrnes] reply to the Japanese surrender offer…the general public were and still are much less tolerant of discredited deities…The man in the street seemed keener to hear about Admiral Halsey riding on Hirohito’s white horse, as he had boasted he would, than to listen to explanations about the problems of administering Japan.” More Japanese died under air bombardment. The Russians swept on across Manchuria.
On the morning of 14 August, at the Imperial Palace Kido was woken by an aide who showed him a leaflet, one of hundreds of thousands showered on Tokyo during the night by B-29s. This gave the text of the emperor’s letter of 10 August accepting Potsdam, and the Byrnes response. Neither document had hitherto been seen by the Japanese public. Kido told Hirohito that he feared the propaganda bombardment might precipitate action by the coup plotters. He proposed to force the pace: there should be an unprecedented meeting of all twenty-three members of the cabinet and Supreme War Council, at which the emperor would announce his decision to accept the Byrnes note. Soon after ten, the leaders of Japan began to arrive, taking their places in silence on rows of chairs in the cramped basement shelter, awaiting Hirohito. At 10:50, the meeting began. The military representatives expressed their familiar objections to surrender. The prime