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Those who seek to argue that Japan was ready to surrender before Hiroshima are peddlers of fantasies. The Tokyo leadership was indeed eager for peace, but on terms rightly unacceptable to the Allied powers. Even after Nagasaki, the peace party prevailed only by the narrowest of margins. While evidence remains fragmentary and inconclusive, Richard Frank is surely right to argue that a critical, if unacknowledged, element in Japanese thinking was awareness that they had lost the chance of a “decisive battle for the homeland.” The hopes of the military were pinned upon exploiting an opportunity to defeat a U.S. amphibious assault. Now Japan faced devastation, starvation and probable Soviet invasion, without the need for America to expose its soldiers to the desperate defenders of Kyushu.

It is sometimes suggested that the U.S. would have lost nothing by making explicit its willingness to permit the Japanese people to keep their emperor. However, in the context of Japan’s conduct in Asia since 1931, the tens of millions of deaths for which Japanese aggression was responsible, it is hard to perceive any good reason for Truman to have modified his demand for the enemy’s unconditional surrender. Byrnes’s judgements withstand the tests of history. If there was a strand of triumphalism in American conduct, why should there not have been? The U.S. and its allies had been obliged to expend immense blood and treasure to frustrate the ambitions of a brutal fascistic aggressor. At any time, by acknowledging defeat Japan could have secured peace, escaped the atomic bombs. The fact that its leaders did not do so reflected their own irrational choice, rather than American obduracy. Why should the sensibilities of such men as Anami, Toyoda, Umezu and their subordinates have been indulged, when at last their bloody pretensions were brought to naught?

The emperor himself will never cut a sympathetic figure in Western eyes. Hirohito presided over a society which had brought misery upon many nations. If he was not a prime mover, throughout the war his preoccupation with the preservation of the imperial house caused him to treat Japan’s militarists as honourable men and legitimate arbiters of power, to applaud their successes and acquiesce in their excesses. Yet there was a redemptive quality about his conduct in those last days. Albeit belatedly, he displayed a courage and conviction which saved hundreds of thousands of lives. To a man of such instinctive diffidence, his role was entirely unwelcome, but he fulfilled it in a fashion which commands some respect. It is sometimes argued that the Allies were mistaken not to remove Hirohito from his throne in August 1945; that failure to do so allowed the Japanese people to deny the iniquity of the crimes committed in his name, as many do to this day. Nonetheless, whatever his faults in years past, through Hirohito’s actions in August 1945 the imperial house worked a passage to its own salvation.

At 7:21 on the morning of the fifteenth, Japan’s radio network began to broadcast repeated calls for every listener to tune in at noon, to receive a personal message from the emperor. Following the National Anthem, Hirohito’s squeaky tones, speaking in old Japanese almost incomprehensible to many of his subjects, delivered his reading of the Rescript:

After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and actual conditions obtaining in Our Empire today, We have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure. We have ordered Our Government to communicate to the Governments of the United States, Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union that Our Empire accepts the provisions of their Joint Declaration.

He then delivered an exposition of his nation’s past conduct which has become familiar to posterity, together with a circumlocution tortured even by Japanese standards, that the war situation had evolved “not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” He lamented America’s employment of “a new most cruel bomb.” He appealed to the