Unconditional Surrender
Notes on this page are based on the following book:
Dower, J. W. (2000). Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (Illustrated edition). W. W. Norton & Company.
Commodore Perry entered Edo Bay in 1853. General MacArthur entered Tokyo Bay in 1945. When Japan tendered its unconditional surrender to the Allied Forces on September 2nd, 1945, the Black Ships had arrived.
The once closed country was opened not on its terms, but by an occupying force. In the Meiji period, Japan believed that they could use Western technology to further dominance in the region and repel an occupation. Both goals failed. The United States occupied mainland Japan until 1952 and Okinawa until 1976.
A scene that is repeated in literature, journalism, histories, and television and signals the beginning of the post-war period is when Emperor Hirohito, known as Emperor Showa, chose to directly address the Japanese public upon surrender. He never mentioned “surrender” or “defeat” but said that the war had not turned out in their favor; he said that to continue war would lead to the destruction of Japan and “all human civilization” as if capitulating was a magnanimous act to the world; and in a dash of a phrase– “my vital parts as torn asunder”–he had the gall to portray himself as the ultimate victim of the millions of dead Japanese, not to mention the Asians (Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, Burmese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese…) and Allied forces killed by Japanese aggression.
As a piece of writing, it indicated how even if the Black Ships had come, conservative elements in Japanese society were stubborn and would not give up its ideology of internal racial and cultural purity. And they found an ally in the Americans.
Was Emperor Hirohito himself responsible? This was a major question left to General MacArthur, the head of the Occupation. However, before the Tokyo tribunal had even begun, General Fellers advised openly to fix Japanese General Tojo’s testimony to exclude Hirohito from the decision-making process in an attempt to absolve the emperor of responsibility.
Responsibility rests with the emperor. The Meiji Constitution held that the emperor was sovereign. And the emperor had direct control of the military. Unelected officials had neutered the power of the Lower House and, so, the people.
Against pressure from President Harry Truman, General MacArthur was sympathetic to Fellers’ reasoning and passionately advised General Eisenhower not to put him on trial. When Tojo was on the stand, and strayed from the official line, the prosecution coached Tojo so as not to implicate Hirohito.
Emperor’s New Year’s poem
Why would General Fellers, General MacArthur, and the whole tribunal apparatus seek to shield the emperor? During World War II, MacArthur and the US Intelligence bought the Japanese propaganda of the role of the emperor as a god, the Japanese public as a family with him at the head, and all members of society willing to give their lives for his life. That continued post-war for MacArthur who argued that if indicted there would be centuries of reprisals and social upheaval ultimately resulting in Communism.
When the Japan’s chief justice of the Supreme Court of Japan publicly agreed with liberal critics that the emperor should have taken blame for the war right after it ended, and a large portion of the public was in favor of abdication, and the emperor himself had conflicted feelings, it was Fellers who came out of retirement to vouch for the emperor. Ultimately, even though his closest adviser Kido Koichi was jailed and advised abdication and taking responsibility for Japanese deaths, Hirohito did not abdicate, but remained head of state until his death in 1989.
Some Americans who believed the propaganda of the emperor’s role of head of the war effort did not want him to be put on trial, abdicate, or even express guilt over the consequences of that very role. While you could make claims that Americans’ aim was countering the Soviet Union, how Hirohito survived has a lot to do with the mystique of his position, an aura cultivated by centuries of reverence, culture, and, yes, literature. As in Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, the Emperor continued the tradition of a New Year’s poem (a waka) and in 1946 wrote the following:
Courageous pine
Enduring snow
that is piling up
color unchanging
Let people be like this
For all the external change and cultural missteps of Meiji, Taisho, and Showa periods, the emperor was defiant. Fellers and MacArthur fell for and fell in love with the nobility of the Japanese character and the office of the emperor and let that cloud their official function as just arbiters of the peace. They were enamored with that uniqueness that Japan sought to express to itself and outside through culture. To Fellers and MacArthur, this uniqueness made it seem that universal claims of justice did not apply to the head of state, the culturally identified head of the Japanese nation. This tug of war between claims of uniqueness and universality was present in the drafting and adoption of the new Japanese Constitution.
1947 Constitution
The new Constitution was written by a committee of Americans from the General Headquarters of the Occupation who stripped down the German legal structure of the Meiji Constitution and added principles from the Anglo-American tradition. Japanese interest groups were not immediately aware of this and were simply presented with a translated copy. A major point of disagreement was the status of the emperor.
President Truman said that “the Emperor system must disappear if Japan is ever to be really democratic”. Some Japanese groups agreed, but MacArthur pushed back. In his famous “declaration of humanity” prior, Emperor Hirohito declared that the “Emperor was not divine.” However, the word he used meant “divine manifest in human form” not “divine” or “god” exactly. It allowed that the imperial house was descendant from the deities (kami).
The emperor (and his calendar and ceremonial role) remained. Sovereignty went to the people. But in an act of linguistic subterfuge, the word for “people” was translated into Japanese as “nationals.” The term “nationals” excluded the foreign-born or progeny of immigrants born in Japan; these groups do not have the same rights as children with a documented Japanese ancestry, so-called bloodline, even if they were born outside of Japan.
The Constitution, however, remains a progressive document with universal suffrage, the right to education (building on the success of Meiji policy), the abolition of the feudal system, the mandate that all official documents be written in colloquial Japanese, and the famous Article 9 calling on the renunciation of War:
Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan (1947). Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
1947 Constitution
The Japanese public took to the Constitution readily and had called for colloquial Japanese, right to education, right to work among other reforms through political interest groups. The US government and the Japanese bureaucracy was concerned when antiwar groups cited Article 9 to halt re-militarization of Japan at the start of the Korean War.