How wars end

The summer of 1944 made it apparent that Japan’s defeat had become unavoidable. Saipan fell into American hands in July. The empire’s southern resource line, which was the vital maritime route that linked the home islands to raw materials as well as oil from Southeast Asia that fuelled its war, was damaged. Senior naval figures knew that the chance to turn the tide back in Japan’s favour had become extremely low and there was no route back to parity, especially after the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October of the same year. But even then, Japan’s leaders did not admit defeat and surrender for another year. Surely, the delay in bringing hostilities to a close had many causes and reasons, with some aspects remaining unclear even now. Japan had launched its war with no real plan to exit it in the first place. Even as there were no more viable military options left, its leaders insisted on a political order that put the preservation of its imperial institution, its emperor system, or kokutai (national polity) above anything else.

Japan’s weakness was visible even before Pearl Harbor, when it attacked the enemy with no confidence that it would achieve a military victory over the United States, even when Emperor Hirohito was assured that it would and made to believe that war was the only way forward. The ‘Draft Proposal for Hastening the End of the War,’ adopted at the Liaison Conference on 15 November 1941 between Imperial Headquarters (Japan’s highest military decision-making body) and the Japanese government, assumed that Japan would secure important areas in the south, ensuring it would have access to critical materials. It would then, with Germany and Italy, Japan’s allies, force Britain to submit. These initial achievements in the ‘holy war’ would be used to compel Chiang Kai-shek into submission as well. But all this was essentially to break the United States’s will to continue the war and to bring the conflict to a draw. According to this proposal, written by junior officers but approved by the high command with barely a change,  German victory in Europe was indispensable. There was no other independent path out of the conflict, reflecting a system that could set the war in motion but did not know how to bring it to an end.

When the limitations of the plan became startlingly obvious, Japan found itself already depleted. From the 1930s until the early years of the war, many sensible officers as well as diplomats who had advocated for caution and realistic planning in the endgame were already pushed aside. Effective decision-making power was largely in the hands of those who were bound to the original choice for war by 1945, leaving little flexibility to adapt when the strategy showed no way out.

As Japan suffered more and more military setbacks and defeats, at Midway in June 1942 and then the Marianas, the idea of one ‘decisive blow’ that would damage the United States severely so that Japan could secure peace on the most favourable terms, short of unconditional surrender, gained weight. Even Emperor Hirohito believed that it would be difficult to begin talks unless they showed some achievements in battle. He later told his aide, Tajima Michiji, that he disliked the idea of an unconditional surrender that was imposed on Japan and wished to seize a good opportunity to bring peace quickly, but was just waiting for the right moment when Japan might win. Even when no such decisive blows could be struck in the Battle of Okinawa, which was brutally fought in April, the idea of a single decisive blow persisted, albeit in another form, Ketsu-go, ‘decisive home island battle.’ But the navy had lost nearly all its warships; it had no forces that could meaningfully contribute to a battle, the leadership concluded. Even the army’s confidence was beginning to fade.

When Prime Minister Suzuki Kantarō formed his cabinet in April 1945, in an attempt to keep the government together so it could still take decisions, he tried not to provoke the army publicly. But privately, he sought a diplomatic exit. Feeling impatient and deeply frustrated at the political and military leadership’s failure to move Japan toward peace, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Kido Kōichi, acting as the emperor’s political adviser, had drafted a war-termination plan in early June. With the emperor’s approval, he worked to align the six leaders – Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Army Minister, Navy Minister, Chief of the Army General Staff and Chief of the Navy General Staff – behind the shift to Soviet mediation. More than for diplomatic reasons, Kido backed the Soviet track for domestic ones. The army would not countenance a direct approach to London or Washington. A Soviet channel was the only route they might accept while protecting the imperial institution. On 12 July, the Japanese government finally took the decision to instruct the Moscow Ambassador, Satō Naotake. Later that month, Emperor Hirohito requested that Prince Konoe Fumimaro be sent as special envoy to carry the emperor’s letter asking the Soviet Union to mediate. It was an ironic choice when one considers that it was Konoe who had warned against concessions to the Soviet Union and intended to prevent the conclusion of peace through the Soviet Union earlier. Even so, the leadership could not essentially settle on what to offer to either Moscow or the Allies, making the gulf between civilian pessimists and army optimists visible.

There were also reports coming one by one from the battlefield. General Umezu Yoshijirō, Army Chief of Staff, reported from Manchuria that units were depleted. Admiral Hasegawa Kiyoshi, who was dispatched by the emperor himself as an inspector, briefed him on the Navy’s desperate state: almost all major fleet units were lost. How could they possibly defend the homeland like this? Reports from within the imperial family, too – notably from Prince Morihiro Higashikuni, intelligence officer with the 36th Army and the emperor’s son-in-law – conveyed to the emperor that they were short of even basic equipment. Such assessments fed into Hirohito’s decision to move away from the last-ditch military solution.

But why insist on the Soviet route? Tokyo lacked the knowledge that Stalin had planned to attack Japan at Yalta in February 1945, within two to three months of Germany’s surrender. A kind of wishful thinking that qualitative differences in interest between the Soviet Union and the Anglo-Americans could be exploited, played into the decision. Japan also had a Neutrality Pact with the Soviet Union. When the absence of open hostilities was read together with Stalin’s perceived brokerage role, it was sensible to try Moscow. Even when fragmentary intelligence hinted at potential Soviet hostility, because it could not be confirmed, hope survived. When Hirohito anxiously asked whether Japan’s request had truly reached Stalin and Molotov, he was told it had and that they had passed it to Truman and Churchill as well. He ‘appeared satisfied’ that Japan could now ‘press forward and speak in depth with the Soviets,’ according to the lines in Foreign Minister Tōgō Shigenori’s diary that were previously blacked out and recently deciphered. The emperor would want to stay on the Moscow course that he advocated, even after the Potsdam Declaration of 26 July. Stalin had not signed the Potsdam Declaration so there was still a chance, Japan’s foreign minister judged, not knowing Stalin was engaging Japan until Soviet preparations for war were complete. After all, it had taken a huge effort and time to form the policy. To scrap it and create a new one would require a significant amount of time and effort which Japan lacked.

It was not that there were no other alternatives. An international central bank hub based in Basel was used as a backchannel to US intelligence in addition to the neutral legations in Switzerland as well as Sweden. There was also a Vatican conduit by mid-1945. Tokyo noted all of them but did not pursue them with urgency. It was Emperor Hirohito’s misjudgement to fixate on Soviet mediation that closed other paths to peace and squandered what little time remained.

Hopes disappeared in August 1945 with the atomic bombings and the Soviet Union’s entry into the war against Japan in violation of the Neutrality Pact. The discussion over conditions for accepting the Potsdam Declaration had split the Japanese leadership in two. When they failed to consolidate opinions and reach an agreement, the Emperor’s seidan (‘sacred decision’) was invoked twice – on 10 and 14 August – to break the deadlock and accept the Potsdam Declaration. Even then, the Kyūjō Incident, an attempted coup to prevent surrender, saw rebels who wanted to continue the war cut the Imperial Palace’s telephone lines and hunt for the gyokuon recording, the emperor’s pre-recorded surrender address (‘Jewel Voice Broadcast’), which was to be aired at noon on 15 August. Only Grand Chamberlain Tokugawa Yoshihiro’s concealment of the discs in a plain safe and his relentless endurance under rough handling later allowed the emperor’s broadcast to be aired, showing how narrow the margin remained. Nonetheless, as new studies show, the very narrative through which postwar Japan remembered ‘15 August’ obscured the fact that war with the Soviet Union and its consequences ran on beyond that date.

Looking back, had Japan ended the war earlier, the damage from the air raids on the mainland, the tragedy of the Battle of Okinawa, the devastation of the atomic bombings, as well as the horrors brought by the Soviet entry into the war along with the subsequent Siberian internment could all have been avoided. But it had structured its war to preclude a timely exit. With an endgame depending on victory in Europe, a fixation on a decisive battle long after it was unsustainable, a cabinet unable to agree on terms, a palace that could broker a pivot but insisted on only one diplomatic channel, Soviet mediation, rather than trying alternative neutral channels, and the priority of protecting the imperial institution narrowing the space for sensible and timely decision-making, the reckoning only came by force of events.

Fifty years on, the lesson remains the same beyond Japan’s shores: when the terms for ending a war are left undefined, a state can drift towards defeat, with the choice of peace arriving only when the power to shape it has gone.