Why did the Japanese surrender in World War II? If your answer is because they were nuked twice,
you may have only ever heard America’s side of the story. But the Americans were the ones who
dropped the bombs, not the ones who dealt with the repercussions. So even though the
nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unprecedented, they were not the sole reason
Japan ultimately surrendered. In this video, we’re going to talk about what happened after
the bombs were dropped and what ultimately led to the end of the war in the Pacific.
In the summer of 1945, the war between Imperial Japan and the Allies raged on,
long after Germany’s defeat, and both sides were exhausted. On July 26 1945,
the United States, Great Britain, and China signed the Potsdam Declaration, calling for
Japan’s unconditional surrender. Refusal would bring “prompt and utter destruction.”
Publicly, Japan was trying to preserve its reputation of fighting until the bitter end.
But behind the scenes, the Japanese knew they were screwed, so they met in secret with the Soviets,
who were publicly neutral in the Pacific Theater. Japan tried to negotiate a more favorable deal
before giving up the fight. What the Japanese didn’t know was the Soviets were two-timing them.
They had no intention of giving Japan anything. In fact, they wanted to take from Japan.
The Soviets planned to attack Japanese forces in Korea and Manchuria to gain
unfettered access to the Pacific Ocean. This would have been horrible for Japan,
which relied heavily on oil and other raw materials imported from Manchuria.
There was no way Japan could have handled a Soviet invasion, and the Soviets knew it.
The Soviets also knew that the Allies wouldn’t accept separate or conditional
peace treaties with Japan. So they strung Japan along and gave the Japanese false
hope of reaching a favorable surrender that the Allies would accept. They did this to
prolong the war as long as they could, weakening Japan just that much more.
But America wanted to end the war. And when Japan gave no comment to
the Potsdam Declaration, America went nuclear.
The Yanks bombed Hiroshima at 08:15 in the morning local time on August 6 1945, completely leveling
the city. They brought Nagasaki to its knees three days later, on August 9th. Now, despite
what you may think, the damage the nukes caused wasn’t the worst Japan sustained during the war.
The Americans had been conducting air raids for years, obliterating 66 Japanese cities. In fact,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were selected as targets because they were two on
a very short list of places the Americans hadn’t attacked already.
Scientists in the United States wanted to test the bombs on untouched cities.
In reality, some Allied air raids caused far much more damage than either atomic bomb.
In Hiroshima, by the end of the year, 140,000
people had died because of the bombs. Conversely, the US killed 100,000
people in a single night during an air raid in Tokyo. If you were to rank US air raids
against Japan in terms of area destroyed in a single attack, Hiroshima actually falls
sixth. If we’re ranking the attacks in terms of percentage of the city destroyed, it ranks 17th.
Regarding the impacts of the atomic bombs,
the director of Asian Studies at Tokyo’s Temple University, Jeffrey Kingston, said,
“If you look at it from the perspective of the Japanese military, it doesn’t really
make a big difference whether people are dying from fire bombing or atomic
bombs … it is [just] two additional city centers that are destroyed.”
The bombing of Nagasaki wasn’t even the Japanese leaders’ primary concern that
day. It was the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria. This,
more than anything, marked the end for the Japanese.
In the afternoon of August 9th,
following the Soviet declaration of war and American nuclear attack,
the six-man Japanese cabinet met to discuss the possibility of unconditional surrender.
In the end, the vote was split three-three. The cabinet was afraid and confused. Those
for surrendering argued that the destruction of the Japanese armed forces and Japanese
people was inevitable. The US had bombs capable of wiping out entire cities,
but that wasn’t the only factor to consider.
Fighting the Americans alone was something the Japanese still felt they could manage,
even after the bombs. What tipped the scale was the Soviets. Japan simply didn’t have the
capacity to defend itself from two major powers at once, especially because the Soviet invasion
of Manchuria had severed Japan’s access to the resources it would require to stay in the fight.
The cabinet members against surrender didn’t have much of an argument. They
didn’t want to surrender because, well, that’s just not what the Japanese did.
In the end, Emperor Hirohito made the deciding vote, choosing to surrender. Though he cited
the bombing as the deciding factor in his public address, he said this to the Japanese military
:“The Soviet Union has entered the war against us,
[and] to continue the war [...] would [endanger] the very foundation of the Empire's existence.”
When Japan sent its notice of surrender to the Allies, it was not quite as unconditional as the
Allies had wanted. The Japanese wanted to keep their system of government, Emperor and all.
Just after midnight on August 12th, a dispatch from a San Francisco radio
station relayed information from the Allies to Japan. It said that they
planned to install a military occupation in Japan, similar to the one in Germany.
While those working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs interpreted this as the Allies simply
restricting Japan’s sovereignty, the members of the Staff Office in the Ministry of War
deemed it enslavement. These officers saw only one way out: a good old-fashioned coup d'état.
They went to War Minister Kohrechika Anami to ask him if he would help them put a stop to the
Potsdam Declaration. General Anami, considered the most powerful person in Japan after the Emperor,
didn’t give these officers a straight answer. The officers knew their coup wouldn’t get
very far without General Anami, but they were prepared to take action with or without him.
The leader of the coup, Major Kenji Hatanaka, spent the next couple of days planning and
gathering allies. On the night of August 13th, an Imperial Conference was held to officiate
the surrender. Hatanaka and his supporters tried to convince the leaders present at
the conference to join their coup and stop the surrender, but they were told that it
was the Emperor’s will, and what’s done is done. So, Katakana set his coup in motion.
The goal was simple: occupy the Imperial Palace. The Palace was aware of an incoming coup, so
it doubled its defense force of Imperial Guards. What the Palace didn’t know was that Hatanaka had
already won over the leader of the 2nd Imperial Guard. At about 01:00 in the morning on the 15th
of August, Hatanaka and his men surrounded the Palace, then stormed in and tried to convince the
commander of the 1st Imperial guard, Lieutenant General Takeshi Mori, to join them. Without Mori’s
support, the rebellion had no hope. Mori refused. In response, Hatanaka killed him. His rebels also
killed Mori’s brother-in-law, Michinori Shiraishi, who was in a meeting with Mori at the time.
With Mori out of the way, Hatanaka used Mori’s official stamp to send a fake order
to the 1st Imperial Guard, requesting their aid in protecting the Emperor.
In reality, Hatanaka wanted to place the Emperor under house arrest for betraying the nation.
Hatanaka and his men blocked all of the Palace’s exits and detained 18 people over the course of
the night. They spent hours searching for the pre-recorded surrender speech, to no avail.
While Hatanaka was fruitlessly searching for the recordings, another group of rebels left to
find Prime Minister Suzuki, and assassinate him. Luckily for Suzuki, his chief secretary had warned
him about the incoming rebels, and he escaped just minutes before they arrived to take his life. With
no one to murder, the rebels set fire to the prime minister’s house and also the chief secretary’s.
Less than two hours in, the coup was already falling apart. Hatanaka was informed that the
Eastern District Army was on its way to stop him. He and his men didn’t have the firepower to fight
the army, so in a last-ditch effort to rally support, he requested 10 minutes on national
radio to explain himself. He actually went to the radio station, but they told him to get lost.
At dawn, the Eastern District Army arrived and took the palace, completely dismantling the coup.
Hatanaka rode through the streets of Tokyo, throwing out leaflets to explain their actions.
Just before the Emperor’s surrender speech was broadcast at 11:00 AM on August 15, Hatanaka
put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. On his body was a hand-written note which read,
“I have nothing to regret now that the dark clouds have disappeared from the reign of the Emperor.
What do you think? Do you still believe Japan surrendered because of the nukes?
Would you have joined the coup if you were a Japanese soldier? Tell us down in the comments.