Tokyo says it will surrender, but only if the Emperor stays on his throne
Five days after an atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima and one day after a second fell on Nagasaki, Tokyo finally answered the Potsdam Declaration. On August 10, 1945, the Japanese government announced it had cabled the Allies accepting the surrender terms Truman, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek had issued two weeks earlier, but only on one condition: the message must not "comprise any demand that prejudices the prerogatives of the Emperor as sovereign ruler." Foreign Minister Shigenori Tōgō's offer left Washington to decide whether a conditional surrender was surrender at all.
The declaration was largely an American document, drafted to keep Washington's strategic options open in the Pacific and to head off Soviet influence in postwar East Asia. Truman's insistence on unconditional surrender, issued days after he learned the atomic bomb worked, set the terms America would use to justify Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and seven years of occupation reshaping Japan into a democracy under MacArthur.
QWhose handwriting actually appears on Chiang Kai-shek's and Churchill's signatures on the Potsdam Declaration?
Both signatures belong to Harry Truman. Chiang Kai-shek never attended the Potsdam Conference since he wasn't invited to the Berlin suburb where it was held, so his agreement was sought by telegram, with Ambassador Hurley delivering the message in Chongqing on July 25 and Chiang's reply arriving at 11:05 a.m. the next day. Churchill had already flown home to Northolt on July 25 and authorized the British text before resigning as Prime Minister that same evening. Truman simply wrote out both men's names on the final document himself. The declaration's three signatures were really the work of one man's pen in one room in Germany.
QWhy did Stalin refuse to put his name on the Potsdam Declaration alongside Truman and Churchill?
The Soviet Union was still bound by a 1941 neutrality pact with Japan and technically not at war, so Stalin declined to endorse the ultimatum at Potsdam itself. He instead promised to subscribe to it once the Soviets entered the Pacific war, which he'd scheduled for early August. Moscow finally agreed to adhere to the declaration on August 8, and Stalin unilaterally abrogated the neutrality pact the next day, launching a three-front invasion of Manchuria the same day Nagasaki was bombed. The timing traced back to a secret commitment Stalin had made to the Allies at Yalta back in February. Japan's own ambassador in Moscow had been counting on Soviet mediation that never had a chance to materialize.
QWhat did Emperor Hirohito's surrender broadcast reveal about Japan that had nothing to do with the war's terms?
The August 15 radio address marked the first time many ordinary Japanese citizens had ever heard their Emperor's actual voice. Hirohito had been treated as a distant, almost sacred figure throughout the war, rarely if ever addressing the public directly through mass media. Foreign Ministry official Toshikazu Kase had earlier recorded that Hirohito, upon first reviewing the Potsdam terms, said 'without hesitation that he deemed it acceptable in principle,' well before the government's public posture caught up to that private view. The broadcast itself became as much a national event for its novelty as for its content, introducing millions of subjects to a voice they had only imagined.
