Defeat and Occupation — Setting Out from the Ashes

At noon on August 15, 1945, people bowed their heads to listen to a static-laden voice coming from the radio. The war was over — for many Japanese, it was a moment in which relief, emptiness, and a deep sense of loss all mingled together. Textbooks record this day as the end of the war, and on the next page the story of democratization and reconstruction has already begun. Yet around that single day fall heavy shadows: the weight of decisions that might have been reversed, and the structure that made reversal impossible. And what had ended was only the fighting. From here, an unfamiliar stretch of time called occupation was about to begin.

The Hesitation That Lasted Too Long Before Acceptance

The Potsdam Declaration, by which the Allies urged Japan to surrender, was issued on July 26, 1945. Yet Japan did not finally accept it until August 14, about three weeks later. What was happening during this empty stretch of time?

Right after the declaration was issued, the Japanese government did not formally reject it; instead, without making its stance clear, it announced that it would ‘ignore’ the declaration. There is debate over how these words were conveyed abroad, but the result was that no thread of negotiation was opened. Then, on August 6, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and on the 9th on Nagasaki, while in between, on the 8th, the Soviet Union broke the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact and entered the war against Japan. As several catastrophes overlapped, the leadership was at last driven toward a decision.

Even so, acceptance was not easily settled. The greatest point of contention was the preservation of the national polity — whether the form of the nation centered on the Emperor could be protected. On August 10, Emperor Showa endorsed a draft of acceptance conditioned on preserving the national polity, but the Allied reply (the Byrnes Reply) was taken as not explicitly guaranteeing the continuation of the imperial institution, and opposition flared up again, centered on the military. In the end, at the Imperial Conference of August 14, acceptance was decided by the Emperor’s own will (the so-called ‘sacred decision’). The ‘structure in which no one could decide’ that we have seen up to now delayed the decision until the very last moment — and we must take seriously how heavily its cost piled up across these three weeks.

The Jewel Voice Broadcast, and the Day That Did Not End

From late on the night of August 14 into the morning of the 15th, a final upheaval over ending the war was unfolding. Some young officers who opposed acceptance plotted a coup to block the broadcast (the Kyujo Incident). There were also moves to seize the recorded disc of the Emperor’s own voice, but these ended in failure. This episode tells us that the decision that moved history was not of one mind until the very last moment.

Then, at noon on August 15, the Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War flowed across the nation as the Jewel Voice Broadcast. Because of its difficult phrasing and the poor state of the recording, it is said that not everyone could fully grasp its meaning on the spot. Even so, many people realized that the war was over. Some broke down in tears, some gazed up at the sky in a daze, some felt quietly relieved — how it was received differed from person to person. At the front, confusion over disarmament continued, and the hardships of soldiers and civilians left in distant territories were, if anything, only now beginning in earnest. Beyond this day spread a reality that the single word ‘the war’s end’ conceals.

It should be noted that the instrument of surrender was formally signed on September 2, aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. The war’s end as a ceremony was placed half a month after the Jewel Voice Broadcast.

Occupation, a Time Never Experienced Before

When the war ended, Japan experienced occupation by a foreign army for the first time in its history. The General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ) was placed in Tokyo, and the governance of Japan was carried out under MacArthur. Formally it was an occupation by the Allied Powers, but in substance it can be said to have been led by the United States.

What GHQ pursued were two great directions: demilitarization and democratization. The military was dismantled, people involved in the war were removed from public office (the purge of public officials), and the mechanisms of politics, economy, and society were reorganized one after another. On the economic front, the zaibatsu were dissolved — the great combines such as Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda, which had held vast wealth — and land reform was carried out, buying up land from landlords and distributing it to tenant farmers. These were also attempts to break the concentrated economic structure that had supported the war, and to spread wealth and rights to a greater number of people.

And the greatest change of all was the new constitution. Promulgated on November 3, 1946, and enforced on May 3, 1947, the Constitution of Japan made its pillars the principle that sovereignty resides with the people, the positioning of the Emperor as a symbol, and the renunciation of war (Article 9). It was also in this period that women were granted the right to vote, and that many female legislators were elected in the first postwar general election. Regarding the role GHQ played in the process of the constitution’s establishment, there is a view that it was ‘imposed’ and a view that it was an interaction with reform proposals on the Japanese side and movements among the public at the time, and assessments remain divided to this day.

What the Tokyo Trial Asked, and What It Left Unasked

Another heavy event that occupied Japan was made to face was the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the so-called Tokyo Trial, which judged the responsibility of the war’s leaders. Held from May 1946 to November 1948, it handed down judgments of death by hanging on seven men including Hideki Tojo, and life imprisonment and other sentences on many others.

This trial is greatly distinguished by the point that it judged the individual leaders who started the war under a new concept, ‘crimes against peace.’ To put individual rather than state responsibility on trial before an international court — that was a world-historical attempt, alongside the Nuremberg Trials. At the same time, there was criticism from the outset over its legitimacy. Justice Pal, the Indian representative, is known for raising questions about judging past acts under laws made after the fact (the problem of ex post facto law) and about the very structure of victors judging the vanquished, and for arguing for the acquittal of all the defendants.

What matters here is not to fix one’s assessment of this trial in a one-sided way. To grasp it as ‘Japan alone was unjustly judged,’ or to grasp it as ‘everything was a completely correct judgment,’ both simplify a complex reality. There is also the point that Justice Pal’s opinion was a question about the legitimacy of the procedure, and did not justify Japan’s war. The significance of the trial in making Japan’s responsibility as an aggressor visible, and the problems left in its procedure — to see both without separating them is indispensable to understanding the starting point of the postwar era.

And the fresh start from the ruins began while bearing such heavy questions. Amid lives in which homes were burned, kin were lost, and even that day’s food was hard to come by, people nonetheless tried to face forward and live anew. Occupation, reform, trial — the several years in which these were layered together became the foundation that shaped the outline of present-day Japan.

The war did, indeed, end. Yet what it left behind — as the memory of the war dead, as relations with neighboring countries, and as the form of the constitution — remains with us still, eighty years on. In the final installment, we will once again look anew at what this long war left us.