Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (124 page)

After the war, the emperor advanced a short and misleading explanation of these Soviet negotiations:

Hirohito failed to mention how limited Japan's territorial concessions to the Soviets were for staying out of the war compared to what the Allies were offering Stalin for coming into it.
⁵⁶
Neither did he mention earlier efforts, under Foreign Minister Shigemitsu, to promote peace between the Soviets and the Nazis.
⁵⁷
Japan's Soviet policy had aimed at maintaining “tranquillity” in relations with
Moscow, promoting a Nazi-Soviet peace, and setting the Allies against one another. That policy had begun to change during 1943, and by late 1944—after he had learned that Stalin had labeled Japan an “aggressor state”
⁵⁸
—Hirohito had approved a vague proposal for sending a special envoy to Moscow. By the time the Suzuki government decided to ask for Soviet good offices in ending the war, Soviet policy had shifted from maintaining neutrality to awaiting the right moment to attack Japan. But Hirohito paid no attention to the recent history of Japan-Soviet relations. He misread the evidence because it conflicted with his goal of negotiating an end to the war that would guarantee an authoritarian imperial system with himself and the empowered throne at the center.

Continuing with his postwar explanation of Japan's overtures to Moscow, the emperor added: “However, even when it came to the beginning of July [1945], there was no answer from the Soviet Union. For our part, we had to decide this matter prior to the Potsdam Conference…. For that reason, I consulted Suzuki and decided to cancel the Hirota-Malik talks and negotiate directly with the Soviets.”
⁵⁹

Leaving aside the fact that Ambassador Malik, not the emperor, effectively ended the talks, Hirohito in early July did indeed become more concerned about negotiating an end to the war that would preserve the imperial prerogatives. Around July 12 he and Kido began pushing to open secret direct negotiations with the Soviets by sending Prince Konoe to Moscow as the emperor's special envoy. A few days earlier, however, in a July 9 report to the throne, former foreign minister Arita Hachir
had pointed out that, “There is almost no chance of our bringing Chungking, Yenan, and the Soviets to our side, or of using them to improve our position…. [I]f we try to do this, we will merely be wasting precious time in a situation where every minute counts.” Judge the big picture coolly and rationally, pleaded Arita in his audience with the emperor, for “merely to call for
absolute victory will produce nothing.” In order to make “the divine land…imperishable,” we must “bear the unbearable.”
⁶⁰

More important, since June 8 Ambassador Sat
in Moscow had been telling T
g
it was unimaginable that the Soviets would ever help Japan.
⁶¹
On July 13 Sat
warned T
g
that although “we are overawed that the dispatch of a special envoy is the imperial wish,” it would not mean anything at all to the Soviets, and would only cause trouble for the imperial house, “if the Japanese government's proposal brought by him is limited to an enumeration of previous concepts, lacking in concreteness.”
⁶²

On July 20—one day after Sat
had notified Tokyo that the Soviets had indeed refused to accept the special envoy “on the grounds that the mission is not specific” (just as he had been saying they would all along), the ambassador sent his most emotional telegram yet to T
g
, summing up his feelings about the whole situation. Sat
(like Arita on July 9 and Prince Konoe since February) urged immediate surrender because the state was on the verge of being destroyed. “[T]his matter of protecting the national polity [
kokutai
],” Sat
emphasized, could be considered as “one of a domestic nature and therefore excluded from the terms of a peace treaty.”
⁶³
In other words there was no need for Japan to insist on securing a foreign guarantee of its monarchy: The
kokutai
, meaning for him the emperor's prerogatives, could be saved without delaying surrender, and restored later when Japan once again became independent.