Reply to Tsuyoshi Hasegawa

My criticism was intended to illustrate interpretive pitfalls with incomplete, ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory evidence. In the section noted, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa carried his argument beyond what I understood his evidence to bear, most clearly in his use of a passage from Sakomizu Hisatsune’s 1964 memoir that seemed to contradict his own point.

The substantive questions Hasegawa presents in his correspondence—was the August 7 cabinet meeting a decisive turning point for Japan’s decision to surrender, and did Foreign Minister Tōgō Shigenori switch to advocating unconditional surrender based on the Potsdam Proclamation?—call for judgments about what qualifies as significant and how much one may surmise from disparate documents. On the first point, the critical criterion for Hasegawa is whether the Hiroshima bombing caused the collective Japanese leadership through formal cabinet decision to abandon Soviet mediation as the means toward a negotiated surrender. Given his interest in emphasizing the Soviet role in Japan’s surrender, this is not surprising, but scholars have known the answer to this question for decades. Tokyo leaders did not collectively abandon Soviet mediation until the Soviets declared war a few days later, and it is clear that the army leadership in particular constituted the diehard faction.

Hasegawa’s second question is more germane because it gets at the more discrete process of policy change whereby members of the leadership confronted the inertia of war policy, gradually putting fewer and then no conditions on surrender. Whether Tōgō argued for accepting the Potsdam terms on August 7, beyond merely presenting the option, I do not know. Sadao Asada thinks so, Hasegawa thinks not. What we can discern, as Hasegawa notes, is that the option was argued for in cabinet session. He discounts the discussion because it did not result in formal abandonment of Soviet mediation, but that criterion is too blunt a measure of the bomb’s impact and it skews the analysis toward privileging the impact of Soviet war entry.

The original Japanese language from Sakomizu’s memoir suggests even more clearly that the cabinet confronted, though obviously not in the sense that it resolved, the issue: “Kakuryō no aida de wa kaku naru ue wa, sumiyaka ni Potsudamu Sengen o judaku suru hōshiki ni yotte sensō o shūketsu seshimubeshi to iu giron mo ōku deta ga . . . ” (emphasis added).¹ If we can believe Sakomizu’s memoir, then on August 7 the cabinet seriously considered immediate acceptance of Potsdam over continued pursuit of Soviet mediation, and probably several cabinet members argued so. In the face of army intransigence, one, presumably last, attempt at the Soviet mediation would seem to have been in order. The August 7 cabinet meeting was not “decisive” in the narrow sense, but the Hiroshima bombing does seem to have been decisive for some of the cabinet and to have moved cabinet sentiment significantly toward eventual surrender under Potsdam terms. Hasegawa’s scholarship is generally careful and detailed, but on this point it is misleading to imply that none of the cabinet believed a change in policy necessary.