Alex WellersteinVerified account

"Other": probably played a role in the decision of the Japanese to accept unconditional surrender, but it is hard to disentangle their effect from other events that happened simultaneously. (AKA the annoying historian answer: "it's too complicated for a simple yes/no!")

A good answer. :) I know it’s a forced binary but it’s reflective of some of what is coming out of some my written data & I wanted to poke at that in an interactive situation to see what responses would be. Thank you for voting! BTW, I DM’d you a CFP of potential interest.

Side note- did the Japanese accept unconditional surrender? The Byrnes note?

They offered conditional surrender on August 10th. The US rejected this and dropped some more conventional bombs on them while they had an attempted coup. Then on August 14th the Emperor gave his radio broadcast accepting unconditional surrender.

I thought the US allowed one condition, that Emperor Hirohito be kept as a figurehead? From what I read, the US felt they had no time to reject that condition because the Soviets were cutting through Korea like butter, after having conquered Manchuria in less than a week.

They required and accepted unconditional surrender and then, later decided to allow him as a figurehead. Which is to say: if they knew they were going to do that (it isn't clear they did), they COULD have offered conditional surrender (and maybe gotten it sooner), but didn't.

My understanding was that Byrnes Note comment about ultimate form of Japanese gov being chosen by Japanese was nod to keeping emperor as Japanese were unlikely to dump Him?

It is deliberately vague, but the Japanese were worried that the Emperor would be tried as a war criminal, for example. The Byrnes note deliberately does not diverge from Potsdam which deliberately does not clarify these issues.