Alex WellersteinVerified account

Contrary to the notion that the Japanese high command was fanatically ignorant of this, they were not. They understood the war was not going in their favor, and they had no real pretensions of "winning." The question for them was: what to do about it? How to avoid losing it all?

The militarists, who dominated the Japanese cabinet, believed that they could bleed out the US by making a land invasion costly. This is the "fanatical"/"suicidal" stuff, and it's no joke. The idea was that the US would tire of war, and either leave or settle on better terms.

The non-militarists, including the foreign ministry and the Emperor, didn't love the sound of that. They were exploring ideas of a "diplomatic" resolution of the war — e.g., finding a way to surrender on terms the Japanese could feel at least somewhat good about.

What this meant in practice was that the Japanese were trying, through two separate avenues, to court the still-neutral USSR, with the hope that they could act as an intermediary between the US and Japan in negotiating such an end to the war.

What would that look like? We don't really know, because the USSR never gave the Japanese an audience, because they were already committed to joining the war against them, in exchange for territory. But we'll come to that in a moment.

The core component of what the "peace" faction of the Japanese high command definitely wanted was a preservation of the Emperor system, and guarantees that the Emperor wouldn't be tried as a war criminal.

When I explain this to US audiences, I emphasize that this is kind of like insisting that the US be able to retain its Constitution: it's foundational to the concept of the nation. It was seen as absolutely core to Japanese identity, history, and nationhood; i.e., non-negotiable.

Separate from that, they floated a few other ideas of things they might get to "keep," such as foreign territories and the like. So again, we don't really know what they wanted. It wasn't as simple as an easy guarantee of the Emperor's safety, but that was the core piece.