In 2005 the translated diary of Admiral Yonai, the Japanese Navy Minister and member of the Supreme Council, was released. In the days between the Imperial Saiden (Sacred Decision) to accept the terms of Potsdam and before it was announced, Yonai wrote that “It may be inappropriate to put it in this way, but the atomic bombs and the Russian entry into the war were in a sense, God’s gifts…Now we can end the war without making it clear that we have to end the war because of the domestic situation.. I have long been advocating the conclusion [of the war], not because I am afraid of the enemy’s attacks or because of the atomic bombs, the most important reason is my concern over the domestic situation.” 

The atomic weapons offered an external excuse for surrender, allowing Japan to end the war without explicitly revealing that the domestic situation had become untenable. Emperor Hirohito, once considered a demigod, was losing public support for continuing the war amid growing hostility toward him and his government. The official propaganda was losing traction in the face of unopposed allied bombers and fighters over the home islands, growing food shortages – the “domestic situation.” Yet even then the general public did not know the extent to the “situation.”

Yoshio Kodama was not a government leader during World War II, but an ultranationalist and powerful political fixer who operated behind the scenes. During the war, he was an agent for Japanese military intelligence and amassed a fortune through smuggling and procuring materials for the Imperial Japanese Navy. He had a unique view of the war from the ground level to halls of power. After the war he wrote a memoir, I Was Defeated, in which he wrote:

Although the nation was resigned to the fact that the decisive battle on the Japanese home islands could not be avoided . . . they still thought that the Combined Fleet of the Japanese Navy was undamaged and expected that a deadly blow would be inflicted sometime either by the Japanese Navy or the land-based Kamikaze suicide planes upon the enemy’s task forces. Neither did the nation know that the Combined Fleet had already been destroyed and neither could they imagine the pitiful picture of rickety Japanese training planes loaded with bombs headed unwavering towards an imposing array of enemy [aircraft carriers and battleships].

In history, after the dropping of the second atomic weapon on Nagasaki, Emperor Hirohito called an Imperial Council, a meeting of serious consequence. The Supreme War Council was deeply divided yet, for the first time, they worked on terms to end the war. After a prolonged discussion the Council was divided. They agreed that the war needed to end, but they disagreed with the conditions of surrender. The post August 1945 in History outlines the divisions between the group that would only accept the Potsdam Declaration for unconditional surrender with four conditions vs. the group that wanted to accept with the only condition being the retention of the Imperial House (kokutai). At the August 9/10 Imperial Council, when all had spoken, the Emperor had the final word. He then announced his support of the “one condition” offer. He said that Japan must “bear the unbearable.” One can only imagine that Hirohito was referring to the psychological impact of defeat after so many years of propaganda.

Without the availability of atomic weapons, as this series has assumed, and as the war continued it would be the civilian people of Japan that truly have to  “bear the unbearable.” But it would not be limited to the psychological. The impacts would also be physiological and sociological at the national and the personal levels.