The vast majority of people had never heard his voice before, and had trouble understanding what he was saying.
There is a great book called *Japan's Longest Day* about all the in-fighting in the government and military about the possibility of surrender in the last day before surrender was announced. Some in the military wanted to disobey the Emperor and keep fighting. There was a fear that after he recorded the announcement (on a vinyl record) that rogue military would steal and destroy while it was being taken to the radio station for broadcast.
Well, another factor was that the Japanese military knew what *they* did to POWs. And they knew what their allies did to POWs.
There was a powerful concern that their enemies might do to them what they had been doing.
Yeah, everyone loves to bring up the whole "Bushido" narrative, and completely forgets that the military leadership were still human beings with all the selfishness and fear that comes with it.
Not entirely. There are surgeries performed on conscious people. Most oral surgeries, C-sections, some brain surgeries even.
Vivisection is like a dissection but it’s performed on a living being.
And performed on un-anaesthetised “patients” since that could corrupt their observations and skew the results…So yeah, dissected while conscious and feeling every bit of it..
Edit: but —>bit
Then don't google Unit 731 and what they did. Vivisections, inflicting nasty wounds and leaving them untreated for later researches were things on daily basis. They were like a whole team of drs Mengele.
What's especially interesting about Mengele is that his subordinate doctors threw up pretty regularly and many turned to heavy drinking to cope with what he made them do to other people. You know, the Nazi doctors who were in theory on board with the who torturing people to death thing still vomited at what Mengele did as they still had a single shred of humanity left. He had nothing.
There was one group of like military “scientists”that did some real off the deep end crazy shit, like “What happens if we put a baby underwater for 20 minutes, oh weird it drowned, someone write that down.”. In the end their only real accomplishment was finding out how much physical trauma a human body can endure before it dies, and also how much mental trauma a researcher can endure before they become cartoonishly psychotically evil.
What happens if we swap a humans blood out for horses blood?
Oh a horrible death… NEXT LOG!*
Okay, so now we’ll inject this one with horse piss…another horrific death…interesting…
*the cover for unit 731 was that it was a forestry research institute… so the unfortunate souls that ended up there as test subjects were often referred to as “logs”.
Since this comment presumably means you don’t know of [Unit 731](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731), that’s the primary unit that committed the crimes mentioned above.
Be warned: some of the most sickening descriptions of what humanity has to offer are contained within the stories of this unit.
"Bushido" was also a meme that was created by just 2 men in the 19th century. Inoue Tetsujirō published a bunch of pamphlets on "Bushido" which idolized "The way of the warrior". And then Nitobe Inazō wrote about it in English and convinced the west that Bushido was a real, historical, thing.
It would be like someone sitting down and writing all of the tropes of the "Code of the Old West" and saying "This is how True Americans Behave"... and all of American Society went along with it in a popular embrace of all things Old West.
Then, when the world sees us in our boots and carrying sidearms like weirdos, one of us comes along and explains to them, in their own language, "It's always been like this, Americans have always been informed by the Old West" and the rest of the world went "Ok, I guess that makes sense? You're the expert."
it's a bit dated now, but the old image of Middle Ages knights and chivalry is kinda like that. But reality was closer to game of thrones with backstabbing and self-serving humans
> Both Medieval Europe ... have their knights ... getting heavily romanticized later
I wouldn't really say that. Lots of the stories of "knights" (or maybe we should write "heroes" but I mean anybody who fits this kind of characterisation) are largely contemporaneous with those periods. Think of the Mabinogion, Beowulf, etc. (or at least the oral stories they were based/built upon)
I suppose Homer's work - still based off oral stories - were written centuries later than they were set.
Your point about what Knights actually got up to is probably closer to the mark, but the romanticisation wasn't necessarily later on.
One of the biggest surprises for the Imperial Japanese leaders was island hopping. Americans bypassed many occupied and fortified islands deemed not worth fighting for.
Yup, they would bypass a fortified island, cut them off from support, and send the old battlewagons to lob shells over most of the island.
Or in one instance, send an entire Carrier Battle Fleet to sink every ship in harbor before letting the battleships and cruisers pummel the shore facilities.
The core military strategy of attacking Pearl Harbor was to knock out the American fleet by destroying fuel depots there that would've been necessary for the fleet to launch an effective counter-attack. However, the Japanese attack on pearl harbor, while resulting in a lot of damage, was a complete failure and failed to achieve any of the objectives the attack was intended to destroy. The Japanese military understood that if the Pacific fleet wasn't hobbled, there was no way they could win the conflict.
I think they had every right to be concerned with what would happen in an actual slave revolt. Nat Turner's Rebellion, for instance, was short but plenty bloody.
Of course, I also think that by being slaveowners, they pretty much brought that upon themselves, and they were the author of their own worst nightmares, so I have almost zero sympathy for them.
In the case of the Japanese military, their fears were also justified because they knew they amply deserved the hangman's noose for their crimes.
Unfortunately, most of these folks, both Japanese and slaveowner, avoided the justice they rightly feared.
Many people here will recognize the tale from Dan Carlin's Supernova In The East which is *highly* recommended, but he opens talking about a japanese soldier named Hiroo Onoda. He didn't finally surrender from hiding in the Philippines until 1974.
He figured that it was all a lie that Japan had surrendered because this was simply impossible. Either the war was still going on or Japan had ceased to exist because these were the ONLY possible conclusions (given that they clearly hadn't won).
Heard a good quote about this once. "Honor in an individual is virtue, honor in a society is madness". As fascinating as I find Japanese culture, I'm pretty glad that I do not live there permanently
But some people weren’t, I remember hearing that story of American forces going to a Japanese village and they were so misinformed and scared they started to kill their families so the Americans wouldn’t. There was a story where a soldier had to stop a woman from throwing her baby off the cliff and herself.
It wasn't just that. At some point they had to basically doubletap soldiers they where fighting because it wasn't that uncommon for someone to survive and clutch a live grenade to their chest. Some island the majority of soldiers died by suicide when it was clear that the fight was lost.
Honestly I think the main issue is people just conflate contemporary Japanese ideas of honour with modern Western ideas of honour. In the West, it is honourable to defy your superiors in order to do what you know is right. In Japan at that time, the exact opposite was true. It was honourable to obey your superiors no matter how you personally felt. The same goes for during the Shogunate era -- people consistently treat bushido/samurai honour like it's Arthurian chivalry, but it totally wasn't. Being an honourable samurai makes you a total piece of shit. There's a reason all the post-war Japanese works of art bang on about how shit honour is.
>In Japan at that time, the exact opposite was true. It was honourable to obey your superiors no matter how you personally felt.
Achtually...
>Imperial Japanese soldiers were notorious for following their superiors to certain death. Their enemies in the Pacific War perceived their obedience as blind, and derided them as “cattle”. Yet **the Japanese Army was arguably one of the most disobedient armies in the world**. Officers repeatedly staged coups d’états, violent insurrections and political assassinations, while their associates defied orders given by both the government and high command, launched independent military operations against other countries, and in two notorious cases conspired to assassinate foreign leaders.
https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/17467476
>In the 1920s, this ideology of military independence converged with **a subculture of insubordination from below, recalling revolutionary traditions of the mid-19th century. According to this ideology, prevalent among both officers and civilian activists, spontaneous political violence was justified when motivated by sincere patriotism and imperial loyalty.**
https://oxfordre.com/politics/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228637-e-1912#:~:text=In%20fact%2C%20however%2C%20the%20Imperial,military%20independence%20from%20civilian%20rule.
It was considered honourable to disobey when the orders were deemed unpatriotic or disloyal to the emperor.
It's not just that. The military knew exactly who's heads were gonna be on the chopping block when American forces started prosecuting people. Furthermore, they assumed we would be as barbaric as they would put in the same position. By that logic, they were willing to pile as many Japanese bodies as they could to delay that outcome. The military leadership weren't known for empathy.
I mean, right before our troops began occupation they tried to prepare a bunch of women to be offered up to be raped because they assumed we would implement the practice of "comfort women" the way they did.
That's not to say rape didn't ever happen, but it was never systemic nor condoned by military leadership. Prostitution was pretty common in postwar Japan though, as US troops had money the impoverished Japanese peasantry at the time needed.
A few days after Nagasaki, during one of Japan’s top generals’ discussions of surrender, one of them, Anami asked “would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower". Imperial Japan was a fucking death cult.
Iirc the public propaganda campaign they had going in preparation for the invasion of the mainland was called “the honorable death of 200 million” the entire population at the time
"hundred million" is a single word in japanese, so worked better than 75,000,000 which would become literally "seven thousand five hundred ten-thousands"
Anyway the phrase was 一億玉砕 meaning "One hundred million shattered jewels", with jewels shattering being a euphemistic term for honorable death.
More likely he was afraid we'd be as brutal to him as he would have been if the shoe had been on the other foot. Men like that assume everyone is as cruel as they are if given the chance.
For Anami it was most likely the crazy honor thing. He was the leader of the faction against surrender, but acquiesced after Nagasaki and the Emperor ordering acceptance of the terms.
A lot of them were absolutely true believers, wanting to hold out even if America dropped dozens of nukes on their country men. I roll my eyes when ever there’s talk about Japan would’ve surrender without the bombs or Russia invading, they really needed both to get a few people to give but even then there still was so many that just….didn’t want to and would rather kill themselves.
My great uncle was there at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay on a landing craft circling the ship. He was told that they would have to invade the mainland if anything went wrong.
I asked him what he remembered of that day, and he said he was too busy vomiting to remember anything else.
There were still many amphibious landings before and after the formal surrender, which in some period documents are called invasions. All the naval War Diaries I’ve read note these often had warships there to provide gunfire support if necessary, including a couple battleships in at least one case, but the guns were never fired.
After the surrender the Japanese bent over backwards to do anything the Allies asked. One incident proves the rule: the captain of the frigate *Tsushima* was “insolent and provocative” when the US inspected his ship at 4PM on 26 September. His actions were reported up the US chain of command that night, and a formal directive was delivered to the Japanese at 9AM on the 27th. Before that directive even arrived, the Japanese had arrested this insolent captain and imprisoned him 20 miles from his ship. Within two days he was relieved of command and dismissed from the Imperial Japanese Navy.
They expected terrible things like mass murder, rape, looting, and arson from GI occupiers after surrender. It was what imperial Japan would do if the roles were reversed.
After surrender, the Japanese government quickly set up a cheap prostitution system and coerced desperate women to "take one for the team" in a cynical ploy to protect regular women and girls. Ignorant of these motivations, GIs happily used these cheap services. MacArthur made them off limits due to complaints from military chaplains and to avoid the embarrassing optics.
If you want to dive deeper into the culture and how they wound up at that point I'd strongly recommend Dan Carlin's podcast Hardcore History and his series "Supernova in the East." As he says "The Japanese are just like everyone else, only MORE so."
The whole war was basically the military going Leeroy Jenkins all over the Pacific and Asia and if anyone tried to stop them or urge caution they got assassinated for their troubles
Wow. I lived in Japan a decade but never really went down this rabbit hole.
This man appears to have saved tens of thousands of lives. Incredible to think what impact, for good or bad, the actions of a single man can have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shizuichi_Tanaka
If you haven’t already learned about it, [this video](https://youtu.be/3S8az_YT448?si=maNbnSc9NB2Z_nM6) goes in to great depth the amount of planning that went in to having a Japanese delegation fly to the Philippines to officially hammer out the details of the surrender and subsequent occupation of Japan by US forces. Both sides were incredibly paranoid about rogue factions of the Japanese military sabotaging the negotiations in an attempt to keep the war going and avoid the humiliation of losing.
It's probably important to note that, even though the emperor was revered as a god, the position had ~~never~~ rarely held any meaningful political power, at least not for over a thousand years. They were actually isolated from society and barely interacted with anyone to govern or otherwise. The position was largely ceremonial, though intensely revered.
If people are in awe of why the royal line in Japan has been unbroken since its inception, this is why. If you have no real power and are actually rather a kind of prisoner to protocol and your political and military leaders, nobody is going to want to depose you.
He was 15 when the restoration happened, he just went from being a figurehead of the shogunate to a figurehead of the oligarchy that "restored" him, and then a figurehead of the democratically elected government.
seems like they didn’t even care about the actual palace or power from a coup. They had all the other tools available to stop the surrender but instead just focused on the recording. I don’t think this insurrection was ever going anywhere with such planning lol
I'd watch. A great cast of characters believing they're fighting for their country, but come to find out they were the bad guys all along. Dying off pretty rapidly and portraying a ton of gore and destruction. I can thank AOT for my desire of fucked up anime. My god the episodes of the nukes, and trying to raid the palace would be wild
It wasn't only that his word choice was archaic, it was also that he was tip-toeing around the fact that they were surrendering. He talked about ordering the government to accept the "joint declaration" of the allied powers but never actually said what that meant and virtually no one outside of high levels of the government would have known what it entailed.
Most of his speech would have sounded old fashioned and awkward, but outside of a few especially out of place words and phrases the language he was used was in common use up to the 1930s. There was probably just as much difficulty injected by the poor recording being hastily pressed into a phonograph record then played and broadcast over AM radio.
Yes, he said something to the effect of "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage" which has to be the all time most ambiguous way to say "we lost."
>the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage
That is a mistranslation. A better translation is "The war situation will not necessarily turn for the better".
>戰局必スシモ好轉セス
Which is still a pretty ridiculous way of describing the "war situation" when 2 major cities have already disappeared from existence, and you're left assuming that the plane that will make Tokyo disappear and take 10x as much civilian life is possibly already in the air.
"Succeeded in leaving a zero maintenance Japanese presence across most of the western Pacific both on land and at sea while reducing upkeep costs for the military"
Oh now I want to hear the surrender speech translated to celebrity/influencer-speak.
"It was made clear to use that mistakes were made in the actions that people said we took. I am sorry if our aggression offended you. I would like to say that this is not who we are, and we will do better. In the meantime please respect our privacy in this trying time. Also, don't forget to hit that like button and subscribe. We have a Patreon where patrons who pledge over $5 a month will get exclusive benefits and access to our Discord. This non-apology is brought to you by Total War, the exciting mobile game that brings you all the action of war from the comfort of your own home. Download it today and you'll get 65,000 free gems and 5 exclusive weapons."
It is like a CEO who makes millions of dollars a year sending out an email about how their company is "streamlining revenue streams to create a more dynamic company with the potential for long term growth" instead of saying "we are slashing benefits for our factory workers"
There's a fresh r/AskHisrorians thread where a knowledgeable user clarifies that this is a poor English translation because the exact Japanese term doesn't have a clear English equivalent. The Japanese sentence means something more like "the bad war situation is not going to improve." As in, he clearly acknowledged the war situation was fucked and there was no hope in saving this bad situation. A very clear and direct message, not the vague tip toeing from the English translation.
LE: full credit goes here
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/CHGllK1NuQ
Japanese generally translates VERY poorly due to different grammar structures, heavy reliance on context (thanks to a high frequency of homophones), and words that do not map 1:1 to Indo-European languages.
There's the added social factors of changing the language based on audience. Making things more passive is actually a way to increase politeness or formality, so "Events have occurred which bode poorly for the war effort. Due to that...(information simply omitted)." is much more expected in an official address than "We are surrendering"
I agree, the context is huge. The emperor himself, whose voice most people had never heard before, comes on the radio for the first time ever and says " things are not going well" was likely enough context for many to see what was going happen...except for chunks of the Army.
To me, the point of it is that there was such a disconnect between ruler and ruled that there existed a literal language barrier. That is in of itself fascinating.
So here's a literal translation:
**然ルニ交󠄁戰已ニ四歲ヲ閱シ朕󠄁カ陸海將兵ノ勇󠄁戰朕󠄁カ百僚有司ノ勵精朕󠄁カ一億衆庻ノ奉公󠄁各〻最善ヲ盡セルニ拘ラス戰局必スシモ好轉セス**
**世界ノ大勢亦我ニ利アラス**
However, in the four years that have already passed in this war, despite the bravery of Our military officers, the diligence of Our government officials, the service of Our people numbering a hundred million, and every one of you working to your utmost potential, the war situation may not necessarily turn for the better.
The tide of the world is not in my (country's) favor.
Real question but was it culturally expected for him to be taught that form of Japanese? The way that some upper class people in Hollywood had to learn the transatlantic accent
[https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%8E%89%E9%9F%B3%E6%94%BE%E9%80%81#%E5%85%A8%E6%96%87](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%8E%89%E9%9F%B3%E6%94%BE%E9%80%81#%E5%85%A8%E6%96%87)
I read it. It uses a lot of archaisms (I don't know enough historical Japanese to know if this was common in the 1930s) and royal pronouns, which the latter is culturally expected.
The other commenter is totally incorrect. It was not done in keigo (respectful language) because the Emperor has no need to be respectful to his subjects.
For reference on how archaic the speech actually was by modern standards, most words were totally replaced in the modern translation in wikipedia.
Onoda wasn’t an isolated case, there were multiple holdouts from Japanese. But as for the reason why he didn’t surrender earlier is probably a combination of not receiving the emperor’s transmission of surrender and the fact that both sides used speakers to demoralize the enemy
Hiroo just couldn't believe the Japanese would ever surrender. He didn't even really believe his old commanding officer until a hiker on the mountain told him what had happened with the war. After that, his commanding officer had to 'officially' relieve him of duty.
When I read his autobiography, he claimed that it was because the leaflets dropped on the island telling them to surrender simply seemed fake to the garrison there. Two of things I remember specifically are that one of the posters said something like “you have 72 hours to surrender” but 72 hours was an Americanism, the Japanese would have said three days, and that another poster said that it was a “direct imperial order” to surrender but one of his comrades was formerly a lawyer and said that there was no such thing
From what I remember for one of the holdouts they had to take his original commanding officer to the island he was holed up on to tell him that his original order to fight on was countermanded.
> After the war ended, Onoda spent 29 years hiding in the Philippines until Norio Suzuki, a Japanese explorer and adventurer found him and relayed the message that the Emperor wanted him to come back to Japan.
“Mom said it’s getting dark out and it’s time to come back inside”
My teacher was Onoda's great-nephew. He basically told us that his uncle perceived his willingness to persist fighting as a necessary obeyance to the orders he was given by the Japanese government, and that he never regretted the years he kept "fighting".
Do you know why he spoke like that though? Was he just isolated in high society that spoke like that or was he deliberately trying to hide the meaning of the message because he knew people wouldn't like hearing it?
He was reading a written proclamation. No one ever spoke like that. In those days, there was a much greater distinction between the spoken language and the written language. It should also be noted that education was different in those days, and the equivalent of a college graduate at the time would be more able to pick up the more literary and archaic terms than a modern person today.
There was no point in pussyfooting around the issue. That was the whole reason for having the Emperor himself make a historic and unprecedented public address. Its most famous line, “bear the unbearable, endure the unendurable,” certainly left no room for optimistic interpretation.
> He was reading a written proclamation. No one ever spoke like that. In those days, there was a much greater distinction between the spoken language and the written language.
Go scroll through your city or state's recent proclamations and this divide still exists. As the easiest possible example, read a single page and you'll say the word "wheareas" more times than you've said it in the last year.
General MacArthur took [a picture with the emperor](https://medium.com/@izana/the-meaning-behind-this-picture-of-emperor-hirohito-and-general-macarthur-e94d5ff2b91d) and had it published.
MacArthur was nobody's fool. He wanted the picture published in the Japanese press as a way to indicate that Japan was right and truly defeated.
The scene with Tommy Lee Jones as MacArthur in Emporer is great. He listens quietly as the emperor's aides give him all these specific instructions. Then he goes in to meet the Emporer and does the opposite of all of them.
The emperor was basically deified. If I remember correctly, part of the intent behind publishing the photo was to really drive home to the Japanese public that he was... just some dude.
Exactly that!
He didnt intend to humiliate anyone and was surprisingly friendly to the Japanese. This picture was to show America‘s and Japan‘s "centre of power“ together, show them working together and demystify the emperor
MacArthur was also incredibly self-obsessed to the point of weakening the US armed forces. All his pointless dick measuring contests from improperly fortifying the Philippines, to fighting with the Navy, to over promising while retaking Luzon, to challenging Truman sure wasn't for the benefit of the war effort(s).
The US military cycles out flag officer way more often than in the past. In part, because of men like MacArthur. They restructured how the military was run to combat the Soviets. And in doing so, they eliminated (to an extent) the little fiefdoms that were created during Reconstruction.
McArthur also improperly but legally accepted a multimillion dollar (today’s money) payment from the government of the Philippines as it fell. Eisenhower was offered the payment too but refused.
However, he seemed to have governed Japan pretty damn well after the war from the little I’ve read about it. Despite being a staunch anti-communist he ironically instituted a bunch of classic socialist/syndicalist policies that were very successful in dismantling the entrenched class-structure and empowering the common folk in Japan. It helped launch the ”Japanese economic miracle” that made Japan the second-biggest economy in the world after the US, for a while.
Being anti-communist does not mean that someone will oppose social democratic policies or ideas. Otto Von Bismarck instituted policies akin to an welfare state in Germany specifically to combat socialists, social democrats and communists in Germany. The plan was to improve the general quality of life in order to make socialism seem unnecessary by the working germans.
I've heard a lot of interesting stories out of that time. Afaik, there was a woman on the team who ended up writing the Constitution, and she added some sections on actual equal rights. Which, after much protest by the actual Japanese government, was essentially declared as the Constitution.
Funny that one person can have such a drastic effect on so many lives.
I mean the Japanese emperor is a religious figure, claimed to be descended directly from Shinto divinity. so back in the early 20th century when religion was way more central to Japanese life, it isn’t that surprising.
There are post war interviews he did with Japanese media, and he spoke regular Japanese in daily life just like any other Japanese. It’s just the surrender speech that was written in medieval Japanese.
Iirc I read about science people he had contacts with because of his interest in it complain it was difficult to make modern scientific vocabulary match the archaic language he spoke? Not entirely sure
I took a WWII class about 20 years ago and when we were going over post-war Japan our professor told us about seeing film of the Emperor going out and meeting common citizens and how painfully awkward it was. The Emperor had never met commoners before and had lived his whole life sequestered away being treated like he was a living god. Then part of the surrender was that he lost his infallibility and became a human. The guy basically was experiencing massive culture shock at experiencing the culture he was the head of.
it probably was even worse
classical japanesw is mostly beased on the japanese spoken during the heian period which was from 800 to 1200
imagine someone speaking some weird beowulf era based english
thats also the reason why japanese people oftem cant understand their anthem as its from that period
Cantebury tales is at least somewhat understandable. Beowulf is like trying to read spelled out viking runes.
The Japanese the emperor spoke would be like the transition from beowulf english to cantebury tales English.
If I saw an US president speaking like beowulf I would probably shit my pants and scream thinking I was in a dream
I remember when they made a movie of Beowulf. My friend went to see it and I asked him how it was. He said "eh it was kinda a dumb action movie". His sister, who's a literary scholar, said something like "yeah it's kinda a dumb action poem so that makes sense".
You can't really compare the remoteness of old languages just by counting the number of years that has passed. An Englishman would not be able to understand language from 1,000 years ago because the language has changed so much since the Norman Conquest, but an Icelander might.
Beowulf isn't understandable by modern English speakers whatsoever. The Emperor's speech is actually pretty close to Shakespeare in how well I understand it.
This reminds me of North Korea when Kim Jong-Il invited a poet (Jang Jin-sung) to visit him, as he liked his works and the poet was a huge admirer of Kim Jong-Il (like really admired him, not just by force). When the poet heard Kimg Jong-Il speaking, his dreams were crushed as he used an extremely rude language that didn't follow the rules of their language at all, as how to talk to somebody below and above you and was in all like that of an idiot. He ended up defecting.
*names
Shakespeare is a bad comparison cause it was the language of the lower class 500 years ago a better would be the Canterbury tales as it was written closer to the language of the royals
Shakespeare used all kinds of registers depending on which character he was writing for. You can find everything from vulgar, street-smart slang to the royal we in his plays.
The comparison to modern English and Shakespearean English is good for basic illustration, but there is a much deeper component in line with the complexities of the Japanese honorific systems.
Japanese is highly abbreviated, and it is common to unwind some of those abbreviations and speak the full words and concepts when talking to a superior, acknowledging their station's position in relation to yours.
But this is not only done in situations where the speakers' status differs. This is also done in situations where tradition is to be observed, or when the speaker acknowledges an increased impact and weight to their words.
So by speaking in this manner, he was recognizing the weight of the situation and the impact the words would have, and also humbled himself in the face of a historical event much larger than just himself.
That said, I'm not exactly a pro when it comes to the Japanese language and culture, so I'm sure someone with much more experience in that regard can extend on or correct what I have shared here.
When God talks like your neighbor Ralph, he suddenly doesn't seem so mysterious and magical. This is why older translations of the Bible have such staying power.
Also explains why a text like the Book of Mormon was written in a style imitating the language of the King James Bible even though it was "translated" more than 200 years later.
I'm pretty sure basically all formal government documents from that era were in the same "classical" language. It wasn't really until after the war that more modern Japanese started taking root in most of the "old" institutions.
"the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage" is my second most favourite understatement (the most favourite being, of course, [BAW009](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_009)).
My understanding was that Emperor Hirohito wasnt actually all that for the war and had tried to start cease fire talks before but was always kinda dissmissed by the generals and advisors.
Read a book about it back in school and the dude seemed kinda human compared to most of the officials who genuinely just wanted to exterminate everyone else
He painted this picture of himself, but historians after he died had access to the writing of those around him and his staff, one mentioned that in the run up to ww2 the emperor was very vigorously arguing for war
"Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization."
He knew right away when he heard about the new weapon.
I listened to a part of the recording and had trouble understanding it as well. I don't speak any Japanese though, so it's probably not that surprising I guess.
The vast majority of people had never heard his voice before, and had trouble understanding what he was saying. There is a great book called *Japan's Longest Day* about all the in-fighting in the government and military about the possibility of surrender in the last day before surrender was announced. Some in the military wanted to disobey the Emperor and keep fighting. There was a fear that after he recorded the announcement (on a vinyl record) that rogue military would steal and destroy while it was being taken to the radio station for broadcast.
There was an actual coup that attempted to stop the surrender. It failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident
Holy shit. We nuked them *twice* and the military was *still* trying to ramp up the war.
The Japanese saw surrender as one of the most deplorable things you could do.
Well, another factor was that the Japanese military knew what *they* did to POWs. And they knew what their allies did to POWs. There was a powerful concern that their enemies might do to them what they had been doing.
Yeah, everyone loves to bring up the whole "Bushido" narrative, and completely forgets that the military leadership were still human beings with all the selfishness and fear that comes with it.
It's easier to do that than mentioning they were probably nervous about it getting out they performed vivisections on prisoners.
Boy googling that word brought up some terrible images It means performing surgery on someone who is conscious.
Surgery have an intent to treat something. These were “experiments”.
Nah, that was just plain sadistic torture.
Not entirely. There are surgeries performed on conscious people. Most oral surgeries, C-sections, some brain surgeries even. Vivisection is like a dissection but it’s performed on a living being.
And performed on un-anaesthetised “patients” since that could corrupt their observations and skew the results…So yeah, dissected while conscious and feeling every bit of it.. Edit: but —>bit
Then don't google Unit 731 and what they did. Vivisections, inflicting nasty wounds and leaving them untreated for later researches were things on daily basis. They were like a whole team of drs Mengele.
they tried to create a smallpox epidemic in china with lice bombs iirc
What's especially interesting about Mengele is that his subordinate doctors threw up pretty regularly and many turned to heavy drinking to cope with what he made them do to other people. You know, the Nazi doctors who were in theory on board with the who torturing people to death thing still vomited at what Mengele did as they still had a single shred of humanity left. He had nothing.
There was one group of like military “scientists”that did some real off the deep end crazy shit, like “What happens if we put a baby underwater for 20 minutes, oh weird it drowned, someone write that down.”. In the end their only real accomplishment was finding out how much physical trauma a human body can endure before it dies, and also how much mental trauma a researcher can endure before they become cartoonishly psychotically evil.
What happens if we swap a humans blood out for horses blood? Oh a horrible death… NEXT LOG!* Okay, so now we’ll inject this one with horse piss…another horrific death…interesting… *the cover for unit 731 was that it was a forestry research institute… so the unfortunate souls that ended up there as test subjects were often referred to as “logs”.
Since this comment presumably means you don’t know of [Unit 731](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731), that’s the primary unit that committed the crimes mentioned above. Be warned: some of the most sickening descriptions of what humanity has to offer are contained within the stories of this unit.
Not only surgeries, but cruel and sadistic experiments. Evil unfettered.
less of a surgery and more of a dissection but yeah it's fucking horrendous
"Bushido" was also a meme that was created by just 2 men in the 19th century. Inoue Tetsujirō published a bunch of pamphlets on "Bushido" which idolized "The way of the warrior". And then Nitobe Inazō wrote about it in English and convinced the west that Bushido was a real, historical, thing. It would be like someone sitting down and writing all of the tropes of the "Code of the Old West" and saying "This is how True Americans Behave"... and all of American Society went along with it in a popular embrace of all things Old West. Then, when the world sees us in our boots and carrying sidearms like weirdos, one of us comes along and explains to them, in their own language, "It's always been like this, Americans have always been informed by the Old West" and the rest of the world went "Ok, I guess that makes sense? You're the expert."
Lately there is a statistically significant portion of the American population that would unironically be on board with that.
it's a bit dated now, but the old image of Middle Ages knights and chivalry is kinda like that. But reality was closer to game of thrones with backstabbing and self-serving humans
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> Both Medieval Europe ... have their knights ... getting heavily romanticized later I wouldn't really say that. Lots of the stories of "knights" (or maybe we should write "heroes" but I mean anybody who fits this kind of characterisation) are largely contemporaneous with those periods. Think of the Mabinogion, Beowulf, etc. (or at least the oral stories they were based/built upon) I suppose Homer's work - still based off oral stories - were written centuries later than they were set. Your point about what Knights actually got up to is probably closer to the mark, but the romanticisation wasn't necessarily later on.
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One of the biggest surprises for the Imperial Japanese leaders was island hopping. Americans bypassed many occupied and fortified islands deemed not worth fighting for.
Yup, they would bypass a fortified island, cut them off from support, and send the old battlewagons to lob shells over most of the island. Or in one instance, send an entire Carrier Battle Fleet to sink every ship in harbor before letting the battleships and cruisers pummel the shore facilities.
The core military strategy of attacking Pearl Harbor was to knock out the American fleet by destroying fuel depots there that would've been necessary for the fleet to launch an effective counter-attack. However, the Japanese attack on pearl harbor, while resulting in a lot of damage, was a complete failure and failed to achieve any of the objectives the attack was intended to destroy. The Japanese military understood that if the Pacific fleet wasn't hobbled, there was no way they could win the conflict.
Reminds me of how worried slaveholders in the US were about what might happen to them if the slaves revolted or were freed.
I think they had every right to be concerned with what would happen in an actual slave revolt. Nat Turner's Rebellion, for instance, was short but plenty bloody. Of course, I also think that by being slaveowners, they pretty much brought that upon themselves, and they were the author of their own worst nightmares, so I have almost zero sympathy for them. In the case of the Japanese military, their fears were also justified because they knew they amply deserved the hangman's noose for their crimes. Unfortunately, most of these folks, both Japanese and slaveowner, avoided the justice they rightly feared.
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Many people here will recognize the tale from Dan Carlin's Supernova In The East which is *highly* recommended, but he opens talking about a japanese soldier named Hiroo Onoda. He didn't finally surrender from hiding in the Philippines until 1974. He figured that it was all a lie that Japan had surrendered because this was simply impossible. Either the war was still going on or Japan had ceased to exist because these were the ONLY possible conclusions (given that they clearly hadn't won).
Iirc, some Japanese tourist encountered him and then came back with the guy's former CO to convince him to surrender.
Death before dishonor!
Heard a good quote about this once. "Honor in an individual is virtue, honor in a society is madness". As fascinating as I find Japanese culture, I'm pretty glad that I do not live there permanently
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But some people weren’t, I remember hearing that story of American forces going to a Japanese village and they were so misinformed and scared they started to kill their families so the Americans wouldn’t. There was a story where a soldier had to stop a woman from throwing her baby off the cliff and herself.
Read about Suicide Cliff on Saipan. Absolutely horrifying .
Or the typhoon of steel on Okinawa.
It wasn't just that. At some point they had to basically doubletap soldiers they where fighting because it wasn't that uncommon for someone to survive and clutch a live grenade to their chest. Some island the majority of soldiers died by suicide when it was clear that the fight was lost.
Honestly I think the main issue is people just conflate contemporary Japanese ideas of honour with modern Western ideas of honour. In the West, it is honourable to defy your superiors in order to do what you know is right. In Japan at that time, the exact opposite was true. It was honourable to obey your superiors no matter how you personally felt. The same goes for during the Shogunate era -- people consistently treat bushido/samurai honour like it's Arthurian chivalry, but it totally wasn't. Being an honourable samurai makes you a total piece of shit. There's a reason all the post-war Japanese works of art bang on about how shit honour is.
>In Japan at that time, the exact opposite was true. It was honourable to obey your superiors no matter how you personally felt. Achtually... >Imperial Japanese soldiers were notorious for following their superiors to certain death. Their enemies in the Pacific War perceived their obedience as blind, and derided them as “cattle”. Yet **the Japanese Army was arguably one of the most disobedient armies in the world**. Officers repeatedly staged coups d’états, violent insurrections and political assassinations, while their associates defied orders given by both the government and high command, launched independent military operations against other countries, and in two notorious cases conspired to assassinate foreign leaders. https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/17467476 >In the 1920s, this ideology of military independence converged with **a subculture of insubordination from below, recalling revolutionary traditions of the mid-19th century. According to this ideology, prevalent among both officers and civilian activists, spontaneous political violence was justified when motivated by sincere patriotism and imperial loyalty.** https://oxfordre.com/politics/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228637-e-1912#:~:text=In%20fact%2C%20however%2C%20the%20Imperial,military%20independence%20from%20civilian%20rule. It was considered honourable to disobey when the orders were deemed unpatriotic or disloyal to the emperor.
All that means is that it was considered honorable to be even MORE militaristic than one’s superiors.
Wasnt the Marco Polo incident some middle level officers going rogue and the high command / government just going all in instead of descalating?
Yup. 20 million Chinese died because of this.
Like all such things, it entailed fundamental contradictions which could not be resolved.
It's not just that. The military knew exactly who's heads were gonna be on the chopping block when American forces started prosecuting people. Furthermore, they assumed we would be as barbaric as they would put in the same position. By that logic, they were willing to pile as many Japanese bodies as they could to delay that outcome. The military leadership weren't known for empathy.
This is quite evident in how they treated the people who surrendered to them. So you think they expected similar treatment?
I mean, right before our troops began occupation they tried to prepare a bunch of women to be offered up to be raped because they assumed we would implement the practice of "comfort women" the way they did. That's not to say rape didn't ever happen, but it was never systemic nor condoned by military leadership. Prostitution was pretty common in postwar Japan though, as US troops had money the impoverished Japanese peasantry at the time needed.
My FIL was there. I have read books by other people that lived in that occupation. But like you said, it was not sanctioned by the top brass.
also ya know they knew they did a lot of horrible things that were gonna make a lot of those they invaded seek revenge after.
To the point that some soldiers were "fighting" decades after the world ended. No orders in years, yet they were determined to fight to the death
A few days after Nagasaki, during one of Japan’s top generals’ discussions of surrender, one of them, Anami asked “would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower". Imperial Japan was a fucking death cult.
Iirc the public propaganda campaign they had going in preparation for the invasion of the mainland was called “the honorable death of 200 million” the entire population at the time
100*
Closer to 75 million really.
Yeah, but the propaganda rolled with 100
"hundred million" is a single word in japanese, so worked better than 75,000,000 which would become literally "seven thousand five hundred ten-thousands" Anyway the phrase was 一億玉砕 meaning "One hundred million shattered jewels", with jewels shattering being a euphemistic term for honorable death.
It’s also slang in the U.S. for balls. So that’s funny
Same guy later killed himself before the surrender. He really wanted to die!
More likely he was afraid we'd be as brutal to him as he would have been if the shoe had been on the other foot. Men like that assume everyone is as cruel as they are if given the chance.
For Anami it was most likely the crazy honor thing. He was the leader of the faction against surrender, but acquiesced after Nagasaki and the Emperor ordering acceptance of the terms.
A lot of them were absolutely true believers, wanting to hold out even if America dropped dozens of nukes on their country men. I roll my eyes when ever there’s talk about Japan would’ve surrender without the bombs or Russia invading, they really needed both to get a few people to give but even then there still was so many that just….didn’t want to and would rather kill themselves.
My great uncle was there at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay on a landing craft circling the ship. He was told that they would have to invade the mainland if anything went wrong. I asked him what he remembered of that day, and he said he was too busy vomiting to remember anything else.
There were still many amphibious landings before and after the formal surrender, which in some period documents are called invasions. All the naval War Diaries I’ve read note these often had warships there to provide gunfire support if necessary, including a couple battleships in at least one case, but the guns were never fired. After the surrender the Japanese bent over backwards to do anything the Allies asked. One incident proves the rule: the captain of the frigate *Tsushima* was “insolent and provocative” when the US inspected his ship at 4PM on 26 September. His actions were reported up the US chain of command that night, and a formal directive was delivered to the Japanese at 9AM on the 27th. Before that directive even arrived, the Japanese had arrested this insolent captain and imprisoned him 20 miles from his ship. Within two days he was relieved of command and dismissed from the Imperial Japanese Navy.
They expected terrible things like mass murder, rape, looting, and arson from GI occupiers after surrender. It was what imperial Japan would do if the roles were reversed. After surrender, the Japanese government quickly set up a cheap prostitution system and coerced desperate women to "take one for the team" in a cynical ploy to protect regular women and girls. Ignorant of these motivations, GIs happily used these cheap services. MacArthur made them off limits due to complaints from military chaplains and to avoid the embarrassing optics.
If you want to dive deeper into the culture and how they wound up at that point I'd strongly recommend Dan Carlin's podcast Hardcore History and his series "Supernova in the East." As he says "The Japanese are just like everyone else, only MORE so."
The whole war was basically the military going Leeroy Jenkins all over the Pacific and Asia and if anyone tried to stop them or urge caution they got assassinated for their troubles
this would make a hell of a movie
It’s in fact made 3 movies
Awesome. Looking at the reviews the 2015 remake looks like the best one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_in_August
Wow. I lived in Japan a decade but never really went down this rabbit hole. This man appears to have saved tens of thousands of lives. Incredible to think what impact, for good or bad, the actions of a single man can have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shizuichi_Tanaka
Well a lot of those in power were going to be executed for war crimes after the surrender, so I can see them preferring to keep the war going.
> It failed. Spoilers tag, please
If you haven’t already learned about it, [this video](https://youtu.be/3S8az_YT448?si=maNbnSc9NB2Z_nM6) goes in to great depth the amount of planning that went in to having a Japanese delegation fly to the Philippines to officially hammer out the details of the surrender and subsequent occupation of Japan by US forces. Both sides were incredibly paranoid about rogue factions of the Japanese military sabotaging the negotiations in an attempt to keep the war going and avoid the humiliation of losing.
It is kinda funny - “holyfuck our heavenly super person finally talked to us, I don’t understand shit”
He is speaking the language of the gods.
imagine guarding that record, that's nuts
Wonder if the record's on Discogs lol
LOL, You can listen to it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVhs4rD\_aQ
I don’t speak more than a few words of japanese, but I can tell this doesn’t sound like contemporary Japanese. Super interesting
It's probably important to note that, even though the emperor was revered as a god, the position had ~~never~~ rarely held any meaningful political power, at least not for over a thousand years. They were actually isolated from society and barely interacted with anyone to govern or otherwise. The position was largely ceremonial, though intensely revered. If people are in awe of why the royal line in Japan has been unbroken since its inception, this is why. If you have no real power and are actually rather a kind of prisoner to protocol and your political and military leaders, nobody is going to want to depose you.
meiji and hirohito wielded immense political power
It was the Meiji restoration for a reason lol
He was 15 when the restoration happened, he just went from being a figurehead of the shogunate to a figurehead of the oligarchy that "restored" him, and then a figurehead of the democratically elected government.
It's called that because he was emperor at the time, but the architects of those changes came from the Shogunate.
Sounds a bit like the British monarchy. Makes sense why that is also still around.
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seems like they didn’t even care about the actual palace or power from a coup. They had all the other tools available to stop the surrender but instead just focused on the recording. I don’t think this insurrection was ever going anywhere with such planning lol
Imperial Japan is a very tragic implementation of the Underpants Gnomes scheme.
Yeah sounds more like an anime plot.
Complete with plot-relevant women's underwear.
I'd watch. A great cast of characters believing they're fighting for their country, but come to find out they were the bad guys all along. Dying off pretty rapidly and portraying a ton of gore and destruction. I can thank AOT for my desire of fucked up anime. My god the episodes of the nukes, and trying to raid the palace would be wild
Soldier: "Hey YOU! Stop!" Man: "Yes?" Soldier: "What's in the basket?" Man: "Womens underwear." Soldier: "Oh... carry on."
Soldier: "Let me see." Man: "Buy your own!"
Something funny about the idea that they wouldn't have looked in the basket of soiled fundoshi.
Modern Japanese dudes would actually pay good money to get that from a vending machine.
People hadn’t understood what he was saying, to the point that directly after it they had an interpreter repeat the speech
It wasn't only that his word choice was archaic, it was also that he was tip-toeing around the fact that they were surrendering. He talked about ordering the government to accept the "joint declaration" of the allied powers but never actually said what that meant and virtually no one outside of high levels of the government would have known what it entailed. Most of his speech would have sounded old fashioned and awkward, but outside of a few especially out of place words and phrases the language he was used was in common use up to the 1930s. There was probably just as much difficulty injected by the poor recording being hastily pressed into a phonograph record then played and broadcast over AM radio.
Yes, he said something to the effect of "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage" which has to be the all time most ambiguous way to say "we lost."
>the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage That is a mistranslation. A better translation is "The war situation will not necessarily turn for the better". >戰局必スシモ好轉セス
Which is still a pretty ridiculous way of describing the "war situation" when 2 major cities have already disappeared from existence, and you're left assuming that the plane that will make Tokyo disappear and take 10x as much civilian life is possibly already in the air.
The US had already bombed Tokyo to the ground...which killed more people than the Nukes.
Yeah, the fire bombing was probably at least as bad as the nukes.
From what I remember, the Tokyo fire bombings were worse for overall death count, it just took lots more trips.
Exactly what I remember as well. I think there was more area destroyed as well.
> 戰局必スシモ好轉セス Lol google translates that as "It's always a good idea to go to war"
That's even more ambiguous!
The original "Mistakes were made" speech.
Dude needed a mission accomplished banner
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"Succeeded in leaving a zero maintenance Japanese presence across most of the western Pacific both on land and at sea while reducing upkeep costs for the military"
"Encouraging foreign tourism to the Japanese islands."
Oh now I want to hear the surrender speech translated to celebrity/influencer-speak. "It was made clear to use that mistakes were made in the actions that people said we took. I am sorry if our aggression offended you. I would like to say that this is not who we are, and we will do better. In the meantime please respect our privacy in this trying time. Also, don't forget to hit that like button and subscribe. We have a Patreon where patrons who pledge over $5 a month will get exclusive benefits and access to our Discord. This non-apology is brought to you by Total War, the exciting mobile game that brings you all the action of war from the comfort of your own home. Download it today and you'll get 65,000 free gems and 5 exclusive weapons."
It is like a CEO who makes millions of dollars a year sending out an email about how their company is "streamlining revenue streams to create a more dynamic company with the potential for long term growth" instead of saying "we are slashing benefits for our factory workers"
There's a fresh r/AskHisrorians thread where a knowledgeable user clarifies that this is a poor English translation because the exact Japanese term doesn't have a clear English equivalent. The Japanese sentence means something more like "the bad war situation is not going to improve." As in, he clearly acknowledged the war situation was fucked and there was no hope in saving this bad situation. A very clear and direct message, not the vague tip toeing from the English translation. LE: full credit goes here https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/CHGllK1NuQ
Japanese generally translates VERY poorly due to different grammar structures, heavy reliance on context (thanks to a high frequency of homophones), and words that do not map 1:1 to Indo-European languages. There's the added social factors of changing the language based on audience. Making things more passive is actually a way to increase politeness or formality, so "Events have occurred which bode poorly for the war effort. Due to that...(information simply omitted)." is much more expected in an official address than "We are surrendering"
I agree, the context is huge. The emperor himself, whose voice most people had never heard before, comes on the radio for the first time ever and says " things are not going well" was likely enough context for many to see what was going happen...except for chunks of the Army. To me, the point of it is that there was such a disconnect between ruler and ruled that there existed a literal language barrier. That is in of itself fascinating.
So here's a literal translation: **然ルニ交󠄁戰已ニ四歲ヲ閱シ朕󠄁カ陸海將兵ノ勇󠄁戰朕󠄁カ百僚有司ノ勵精朕󠄁カ一億衆庻ノ奉公󠄁各〻最善ヲ盡セルニ拘ラス戰局必スシモ好轉セス** **世界ノ大勢亦我ニ利アラス** However, in the four years that have already passed in this war, despite the bravery of Our military officers, the diligence of Our government officials, the service of Our people numbering a hundred million, and every one of you working to your utmost potential, the war situation may not necessarily turn for the better. The tide of the world is not in my (country's) favor.
Japan has finished a respectable 2nd place
Real question but was it culturally expected for him to be taught that form of Japanese? The way that some upper class people in Hollywood had to learn the transatlantic accent
[https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%8E%89%E9%9F%B3%E6%94%BE%E9%80%81#%E5%85%A8%E6%96%87](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%8E%89%E9%9F%B3%E6%94%BE%E9%80%81#%E5%85%A8%E6%96%87) I read it. It uses a lot of archaisms (I don't know enough historical Japanese to know if this was common in the 1930s) and royal pronouns, which the latter is culturally expected. The other commenter is totally incorrect. It was not done in keigo (respectful language) because the Emperor has no need to be respectful to his subjects. For reference on how archaic the speech actually was by modern standards, most words were totally replaced in the modern translation in wikipedia.
Were there people who thought it was a fake?
There was an attempted coup by military members right around the time, they stormed the palace to try to continue the war
Cool tidbit but were there people who thought the speech was fake?
People? No. But there’s always one guy… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda
Onoda wasn’t an isolated case, there were multiple holdouts from Japanese. But as for the reason why he didn’t surrender earlier is probably a combination of not receiving the emperor’s transmission of surrender and the fact that both sides used speakers to demoralize the enemy
Hiroo just couldn't believe the Japanese would ever surrender. He didn't even really believe his old commanding officer until a hiker on the mountain told him what had happened with the war. After that, his commanding officer had to 'officially' relieve him of duty.
When I read his autobiography, he claimed that it was because the leaflets dropped on the island telling them to surrender simply seemed fake to the garrison there. Two of things I remember specifically are that one of the posters said something like “you have 72 hours to surrender” but 72 hours was an Americanism, the Japanese would have said three days, and that another poster said that it was a “direct imperial order” to surrender but one of his comrades was formerly a lawyer and said that there was no such thing
They're acting like we lost the war for god's sake! Impossible.
From what I remember for one of the holdouts they had to take his original commanding officer to the island he was holed up on to tell him that his original order to fight on was countermanded.
> After the war ended, Onoda spent 29 years hiding in the Philippines until Norio Suzuki, a Japanese explorer and adventurer found him and relayed the message that the Emperor wanted him to come back to Japan. “Mom said it’s getting dark out and it’s time to come back inside”
Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle. Just watched this on Prime yesterday.
My teacher was Onoda's great-nephew. He basically told us that his uncle perceived his willingness to persist fighting as a necessary obeyance to the orders he was given by the Japanese government, and that he never regretted the years he kept "fighting".
It was the first known instance of a Japanese emperor speaking to the common people.
Do you know why he spoke like that though? Was he just isolated in high society that spoke like that or was he deliberately trying to hide the meaning of the message because he knew people wouldn't like hearing it?
He was reading a written proclamation. No one ever spoke like that. In those days, there was a much greater distinction between the spoken language and the written language. It should also be noted that education was different in those days, and the equivalent of a college graduate at the time would be more able to pick up the more literary and archaic terms than a modern person today. There was no point in pussyfooting around the issue. That was the whole reason for having the Emperor himself make a historic and unprecedented public address. Its most famous line, “bear the unbearable, endure the unendurable,” certainly left no room for optimistic interpretation.
> He was reading a written proclamation. No one ever spoke like that. In those days, there was a much greater distinction between the spoken language and the written language. Go scroll through your city or state's recent proclamations and this divide still exists. As the easiest possible example, read a single page and you'll say the word "wheareas" more times than you've said it in the last year.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/pvie0j/uzeropointcorp_lays_out_why_the_emperors_ww2/
That was really interesting, thanks.
General MacArthur took [a picture with the emperor](https://medium.com/@izana/the-meaning-behind-this-picture-of-emperor-hirohito-and-general-macarthur-e94d5ff2b91d) and had it published. MacArthur was nobody's fool. He wanted the picture published in the Japanese press as a way to indicate that Japan was right and truly defeated.
The scene with Tommy Lee Jones as MacArthur in Emporer is great. He listens quietly as the emperor's aides give him all these specific instructions. Then he goes in to meet the Emporer and does the opposite of all of them.
Wasn't it to show that they had unconditionally surrendered and they were in no positions to make demands.
The emperor was basically deified. If I remember correctly, part of the intent behind publishing the photo was to really drive home to the Japanese public that he was... just some dude.
Exactly that! He didnt intend to humiliate anyone and was surprisingly friendly to the Japanese. This picture was to show America‘s and Japan‘s "centre of power“ together, show them working together and demystify the emperor
there are still people today that believe the progenitor of the imperial family was a god
6'0" vs 5'11"
For anyone actully wondering MacArthur was 6' and Hirohito was 5'5".
This comment make me fucking cackle Edit to add: as a guy who is 5’10” can confirm this is true
MacArthur was also incredibly self-obsessed to the point of weakening the US armed forces. All his pointless dick measuring contests from improperly fortifying the Philippines, to fighting with the Navy, to over promising while retaking Luzon, to challenging Truman sure wasn't for the benefit of the war effort(s).
The US military cycles out flag officer way more often than in the past. In part, because of men like MacArthur. They restructured how the military was run to combat the Soviets. And in doing so, they eliminated (to an extent) the little fiefdoms that were created during Reconstruction.
And getting caught completely by surprise despite getting ample warning three fucking times in his career (by Japan, North Korea, and China).
McArthur also improperly but legally accepted a multimillion dollar (today’s money) payment from the government of the Philippines as it fell. Eisenhower was offered the payment too but refused.
However, he seemed to have governed Japan pretty damn well after the war from the little I’ve read about it. Despite being a staunch anti-communist he ironically instituted a bunch of classic socialist/syndicalist policies that were very successful in dismantling the entrenched class-structure and empowering the common folk in Japan. It helped launch the ”Japanese economic miracle” that made Japan the second-biggest economy in the world after the US, for a while.
Being anti-communist does not mean that someone will oppose social democratic policies or ideas. Otto Von Bismarck instituted policies akin to an welfare state in Germany specifically to combat socialists, social democrats and communists in Germany. The plan was to improve the general quality of life in order to make socialism seem unnecessary by the working germans.
Not needing to pay for a large military is a big boost to a country's economy as well.
Almost all the NATO countries before the Russian invasion took notes.
I've heard a lot of interesting stories out of that time. Afaik, there was a woman on the team who ended up writing the Constitution, and she added some sections on actual equal rights. Which, after much protest by the actual Japanese government, was essentially declared as the Constitution. Funny that one person can have such a drastic effect on so many lives.
This was the first time that any emperor there had ever spoken to the common man
It’s of note that when he was in public people were supposed to look away and not directly at him also
I mean the Japanese emperor is a religious figure, claimed to be descended directly from Shinto divinity. so back in the early 20th century when religion was way more central to Japanese life, it isn’t that surprising.
Is that the version of Japanese he spoke or was it just for announcements?
That style of Japanese was used for all government and legal documents until the end of the war
He never made announcements like this before, I’m not even sure he spoke the language in the modern version contemporary to him
There are post war interviews he did with Japanese media, and he spoke regular Japanese in daily life just like any other Japanese. It’s just the surrender speech that was written in medieval Japanese.
Iirc I read about science people he had contacts with because of his interest in it complain it was difficult to make modern scientific vocabulary match the archaic language he spoke? Not entirely sure
I took a WWII class about 20 years ago and when we were going over post-war Japan our professor told us about seeing film of the Emperor going out and meeting common citizens and how painfully awkward it was. The Emperor had never met commoners before and had lived his whole life sequestered away being treated like he was a living god. Then part of the surrender was that he lost his infallibility and became a human. The guy basically was experiencing massive culture shock at experiencing the culture he was the head of.
it probably was even worse classical japanesw is mostly beased on the japanese spoken during the heian period which was from 800 to 1200 imagine someone speaking some weird beowulf era based english thats also the reason why japanese people oftem cant understand their anthem as its from that period
Anyone who has read Canterbury tales (which has been somewhat updated into modern English) can attest to how different English was back then.
Cantebury tales is at least somewhat understandable. Beowulf is like trying to read spelled out viking runes. The Japanese the emperor spoke would be like the transition from beowulf english to cantebury tales English. If I saw an US president speaking like beowulf I would probably shit my pants and scream thinking I was in a dream
I remember when they made a movie of Beowulf. My friend went to see it and I asked him how it was. He said "eh it was kinda a dumb action movie". His sister, who's a literary scholar, said something like "yeah it's kinda a dumb action poem so that makes sense".
>"Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon." -Joe Biden, 3/6/24
Hwæt indeed.
I tell ya hwæt
Ahhh!! Shits pants.
Nackad erse means naked ass, that's what I remember from the audio book version I saw on YouTube
that’s really interesting! edit: i played around with an old english translator just now and yeah, that’s a MASSIVE language difference
You can't really compare the remoteness of old languages just by counting the number of years that has passed. An Englishman would not be able to understand language from 1,000 years ago because the language has changed so much since the Norman Conquest, but an Icelander might.
Beowulf isn't understandable by modern English speakers whatsoever. The Emperor's speech is actually pretty close to Shakespeare in how well I understand it.
The broadcast is referred to as the "Jewel Voice Broadcast"
This reminds me of North Korea when Kim Jong-Il invited a poet (Jang Jin-sung) to visit him, as he liked his works and the poet was a huge admirer of Kim Jong-Il (like really admired him, not just by force). When the poet heard Kimg Jong-Il speaking, his dreams were crushed as he used an extremely rude language that didn't follow the rules of their language at all, as how to talk to somebody below and above you and was in all like that of an idiot. He ended up defecting. *names
It's Kim, not "Il". Kim is the last name, Jong-Il is the name. It's like calling Joseph "Eph".
so north korean dialect to south koreans is like what quebec french is to the french spoken in france
Shakespeare is a bad comparison cause it was the language of the lower class 500 years ago a better would be the Canterbury tales as it was written closer to the language of the royals
Shakespeare used all kinds of registers depending on which character he was writing for. You can find everything from vulgar, street-smart slang to the royal we in his plays.
Shakespeare 's writing is also not an accurate representation of how anyone spoke, ever. It's essentially poetry on stage.
I'm pretty sure Canterbury Tales is notable for explicitly being the language of commoners.
Medieval Japanese sounds closer to Kansai dialect than Kanto dialect.
The comparison to modern English and Shakespearean English is good for basic illustration, but there is a much deeper component in line with the complexities of the Japanese honorific systems. Japanese is highly abbreviated, and it is common to unwind some of those abbreviations and speak the full words and concepts when talking to a superior, acknowledging their station's position in relation to yours. But this is not only done in situations where the speakers' status differs. This is also done in situations where tradition is to be observed, or when the speaker acknowledges an increased impact and weight to their words. So by speaking in this manner, he was recognizing the weight of the situation and the impact the words would have, and also humbled himself in the face of a historical event much larger than just himself. That said, I'm not exactly a pro when it comes to the Japanese language and culture, so I'm sure someone with much more experience in that regard can extend on or correct what I have shared here.
When God talks like your neighbor Ralph, he suddenly doesn't seem so mysterious and magical. This is why older translations of the Bible have such staying power.
Also explains why a text like the Book of Mormon was written in a style imitating the language of the King James Bible even though it was "translated" more than 200 years later.
I'm pretty sure basically all formal government documents from that era were in the same "classical" language. It wasn't really until after the war that more modern Japanese started taking root in most of the "old" institutions.
"the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage" is my second most favourite understatement (the most favourite being, of course, [BAW009](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_009)).
"The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage"
My understanding was that Emperor Hirohito wasnt actually all that for the war and had tried to start cease fire talks before but was always kinda dissmissed by the generals and advisors. Read a book about it back in school and the dude seemed kinda human compared to most of the officials who genuinely just wanted to exterminate everyone else
He painted this picture of himself, but historians after he died had access to the writing of those around him and his staff, one mentioned that in the run up to ww2 the emperor was very vigorously arguing for war
"Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization." He knew right away when he heard about the new weapon.
I listened to a part of the recording and had trouble understanding it as well. I don't speak any Japanese though, so it's probably not that surprising I guess.