Hello there,
From my understanding up until this point, I thought that Truman (and others at the Postdam Conference) had demanded that Japan must surrender unconditionally -- and that one of Japan's biggest issues with this, and one of the reasons for their refusal -- was because they wanted to keep their Emperor. However, I just read a site which states that the Allies privately assured Japan during the Postdam Conference that they could keep the monarchy????I feel like it's a pretty important part, considering that the bombs were dropped partially because Japan wouldn't agree to an unconditional surrender, but in the end they still kept their emperor, so if the Allies had originally agreed to this, it seems to kind of nullify that argument for dropping the bomb...
Here's the quote and website, in regards to the Postdam Conference;
"...concealing the fact that they had privately agreed to let Japan retain its emperor": http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/potsdam-conference
I'm really just wondering if there's any factual basis for this statement. Not only can I not find primary source documents backing this up, I can't even find other articles that corroborate this, but this is a pretty well known site too??
Thank you!
According to my understanding, that is not true. Yoshinobu Higurashi's book on the Tokyo Trials (Tokyo Saiban) claims that the final decision to not persecute the Emperor came in April 1946 with policy document FEC007/3 which stated that "it should be understood that the Supreme Commander should take no action against the Japanese Emperor without a further directive from the United States Government." This was a response to Australia's insistence to persecute the Emperor, despite objections from the UK and the US. In January 1946, the Australian persecutor Alan James Mansfield submitted to the court a list of war criminals they wish to persecute including the Emperor. It was veto'd by MacArthur and Australia backed down completely after the aforementioned document was published. The Soviets, part of the trial, didn't care about the stability of US-occupied Japan and also pushed to persecute the Emperor. They backed down as well, after Australia backed down.
Therefore, it seems unlikely that the Allies (which I presume included the Soviets and Australia) would have agreed on the matter at Postdam, as intense debates were still ongoing during the trial.
However, the idea of not persecuting the Emperor was certainly raised during Postdam. Labour War Minister Ernest Bevin stated that a defeated government without a figurehead would eventually lead to the reemergence of militarism, such as that of interwar Germany.