What Came After Hiroshima

By Wesley Liu

Saturday, August 08, 2026

 

Most books about Hiroshima, Japan, ask readers to confront the atomic horror of August 6, 1945. Kiyoshi Tanimoto’s Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir asks something more difficult: what comes afterward.

 

Although Tanimoto wrote the manuscript in English only a few years after the bombing and sent it to the writer John Hersey, it remained buried among Hersey’s papers for decades before recently being rediscovered in Yale University’s archives and finally published. The title refers to the moment, 8:15 a.m, when the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima.

 

Many readers first encountered Tanimoto through Hersey’s book, Hiroshima, which followed six survivors of the bombing and introduced Tanimoto to an international audience. However, this memoir offers something Hersey never could. In this memoir, Tanimoto speaks for himself—not as a historian reconstructing the past or as a journalist assembling evidence, but as a local Methodist pastor trying to shepherd his congregation through the collapse of everything they believed about their country, their government, and even themselves. That perspective makes Hiroshima, 8:15 far more than another account of the atomic bomb. It is a meditation on what happens when a civilization loses a war and must decide what parts of its soul should survive.

 

The most remarkable insight comes surprisingly early. Reflecting on Hiroshima after the bombing, Tanimoto refuses to place ultimate blame on technology alone.

 

The atomic bomb was a terrifying weapon, but it was man’s fighting spirit that made the war more terrible. Despite the great blow, unprecedented in all history, which they had suffered, the people of Hiroshima never said a word about giving up. The greater the amount of sacrifice, the stronger they were determined to avenge themselves. Herein lies the delusion of war and the unsolved problem of cruelty.

 

This is a startling observation because it rejects the easy assumption that unimaginable, overwhelming destruction naturally extinguishes the will to fight and produces peace. Many accounts of Hiroshima treat the bombing only as the event that finally brought World War II to an end. Tanimoto does not deny its military significance or human devastation, but he observes something more unsettling: Even after Hiroshima was reduced to ruins, the desire for revenge persisted among many who survived—and indeed, the more a people has suffered, the harder it becomes to admit that the suffering was in vain. This is not the conclusion of a political theorist. It is the observation of a pastor watching wounded people wrestle with grief, anger, and despair.

 

That pastoral perspective shapes the entire memoir. Tanimoto rarely writes about grand strategy or diplomatic negotiations. His attention is fixed on ordinary people—the members of his church, his neighbors, his family, and the moral condition of the nation around them. He is interested less in who won the war than in what the war did to the human heart.

 

Nowhere is this clearer than in his account of Japan’s surrender. Reading the newspapers the morning after the emperor’s August 16, 1945 announcement, Tanimoto admits that he did not initially feel relief. The defeat, he recalls, “cut deeply” into his heart after years of sacrifice, leaving many young Japanese in what he called a “vacuum state.” Yet amid that despair, one passage from Emperor Hirohito’s address slowly redirected his life. The emperor declared that he could no longer "endure seeing the people suffer further” and hoped to open “a road to eternal peace.” Those words became, in Tanimoto’s own resolution, a lifelong calling: “Let me struggle forever to construct peace for eternity.” Significantly, he adds that “it would be days before I reached this personal resolve.” Recovery, he insists, is gradual.

 

One of the memoir’s most revealing conversations occurs with Capt. Sawano, a naval officer and longtime Sunday school superintendent in Tanimoto’s church. Rather than lament Japan’s defeat, Sawano argues that the country “should make a new start.” The dream of world dominance, he concludes, had been arrogant, and perhaps defeat itself was “a divine providence” calling Japan back to humility. For Sawano, the country’s renewal would depend less on politicians than on “religious people and educators.” Tanimoto clearly sees this conversation as pointing toward a deeper reconstruction. Political reform alone would never be enough. A broken nation first had to recover its moral bearings.

 

His reflections on the collapse of imperial ideology are equally fascinating. He describes a people whose “minds and spirits” had been “shaken from their foundations.” Even his intensely patriotic father decided to burn the portraits of the emperor he had carefully collected throughout his life. Christians like Tanimoto had long rejected emperor worship and suffered for doing so—yet Tanimoto is troubled by the speed with which the broader public abandoned the emperor altogether. “What a great change had come,” he remarks. His concern is not nostalgia for the old order but the realization that convictions adopted too easily can also be discarded too easily. He supports dismantling the emperor’s divine status as essential to democratization, but he worries that simply replacing one unquestioned orthodoxy with another would leave Japan no freer than before.

 

Yet Tanimoto does not pretend he was immune from the assumptions of wartime Japan. One of the memoir’s greatest strengths is its honesty about how slowly deeply-held beliefs give way. While speaking with a Filipino soldier serving in the Allied occupation forces in Japan, Tanimoto instinctively praises the discipline and morality of the Japanese military, describing its adherence to Bushido, an ancient samurai honor code. The soldier interrupts him: “The Japanese have ruined Manila.”

 

At first, Tanimoto is bewildered. Having never served in the armed forces, he genuinely knew little about the atrocities committed across Asia. Only after listening to returning soldiers does he grasp the truth. Looking back, he confesses that he became “ashamed” of the trust he had once placed in the Imperial Army and finally understood the Filipino soldier’s indignation. It is one of the memoir’s most compelling moments because readers watch Tanimoto’s moral understanding change in real time. He does not write as someone who always possessed clarity. He writes as a pastor learning difficult truths alongside his congregation.

 

A similar complexity emerges several months later. In December 1945, as Hiroshima was beginning the slow work of rebuilding under the Allied occupation, an American reporter visited the city and assumed that its survivors resented the United States. By this point, Tanimoto’s own thinking had changed considerably. The immediate anger, confusion, and desire for revenge that had followed the bombing had gradually given way to a painful process of self-examination. “The people in Hiroshima do not resent the Americans,” Tanimoto tells the reporter. “If we feel resentment, it is against the Japanese leaders and not the Americans.”

 

The answer astonishes the reporter, but Tanimoto explains that he had scarcely reflected on the morality of the atomic bomb itself because survival had occupied every waking hour. There were church members to locate, families to comfort, and a devastated city struggling simply to live with a new “atomic disease.” Only later, after conversations with returning soldiers, members of the Allied occupation forces, and foreign visitors, did his attention turn toward the political and moral decisions that had led Japan into what he called “such a reckless and lousy war.” Their conversation soon broadens into a discussion of Japanese expansionism, Western colonialism, immigration restrictions, and competing visions of the international order. Neither man completely persuades the other, yet when the reporter remarks that “the future world is a world for everybody,” Tanimoto admits that the idea “deeply penetrated” his heart. Once again, the memoir’s defining quality is not certainty but a willingness for difficult conversations and an openness to moral reconsideration of deeply held convictions.

 

By the memoir’s final chapters, Tanimoto concludes that Japan’s reconstruction will require more than constitutional reform. As a Christian minister, he argues that “the realization of democracy in Japan” must begin with renewing individual values through Christianity. Yet he carefully distinguishes this from partisan politics. The church, he insists, “should be independent from political organizations but not indifferent to politics,” maintaining that “government administrations must be guided through Christian conscience.”

 

Whether readers share Tanimoto’s theological commitments or not, the larger point remains compelling. Institutions alone cannot sustain a free society. Political renewal of institutions requires moral renewal of individuals. That is ultimately what makes this such a remarkable memoir.

 

Eighty-one years after Hiroshima, those issues remain as urgent as ever. The technologies of war have changed dramatically. Human nature has not. Tanimoto’s enduring contribution is not simply that he survived history’s first atomic bombing. It is that, as a pastor rather than a politician or historian, he understood that the greatest challenge after war is not rebuilding cities. It is rebuilding consciences.

The Iran War Is a Heavy Tax on Our Asian Allies

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, August 03, 2026

 

Japan is generally a low-tariff country, which ought to come as no surprise: Japanese people are famously not stupid.

 

Being an island only very lightly blessed with domestic natural resources other than its hardworking and productive people, Japan has to import virtually all of its fuel (both for powering vehicles and for generating electricity), the majority of its food, and hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of industrial inputs, machinery, electronics, and pharmaceuticals. Island nations with similar resource constraints tend to be either one of two things: free-traders or poor. Historically, even island nations with more abundant natural resources, such as England at the height of its powers, turn to international trade almost instinctively.

 

With the exception of a few culturally sensitive items such as rice, Japan has long followed an economic policy of forthrightly welcoming imports and pursuing trade relationships with partners around the world. Contrary to the reliably ignorant pap one hears from the Trump administration and its groveling media sycophants (did you hear Sean Hannity’s eulogy for Lindsey Graham?) Japan imports goods equivalent to about a quarter of its GDP most years, whereas in the United States, supposedly a poor waif victimized by the free-trade regime created in the 20^th century (by the United States), that figure typically is more like 14 percent, though it tends to edge up a little bit when the U.S. economy is doing particularly well.

 

The notion that protecting a nation’s economy from imports is a way to make that nation rich is belied by the facts, with very wealthy countries often having high levels of imports (nearly 70 percent of GDP for both the Swiss and the Dutch) and poorer countries often enjoying relatively little in the way of imports (14 percent for Haiti, 17 percent for Nigeria). One can find many counterexamples to that, of course: rich countries with relatively low imports (the United States) and poor countries with high imports (dirt poor Kiribati has imports equivalent to 98 percent of GDP), because the stronger relationship is not between affluence and imports but between such factors as the size and diversity of the economy, relative strength of the currency, stability of government, openness to trade, etc. and imports. Both Japan and the United States have lower levels of imports than the average high-income country (around 31 percent) and, in that respect, more closely resemble lower- and middle-income countries.

 

No surprise, then, that tariff collections contribute almost nothing (about 1 percent of total revenue) to Japan’s government finances, which are sustained by the personal income tax, the corporation tax, and, most important, the consumption tax, which at one-third of government revenue is the largest single contributor to Japanese public coffers. And Japan—which already suffers from excessive government debt, amounting to 230 percent of GDP—is about to substantially cut that consumption tax, reducing the rate on food and beverages from 8 percent to 1 percent for two years.

 

Why 1 percent? That’s an interesting tidbit. The government of Sanae Takaichi apparently had first considered suspending the consumption tax on food entirely for two years, but the difficulty of reprogramming all of the nation’s cash registers and retail software once for the suspension and then again for the reintroduction of the tax in two years was such that it was judged to be more economically efficient to cut the rate to 1 percent. Transaction costs—they can sneak up on you in non-obvious ways.

 

Even reducing the rate to 1 percent instead of 0.00 percent will impose heavy costs on the Japanese treasury, with forgone tax revenue amounting at least to something on the order of $61 billion over the planned two-year reduction. That’s a revenue hit of almost 6 percent of total government income just from reducing the consumption tax on food and beverages while leaving it at its current level for everything else. Japan already has demographic challenges, high debt, relatively low taxes (government revenue is about 20 percent of GDP, as opposed to something more like 30 percent in France, Canada, or Australia), a weak currency, an insufficient work force, a business culture short on American-style innovation and slow to adapt to new global realities, and, hence, three decades of economic stagnation: In a situation such as Japan’s, economic stimulus does not come cheap.

 

Japan is hurting particularly intensely at the moment thanks in no small part to—not to put too fine a point on it—us.

 

Donald Trump’s illegal, idiotic, and incompetently managed war in Iran is imposing relatively mild economic costs on the United States—for now. We have had sustained high inflation since the COVID era, and the pain has been widespread and persistent, and what the Iran war has added is mainly—if I may speak on behalf of my people—a redneck tax, by which I mean an economic burden that is felt most directly by guys now paying $255 for an all-the-way-from-E fill-up for a Ford Super Duty diesel. But high diesel prices have a way of getting spread around the U.S. economy: Basically everything Americans buy moves around by rail or by truck or by a combination of rail and truck, and what our freight trains have in common with our long-haul trucks is that they pretty much all run on diesel: diesel-electric systems for the trains and regular-ol’ diesel internal-combustion engines such as the Cummins X15 and Volvo D13 powering the big rigs.

 

But the costs imposed on Japan have been large and immediate. The United States has a large and diverse domestic energy industry (thank your neighborhood fracking crew), while Japan relies almost exclusively on Middle Eastern oil shipped through the Strait of Hormuz. Japan is the world’s second-largest single importer of liquefied natural gas, which comes from most of the same places as the oil and via the same route. But it is not only petroleum fuels: The war has disrupted Japanese shipping in many other ways, leading to shortages not only of hydrocarbon products such as naphtha but also such common commodities as aluminum. This has led to shortages touching things Americans rarely think about, such as ink: One Japanese snacks company switched to black-and-white packaging in the name of economy. Another snacks company suspended production of one line of goods because it could not secure enough polystyrene containers for packaging. Higher costs for components and materials helped to send Toyota’s profits falling by nearly half in the fourth-quarter results reported in May—and Trump’s destructive tariffs put a brake on the firm’s U.S. sales, too. Toyota’s problems are not a faraway concern: Toyota employs some 50,000 Americans here in the United States, which is more than the Ram, Jeep, and Dodge brands combined, along with the rest of their Stellantis stablemates.

 

Washington is always looking to tidy things up in the Middle East—This one is our last misadventure there, honest!—before making that “pivot” to Asia our foreign policy solons have been talking about since the waning days of the so-called war on terror. But if you think of that pivot as a pirouette, part of a dance, who is going to be our most attractive dance partner when the time for turning comes?

 

If not Japan, then the Republic of Korea—which has, if anything, been hit harder by the Iran war than Japan has, suffering an unprecedented crash in its stock market, a severe devaluation of its currency, supply disruptions for its all-important semiconductor industry, energy shortages, and more. The OECD forecast took 0.4 percentage points off its expected growth for South Korea, the biggest hit for any advanced economy. South Korean authorities are facing a three-headed dragon in the form of high interest rates, high inflation, and a weak currency. And that’s assuming that they can scrape together enough fuel to keep the lights on and the trucks moving.

 

But Japan probably should be the larger concern for Washington, if only because Japan has more than twice the population and more than twice the economic output of the Republic of Korea. If the pivot to Asia is about containing and counteracting Chinese power and Beijing’s hegemonic aspirations, these are the partners we are going to need. And they are taking it in the shorts because somebody convinced Donald Trump—who is, it cannot be overemphasized, an utter fool and a geopolitical illiterate—that Iran could be knocked over with as little drama or risk as our lark of a kidnapping-coup in Venezuela.

 

How it came to be that the Trump administration launched a war on Iran without having a plan for controlling the Strait of Hormuz is something of a mystery; the smart analysts surmise that all of our existing protocols for controlling the strait (a scenario endlessly war-gamed by U.S. military and intelligence leaders) assumed the presence of ground troops, at least on the northern shore of the waterway, while the Trump administration has taken that off the table as a matter of pure political cowardice. At first mildly hawkish vis-à-vis Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, Trump was a johnny-come-lately critic of that war and of George W. Bush’s prosecution of it, and he does not want to be seen now as having instigated an even less profitable version of that war—especially now that the Iran war is the Iraq war, too, with Saudi Arabia and the U.S. attacking Iran’s proxy forces in Iraq.

 

If the United States wishes to maintain its leading position in the world, it is going to need allies—and not only the European democracies that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and the rest of that towering inferno of jackassery go out of their way to insult and abuse, to say nothing of the other two countries of North America, which have been abused with at least equal stupidity. We are going to need Middle East players such as the United Arab Emirates and Asian powers such as Japan and South Korea.

 

What do those countries all have in common? They are paying high prices for a war they did not choose, that they were in the main not even much consulted about, and that they know—because they are famously not stupid—is being conducted in the most mincingly craven way by American leaders who do not know what to do and who wouldn’t have the guts or the honor to do the right thing if they knew what it was.

 

(A Little More) Economics for English Majors

 

Writing in the Wall Street Journal—really, the Wall Street by-God Journal!—Harriet “One Letter Away from Sorry” Torry offers up this remarkable paragraph:

 

GDP reflects the total of all spending. But since some of that spending is on imported products, rather than things made in the U.S., imports are considered a drag on GDP.

 

No, no, no—a thousand times: no.

 

The thing about GDP is that the D stands for something.

 

Statisticians subtract imports from GDP not because imports are “a drag on GDP” but because they have no bearing on GDP whatsoever. The subtraction is necessary because spending on imports already is counted in the other GDP variables: government spending, consumption, and investment. As our friends at the St. Louis Fed put it:

 

When the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) measures economic output, it categorizes spending with the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA). Some of this spending, which is counted as C, I, and G, is spent on imported goods. As such, the value of imports must be subtracted to ensure that only spending on domestic goods is measured in GDP. For example, $30,000 spent on an imported car is counted as a personal consumption expenditure (C), but then the $30,000 is subtracted as an import (M) to ensure that only the value of domestic production is counted. As such, the imports variable (M) functions as an accounting variable rather than an expenditure variable. To be clear, the purchase of domestic goods and services increases GDP because it increases domestic production, but the purchase of imported goods and services has no direct impact on GDP.

 

For pete’s sake, this is the Wall Street Journal—not the Trump administration’s trade office.

 

In Closing

 

Friday-night news dump alert!

 

Federal prosecutors late last week moved to dismiss charges against supposed reflecting pool vandal David Hearn. In the least surprising development of the week, the former Fox News grotesque who runs the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia confirmed that the charges had been dropped because the mess at the pool was the “result of a botched installation and not vandalism.” Everybody knows that. Everybody knew that when the DOJ charged David Hearn with a felony because nobody had the guts to tell Donald Trump that, once again, he’d picked incompetent people to do a job that subsequently was done incompetently. Trump is, of course, having a temper tantrum about this.

 

Using the DOJ as a political weapon is bad enough—but using it as a therapeutic tool for our neurotic and infantile president is something else.

Beijing’s Silent Airspace Gambit

By Jianli Yang

Saturday, April 11, 2026

 

On March 27, China’s Shanghai Flight Information Region issued multiple Notices to Airmen (NOTAMs), abruptly designating vast stretches of airspace along its eastern seaboard as restricted warning zones and thereby barring flights from the area. The scope was extraordinary. The no-flight zones extend from the Korea-facing Yellow Sea to the Japan-facing East China Sea, flanking Shanghai to the north and south. Their total area exceeds the geographic size of Taiwan. Even more striking, the altitude designation, “SFC–UNL,” places no vertical limit on the restricted airspace, effectively restricting even the highest-flying aircraft.

 

The duration of the ban was even more unusual: until May 6, for a total of 40 days.

 

As the Wall Street Journal noted, the scale and length of these restrictions are unprecedented. Unlike past notices that were tied to specific military exercises, Beijing has provided no official explanation for its move.

 

But China’s silence is deliberate. That’s because this airspace restriction is not simply a commercial aviation matter. It is a strategic signal.

 

Japan Is No Longer a Secondary Variable

 

Taiwanese security officials have indicated that the configuration is “clearly directed at Japan,” per the Journal. Beijing appears to be revising its threat hierarchy to no longer view Japan as merely a supporting actor in a Taiwan contingency. Japan, in China’s eyes, is becoming something else: an independent trigger point for conflict. Consequently, China is increasingly keen on countering Japan’s strength and influence.

 

Japan’s shift in importance to China reflects a deeper transformation in how war itself is conceptualized. In the Cold War, the sequencing of conflict followed geography and political objectives. Today, in an era shaped by long-range strike capabilities and networked warfare, sequencing increasingly follows threat nodes. Japan — insofar as it has rapidly acquired the ability to strike China’s mainland and has more deeply integrated into the U.S. alliance system — has emerged as such a node.

 

This shift opens a new strategic possibility for China: reckon with Japan first, thus altering the regional balance, and then resolve the Taiwan question under more favorable conditions.

 

Recent developments explain China’s reassessment of its regional strategic priorities.

 

At the end of March, Japan announced the deployment of two new long-range strike systems: the Type-25 land-based, anti-ship missile and the Type-25 hypersonic glide vehicle. The former extends its range to roughly 1,000 kilometers, placing much of China’s eastern seaboard — including Shanghai — within reach. Future variants are expected to approach ranges of 2,000 kilometers.

 

This is a qualitative shift. Japan now possesses, for the first time in the postwar era, meaningful stand-off strike capability.

 

At the same time that Japan is improving its strike capabilities, it is growing more assertive against Chinese regional aggression. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi recently stated — in remarks that outraged Beijing — that “a Taiwan contingency is a Japanese contingency.” These comments signaled her country’s willingness to intervene in any potential cross-strait crisis. From Beijing’s perspective, this means that any future attempt to resolve the Taiwan question by force will almost certainly entail confrontation with Japan.

 

Amphibious assault vehicles of Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force take part in a marine landing drill in Kagoshima prefecture, southwestern Japan. (Issei Kato/Reuters)

 

Once that conclusion is accepted, a strategic question naturally emerges: If conflict with Japan is likely anyway, why wait?

 

For Beijing, the relevant questions are as follows: Why allow Japan’s capabilities to mature further? Why fight at a time and place dictated by others? Instead, why not shape the conditions of a regional conflict in advance?

 

The Logic of ‘Node Suppression,’ Not Necessarily War

 

None of this should be taken to imply that Beijing seeks immediate war with Japan. The structural constraints remain clear: A direct, large-scale conflict with Japan risks rapid escalation into war with the United States.

 

Instead, the emerging approach from Beijing is more subtle.

 

China is unlikely to attempt to defeat Japan outright. Rather, it is pursuing a strategy aimed at suppressing Japan’s effectiveness as a strategic node, degrading its ability to act, and eroding its confidence.

 

Crucially, this is not achieved through a single decisive conflict. China will not weaken Japan through one war. It will do so, if at all, through a sustained series of actions that remain below the threshold of open war, gradually reshaping the strategic environment.

 

The 40-day airspace restriction is best understood in this context. China’s extended airspace closure is not simply a military exercise — it is a form of strategic experimentation in rule-setting.

 

By expanding the duration and scale of restricted zones without explanation, Beijing is testing whether it can gradually redefine operational norms in contested space without triggering direct confrontation. The objective is not immediate tactical gain, but long-term transformation: to turn what was once open, predictable space into a controlled, uncertain environment.

 

This is a form of what might be called “rule intervention.”

 

Control is no longer achieved solely through physical occupation. It is exercised by shaping the rules under which others operate. A NOTAM, repeated often enough, can change behavior as effectively as a naval blockade.

 

If such measures are normalized, they will constrain Japan’s operational freedom and alter its risk calculations. Over time, this will erode Japan’s role as a reliable forward node in the U.S. alliance system.

 

There is also a domestic dimension to this sequencing.

 

A confrontation with Japan would likely mobilize Chinese public opinion far more readily than a war over Taiwan. Anti-Japanese sentiment, rooted in the unresolved legacy of World War II, remains potent. Japan is seen as an external adversary; Taiwan, by contrast, is widely regarded as part of a shared national community.

 

This distinction matters politically.

 

A Japan-focused crisis could unify domestic support while simultaneously complicating Taiwan’s internal politics. Taiwan’s opposition forces — particularly the Kuomintang and its supporters, who represent a substantial portion of the electorate — might find it far more difficult to align openly with Japan in a conflict not directly triggered by Taiwan itself. For Taipei, the choice would be agonizing: intervene and risk direct war with China, or remain on the sidelines and risk strategic isolation.

 

In this sense, “Japan first” does not simply alter the military sequence — it reshapes the political landscape.

 

Timing Is Not Accidental

 

It’s also important to remember that China’s 40-day window is not occurring in a vacuum; rather, it’s overlapping with a series of politically and strategically significant regional events.

 

Kuomintang chairwoman Zheng Liwen is currently on a visit to China, and meeting Xi Jinping is on the agenda. The symbolism is unmistakable. The Kuomintang led China’s resistance against Japan during World War II, while the Chinese Communist Party nominally operated under its leadership in a “united front.” A revival — symbolic or otherwise — of a joint anti-Japanese narrative would carry powerful political implications.

 

As Japan positions itself as a defender of Taiwan, Beijing is creating conditions under which Taiwan’s political forces may not respond uniformly. While Takaichi has declared that “a Taiwan contingency is a Japanese contingency,” the reverse does not necessarily hold. If Japan faces a crisis, Taiwan’s support does not automatically follow. This asymmetry is, for Beijing, strategically exploitable.

 

Furthermore, a potential Trump–Xi meeting is expected after the 40-day window. As the United States is increasingly preoccupied with the prospect of deeper involvement in conflict with Iran, these overlapping timelines are not trivial. They create a strategic opportunity for China.

 

The U.S. Factor: Constraint and Opportunity

 

Any Chinese strategy toward Japan ultimately hinges on the United States. But Washington’s posture is evolving.

 

Recent interactions between Prime Minister Takaichi and President Trump did not produce a strengthened military commitment between the two countries. There was no clear articulation of U.S. support in the event of a China–Japan conflict. Instead, Trump reportedly offered to “say good things” about Japan and its leadership to Xi Jinping — an approach reflecting a transactional rather than alliance-centric mindset.

 

Beijing will not overlook this.

 

President Donald Trump shakes hands with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in the Oval Office, March 19, 2026. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

 

When the dominant security provider appears uncertain, distracted, or transactional, the incentives for testing the system increase. Furthermore, with the United States potentially entangled in a drawn-out Middle Eastern conflict, its military, political, and economic resources will be stretched. Decision-making bandwidth narrows. Response timelines lengthen.

 

Under such conditions, the Indo-Pacific does not automatically slide into war. But the risk structure shifts in subtle and important ways.

 

China prepares but may not choose to initiate a direct conflict with Japan. But it will be more likely to intensify pressure on Japan as a critical node. This is a classic pattern: When a dominant power is constrained, competitors do not necessarily escalate immediately to open conflict. They move instead to weaken the system’s key nodes.

 

The 40-day airspace restriction may ultimately be remembered as an opening move — not of a war, but of a new strategic phase. If repeated and expanded, such actions could gradually force a shift in U.S. posture from forward presence to more dispersed, defensive arrangements — effectively conceding partial erosion of control along the first island chain.

 

It is precisely through such incremental changes that strategic balances are reshaped.

 

American policymakers should not dismiss this episode as routine military activity. It reflects a broader shift in Beijing’s strategic thinking. And the key question is not whether conflict is imminent, but whether the United States recognizes the emerging pattern in time to respond effectively.

 

The skies over the East China Sea have fallen silent for 40 days. But that silence carries a message.

 

It is, in effect, an unsigned diplomatic cable — one that signals a shift in how Beijing may seek to reshape the regional order. And it would be a mistake to ignore it.

America Alone

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, April 09, 2026

 

The war in Iran may not be the last war that America wages during this presidency, but it will almost certainly be the last challenging war.

 

Whether that’s good or bad depends on how you look at it.

 

Having painted himself into a corner in the Persian Gulf, the president won’t risk another conflict in which he stands a meaningful chance of looking weak, I suspect. From here on out, we’re fighting tomato cans only. And that’s good news: A strongman who’s learned the limits of his strength will be less likely going forward to put American service members in harm’s way.

 

But it’s bad news if you believe U.S. military power is the only thing limiting the global reach of Chinese totalitarians.

 

There’s no liberal kinship binding Donald Trump to Taiwan—or Japan or South Korea, for that matter. If Xi Jinping dares the president to test his mettle against the People’s Liberation Army, my guess is the commander in chief will decide that letting China control its own “sphere of influence” is preferable to rolling the dice on a war that could shatter perceptions of American (i.e. his) might.

 

Never mind that ducking a fight with Beijing would itself go a long way toward doing that.

 

I could be wrong about all of that, as I’ve underestimated Trump’s appetite for war before. A strategic defeat in Iran might lead him to behave more aggressively toward China, not less, by leaving him feeling that he has something to prove.

 

But probably not. A bully who’s met unexpected resistance in the schoolyard will instinctively want to push smaller kids around to reestablish his dominance, not pick another fight with someone his own size. Just because I couldn’t wedgie Iran into crying uncle doesn’t mean I can’t do it to you.

 

If I’m right, America will spend the next 33 months preying on nations that can’t fight back while straining to avoid conflict with powers like China and Russia as they go about preying on our own allies.

 

How many dependable partners will a country like that still have when Trump leaves office in 2029?

 

No allies.

 

Israel?

 

Doubtful. The Israelis may want their alliance with America to continue in its current form, but Americans do not. One of the most sobering polls I’ve seen this year was this Pew Research survey published on Tuesday gauging U.S. opinion about the Jewish state. Majorities in both parties between the ages of 18 and 49 now view Israel unfavorably. (Yes, Republicans too.) Democrats 50 and older also hold an overwhelmingly unfavorable opinion.

 

Only among Republicans 50 and older—Donald Trump’s demographic—is negative sentiment toward Israel still a minority view. If the next president is J.D. Vance, it’s a cinch that Washington’s longstanding alliance with Tel Aviv will be radically more ambivalent than it’s been for most of my life. If the next president is a Democrat, the alliance might exist mostly in name only. There’ll still be intelligence-sharing, I assume (or hope), but Benjamin Netanyahu’s de facto political union with Trump has finished off whatever meager affection the American left still had for his country.

 

The Gulf states?

 

A good outcome to the Iran war might have cemented that alliance, but the window for a good outcome has closed. America’s Arab partners have been battered by Iranian missile and drone strikes, with Uncle Sam unable to fully protect them, while the bottleneck in the Strait of Hormuz continues to strangle their core industry. “The U.S. and Israel went into the war and didn’t take Gulf interests into account, so we ended up as collateral damage,” one Kuwaiti academic complained to the Wall Street Journal. “The fear is that being collateral damage in the war extends into peace, and this is something we wouldn’t accept and need to work against.”

 

If the conflict ends with Iran’s terror-supporting regime still in place, as is all but certain, Gulf nations will need to weigh their relationship with the U.S. against the risk of further antagonizing that regime. Forced to live cheek by jowl with Shiite fanatics who’ve proved their ability to take the region’s energy sector hostage, Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia and the UAE might conclude that triangulating between Iran and America is the safer long-term play. Having a friend in Washington is nice, but not as nice as not having to worry about Iran blowing up your oil fields.

 

Needless to say, the Gulf states will also pay a steep political price with the next Democratic administration for their corrupt courtship of Trump. Although maybe they’d prefer that anyway: At least a Democratic president would know better than to insult the most powerful Arab leader in the world by accusing him publicly of “kissing my ass.”

 

Japan?

 

Tokyo is probably America’s best bet for an ally who’ll still be there after the smoke from the Trump conflagration clears, but I wouldn’t bet heavily on that either. For starters, the Iran war is hitting the Japanese economy much harder than ours, as Japan gets no less than 93 percent of its crude oil via the Strait of Hormuz. Having that tap suddenly turned off has wreaked all of the havoc you might expect—a market dip, declining consumer confidence, and a rising risk of inflation. If our war saddles them with a recession, Japanese voters might understandably hold a grudge.

 

Skillful diplomacy could avert that, perhaps, but Americans opted out of skillful diplomacy when they chose a kakistocracy to govern them in 2024. Trump has responded to Japan’s economic pain by throwing a jab about Pearl Harbor during a visit by the Japanese prime minister to the White House last month and then browbeating the government for not helping him clean up the mess he made in Iran.

 

If he does anything in the Far East over the next 33 months to signal that his commitment to containing China isn’t ironclad (and there have already been rumblings to that effect), Japan will find itself in a position similar to the Gulf states. They can resolve to fight the regional menace that threatens them or they can move to appease it in hopes that it’ll leave them alone. But either way, they won’t be able to count on America to do anything meaningful about it.

 

Which brings us to Europe.

 

Enemies, a love story.

 

Our alliances with Israel, Japan, and the Gulf states will still exist nominally in 2029 even if there’s little substance to them. I’m not sure our European alliances will.

 

“NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!” That was the president’s message yesterday after meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. Hours earlier, his press secretary conceded that he was considering leaving the alliance, something he has no legal power to do but which no longer matters in autocratic America.

 

“It all began with, if you want to know the truth, Greenland,” Trump himself told reporters on Monday when asked why he was so angry at Europe for not joining his war. “We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us. And I said, ‘bye, bye.’” It is very stupid politically to pair those two grievances, as one of them explains the other: If you want to know why Europeans haven’t behaved like allies lately, consider what sort of allyship the president showed them when he spent the first month of this year trying to extort them into coughing up territory.

 

That’s what NATO is up against. Trump expects Europe to comply with his individual demands, not necessarily because those demands are reasonable but because that’s what vassals do. Whether it’s helping in the Strait of Hormuz or forking over Greenland, European leaders are supposed to subordinate their national interests—and the will of their voters—to ours when the president asks them to do so. Because he’s not asking.

 

I don’t know how an alliance as poisoned as that survives even nominally for another 33 months. Without a doubt, Trump will continue to alienate NATO members and Europe by alternately insulting them, shaking them down, and making toxic demands of them. I expect him to take another run at muscling them over Greenland too (he might be preparing to do so already), possibly using the current war as a pretext. “Europe wouldn’t let us use their bases to attack Iran so we can’t trust that Denmark will always let us use Greenland,” the president could say.

 

Simply dwell on this fact: Since January 2025, multiple NATO members have been forced to plan their response to a potential U.S. military attack. Say what you want about Vladimir Putin, at least he doesn’t make Europeans glad-hand him when they’re not busy wargaming against his army.

 

A simpler way to put all of that is that the Trump-led U.S. government isn’t hostile to Israel, Japan, or the Gulf states, but it is, plainly, ideologically hostile to Europe—to the point that its hostility is now official national security policy. In fact, while Trump was meeting with Rutte yesterday, J.D. Vance was wrapping up a two-day trip to Budapest, where he attacked the “bureaucrats in Brussels” on behalf of a corrupt Putin toady whose government has become a sort of Russian catspaw within the European Union.

 

Without hyperbole, the White House is momentarily aligned with the Kremlin in trying to rescue an unpopular Hungarian strongman because his politics are their mutual best chance of ending liberalism in the West. You tell me how something like that gets papered over and we end up in January 2029 without the U.S. and Europe in a sort of Cold War.

 

Even Ukraine, America’s greatest remaining point of leverage over Europe, might not bind the rest of NATO to us for much longer. Necessity has led to ingenuity in Kyiv: From drones to missiles to air defense, the Ukrainians have developed formidable native capabilities. The less they’re forced to rely on weapons purchased from America, the less leverage Trump will have to extort Ukraine’s allies into doing his bidding by threatening to cut those weapons off.

 

Although, ironically, the president’s desire for leverage might be the last, best hope of preserving the alliance.

 

Prestige.

 

I don’t think it would bother Trump as an ideological matter if America ended up without meaningful allies in 2029. (I doubt very much that he cares what happens to the country one way or another once it no longer answers to him.) He might actually prefer it.

 

Like his boyfriend Kim Jong Un, Trump is an autark at heart. Our mercantilist leader would be perfectly content, I think, if America subsisted entirely on homegrown food and domestic goods and exported whatever’s left over. Self-reliance is the essence of Trump juche, and self-reliant nations don’t need allies.

 

Nor, I suspect, does the president discern any reason why a nation with the greatest military in history should desire partners. That’s the mafioso in him: If you can impose your will on others (except Iran, I guess), there’s no need to court them. Eventually they’ll come begging for something they need, creating an opportunity to extort them, or you’ll take what you want from them when your own need arises.

 

“America alone” is an acceptable outcome to him in principle. But he’d miss all of the bowing and scraping allied leaders have learned to do to try to satisfy his bottomless need for flattery.

 

That’s the real risk to him in alienating partners. The president doesn’t care for NATO in the abstract, but I’m sure he finds it deeply pleasurable when a figure like Mark Rutte feels obliged to call him “daddy.” If he keeps threatening Europe, at some point that will stop. The leverage he enjoys over global elites dissipates every time he forces them anew to question whether they’re still getting more out of maintaining close ties to the United States than they’re losing.

 

“Nobody can understand what America actually is today. It seems governed by some kind of mad emperor who keeps saying whatever comes to his mind, something we haven’t witnessed since Caligula or Nero,” an Italian senator told the Wall Street Journal this week. “The one thing the Europeans have understood is that we are dealing with a bully. You can give him everything he wants, you can pretend you don’t hear his insults, but he will keep trying to bully us, and so at a certain point we must stop him.”

 

Even the Euroweenies can be pushed only so far. Eventually the president will threaten for the umpteenth time to quit NATO and they’ll reply with an exasperated “go ahead.” (Iran’s behavior this week should have taught Trump a lesson about scare tactics losing their potency.) Then he’ll be alone in the Oval Office, a global pariah with 36 percent job approval, forced to dial up Delcy Rodríguez to chat with a world leader who still respects him.

 

Or pretends to respect him, I should say.

 

That would be grim for him, which may explain why the “punishment” the White House is reportedly preparing for NATO over the Iran war doesn’t seem so punitive. From the Wall Street Journal:

 

The proposal would involve moving U.S. troops out of North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries deemed unhelpful to the Iran war effort and stationing them in countries that were more supportive.

 

…

 

Countries that could benefit because they are viewed as supportive include Poland, Romania, Lithuania and Greece, the officials said. The Eastern European countries have some of the highest defense-spending rates in the alliance and were some of the first to signal they would support an international coalition to monitor the Strait of Hormuz. After war broke out, Romania quickly approved U.S. requests to allow its bases to be used by the U.S. Air Force.

 

Moving U.S. troops from western Europe to eastern Europe isn’t punishment for NATO, it’s simply good strategic sense. If Russia comes for the alliance, it’s not going to do so via the Atlantic, with an amphibious landing in Galicia. Pulling troops from Spain or Germany might be a minor economic blow to those countries but it won’t weaken NATO’s defense if those troops end up in the Baltics. On the contrary.

 

The thought of America alone—of an America with little remaining international prestige—may ultimately be too unpalatable for a leader who really, really revels in that prestige. If our alliances with NATO and its members somehow endure until 2029, that’ll probably be why.

 

But I’d still bet on America ending up more or less alone. With the possible exception of Russia, I can’t imagine any government on Earth living through this period of chaotic, brain-damaged gangster insanity and ever again wanting to invest heavily in a relationship with the United States. I’ve made this point many times but it can’t be overstated: A people capable of electing Donald Trump twice, especially after January 6, is a people that can never again be trusted to lead the world even after he’s gone.

 

So they won’t be. Our alliances post-Trump, insofar as they exist, will be of a qualitatively different and less deferential nature than they were for most of our lifetimes. “Still somewhat better than being dominated by Chinese communists” is the most one can say for the Pax Americana anymore. And already, after just 15 months, things are so bleak that some are unwilling to say it.

Japanese Internment: The Other 80th Anniversary to Remember

By John R. Puri

Monday, August 25, 2025

 

Marion Takehara, born in Los Angeles in 1925, was a student in high school when Japanese airplanes bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. “That’s when everything changed,” she said more than 80 years later.

 

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The legalistic text of his order is almost indecipherable: “I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War . . . to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.” Roosevelt had to torture the language to obfuscate what he was really doing: ordering the mass imprisonment of innocent Americans.

 

They were innocent, those 110,000 Japanese Americans that the federal government herded into internment camps throughout the western states. Takehara certainly was. She and her family, who had lived in California since her parents were young, were given 48 hours’ notice to leave everything behind. “We had to put our dog to sleep because we didn’t know what to do with it,” she remembered painfully at age 96, in a 2022 interview with a San Antonio news station. They could not bring more than they could carry into the internment camp, so neighbors flooded Takehara’s home to purchase furniture and belongings that would otherwise be abandoned.

 

She ended up in the Granada War Relocation Center in Colorado, known to internees as Camp Amache, joining thousands of fellow Japanese Americans. Takehara recalled that the showers in the bathrooms had no doors. “Can you imagine what it’s like for an older person to have to go to the bathroom without doors in the showers? And, when I read over my notes, it made me sad again, too. But we got over it. We got over it. We got over it.”

 

About two-thirds of the interned Japanese Americans were born in the United States. Over a third were 19 and under, below the legal voting age. Many had to sell their homes and businesses at fire-sale prices before entering the camps. The majority remained incarcerated for the next three years as America prosecuted the world war against Japan and its allies. Internment camps began closing in 1945. This year marks the 80th anniversary of when America’s federal government allowed tens of thousands of its people to return to whatever lives they had left.

 

Over the past few years, the nation has commemorated the 80th anniversaries of some profoundly costly yet entirely necessary decisions made during World War II: America’s joining the war a day after Pearl Harbor, December 8, 1941. The Normandy landings, June 6, 1944. Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. Nagasaki, three days later.

 

Internment, though, is the one most of us wish we could take back. Some still insist that it was necessary, to thwart espionage and sabotage by Japanese Americans along the Pacific Coast, but it wasn’t. In 1941, Roosevelt commissioned businessman Curtis Munson to investigate the sympathies of Japanese Americans in the war. Munson concluded in his 25-page report, “As interview after interview piled up, those bringing in results began to call it the same old tune. The story was all the same. There is no Japanese ‘problem’ on the Coast. There will be no armed uprising of Japanese.” Roosevelt may have read just a one-page summary of the report. Either way, he ignored it.

 

The president declined to intern German and Italian Americans, not because they didn’t pose an espionage threat, but because there were simply too many of them, and they were considered better integrated than the Japanese. Meanwhile, he permitted 33,000 Japanese Americans to serve in the U.S. military during World War II. Thousands performed intelligence roles on Pacific islands that Japan had occupied. The Army held recruitment drives inside internment camps — the camps that existed because Japanese Americans were said not to be trusted. More than 800 of the recruits died fighting for their country — the United States — in the European theater.

 

In Hawaii — home of the critical naval base that Japan had bombed — 150,000 Japanese Americans constituted a third of the territory’s population. Large-scale internment on the islands was impractical, so the government allowed them to live unincarcerated throughout the war. Yet no Japanese American was ever convicted of espionage or sabotage in Hawaii — or anywhere else, for that matter.

 

Why did Roosevelt decide on internment, then? He was certainly prejudiced against the Japanese, once criticizing Japanese-Caucasian intermarriage for its “mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood.” But that wasn’t the overriding reason he did it. After Pearl Harbor, large majorities supported the removal of Japanese-American citizens and noncitizens from their communities. Internment was a democratic demand.

 

In the spring of 1942, the National Opinion Research Center polled Americans on their opinions of the internment policy. “Do you think we are doing the right thing, in moving Japanese aliens (those who aren’t citizens) away from the Pacific coast?” Ninety-three percent of respondents agreed that Japanese noncitizens should be “moved.” One percent was opposed. A second question was asked: “How about the Japanese who were born in this country and are United States citizens — do you think they should be moved?” Fifty-nine percent said yes. Twenty-five percent said no.

 

Roosevelt was fulfilling the American people’s wishes. In fact, by releasing Japanese Americans back into the country’s interior as the war ended, the president administered a more moderate policy than most citizens originally wanted. Gallup asked Americans in December 1942 whether those interned “should be allowed to return to the Pacific coast when the war is over?” Just 35 percent said they should, while 48 percent said they should not.

 

The most intense pressure for Roosevelt to implement internment came from the West Coast, where Japanese Americans were concentrated. If they hadn’t been removed from their homes, they likely would have faced sustained, violent harassment.

 

America’s constitutional order is set up to control public passions. But passions are never more popular or fierce than when a proud nation is ambushed and thrust into war. Acting on their passions in 1942, Americans ignored the right to due process before denying their countrymen liberty, in open defiance of the Fifth and 14th Amendments. The resulting policy denied tens of thousands the equal protection of the law.

 

In such moments, courts are supposed to be the bulwark. One Japanese-American man, Fred Korematsu, was arrested for refusing to comply with the internment order, eventually taking his case to the Supreme Court. He argued that internment of an ethnic group without a trial was unconstitutional. He was right. But in a 6–3 decision, led by Justice Hugo Black, the Court abdicated its duty to uphold constitutional protections in the hardest of times. Internment was justified by the “martial necessity arising from the danger of espionage and sabotage.” Black believed that there was danger in not deferring to the president. He had told his fellow justices, essentially, “Somebody must run this war. It is either Roosevelt or us. And we cannot.”

 

What the three dissenters recognized, however, was that there was grave danger in deference as well. Allowing Roosevelt to do what he wanted — what the American people demanded he do — was a legitimization of tyranny. The unifying fervor of war had diminished constitutional protections into little more than parchment barriers.

 

There is never a more inconvenient time to keep constitutional rights secure than wartime. Which is why there is never a more important time to insist that they are.

The Atomic Bombing of Japan Was Justified

By Richard B. Frank

Wednesday, August 06, 2025

 

Journalists have identified the use of atomic bombs against Japan in August 1945 as the greatest story of the 20th century. Beginning in the 1960s, a body of critical work among historians appeared challenging the early narratives that had validated the use of these weapons. (I reject the term “revisionist,” as any historian with new facts and arguments engages in revisionism. “Critical” is a more accurate term for these arguments.) The import of this critical work vaulted over the immediate issue into a searing condemnation of the moral fabric of all American history. These historians condemned the atomic bombings as stunningly singular immoral acts. Some used the bombings as grounds to forever preclude any claim of righteousness or greatness to Americans. The controversy burst outside the cloisters of academia into the public and has become an enduring fault line.

 

The Moral Calculus

 

The controversy erupted in a particularly contentious passage of 20th-century history. Most fundamentally, this moral indictment works from a grossly upside-down portrait of the number and identity of the war’s victims. Further, its factual premises were undermined with the release of extensive new evidence from the 1990s, notably in the U.S. and Japan.

 

The first basic point is that this war was not merely the “Pacific War.” That narrow lens treats events as though they were bound between December 1941 and August 1945. It foregrounds the conflict between the United States and Japan across the Pacific. It recognizes only a handful of additional participants: the Philippines, Australia, Pacific Islanders, and New Zealanders. The actual conflict properly identified is the Asia-Pacific War. It commenced with Japan’s assault on China in July 1937 and only ended officially 97 months later — although fighting continued “postwar” in Asia for years. Japan enormously expanded the war starting in December 1941 to reach India on the west and pierce far into the Pacific Ocean on the east.

 

The Asia-Pacific War killed 25 million human beings, by conservative count. Of these, about 6 million were military personnel, including about 3 million Chinese and 2 million Japanese. There were 19 million dead civilians — or three dead civilians for every combatant death. A reasonable range of European war casualties reaches the vicinity of 37–48 million, but the ratio of civilians to combatants does not rise above two to one.

 

Of the Asia-Pacific War civilian dead, 1–1.2 million were Japanese, including about 210,000 immediate and latent deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This leaves about 18 million dead civilians who were not Japanese. Extremely few of these were white. The 18 million comprises 12 million Chinese, 2.7 million Indonesians, 1 million Vietnamese, and about 2.3 million spread among other peoples of Asia and the Pacific. Framed another way, Japanese civilian deaths form about 6 percent of all civilian deaths, and atomic-bombing-related deaths make up less than 2 percent of all civilian deaths.

 

 

If 25 percent of the dead Chinese were children, that means one Chinese child died for every Japanese combatant and civilian who perished in the war. Combining the Indonesians and the Vietnamese, their civilian deaths exceed the total of Japanese combatant and civilian deaths. By the numbers, across China and all the other areas subjugated in Japan’s empire from December 1941 to August 1945, about 250,000 non-Japanese civilians died every month for 45 months, or the equivalent in population of more than 45 Hiroshimas and Nagasakis. Between April and August 1945, a further million Vietnamese, or about 200,000 each month, starved to death.

 

But who was a “civilian” in Japan? Japan’s leaders in March 1945 issued orders that all Japanese males 15 to 60 and all Japanese women 17 to 40 became part of “Volunteer Patriotic Units.” They received minimal training and no distinctive uniforms that would clearly separate their status as combatants from the civilian population. This confirmed American fears of a “fanatically hostile population” to confront an invasion of Japan. Thus, a major fraction of the population in every Japanese city were combatants, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The critical literature ignores this reality. Nor does it address any moral responsibility for Japan’s leaders for mingling combatants and noncombatants.

 

Getting the moral calculus correct on this anniversary is by far the most important task on the path to understand and judge how the Asia-Pacific War ended. But this also encompasses important factual issues.

 

Invasion of Japan

 

An invasion of the Japanese home islands was a highly contentious component of American strategy to achieve unconditional surrender. The U.S. Army believed that the critical issue was time. The American people would lose patience to sustain the war if the war became protracted. The Army saw the quickest path to Japanese surrender to be an invasion of the home islands. Ominously, after three years of the Japanese “no surrender” record, the Army further believed that it might not be possible to obtain an organized Japanese surrender. An invasion would position the U.S. to systematically subdue the holdouts.

 

The U.S. Navy believed that the critical issue was casualties. Huge casualties would prompt public demand for negotiated peace. The Navy looked to end the war by bombardment by air and sea and a blockade to starve to death Japanese civilians by the millions — based on the norm-breaking path set against Germany in World War I. This strategy would minimize U.S. casualties, but the timeline to a Japanese surrender by this strategy was unknowable.

 

The Army secured President Harry S. Truman’s reluctant authorization in June 1945 for an initial invasion of Kyūshū, the southernmost Japanese home island starting on November 1, 1945. Then, in July and into August, radio intelligence stunningly unmasked the Japanese preparation to turn southern Kyūshū into a huge strategic ambush. The Japanese exactly anticipated southern Kyūshū as a target, down to the specific landing areas. The radio intelligence showed that massive Japanese forces packed the landing areas, vastly outnumbering the American units that would actually engage the Japanese defenders, not perform support duties.

 

Admiral Ernest J. King, the senior American naval officer, fiercely opposed any invasion. But he had bided his time, waiting for a showdown. The radio-intelligence picture by early August demonstrated that the facts were on his side. King moved on August 9, the same day as the Nagasaki bomb, to trigger a showdown to cancel the Kyūshū landing (or any invasion). But Japan surrendered before this played out. This story remained unknown, because of secrecy, well into the 1990s. This rendered pointless the contentious debate on potential invasion casualties, since the belatedly revealed reality was far worse than the earlier projection contemplated. King’s action demonstrated just how dark the invasion strategy looked in August 1945. If the planned invasion then looked unthinkable, no plausible American president would have failed to authorize use of atomic weapons in August 1945.

 

Source: Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (Random House, 1999).

 

Belated radio-intelligence disclosures also cast new light on the feeble Japanese diplomatic initiatives in 1945. Japan’s uniformed leaders confidently expected Operation Ketsugō — the plan for defeating an American invasion — to provide the indispensable bargaining room for a negotiated peace. To the very end, they believed that there was no need to specify the terms they could obtain until Ketsugō shaped the range of possibilities.

 

Hirohito initially endorsed Ketsugō. But by June, disturbing reports reached him from inspectors he had dispatched about the lagging preparations. He and others became increasingly uneasy about the declining state of civilian morale. He met with the government’s inner cabinet and urged exploration of diplomacy to end the war. Direct negotiation with the U.S. was anathema to the military, so they authorized an attempted mediation by the Soviet Union, which was not yet at war with Japan.

 

Although at first the initiative prompted American hopes that this might signal an end to the war, and this generated much postwar ink to be spilled, ultimately the effort went nowhere. Americans followed it closely because of their complete mastery of Japanese diplomatic codes. The initiative ran between the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, Naotake Satō, and Foreign Minister Shigenori Tōgō in Tokyo. Satō’s exchanges with Tōgō read like a searing cross-examination on behalf of the Truman administration. Tōgō demanded that Tokyo provide him with inducements to secure Soviet mediation. Satō dismissed Tōgō’s flowery nothings as “pretty little phrases devoid all connection with reality.”

 

Then Satō told Tōgō that the initiative’s prospects depended on Tokyo’s providing a set of terms for ending the war. Tōgō could not provide terms because the military, which dominated Japanese government, refused to even discuss them. Utterly frustrated, Satō replied that the best Japan could hope for was unconditional surrender save for retention of the Imperial House, the country’s reigning dynasty. Tōgō rejected this — in the name of the government. The elite cadre of analysts who prepared the daily news sheet of intercept disclosures for top American leaders took pains to highlight the rejection by Tōgō of unconditional surrender even if terms included the retention of the Imperial House.

 

How Did the War End?

 

The towering library on why Japan surrendered could now fill a gigantic warehouse. My approach stems from decades of experience with witnesses and documents. That experience taught me to look first and foremost at the contemporary evidence as the most reliable guide, before witness testimony and the content of documents are altered by the manifold defects of human memory or by later agendas. The more distant the evidence appears after the event, the greater the caution it earns.

 

A close aide recorded on August 12 the reflections of Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa, Japan’s navy minister and part of the inner cabinet of the government: “The atomic bombs and Soviet entry into the war are, in a sense, gifts from the gods. This way we don’t have to say that we have quit the war because of domestic circumstances.”

 

Yonai’s trenchant contemporary assessment confides that the atomic bombs and Soviet intervention served vitally to mask the real reason for Japan’s surrender: the “domestic circumstances.” This was a euphemism for the fear that the Japanese people were reaching a revolutionary state that would not only topple Emperor Hirohito from the throne but also smash the imperial institution itself. The increasingly dire food shortages that resulted from the American blockade and the weather-induced collapse of the 1945 rice harvest, as well as the ravages of American bombing, produced the “domestic situation.”

 

When Yonai spoke, Japan’s leaders were deadlocked. The Supreme Council for Direction of the War (known as the “Big Six”) legally controlled Japan’s destiny. They were part of Prime Minister Admiral Kantarō Suzuki’s government. Only Foreign Minister Tōgō was a civilian. Besides Suzuki and Tōgō, the Big Six included Navy Minister Admiral Yonai, Army Minister General Korechika Anami, Chief of the Naval General Staff Admiral Soemu Toyoda, and Chief of the Army General Staff General Yoshijirō Umezu. Emperor Hirohito served outwardly as Japan’s supreme ruler and was divine. He was a presider, not a decider. Since becoming emperor in 1925, just once had Hirohito commanded the government to obey his orders. This was in February 1936, when an attempted coup d’état in Tokyo murdered members of his inner orbit. Hirohito donned his field marshal’s uniform and commanded the dithering government to suppress the coup immediately. That singular moment, among almost 20 years of inaction, gave no hopeful prospect of Hirohito’s directly ordering an end to the war — unless something extraordinary happened.

 

The deadlock began to break when a uranium-type atomic bomb devastated Hiroshima, on August 6. Before President Truman announced the atomic bombing, Tokyo only knew that something horrific had happened to Hiroshima. An important fact typically missed is that the Big Six did not seek expert opinion from scientists about the significance of an atomic bomb. Japan had an atomic-bomb program that failed to produce a weapon but yielded one critical product. This was the understanding that creating an atomic bomb hinged on the weapon’s fuel, fissionable material. Japan’s program revealed that producing fissionable material was a protracted and enormously resource-intensive process far beyond Japan’s capability. The Imperial Army insisted that there must first be an investigation to confirm the Americans’ claim. The Imperial Navy argued that the Americans may indeed have one atomic bomb, used at Hiroshima, but that they could not be as powerful as to have more than one, or that, even if they were, international pressure perhaps would prevent them from dropping more. Outwardly, the Big Six seemed unimpressed, but their reasoning showed that they were discounting not the unprecedented power of an atomic bomb but whether the U.S. had an arsenal of such weapons.

 

The Hiroshima bomb did hit one other target. On the afternoon of August 8, Hirohito met with Foreign Minister Tōgō. This was after Hiroshima, with the threat of the “domestic situation” escalating but before Soviet entry. Hirohito told the foreign minister that the war must now end. The Big Six put off Tōgō’s efforts to get them to meet. During the night of August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, and a 1.5-million-man Soviet invasion force attacked Manchuria.

 

News of the Soviet declaration of war and the attack reached Tokyo by morning. Imperial Army leaders knew that the Kwantung Army in Manchuria had been reduced to a pitiful state. It could only delay the Soviets. The vice war minister, General Torashirō Kawabe, rated Soviet intervention as a greater shock than Hiroshima. But he proposed to War Minister Anami that the army should discard the last vestige of civilian government and henceforth rule Japan from Imperial Headquarters. We, very fortunately, do not know where this very frightening alternative course might have left Japan.

 

The Big Six met on the morning of August 9. Prime Minister Suzuki declared that the atomic bomb and the Soviet invasion meant that the war could not go on. During the meeting, news came of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Two atomic bombings in three days implied that the U.S. had an arsenal of such weapons. The Big Six split. Suzuki, Tōgō, and Yonai believed that the war should end on the terms of the Potsdam Declaration of July 25 (of which more shortly), modified only by continuance of the imperial institution. Anami, Umezu, and Toyoda insisted on three more terms: (1) Japanese self-disarmament, (2) Japan’s ability to conduct any “war crimes” trials, and (3) no occupation of Japan. These clearly would permit survival and later revival of the old militarist order that had produced the war that killed 25 million humans.

 

This division of the Big Six continued through the day, but it also offered the unprecedented opportunity for Emperor Hirohito to break the deadlock. He did exactly this at an Imperial Conference in his presence in the early hours of August 10. He cited three reasons for his decision: (1) loss of faith in Ketsugō, (2) the conventional (and by some accounts the atomic) bombing, and (3) the “domestic situation.” He did not mention Soviet intervention. Indeed, from August 8 to the final surrender announcement on August 14, he mentioned Soviet intervention just once in conjunction with the atomic bombs. Moreover, a week after the surrender he sent to his son, the crown prince, a letter that he never expected to be made public. He explained the surrender on the basis that “our people” regarded the British and the Americans too lightly and exalted in their superior “fighting spirit” and ignored science, an obvious euphemism about the atomic bombs. He consciously made no reference to Soviet intervention.

 

Japan dispatched a diplomatic message through Swedish intermediaries on August 10, conveying Tōgō’s “one condition” offer of surrender. But it housed a poison pill. This was a demand that the emperor rule as superior to the occupation commander. This would give the emperor veto power over occupation reforms.

 

Fortunately, U.S. State Department officers recognized this ploy despite its arcane and deceptive language. The U.S. response became known as the “Byrnes note,” after Secretary of State James Byrnes. It emphatically stated that the emperor would be subordinate to the occupation commander. It repeated language from the Potsdam Proclamation to convey that, once it was clear Japan was peaceful and democratic, the ultimate form of government would be chosen by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.

 

War Minister Anami and his allies in the Big Six found this unacceptable because it did not explicitly confirm that the imperial institution would continue. For four days the internal debate continued. On August 13, Hirohito conferred with Kōichi Kido, his chief confidant. Kido’s contemporary diary entry shows that the emperor stated that even if the Americans were willing to retain him as emperor, if the Japanese people did not support this, the institution would fall. Thus, he was willing to submit his status to the Japanese people. Here, 19 days later, Hirohito is saying the terms of the Potsdam Proclamation were satisfactory. Those terms left open the prospect of both a continuance of the imperial institution and even Hirohito’s rule. With this comment, Hirohito showed that he regarded the support of the Japanese people more important to the continuance of the imperial institution than the threat of its abolition by the U.S. or the Soviets.

 

At a second Imperial Conference, on August 14, the Big Six dutifully recounted their divisions over the Byrnes note. At the end, Hirohito reaffirmed his decision to end the war. That night, Hirohito recorded his national address announcing the end of the war. Radical middle-grade Imperial Army officers staged a coup. They killed the commander of the Imperial Guards, entered the emperor’s compound, but did not find the hidden record with Hirohito’s address. The leaders committed suicide the next morning.

 

On August 15, the Japanese people gathered to listen for the first time to the voice of the emperor. In his speech, instead of the word for surrender, the emperor used a tortured circumlocution: “The war situation has not developed necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.” He went on to explain that “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.” Ending the war, therefore, would prevent “the total extinction of human civilization.”

 

At a Hiroshima hospital overflowing with patients suffering horrific injuries from the atomic bomb, Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was surprised when the emperor announced that the war had ended. But shocking were the multiple voices from his patients, many dying, “shouting for the war to continue.”

 

Admiral Yonai later confessed that he experienced extreme anxiety for four days after the emperor’s broadcast over whether the surrender would hold. War Minister Anami, who had the power to stop the surrender, chose not to use it, in deference to Hirohito. Anami committed suicide wearing a shirt given to him by the emperor. The senior Japanese commanders in China and in the Southern Area (Southeast Asia and part of the Pacific), who led about a third of all of Japan’s armed forces, immediately announced that they would not comply with the emperor’s order. Hirohito dispatched imperial princes who convinced them to obey.

 

Slowly, the surrender took hold. The formal surrender occurred on the battleship Missouri on September 2. Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors continued to die, as did a far larger number of Asian civilians who had suffered the impact of Japanese conquest, as well as 300,000–400,000 Japanese civilians who fell into Soviet captivity.