The text at right is from page 240 of 原爆投下への道 (The Road to the Dropping of the Atomic Bomb), by 荒井信一 (Arai Shin'ichi).
In the translation I've italicized the direct quotes of Foreign Ministry officials' reactions to Article 12 of the Potsdam Declaration to differentiate what they wrote from the interpretation Arai adds in the last three sentences. However much Arai strives to pose Article 12's wording as ambiguous diplomatic language, it was a clear and binding public statement that the occupation would end when "there has been established in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people a peacefully inclined and responsible government," and the quoted officials accordingly judged this meant that government could be a constitutional monarchy.
Why this matters is that these quotations undermine one of Gar Alperowitz's most important accusations in his book The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, namely that by removing from Article 12 the wording that "... this would not preclude a constitutional monarchy under the present dynasty," Truman and Byrnes' had knowingly and intentionally guaranteed its rejection. As Arai is the only Japanese historian mentioned in the Acknowledgements of The Decision ..., this is a striking example of the deficiencies of the research underlying that work, which alas has been taken by much of academia and the American public to be, per its cover blurb, a "definitive history".
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"Here, the clear guarantee of the imperial system in the original draft has disappeared. Regarding the reception of Article 12 in Japan, Shibusawa Shin'ichi, then the Treaty Bureau Chief at the Foreign Ministry, recalled, 'When I read this, my first thought was that although it made no mention of what would become of the Imperial System, intuitively it seemed the Allied Powers were not thinking of any constraints such as abolishing it or placing restrictions on it.' Similarly, Cabinet Legislation Bureau Chief Ando Yoshinobu also recalled, 'I was concerned for the Imperial System, but [Article 12] left [the form of] Japanese government up to the will of the people. ... But since anyway this was going to be left to the will of the people, I said to the (Foreign) Minister we should trust the people, as the majority weren't thinking anything like abolishing the Imperial System.' So diplomatic bureaucrats skilled in the art of delicately nuanced diplomatic language saw the possibility of preserving the imperial system in Article 12. The way it was expressed was extremely ambiguous, and such a possibility remained only implicitly suggested. Even the diplomats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs hesitated to assert with confidence that the text presented the possibility of preserving the Imperial System." |
The original Japanese:
ここには、原案にあったようの天皇制についての明確な保証は姿を消している。この一二粂の日本 |