* The Potsdam declaration on Japan was tricky.
* It was drafted while Churchill was still PM.
* In fact it was probably one of the last things he did as PM.
* But it was signed by Attlee.
* Stalin had to be involved, but he couldn’t sign it because the U.S.S.R. was still technically under a non-agression treaty with Japan.
* Truman also wanted Chiang KaiShek to sign it.
* Which meant it needed they needed to get it translated and sent to him at his remote headquarters nears ChongKing in central China.
* The final text gave Japan “an opportunity to end this war” before the “prodigious land, sea and air forces of the United States, the British Empire and of China, many times reinforced by their armies and air fleets from the west, are poised to strike the final blows upon Japan . . . until she ceases to resist.”
* It also advised the Japanese of what befell the Germans when they fought to the end.
* It warned that “the might that now converges on Japan is immeasurably greater than that which, when applied to the resisting Nazis, necessarily laid waste to the lands, the industry and the method of life of the whole German people.”
* But of course it’s worth keeping in mind that many in the Japanese military prided themselves on their particular militaristic interpretation of the Bushido code.
* The classic book, Bushido, the Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe, written in 1899, portrays Bushido - which he says translates as Military-Knight-Ways - as being very similar to the code of chivalry supposedly adopted by the European knights in the Middle Ages.
* He portrays it as relatively pacifistic.
* It’s about courage and honour, sincerity, frugality, loyalty, mastery of martial arts, and honour to the death, but stresses morality as well.
* It was the code of the samurai.
* Here’s some crazy numbers.
* By the end of the 19th century, somewhere between 5% and 10% of the Japanese population were samurai.
* The census at the end of the 19th century counted 1,282,000 members of the "high samurai", allowed to ride a horse, and 492,000 members of the "low samurai", allowed to wear two swords but not to ride a horse, in a country of about 25 million.
* Under the bushidō ideal, if a samurai failed to uphold his honor he could only regain it by performing seppuku (ritual suicide).
* In an excerpt from his book Samurai: The World of the Warrior, historian Stephen Turnbull describes the role of seppuku in feudal Japan:
* In the world of the warrior, seppuku was a deed of bravery that was admirable in a samurai who knew he was defeated, disgraced, or mortally wounded.
* It meant that he could end his days with his transgressions wiped away and with his reputation not merely intact but actually enhanced.
* The cutting of the abdomen released the samurai’s spirit in the most dramatic fashion, but it was an extremely painful and unpleasant way to die, and sometimes the samurai who was performing the act asked a loyal comrade to cut off his head at the moment of agony.
* Unfortunately bushido was hijacked and adapted by militarists and the government from the early 1900s onward as nationalism increased around the time of the Russo-Japanese War.
* And by WWII, it had reached epic proportions.
* I don’t know how much western strategists understood bushido in 1945, but they were certainly aware of kamikaze pilots.
* Kamikaze translates as "divine wind" or "spirit wind”
* The Kamikaze were a part of the Japanese Special Attack Units of military aviators who initiated suicide attacks for the Empire of Japan against Allied naval vessels in the closing stages of the Pacific campaign of World War II, designed to destroy warships more effectively than was possible with conventional air attacks.
* About 3,862 kamikaze pilots died during the war, and somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 naval person
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