Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, but his formal language and lack of explicit surrender caused confusion. The decision to surrender was influenced by the destruction of Japanese forces and the use of atomic bombs by the US.
Hirohito, also known as Emperor Shōwa, was emperor of Japan between 1926 and 1989. However, for the first two decades of his reign, Hirohito never addressed his subjects directly. The first time the Japanese people heard their emperor speaking on the radio was on August 15, 1945, when Hirohito announced that Japan had accepted the Potsdam Declaration. This meant Japan’s unconditional surrender and ended World War II. However, for the Japanese people, the full impact of the emperor’s speech was not immediately realized. Hirohito had spoken in formal classical Japanese, which few could easily understand, and had not explicitly stated that Japan had surrendered – a radio announcer had to clarify this after Hirohito’s speech. By 1945, Japanese forces had been mostly destroyed by the Allied Powers. The use of atomic bombs by the United States and the declaration of war by the Soviet Union against Japan led the emperor and the Supreme War Council to decide in favor of surrender. Emperor Hirohito said on the radio: “We have decided to pave the way for a great peace for all generations to come, enduring the unbearable and suffering what is unbearable.”
Read more about Japan and World War II:
On December 7, 1941, Japanese fighter planes attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing more than 2,000 American soldiers and sailors.
Three days later in August 1945, American forces dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 120,000 people.
The current emperor of Japan is the 82-year-old Emperor Akihito, the eldest son of Hirohito.
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