A Short Note: The Dumbest Move Tokyo Could Have Made

Tokyo just did something breathtakingly tone-deaf.

Between 8 and 21 August, Japan’s National Archives will put the original “Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War” on public display. That is the very script Emperor Hirohito recorded on 14 August 1945 and broadcast the next noon to tell his people Japan would accept the Potsdam Declaration—i.e., surrender. Yet the Japanese government now markets the document as proof of Japan’s “efforts for peace.” In plain English: they are rewriting capitulation into magnanimity.

The rebranding is audacious. When the rescript was first aired it had no official title, but a decade later the Japanese right coined the phrase “終戦詔書” (“Rescript on Ending the War”). The two missing characters—“投降” (surrender)—vanished from popular memory. This year, the 80th anniversary of Allied victory, Tokyo is betting that most Japanese—and even fewer foreigners—will bother to recall that the Potsdam Declaration’s full name was the “Proclamation by the Heads of Government of the United States, China and the United Kingdom Calling upon Japan to Surrender.” Accepting it was surrender, no matter how gently Hirohito phrased his radio address.

Why exhume the document now? Not to apologize, but to domestically re-frame August 1945 as the moment Japan, out of sheer benevolence, chose to “end hostilities.” That sleight-of-hand may play well inside Japan, where only a sliver of the public has ever read the Potsdam text; abroad, it is an open dare.

A dare, however, can backfire. By parading the rescript, Tokyo has just handed its neighbors the single best piece of evidence that Japan did, in fact, accept every clause of the Potsdam Declaration—including the long-forgotten Article 8, which limits Japanese sovereignty to “Honshū, Hokkaidō, Kyūshū, Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine.” The “we” were the governments of the United States, the Republic of China, the United Kingdom and, after 8 August 1945, the Soviet Union. Today those rights descend respectively to Washington, Beijing, London and Moscow.

In short, the four victorious powers have never formally designated which of the roughly 14,000 other islands Japan currently administers actually belong to it. Legally speaking, everything beyond the four main islands—Okinawa, the Kurils, Tsushima, Awaji, even the three islets guarding the mouth of Tokyo Bay—are still in limbo. Japan’s ports, highways and runways built on them are, strictly speaking, unauthorized structures. Berlin lost 34 percent of its pre-war territory because the Potsdam Agreement (for Germany) was enforced. Tokyo, by contrast, has never faced that reckoning.

Beijing already has the diplomatic ammunition to press the issue. The 1972 Japan-China Joint Communiqué records Tokyo’s pledge to “respect the position of the Chinese Government regarding Article 8 of the Potsdam Declaration.” The 1978 Peace and Friendship Treaty then bound both sides to “strictly observe” the principles of the Joint Communiqué. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida himself exchanged congratulatory messages on the 45th anniversary of that treaty in 2023, implicitly renewing the commitment.

So if Japan insists on showcasing the rescript as a prop in its historical theater, China—and, in theory, the other Allied successors—can insist that Japan finally perform the obligations attached to it. Step one: convene the powers named in 1945 and delimit Japanese territory once and for all. Step two: remove or repurpose any “illegal structures” on islands not assigned to Japan. The mere mention of such a process would concentrate minds in Nagatachō far more than any protest march.

Tokyo’s right wing wanted a symbol of victimhood; it may have gifted Beijing a lever instead.=