Bear the unbearable
Truman“Bear the unbearable” is Hirohito’s phrase for the decision that Japan must surrender after Nagasaki. Spoken as the Japanese leadership faced a deadlock between continued resistance and acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, it marked a decisive reversal: the country must endure the intolerable act of giving up the war.
The phrase in its setting
On the morning Nagasaki was bombed, Japan’s Supreme Council for the Direction of the War was meeting in Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki’s bomb shelter outside the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. Three powerful military commanders—two generals and an admiral—argued against surrender. The proposed alternative was to draw American forces onto Japanese soil and fight one last battle. War minister Korechika Anami invoked national honor and imagined the nation destroyed like a beautiful flower. Against this insistence on a final struggle, “bear the unbearable” framed surrender as the course Japan had to accept.
The decision to surrender
News of the bombing adjourned the meeting. The council reconvened that night with Hirohito, who decided that Japan must surrender. Less than twenty-four hours after Nagasaki, the phrase gave succinct form to that choice: the unbearable was not only the devastation of continued war, but also the surrender that the military commanders had resisted. The Japanese government agreed to accept the Potsdam Declaration on the understanding that the Emperor would remain sovereign.
The phrase’s immediate consequence
The condition attached to Japan’s acceptance made the next step uncertain. On the morning of August 10, Harry S. Truman received a War Department radio dispatch reporting Japan’s position and summoned James F. Byrnes, Henry L. Stimson, William D. Leahy, and James Forrestal. Truman questioned whether retaining the Emperor could eliminate Japan’s warlike spirit, and whether a surrender carrying such a condition could still be considered unconditional. The phrase thus marks the Japanese decision to yield, while the condition surrounding that decision leaves open the diplomatic question of what surrender would mean.
