Drafting of the Imperial Rescript on Termination of the War

Following Emperor Hirohito's first Seidan (Sacred Decision) at the Imperial Conference of August 9-10, 1945, Chief Cabinet Secretary Sakomizu Hisatsune began secretly preparing the Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War (終戦の詔書) at the Prime Minister's Official Residence (Kantei). Sakomizu produced the outline; he first considered plain colloquial Japanese but, unable to settle how the Emperor should refer to himself and address the people, fell back on the classical literary style.

The literary text was composed from August 9 onward by the Chinese-classics scholar Kawata Mizuho, an adviser to the Cabinet, and Sakomizu worked the Emperor's remarks at the Imperial Conference into the draft. On August 14 the Confucian scholar Yasuoka Masahiro, adviser to the Greater East Asia Ministry, revised it. Yasuoka proposed replacing 'according to the dictates of time and fate' with a phrase meaning 'where righteousness and the mandate lie' (義命ノ存スル所), but ministers objected that the term could not even be found in a dictionary and it was changed back, to Yasuoka's lasting indignation; his phrase about the Emperor's 'vital organs being torn asunder' (五内為ニ裂ク) was kept. The famous phrase about 'enduring the unendurable' is generally traced to the Emperor's own words at the Imperial Conference rather than to Yasuoka.

After the second Sacred Decision on the morning of August 14, the draft went to a final Cabinet session at the Kantei that afternoon and evening. Army Minister Anami Korechika insisted that 'the war situation grows worse day by day' be changed to 'the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage', and this was accepted. Japanese sources say the drafts ran to a 'seventh draft' (this entry previously said at least nine; accounts differ). Because the fair copy by the official Sano Komonta was being written while the Cabinet was still amending the text, omissions were found after it was finished, and Sato Asao, head of the Cabinet Secretariat's general affairs section, decided to insert them in small characters; the original therefore carries pasted corrections and insertions, highly unusual for an imperial rescript.

The rescript, usually counted at 815 characters (802 by another count), was sanctioned by the Emperor and countersigned by the sixteen ministers that night, dated August 14 and published in an extra of the Official Gazette. The Emperor recorded his reading of it late that night, and it was broadcast at noon on August 15. The original is preserved in the National Archives of Japan.