When did Emperor Hirohito gave an address about suicides and non-productive jobs?
Upvote:0
The suicide order is a MYTH - only one writer, David Bergamini - widely discredited - has tried to seriously put forward this idea. Scholarly consensus is that this never happened.
Upvote:5
Hirohito didn't make a speech or address, but he sent out an official announcement to the military and to Tojo that Japanese civilians should commit suicide rather than be taken prisoner.
As the war turned against the Japanese, Hirohito personally found the threat of defection of Japanese civilians disturbing because there was a risk that live civilians would be surprised by generous U.S. treatment.[27] Native Japanese sympathizers would hand the Americans a powerful propaganda weapon to subvert the "fighting spirit" of Japan in radio broadcasts. At the end of June 1944 during the Battle of Saipan, Hirohito sent out the first imperial order encouraging all Japanese civilians to commit suicide rather than be taken prisoner.[27]
The Imperial order authorized Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito, the commander of Saipan, to promise civilians who died there an equal spiritual status in the afterlife with those of soldiers perishing in combat. General Tojo intercepted the order on June 30 and delayed its sending, but it was issued anyway the next day. By the time the Marines advanced on the north tip of the island, from 8–12 July, most of the damage had been done.[27] Over 1,000 Japanese civilians committed suicide in the last days of the battle to take the offered privileged place in the afterlife, some jumping from "Suicide Cliff" and "Banzai Cliff".[
Before the eventual unconditional surrender of Japan after the dropping of the atomic bombs, the government was considering orders for mass-suicides "modeled on the 47-Ronin incident."
By the time Japan surrendered, 10,000 civilians are believed to have committed suicide. Many in the military also committed suicide by crashing planes into American ships. 3000 Japanese sailors were found aboard one ship who had all committed suicide rather than be taken prisoner.
The information sourced here is mostly from Wikipedia. I suggest the book "Girl with the White Flag" (white flag for surrender) for a personal historical account of the absolute terror Japanese civilians felt when American troops approached. They believed the soldiers would brutally murder them.
This wasn't the account of Japanese history I learned, so I read more up on this. The information can all also be found on Wikipedia. I learned that the Emperor had very little role in the war, but this is apparently was a fabrication by the US to exonerate him from war crimes. The best and newest evidence shows he was intimately involved. The US did this perhaps to make Japan easier to govern and occupy, as the emperor had an important symbolic role to the Japanese people; and also, the US put all blame on the military, therefore discrediting them. They told the Japanese that they and the Emperor had been tricked by the military. Hirohito offered to stand trial for war crimes and the US refused to allow him to do this.
More post
- 📝 What sort of maps did the ancient Greeks make and distribute?
- 📝 Why didn't a noble family change their last name from a kind of duck to something more prestigious?
- 📝 How did the Romans discover dry cleaning?
- 📝 Why was Operation Felix cancelled?
- 📝 What was the first ever televised lottery?
- 📝 How many U.S. Founding Fathers knew about Baruch Spinoza?
- 📝 Was the Iraqi Mukhabarat modelled on the German Reichssicherheitshauptamt, and in what ways?
- 📝 What was the purpose of a division staff in a US Navy Task Force/Fleet in WWII?
- 📝 Why are some New Kingdom dates quotes in pairs two years apart?
- 📝 Was the Bosnian Crisis the trigger to WWI and not the assassination?
- 📝 When did Frankfurt am Main adopt the Gregorian Calendar?
- 📝 How did Raphael paint halos?
- 📝 How did people say “I have to go to the bathroom” before the bathroom and pipes were common?
- 📝 Was the attack on Pearl Harbor totally unexpected?
- 📝 When was flat glass invented?
- 📝 What was the composition of a US Half-Track Unit during the Korean War?
- 📝 Is this movie "History of the World: Every Year" credible?
- 📝 How were little children dressed in medieval times?
- 📝 What is the age of the oldest written proof of Christianity?
- 📝 Did Japan make a contribution to World War II way out of proportion to its nominal relative GDP?
- 📝 Why did the Levee en Masse call for children to make lint?
- 📝 If the heir to a Kingdom is called Crown Prince, what is the heir to a Duchy called?
- 📝 What were the required conditions to be accepted by a university in Medieval times?
- 📝 Does Taleb's claim of epidemics with a death count of >1,000 being in the lower hundreds (in the last 2,500 years) seem accurate?
- 📝 Which of the following astronomers actually met in person? Copernicus/Brahe/Bruno/Galilei/Kepler
- 📝 Were the "Petlurovites" who took Kiev in 1918 commanded by a communist?
- 📝 Who proposed the motion that gave Gaius Julius Caesar the title Augustus?
- 📝 Revolutions of communication
- 📝 Transatlantic Zeppelin trips usually took > 100 hours. How did they stock enough food, and where did they sleep?
- 📝 Who was the Ottoman who started as a slave boy and eventually became Grand Vizier by the time he was 80?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 When did Emperor Hirohito gave an address about suicides and non-productive jobs?
- 📝 When did Russia learn about the Philippines and the Japanese and Spanish presences there?
- 📝 When did ancient kings, tribes etc. started to think about becoming an own part of history and act accordingly?
- 📝 When and why did marriage become about love?
- 📝 When and where did the myth about solar eclipse affecting pregnant women start?
- 📝 When did the allies find out about the killing of Jews during WW2
- 📝 How and when did the word "nuclear" replace the word "atomic"?
- 📝 Why did Britain and France not declare war against the Soviet Union when it invaded Poland in WW2?
- 📝 When and how did the USA and the UK become allies?
- 📝 When did FDR announce he was running a 3rd time, and was there any outrage?
- 📝 When and how did people begin to consider slavery immoral?
- 📝 When did the practice of formally "declaring war" cease and why?
- 📝 When and why did having long hair become associated with women, and short hair with men?
- 📝 When and why did garum disappear?
- 📝 When and why did the use of the lifespans of royalty to limit clauses in contracts come about?
- 📝 When did Britain learn about the American Declaration of Independence?
- 📝 When and where did socks become common?
- 📝 Did Churchill and Roosevelt know about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or the following secret pacts between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union?
- 📝 When did the Hebrews stop speaking Hebrew and start speaking Aramaic?
- 📝 When and why did war chariots stop being used?
- 📝 When did the round house fall out of vernacular use throughout Britain and Ireland?
- 📝 When did horseback riding start? Are Doosheh cave petroglyphs authentic and correctly dated?
- 📝 When and how did the Han ethnic group become by far the biggest ethnic group in China?
- 📝 Did the aborigines of Australia and the Maoris in New Zealand know about each other's existence, before the Europeans came?
- 📝 When did the Knights Templar dissolve and why?
- 📝 What did Tacitus write about Nero and the Great Fire of Rome 64AD?
- 📝 Gender Color Association: When did boys become blue and girls pink?
- 📝 When and where did just war theory originate?
- 📝 When and how did classic "Italian" cuisine come to be?
- 📝 Why was gold so popular and valuable back when it did not have many real world uses?