Historical Dictionary of United States-Japan ... - Bakumatsu Films

POTSDAM DECLARATION • 207
If Roosevelt’s sympathy toward Japan was partly sentimental, it was
also based on his reading of the balance of power in the Far East. Although
aware that Japan might rise to challenge American interests in
the region, Roosevelt firmly believed that Russia posed the more immediate
threat. He was also aware that although Japan was everywhere,
victorious it had strained its financial resources to the limit. Nor did he
wish to see Russia driven out of Far Eastern balance-of-power calculations
altogether—it might, he reasoned, have a “moderative effect” on
future Japanese actions. This intuition, coupled with the intransigence of
the Russian negotiators who maintained that their nation’s superior resource
base meant that it could continue the war, led Roosevelt to broker
a peace that included no indemnity payments for Japan.
POTSDAM DECLARATION (1945). Issued on 26 July 1945 over the
signatures of United States President Harry S. Truman, British Prime
Minister Clement Attlee, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the
Potsdam Declaration called for the unconditional surrender of
Japan’s armed forces, for the complete elimination of militarism and
militarists, the removal of obstacles to democratic tendencies, and the
punishment of war criminals. It promised that the Japanese would not
be “enslaved” as a race or “destroyed” as a nation, although it made
clear that, following Japan’s surrender, Allied forces would occupy
the nation until there should have been established “in accordance
with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people a peacefully inclined
and responsible government.”
Prepared in advance by the United States government, the Potsdam
Declaration underwent a complicated drafting process. Acting Secretary
of State Joseph Grew, in May 1945, approached President Truman
and suggested that Japan’s surrender might be facilitated if the
Japanese were assured that surrender would not endanger the institution
of the emperor. He was, in effect, arguing for modification of the
unconditional surrender policy to which Truman’s predecessor,
Franklin D. Roosevelt, had earlier committed the United States. If
his primary objective in doing so was to secure Japan’s prompt surrender,
that objective dovetailed neatly with the sensed need to secure
Japan’s acquiescence in the postwar international order as defined by
the United States, as well as a grim foreboding of the need to contain
the postwar influence of Soviet Russia.