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

250 • UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER
lived and studied in the United States. Upon his return to Japan, he
took up teaching, but his refusal to acknowledge the “Imperial Rescript
on Education” and bow before portraits of the Emperor Meiji
led to his removal from teaching positions. Uchimura also founded a
new Christian movement called Mukyōkai, literally “without
church,” and began publishing Christian magazines. He took up writing
autobiographical and religious works, some in Japanese and some
in English, for the remainder of his life. See also CHRISTIANITY;
NIIJIMA, JO.
UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER. Unconditional surrender was the
overarching military objective of the United States in its war against
Japan. Enunciated by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the
Casablanca Conference of January 1943, it also went a long way toward
setting the parameters of the postwar peace. To borrow the
words of a State Department official, the pursuit of Japan’s “unconditional
surrender” suggested that America’s goal was not only to defeat
that nation militarily, but also “to render it incapable of renewed
aggression and at the same time to eliminate the various factors,
whether economic, social, or political, upon which this aggressive
spirit has thrived.” Debate within the United States government revolved
around the means that would best facilitate such an end.
Protagonists in the debate regarding the unconditional surrender
policy as it applied to Japan offered two widely divergent visions. On
the one hand, there arose a concept of a harsh peace. It stressed the
adoption of extremely restrictive measures so as to preclude the possibility
that Japan might again threaten the peace. On the other, there
were those who advocated a soft peace for Japan. Animated by the
basic belief that vindictive postwar punishment would most likely result
in renewed Japanese militaristic adventures, this vision looked
instead to those Japanese who had pursued cooperative relations with
the United States in the pre–Pearl Harbor era to again lead Japan in
the aftermath of World War II.
Over the course of the war, the advocates of a soft peace gained the
ascendancy in this debate. They suffered various setbacks, however,
as evidenced most significantly by their failure to have included in
the Potsdam Declaration an assurance of the continuation of the institution
of the Japanese emperor. The debate over a soft or harsh