SNA (Tokyo) — Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni stepped in to manage the surrender of the Japanese Empire in 1945. This was handled quite effectively, but it soon became clear that he was not even remotely on the same page with the incoming US occupation forces about what should come next.

Transcript

On August 17, 1945, Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni became prime minister of Japan.

He was the first and only member of the Imperial family to serve as premier, being the uncle-in-law of Emperor Hirohito. He had spent his career in the Imperial Japanese Army, reaching the rank of full General.

The Japan which he took over had never been in a worse condition. Most of its cities lay in ashes, with the Japanese people huddling in poverty and on the brink of mass starvation.

There were important advantages and disadvantages to having Prince Higashikuni take over the government at this time.

The crucial advantage is that his royal status and military career provided him unique authority to oversee the surrender of the Imperial Japanese Army and its probable disbandment. There were legitimate fears that radical officers might engage in rebellions even at this late stage.

Prince Higashikuni succeeded in this mission. Japan formally signed its surrender on September 2 on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. When Allied troops landed, not a single shot was fired and the event took place peacefully.

In the far north, however, some fighting continued as Soviet troops advanced on territories that had been held by Japan. This included the Southern Kuril Islands which Tokyo would later claim should have remained under its authority.

The Higashikuni administration was relieved when the US military showed a light touch in its occupation policies. All Japanese government institutions remained in Japanese hands. Under the command of General Douglas MacArthur and his General Headquarters (GHQ), Allied forces simply set up surveillance of Japanese government departments and did not immediately interfere.

Prince Higashikuni and his colleagues began to hope that Allied reforms might largely be confined to dismantling the Imperial military. Indeed, the deputy prime minister in the Higashikuni Cabinet was none other than former Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, who didn’t expect that he would be targeted for war responsibility.

But this is where the disadvantages of having Prince Higashikuni in charge began to weigh in. Although not generally known, he had been directly engaged in war crimes such as authorizing use of poison gas against Chinese.

Now as prime minister, Prince Higashikuni worried that the morals of the Japanese people had deteriorated; he called for national confession and repentance as first step to facing the future. Allied occupation officials soon opposed this campaign, already deciding that war responsibility would be directed towards Japan’s military and political elite, not towards the Japanese people themselves.

Meanwhile, Prince Higashikuni and most of the government leadership thought it necessary that Emperor Hirohito should abdicate in favor of his young son, Crown Prince Akihito, to take responsibility for leading Japan into the defeat of war. Hirohito himself was open to this idea.

But General Douglas MacArthur and the US Occupation authorities came to the Emperor’s rescue. They felt that Hirohito was someone that they could work with, and that an attempt to depose him might invite unnecessary political disorders.

While Prince Higashikuni understood that the public’s right to free speech would generally need to be honored in the postwar period, he and his colleagues were thunderstruck on October 4 when GHQ ordered the repeal of the 1925 Peace Preservation Law and that all political prisoners must be immediately released, including Japanese Communists.

Rather than comply with this order, Prince Higashikuni resigned as prime minister on October 9, 1945. He had served for only 54 days.

While Higashikuni escaped war crimes charges, in spite of his guilt, he lost his status as a member of the Imperial family in October 1947 as part of wider Occupation-ordered reforms which reduced the number of people accorded royal status.

He lived for decades longer, dabbling in business and religion, and writing his memoirs.

Higashikuni finally died in 1990 at age 102.

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