What does Prime Minister Suzuki mean by Mokusatsu?

In Japanese, the word mokusatsu means “ignore” or “treat with silent contempt”. To the Allied forces, it meant that Prime Minister Suzuki and his government had outright rejected the Potsdam Declaration. As a result, American President Harry S. Truman decided to carry out the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Why did Japan delay surrender?

Kamikaze. It was a war without mercy, and the US Office of War Information acknowledged as much in 1945. It noted that the unwillingness of Allied troops to take prisoners in the Pacific theatre had made it difficult for Japanese soldiers to surrender.

Did Japan try to surrender?

Nuclear weapons shocked Japan into surrendering at the end of World War II—except they didn’t. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union entered the war. Japanese leaders said the bomb forced them to surrender because it was less embarrassing to say they had been defeated by a miracle weapon.

What was Japan’s response to the Potsdam Declaration?

The Japanese government initially rejected the Declaration outright, but later agreed to it after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Soviet Union invaded Japanese territory.

What is the great Mokusatsu mistake?

International news agencies reported to the world that, in the eyes of the Japanese government, the ultimatum was “not worthy of comment.” Mokusatsu, a word that we could very well translate as “no comment” nowadays, or “let me withhold comments for now”, was translated as “let’s ignore it.”

Who said Mokusatsu?

After all, if Kantarō Suzuki had said something specific like “I will have a statement after the cabinet meeting”, or “We have not reached any decision yet”, he could have avoided the problem of how to translate the ambiguous word mokusatsu and the two horrible consequences of its inauspicious translation: the atomic …

Did a mistranslation cause Hiroshima?

Or, at least, it involves the most serious consequences of a mistranslation in history. Although you can never know what would have happened without this error, it is very likely that the sad fate of Hiroshima was the result of a huge error in Japanese-to-English translation.