ABSTRACT
In the vast literature on the close of the Pacific war, no passage about the Japanese surrender is more lucid, economical and fair than the two pages of Edwin O. Reischauer’s Foreword to Robert J.C. Butow’s classic study, Japan’s Decision to Surrender. Reischauer, professor of Asian history at Harvard, was born in Japan to a missionary family, and later served as US ambassador to Japan, 1961-1966. The foreword was written in 1954, when Emperor Hirohito was still considered a demon by many in the western nations. Reischauer’s formulation laid bare the truth of the war’s ending.1
