Mokusatsu

Usage

Despite being a word of Japanese origin, Mokusatsu is also understood in the Western world when it is used in conjunction with the Potsdam Declaration.

The government of Japan used the term as a response to Allied demands in the Potsdam Declaration for unconditional surrender in World War II, which led to President Harry S. Truman's decision to carry out the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Mokusatsu was employed in the morning edition of the Asahi Shinbun during World War II on July 28, 1945, to designate the attitude assumed by the government to the Potsdam Declaration. This newspaper and others had been quick to announce that the Declaration had been rejected by Japan, since the ultimatum (in addition to being transmitted to the Japanese government diplomatically via Swiss intermediaries) was transmitted via radio and airdropped leaflets to the Japanese public. It is questionable whether the Japanese press were acting on reliable government sources when they first announced the Declaration's rejection. Later that day in a press conference, the word was again used by the Premier Kantarō Suzuki to dismiss the Potsdam Declarations as a mere rehash of earlier rejected Allied proposals, and therefore, being of no value, would be killed off by silent contempt (mokusatsu). According to John Toland, Suzuki's choice of the term was dictated more by the need to appease the military, which was hostile to the idea of "unconditional surrender", than to signal anything to the Allies. Suzuki's actual words were:

My thinking is that the joint declaration is virtually the same as the earlier declaration. The government of Japan does not consider it having any crucial value. We simply mokusatsu suru. The only alternative for us is to be determined to continue our fight to the end.'

It was probably Hasegawa Saiji, a translator for Dōmei Press, who translated this as: "The Japanese ignores this, and we are determined to continue our fight until the end" and the foreign press picked this up, taking "ignore" to mean "reject". The expression can also mean to just let a topic or subject die by refusing to follow up on it. The reasons for the "mokusatsu" response could as easily be contempt as embarrassment, discomfort, or even simply not knowing what else to do in response. In Murakami Haruki's A Wild Sheep Chase, the word is used in the sense of sheer disattention or indifference: an advertising agency's employees simply "ignore" or discard anything, carnal or spiritual about a particular model, except for her startlingly distinctive ears.

The NSA Technical Journal has an article on the word in which readers are warned of the consequences of not making ambiguities clear when translating between languages. It concludes:

Some years ago I recall hearing a statement known as "Murphy's Law" which says that "If it can be misunderstood, it will be." Mokusatsu supplies adequate proof of that statement. 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 bombs and this essay.

Although mokusatsu may not have been intended to communicate to the Allies a refusal to surrender, the Potsdam Declaration ultimatum nevertheless allowed for only one acceptable answer: unconditional surrender. Any other answer would, as the declaration warned, cause "prompt and utter destruction". It was only after destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs, two assassination attempts on Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki, an attempted military coup against the Emperor (the Kyūjō Incident), and a declaration of war by the Soviet Union that the Emperor himself broadcast acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, i.e., unconditional surrender, ending the Pacific War.