Subscribe But Molotov's message was the opposite of what the ambassador had been hoping to
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But Molotov's message was the opposite of what the ambassador had been hoping to hear: the Soviet Union was declaring war. The next day Manchuria, China and Korea were invaded, and it might only be days before it was the turn of Japan's home islands. Malik, who must have had trouble keeping a straight face, said he would study the proposal.Unsurprisingly, none of Japan's ideas got anywhere.Finally, Molotov agreed to meet the Japanese ambassador on 8 August. Most bizarrely, on 14 June, the former foreign minister Koki Hirota offered the Soviet ambassador, Jacob Malik, the prospect of a Soviet-Japan alliance in the Pacific. "Japan will increase her naval strength in the future," Hirota told the Russian, "and that, together with the Russian army, would make a force unequalled in the world." A proposal more insanely remote from Japan's actual circumstances is hard to imagine, unless it was to offer to co-operate in a moonshot. (If they had known that Stalin had promised the other Allies he would enter the war against Japan within three months of Germany's defeat, of course, their alarm would have been considerably greater.)In its desperate attempt to keep Russia sweet, Japan launched a manic diplomatic offensive: offering to give up Manchuria, carve up China, and flood the Soviet Union with raw materials from the lands Japan had conquered (something it was in no position to do).
A clandestine transmitter began inciting Manchuria's large Russian population to revolt; the Japanese consul general in Harbin told Tokyo that he believed it was part of a campaign to give the Soviets a pretext for invading Manchuria The Japanese began to worry. On 5 April 1945 the Soviet Foreign Affairs Commissar, Molotov, informed the Japanese ambassador that once the neutrality pact expired in April 1946, it would not be renewed. Japanese intelligence reported a massive movement of Red Army troops and supplies towards the Manchurian border. At this point, however, some semblance of sanity prevailed, and Japan drew back.As the war developed "not necessarily to Japan's advantage", in Hirohito's famous phrase, Japan's relationship with the Soviet Union began to assume ever greater significance; its neighbour's neutrality bulked large in the hopes and fears of Japan's rulers. As Japan modernised and sprouted imperial ambitions, the two nations clashed over Manchuria and Korea, and in 1904-5 fought a bitter 18-month long war, which Japan won.In 1938, when the Japanese army, at its most rampant, was stampeding through China, ferocious battles were fought with the Red Army on the Siberian and Mongolian borders, and if the crazier voices in the Japanese army and cabinet had had their way, Japan would have gone to war against Russia soon after Germany did, welching on the Soviet-Japan Neutrality Pact that had been signed in April 1941.
As early as 1805 a Russian ship had tried to open Japan to trade; in 1852, when the American Commodore Perry's black ships finally achieved that, Russia's Admiral Putyatin was only just beaten to the punch. The people might die in a million gallant ways, but the emperor and his line must live. It was with this in mind, as the war situation became increasingly desperate, that the emperor's closest advisers began casting ever more anxious eyes at their mighty neighbour to the West, the Soviet Union.Russia and Japan's destinies had been intertwined since the dawn of Japan's modern era. Its members' only goal was to die for the emperor.Yet those at the heart of the nation, the heart of the cult, retained a certain flinty realism not permitted in their subjects. By the end of the war Japan resembled not so much an ordinary nation as a vast, apocalyptic cult. When, in mid-1944, the war began to reach Japanese civilians, the expectation was the same.