[I cannot think of a name]

“What’s scary to contemplate is what if Tojo and Company knocked off the Emperor before he made his broadcast?”

What is scary to contemplate is that the war in Japan was ACTUALLY ended by a tape recorder. At the time of the broadcast, the emperor's palace was surrounded and he wasn't going anywhere. What the conspirators didn't know was that there had been great concern that the emperor couldn't get through the speech without choking up. So they recorded it the night before. The message played that day was actually a recording!

What did come out of this was that the conspirators, who were also the most hard line and wanted to continue the war no matter what, were completely embarrassed over their failure and most committed ritual suicide. That was the main reason the resistance fell apart and we did not have a long insurgency, as in Iraq.

[dfwgator]

I think that would be the subject of a great movie, “The Emperor’s Speech.”

[gaijin]

Exactly correct, on all counts.

The Force is strong in you.

[RayChuang88]

The story of how the Emperor Shōwa (as Hirohito is officially known since 1989) recorded that famous broadcast onto a transcription disc and getting it to the NHK broadcast studios was something that would have been worthy of an espionage novel--the whole thing had to be done in secrecy and the transcription disc of the recording was hidden inside a can of 16 mm motion picture film (which in turn was hidden inside a basket of women's laundry) during transport to the studio to keep it from being discovered.

While the broadcast is well-known to older Japanese who heard it, at first many Japanese could not understand what was spoken, since the dialect of Japanese used by the Emperor in the speech was no longer in formal use by 1945.

[SunkenCiv]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3120753/posts?page=74#74