Hirohito was the Japanese emperor who announced surrender on August 15, 1945.
Hirohito, posthumously known by his reign name Shōwa, delivered the recorded radio address that told the Japanese public the government had accepted the Potsdam Declaration. The broadcast followed the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union’s entry into the war against Japan.
The speech was carefully recorded at the Imperial Palace on August 14 and broadcast at noon the next day. It was the first time most Japanese civilians had heard the emperor’s voice. Hirohito used formal Classical Japanese, so many listeners found the message difficult to understand immediately.
The announcement did not itself constitute the final legal surrender. Japanese representatives later signed the Instrument of Surrender on September 2. Hirohito remained emperor after the war, but under the postwar constitution adopted during the Allied occupation, the emperor became a symbol of the state rather than a sovereign with governing powers.