Via WAPO:
On the night of Aug. 14, 1945, the bespectacled Emperor of Japan walked into the second-floor room of the Household Ministry in Tokyo, where the technicians from the national radio station, NHK, had set up recording equipment.
Emperor Hirohito was 44. And for 3½ years, he had presided over the titanic struggle Japan had been waging with the U.S. and its allies since the attack on Pearl Harbor.
But Japan’s once-mighty armed forces had been destroyed — its ships sunk, its soldiers killed, its planes shot down. Its cities had been bombed to rubble — most recently by two atomic weapons. And the emperor now had to tell his people the war was lost.