Drawing on Hiroshi Hasegawa’s analysis, this article examines the substance of the Hull Note and the negotiation process. It argues that the note amounted to a de facto demand for Japan’s unconditional surrender, illuminating the limits faced by the Konoe cabinet and the structure that made war unavoidable.

The Hull Note was also something akin to a demand for Japan’s unconditional surrender.
2016-12-16
The following is a continuation of the essay by Hasegawa Hiroshi.
This is truly a genuine essay that all Japanese people and people around the world should read.
All emphasis in the text is mine.
As glimpsed at the point of the Konoe–Grew meeting, it contained provisions that could be understood as.
● The complete withdrawal from the Chinese continent and French Indochina.
● The denial of the Wang Jingwei Regime that cooperated with Japan.
● The neutralization of the Tripartite Pact among Japan, Germany, and Italy.
These contents were unrelated to the prior course of negotiations.
The Chinese continent to which withdrawal was demanded was understood to include Manchuria.
Secretary of State Cordell Hull himself acknowledged how provocative the Hull Note was, to the extent that he told the Secretary of War that from that point on the matter would leave his hands and pass to the Army and Navy.
Clumsy Japanese diplomacy.
If Konoe had not resigned on October 16, 1941, or even if he had resigned but a Fourth Konoe Cabinet had been formed, one might be tempted to speculate that he would have swallowed almost the entirety of the Hull Note without resorting to war, thereby pushing Franklin D. Roosevelt or the Roosevelt administration, which desperately sought a war against the Axis powers, into a predicament.
In this case, however, that would likely have been impossible.
Even if a summit meeting had been realized somewhere in the United States in the autumn of 1941, and Roosevelt had presented Konoe with something identical or close to what later emerged as the Hull Note, and even if Konoe had accepted it in its entirety with only minor wording changes and succeeded in avoiding war—thus inflicting, in that sense, a major defeat on the United States, which wanted Japan to go to war—such a strategy would have been possible only under the extraordinary arrangements conceived by Konoe at that time.
Those arrangements involved the unprecedented environment in the history of U.S.–Japan relations of a head-of-state summit between the U.S. President and the Japanese Prime Minister, combined with receiving the immediate imperial sanction by telegram from Emperor Showa, who earnestly desired to avoid war, directly and without the intermediation or prompting of the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal.
Within the ordinary domestic framework of Japan, which required approval through regular meetings, such a compromise with the United States would have been fundamentally impossible.
In reality, even at the end of the war, it was only after two atomic bombs had been dropped and the Soviet invasion had begun that Japan could accept the Potsdam Declaration, which demanded the unconditional surrender of the Japanese military.
The Hull Note, too, was something akin to a demand for Japan’s unconditional surrender.
This essay continues.