Throughout the war, Tōgō was among those who doubted that Japan could succeed in a war with the United States. Towards the end, he was one of the chief proponents for acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration which, he felt, contained the best conditions for peace Japan could hope to be offered. Up until the last, he hoped for favorable terms from the Soviet Union. At Tōgō's suggestion, no official response was made to the Declaration at first, though a censored version was released to the Japanese public, while Tōgō waited to hear from Moscow. Unfortunately, many Allied leaders interpreted this silence as a rejection of the Declaration, and so bombing was allowed to continue.
Tōgō was one of the Cabinet Ministers who advocated Japanese surrender in the summer of 1945, and several days after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this action was finally taken.
When the war against the United States was decided, he disliked pressing the responsibility of the failure of diplomacy against others, and signed the document of the declaration of war by his responsibility. He became the defendant of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, as a war criminal for that. He was sentenced to 20 years for war crime charges and died of sickness from his confinement in prison.
Tōgō was reputed to have some Korean ancestry, whose ancestor was a potter who was abducted to Japan during the Japanese invasions of Korea (1592–98). Tōgō's family surname was Park, indicating their Korean roots, but they changed their surname to Tōgō when he was five.[1]
