Prince Takamatsu - After The Surrender

After The Surrender

After the war, Prince Takamatsu became the honorary president of various charitable, cultural and athletic organizations including the Japan Fine Arts Society, the Denmark-Japan Society, the France-Japan Society, the Tofu Society for the Welfare of Leprosy Patients, the Sericulture Association, the Japan Basketball Association, and the Saise Welfare Society. He also served as a patron of the Japanese Red Cross Society.

In 1975, the Bungei Shunjū literary magazine published a long interview with Takamatsu in which he told of the warning he made to his brother Hirohito on November 30, 1941, the warning he made to him after Midway and that, before the surrender, he and Prince Konoe had considered asking for the emperor's abdication. The interview implied that the emperor had been a firm supporter of the Greater East Asia War while the prince was not.

In 1991, Princess Takamatsu and an aide discovered a twenty-volume diary, written in Prince Takamatsu's own hand between 1934 and 1947. The diary, which the magazine Chūō Kōron obtained, revealed the late prince had opposed the Kwantung Army's incursions in Manchuria in September 1931 and the expansion of the July 1937 Marco Polo Bridge Incident into a full-scale war against China.

Prince Takamatsu died of lung cancer on February 3, 1987 at The Red Cross Medical Center in Tokyo. His remains were buried at Tokyo's Toshimagaoka Cemetery.