After the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration, Japanese prime minister Kantarō Suzuki used the word mokusatsu when discussing it in Tokyo. Foreign reports commonly rendered the term as rejecting or ignoring the declaration, although it can carry more ambiguous meanings. Historians dispute how much this translation affected subsequent decisions.

The controversy became a lasting warning about translation under extreme political pressure. Japanese atomic-bomb poets such as Tōge Sankichi and Kurihara Sadako later wrote against euphemism and silence, insisting upon words adequate to Hiroshima's human reality.