Kase struck three other notes, all of them peculiarly Japanese. No other World War II power, not even Germany, was so arrogant in triumph and so abject in defeat. Humbly, the diplomat wondered “whether it would have been possible for us, had we been victorious, to embrace the vanquished with similar magnanimity. Clearly, it would have been different.” Second, he wrote bluntly, almost masochistically: “After all, we were not beaten on the battlefield by dint of superior arms. We were defeated in the spiritual contest by virtue of a nobler idea. The real issue was moral—beyond all the powers of algebra to compute.” The final note was poignant. Kase wrote that while on the American battleship he had noticed many miniature Rising Suns, “our flag,” painted on a steel bulkhead, indicating the number of Japanese ships, submarines, and planes sunk by the Missouri. He had tried to count them, but “a lump rose in my throat and tears quickly gathered in my eyes, flooding them. I could hardly bear the sight. Heroes of unwritten stories, these were young boys who defied death gaily and gallantly. . . . They were like cherry blossoms, emblems of our national character, swiftly blooming into riotous beauty and falling just as quickly.”159
According to members of the imperial household, the emperor lingered over this passage a long time; then he sighed deeply, nodded, and murmured, “Ah so, ah so deska.” Summoning his foreign minister, he disclosed an unprecedented decision. As scions of the Sun Goddess, Ameterasu-O-Mi-Kami, Japanese emperors had never called upon anyone, but once MacArthur had established himself in Tokyo, Hirohito let it be known in an oblique, periphrastic way, he would pay him a formal visit. Shigemitsu was delighted, almost overcome; no other gesture would be so propitious for the difficult period of occupation. Bowing like the destroyer Hatsuzabura, the foreign minister backed out, leaving the imperial presence.160
EIGHT
Last Post
1945-1950
It was characteristic of Japan in 1945 that the emperor’s palace, in the Western sense of the word—or even in the Chinese sense—had never existed. There were, to be sure, palatial grounds. They were immense. A wide, tranquil, algae-covered moat encircled them. Yet all that could be seen from the outside were old stone toro lanterns and boughs of sycamore, bamboo, cypress, cryptomeria, and majestic pines towering over bonsai, those cultivated two-hundred-year-old dwarf evergreens which, revealing the Nipponese gift for miniaturization, mimic great gnarled trees in every detail, down to the tortured angles of limbs twisted in their joints by the arthritis of time. Tourists who tried unsuccessfully to peer past their artfully arranged branches missed nothing except disenchantment. Within there were no soaring wings of stone, no sharp gables, no crenelated towers or spires. Instead the royal family lived in a series of wood-and-paper villas, a kind of elegant Oriental shantytown embellished here and there by shoji, paper sliding doors bearing sixteen-petal crysanthemums, Hirohito’s personal sigil.1
Among his relatives on the premises that September was a bandy-legged, hard-drinking, sybaritic uncle who had condemned captured American airmen to death by beheading, and who now expected to be indicted as a war criminal. Actually he was quite safe. MacArthur had concluded that bringing him to justice would lead to Hirohito’s abdication, which, in turn, would bring anarchy, chaos, and guerrilla warfare. That was wise of the new Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. SCAP’s critics often mocked his claims that he could fathom the Asian mind, and he himself later said that “even after fifty years of living among these people I still do not understand them.” Nevertheless, few Occidentals have come closer to it than he did. He had studied Nipponese folklore, politics, and economy; most of all he had pondered how Hirohito’s people lived, worked, and thought. He sensed their stupendous energy and vast potential, knew that although most people think of Japan as small, it is, in Edwin O. Reischauer’s words, “considerably larger than Italy and half again the size of the United Kingdom” with “roughly twice the population of each of the Western European big four— West Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and France.” The General perceived that, like England, the country had been shaped by its island outlook and vigorous climate, which stretches, in latitude, from that of Montreal to that of Florida. He was not deceived by its 90 percent literacy, for he was aware that the sensei, the quaint teachers with yellow buckteeth and baggy pants, merely taught rote memorization of the language’s complicated kanji, characters derived from Chinese ideograms. The meaning behind the words eluded their pupils and, indeed, the sensei themselves. Every textbook in geography, history, martial sports, “ethics,” and even mathematics, was used to disseminate superstitions. The Japanese lived, quite simply, in a world of make-believe.2
The world may be explained in sociological terms. David Riesman describes three basic social personalities in The Lonely Crowd. “Other-directed” people pattern their behavior on what their peers expect of them. Suburban America’s men in gray-flannel suits are other-directed. “Inner-directed” people are guided by what they have been trained to expect of themselves. MacArthur was inner-directed. The third type, the “tradition-directed,” has not been seen in the West since the Middle Ages. Tradition-directed people hardly think of themselves as individuals; their conduct is determined by folk rituals handed down from the past. The General knew that this described the Japanese, and that it could be seen most clearly in their absolute fealty toward their emperor. Neither the arrival of modern technology nor the lost war had diminished their respect for the godhead. On the Nijubashi, an arched double bridge spanning Hirohito’s moat, reverent Japanese still bowed deeply toward the grounds. Until the B-29s came, trolley conductors would halt in front of the Sakuradamon, the Sakurada Gate, lead their passengers off, and genuflect before reentering the streetcar and proceeding. After the war they merely slowed to a crawl and ducked their heads, but as recently as the 1950s scores of Japanese perished by suffocation when an enormous mob, inspired by a kaze of kanii, a “breath from above,” spontaneously rushed toward the gates on April 29, the birthday of the emperor (Tencho-setsu), to pay their respects to their ruler.3
Officials did not dream of reporting the tragedy to him. They merely carried the bodies away and checked to make sure that the devout throng, in its zeal, had harmed nothing. Isolation of their sovereign has always been important to the Japanese. Even the shoguns, the feudal overlords who once governed in the name of the almighty one, were elliptically described as “the Men Behind Bamboo Screens,” a detail well known to MacArthur, who planned to lurk behind such a screen himself. The moat symbolizes this gulf between mortals and the divine. It is, in fact, quite lovely. White swans glide over its surface, merging with their own bright reflections, and fat carp lurk below. Before the coming of MacArthur, poaching was not only a form of lese majeste, it was a capital offense. Three strangers who cast their lines after fish reserved for imperial hooks paid for it with their heads. In those theocratic days Japan was possessed by what Wainwright, brooding in his Manchurian cell, called “fundamental Dark Age philosophies.” The sovereign’s powers were as absolute as Henry VIH’s, as unyielding as the stone walls on the palace side of the moat.4
These walls, in many ways Tokyo’s most imposing feature, are of considerable historical interest. In 1542 the Portuguese, the first Europeans to discover Japan, arrived and, in the decade which followed, introduced Christianity and gunpowder. The Japanese were appalled by both. They concluded that if this was the best the newcomers could do, Dai Nippon would be better off without them. Jesuits and their converts were deported; no Japanese were permitted to travel abroad, lest they become infected with the Christian virus. The gunpowder remained, however; the shoguns decided that it might be useful against new invaders. At the same time, huge earth-backed walls were constructed around strongholds, to ward off future European cannonballs. The palace’s is among those which have survived. It is gigantic—great blocks of gray rock, all different sizes, fitted together so marvelously that they seem to curve smoothly upward with effortless grace.
In the sixteenth c
entury it would have been impossible to breach them. That was no longer true in 1853, however, when Perry’s ships anchored off Tokyo—or Edo, as it was then called—and demanded that the islands of Dai Nippon be opened to trade. Yielding to force majeure, the shogun signed a treaty ending two centuries of seclusion. At first the changes wrought elsewhere were slow to reach Nippon’s shores. Not until the close of the century did Japanese peasants learn that locomotives were not dragons. Then, however, the curses of industrial society followed swiftly: child labor, pollution, factory accidents, the rapid spread of contagious diseases, and frantic competition with other big powers, including entry in the international arms race. With unerring instinct, the Japanese chose all the wrong role models. They bought their guns from France’s Schneider-Creusot, whose clients arrived on battlefields at a disadvantage because their artillery was inferior to Krupp’s, Vickers’s, and Armstrong’s. Nipponese ambassadors imitated the diplomatic manners of the British, who always managed to give offense. And in the 1880s the advisers of Mutsuhito, Hirohito’s grandfather, asked the Germans to help them create a legislature.
Under the Meiji constitution, which followed, the Japanese Diet provided only the trappings of democracy. It was more authoritarian than the Reichstag. There was no middle class. Women were formally ranked as inferior beings. Real power was vested in the gumbatsu, the militarists, and, later, the zaibatsu, the eleven great industrial families—the Mitsubishis, Mituis, Sumitomos, Yasudas, and the rest—who controlled 75 percent of the country’s commerce, raw materials, and transportation. Peasants were sharecroppers, shackled to the land by ground rents and surcharges, supporting 100,000 absentee landlords. The Japanese religion, Shinto, which had been declared a “national structure” (kokutai) in 1884, was not really a religion at all; it was what National Socialism would later be to Germany, an indigenous folk creed promoting the national character, the martial virtues, and the inferiority of other races. There were 110,000 Shinto shrines, all supported by the state. In addition, every home, down to the last thatched hut beside the most remote rice paddy, had its small shrine, or “god shelf” (Kami-dana), at which the family would gather at certain times of the day to genuflect in the direction of the Imperial Palace. The people had no civil liberties, no civil rights, no habeas corpus. Instead they were given the absolute obligation to obey orders. Truth was unknown. The purpose of conversation was to be polite, not to convey information. The smallest departure from courtesy was prohibited by law. The kempei-tai, the Japanese gestapo, imprisoned countless thousands for harboring, or giving the impression of harboring, “dangerous thoughts.” It was, MacArthur wrote, “more . . . akin to Sparta than to any modern nation.” It was also imitative of European totalitarianism.5
A Japanese wrote unhappily: “Some of the roses of the West, when cultivated in Japan, lose their fragrance.” Yet beneath the imported cosmetics, beyond the concrete highways, behind the elaborate mannered facade, Dai Nippon remained the most Oriental of nations. Half the people—over 35,000,000 people in 7,000,000 households—toiled on 5,698,000 farms, working in their wide straw hats and shaggy rice-stalk raincoats, looking like feudal woodblocks, tilling land as old, as tired, and as wrinkled as themselves. To celebrate their harvests, priests opened festivals by striking temple bells which had been in use for centuries. Order was maintained by feudal tonari gumi, “neighborhood associations.” Samurai warriors displayed athletic prowess and periodically thinned their ranks by committing sep-puku. Newspapers celebrated a charming medieval custom by printing in their New Year’s editions thirty-one syllable odes (tanka), and seventeen-syllable haiku, imitative of the great poet Basho and written by every educated Japanese, including Hirohito, though of course, being a god, he was awarded no prizes. Puppet art, bunraku, flourished; so did gagaku, the ancient court music; so did sumo wrestling, the national sport; so did kabuki plays glorifying feats of war.6
In peacetime—before the arrival of the B-29s and after MacArthur’s restoration of the metropolis—Tokyo has always been one of the world’s most colorful cities, and the three-hundred-meter-tall Tokyo Tower provides a panoramic view of the beguiling, frightening, puzzling, infuriating, and delightful race which brought out the best in Douglas MacArthur, who in turn brought out the best in the Japanese. Peering down through the damp fragrant haze which always seems to hang over the city, one’s first impression is of seething multitudes. Perhaps even the inhabitants have become confused by the capital’s lack of street signs, one thinks, or perhaps something remarkable has happened, to bring out so many people; but no, it is always this way, always teeming, always congested. The countryside is not much different. Japan is chronically overpopulated; only 15 percent of the land is arable, and even that is not particularly fertile. With space at a premium, it was inevitable that Nippon should become the homeland of tiny radios and tiny television sets. It must either export enough such goods to pay for imported food or settle its surplus population elsewhere. That was why it attacked China in 1937 and then the United States, China’s protector, four years later.*
The second impression, listening from the tower, is of an incredible cacophony. Drifting up, all together, are melancholy notes from a Japanese guitar played by an itinerant musician, a merry tune bubbling like a fountain out of a bamboo flute, another melody from a trio of flageolets, still another from a harplike koto, all of them competing with the more familiar sounds of internal-combustion engines, of the babbling of shoppers on the Ginza—the “Silver Place,” so christened in the early seventeenth century, when the reigning shogun minted his coins there—and, in counterpoint, evoking memories of Yum-Yum, Pitti-Sing, and Peep-Bo, of clouds of gay little girls in school uniforms, chattering like starlings.
Next one notices the almost promiscuous use of lacquer and its plastic equivalents. Telephones are bright red. Priests carrying symbolic flails wear black-lacquered hats above their immaculate white robes, capes of gold, and straw sandals; red-lacquered, cockaded hats crown horsemen; lacquer brightens the flower-decked bridles, high wooden saddles, and colorful stirrups of their mounts. Lacquer also highlights the wooden-soled geta, the clogs, of passing geisha, who move in chattering swarms, and even the heavy black beehive coifs of their married sisters, rising over white, wide-eyed, tiny, exquisitely shaped, porcelain faces, look as though they had been lacquered, or even shellacked, into place.
Kimonos are worn by most of the older women, but by fewer of their daughters. That is part of the diversity, one’s final impression of daytime Tokyo. One notices Dior fashions, blue jeans, miniskirts, and even tight shorts on the younger women. And the costumes of the men are even more varied. Fifth Avenue, the Strand, the Faubourg Saint Honore, the Kurfurstendamm, and the Via Veneto are dull compared to the Ginza. Gentlemen wear haori and hakama, the ceremonial clothes of old Japan; other gentlemen wear double-knits and denim. A solemn procession of men in cream-and-green uniforms appears from an alley beside one of the city’s huge new ferroconcrete structures; no one seems to know who the marchers are, but they bull their way through the incredible, swelling crowds. Another procession approaches from a different direction; youths with exalted expressions are bearing on their shoulders a swaying palanquin from whose struts flutter strips of scroll bearing prayers of the devout. Again, identifying their sect appears to be impossible. Probably they are Shintoists; though no longer subsidized, the religion is not extinct. They vanish and are followed by a band of archers whose arrows—lacquered—jut from their quivers like the spreading spangles of a peacock. The archers in turn give way to a horse-drawn rig loaded with a heap of plum-blossoms, iris, and wisteria. . . .7
The riotous display continues until evening. Then there is a subtle change. Dai Nippon is a different nation after sundown. The moon is somehow larger and grander there than in any other part of the world. Paper lanterns, and soft lights glowing behind paper walls, suggest intricate secrets. In the darkness one remembers that if Occidental countries are ruled by governments of laws, the Japanese ar
e governed by emotions. Upton Close, who wrote several books about them, observed that they are a race “who hate tremendously,” who “can give themselves to the most unspeakable savageries,” and yet, “when the fury passes,” are “the most gentle-mannered people in the world.” The Japanese themselves are fascinated by this aspect of their national character. They have an entire vocabulary to describe their many moods. Furyii, for example, is a state of mind signifying communion with all that is creative and lovely in nature. Shikata-ga-nai is resignation. Mono-no-aware denotes an awareness of the world’s transience and man’s mortality. Zangyaku-sei is a brutal and savage spirit. Weariness of living is ensei. The Japanese soldiers who raped Manila were obsessed by zangyaku-sei. The country which lay prostrate at MacArthur’s feet after the surrender on the Missouri was in the grip of the most depressing ensei in the history of their race. Reischauer observes that at the outset of the war their leaders “had expected to win through the superiority of Japanese will power, and the people had responded with every ounce of will they possessed, until they were spiritually drained. Not just the cities but the hearts of the people had been burned out.”8
And no wonder. Before Pearl Harbor, Japan had been called “the workshop of Asia.” Now it was Asia’s scrap heap. Hirohito’s empire had been reduced by 81 percent, from 773,781 square miles to 146,690. The metropolises were unlivable. There were few phones, fewer trains, and virtually no power plants. Soon thermometers would drop—Japanese crickets, more eloquent than Occidental katydids, are said to sing “Katasase, susosase samu-sa ga kuru zo,” meaning “Sew your sleeves, sew your skirts, for the winter is coming,” and each evening after the surrender they grew louder—but coal production was at one-eighth of its peacetime level. Textiles had been the backbone of the country’s prewar economy. In putting the nation on a war footing, 80 percent of the textile machinery had been converted to other uses, and now it lay shattered in the ruins of bombed buildings. Nippon’s merchant fleet was rusting on the floors often Oriental seas. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been reduced to barren pits of glazed rubble, and virtually all other major cities, including the capital, were ghastly wastelands. Here and there one could make out the twisted skeleton of a roof, a thumblike bathhouse chimney, a squat house safe, or, very rarely, a structure with heavy iron shutters, now blackened—a relic of an ancient samurai stronghold.9