He was certainly that. At his discretion he could suspend Hirohito’s functions, dissolve the Diet, outlaw political parties, or disqualify any man from public office. When he decided to dismiss all legislators who had belonged to militaristic, right-wing societies, Prime Minister Kijuro Shidehara’s entire cabinet threatened to quit in protest, letting the prime minister form a new government. The foreign minister brought MacArthur the news. The General said coldly: “If the cabinet resigns en masse tomorrow it can only be interpreted by the Japanese people to mean that it is unable to implement my directive. Thereafter Baron Shidehara may be acceptable to the Emperor for reappointment as prime minister, but he will not be acceptable to me.” The ministers withdrew their resignations; MacArthur’s order was obeyed.24
Japanese newspapers were required to carry the full text of every SCAP message. They published at his pleasure, which could be withdrawn at any time. American correspondents did not have to submit to censorship, but if one of them left the country the General could forbid him to return, and that happened to a Newsweek reporter whose copy had offended MacArthur. American businessmen could not enter Japan without his permission. SCAP controlled them throughout their visit; they couldn’t even register for hotel rooms until their applications had been approved. American money was worthless until it had been exchanged for army scrip or yen, at 360 yen to the dollar—a rate which had been set by the General. Foreign diplomats presented their credentials to him, not Hirohito. As overlord he never returned their calls, and he could declare them persona non grata at any time. Sebald suggested in behalf of the U.S. State Department that he confer with various chiefs of mission in Tokyo to brief them on Korean developments. MacArthur saw no point in it, since he was not responsible for Korea. He added: “And, why, as a sovereign, should I? President Truman doesn’t do so, nor does the King of England or any other head of state.”25
In Japan the winds of change always seem to blow from the south. The annual hanami, or flower-viewing, begins when the white buds of the first cherry blossoms appear in Kagoshima, the country’s southernmost port, whence they spread over Kyushu, cross Bungo Strait to Shikoku, and then traverse the Inland Sea to Honshu. The Yamato, the Stone Age tribesmen who first settled these islands, had followed the same route. And so, in the autumn of 1945, did the six and a half million Japanese troops returning home from the emperor’s lost empire. Dai Nippon’s sixteen thousand Communists, released from kempei-tai prisons as part of MacArthur’s program to honor freedom to dissent, were on hand to greet the despondent veterans. Clearly a political hanami lay ahead, but the General’s liberal programs were preempting the reform issue. Some Japanese had even made a pun of their pronunciation of his name, “Makassar,” since the kanji characters for it can be read as “left-red,” and it became more appropriate with each decision he made. Moreover, the number of Marxist converts dropped sharply when Stalin, breaking a wartime commitment to Roosevelt and Churchill here as in so many matters, decided to keep 376,000 Japanese soldiers of the Kwantang army, who had been stationed in Manchuria, as Siberian slave laborers.26
At home their compatriots were working just as hard, but their labor was freely pledged. The General took every opportunity to remind them that they must shape their own destiny. “SCAP is not concerned with how to keep Japan down, but how to get her on her feet again,” he said. He added, “We shall not do for them what they can do for themselves,” and one of his spokesmen said, “We must restore security, dignity, and self-respect to . . . a warrior nation which has suffered an annihilating defeat.” SCAP would not interfere with their culture or their peaceable customs system. They would rebuild their country under their own leaders, with as little American intervention as possible. He wanted them to regard him as a protector, not a conqueror.27
Thus the GIs were largely spectators, watching the beaten Nipponese repair their shattered machinery, set up little assembly lines in their makeshift shacks, and rebuild houses, factories, and shipyards. MacArthur praised the “dignity” with which they bore their defeat. “The Japanese have got the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount,” he said. “Nothing will take that away from them.” Other Americans, trying to translate the attitude of the crushed people into terms they could understand, called it good sportsmanship. But it lay deeper than that. One Nipponese historian writes that “to the Japanese there was . . . a large measure of self-gratification and comfort in conforming to an exacting set of new rules. “ During the war American officers had noted how the few Japanese prisoners who were captured would pass through a stage of shame and then become enthusiastically cooperative; having served one set of masters, they had switched to another overnight. It was a form of political masochism, and MacArthur was just the man to complement it. Of the twelve nations under conquerors’ boots at the end of World War II, Japan alone seemed to relish the experience. The very qualities which had made the Japanese a formidable foe sustained them now. Their remarkable discipline held. Russell Brines wrote that despite the shortage of materials they erected new houses “on the sites of the old with the ageless patience and fatalism of a race that had been burned out, flooded out and shaken out of its homes many times by natural disasters long before it was bombed out.” Uneasy GIs awaited signs of the unspeakable cruelty which had inflamed the rapists of Nanking, the perpetrators of the Bataan Death March, the baby-slaughterers of Luzon. None emerged. By December the last Japanese infantryman to return from Rabaul had been deprived of his Arisaka rifle, MacArthur had sent Krueger’s Sixth Army home and reduced Eichelberger’s Eighth to cadres. Altogether there were just 152,000 GIs and 38,000 British Tommies in Nippon. Now an Allied soldier could travel alone from one end of the country to another in complete safety.28
Another vanquished people might have been offended by the speed with which the victors took over all steam-heated buildings at the first frost—the Germans certainly resented it—but the Nipponese were too humble, and, apparently, too shocked by accounts in their own newspapers of their troops’ atrocities in China, Burma, the Philippines, and the Indies, to protest. They now loathed Tojo, though their scorn may have been inspired, not by his wartime behavior, but by his attempt to commit hara-kiri in defiance of an imperial rescript. In Sugamo Prison, Kodama wrote: “We Japanese have the national duty of atoning for our sins to the allied powers.” In a report to Washington MacArthur noted a “growing consciousness of Japan’s war guilt.” There is no doubt that this was genuine. Scholars believe that the difference between Dai Nippon and the devastated Third Reich, where the guilt was greater, is that the Nipponese had been changed into a new people. This is hard to credit, but it is very Oriental. The new Japan read of the old Japan’s war crimes, evidence of which was now being produced at trials in Tokyo and Manila, found it sickening, and was transformed.29
A happier surprise for them was the conduct of the GIs. In the weeks after the surrender the new Japanese, aware that some of the old Japanese were still among them, feared that some of them might commit some outrage which would bring Allied retribution. After that danger had passed, they thought that the disclosures at the war-crimes trials might provoke vengeance by the occupation army. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead American soldiers were a constant fount of unexpected kindnesses, rushing ill Japanese to hospitals, returning lost children to their parents, and yielding their streetcar seats to elderly women—something which, in the past, Nipponese had done only for their own relatives. “Do the Japanese despise us for having been soft?” John Gunther asked a large sample of Nipponese. After the poll he answered his own question: “No. They think we are being astute.” Time after time he was told that they had expected punishment, starvation, torture, looting, rapine. Their own troops, they knew, had forced the Chinese to display miniature flags of the Rising Sun; at the very least they had assumed that they would have to wave the Stars and Stripes. Then they discovered that the GIs were generous and affectionate. MacArthur, they learned, had ordered a five-year jail sentence for any American
caught slapping a Japanese. “That,” one man told Gunther, “was when we knew we had lost the war.”30
After the Imperial Palace had disclosed that fifteen-year-old Crown Prince Akihito, heir to the throne, was being tutored by Elizabeth Gray Vining of Bryn Mawr, Akihito’s future subjects pondered ways to incorporate American influences in their own lives. Two million of them became Christians. Congress was petitioned to admit Japan as America’s forty-ninth state. A translated study of An Outline of Government in Connecticut enjoyed a brisk sale. On Saint Patrick’s Day in 1946 six Nipponese defense counsel appeared at the capital’s war-crimes tribunal wearing green lapel ribbons, and the Tokyo Asahi began running Chic Young’s comic strip “Blondie’ with Japanese captions. A school opened in Yoshiwara, the old brothel district, to teach American slang. A “Last Chancu” filling station opened outside Kyoto. Ginza stalls sold toy jeeps (jeepu), geisha crooned “You Are My Sunshine,” musicians learned to play boogie-woogie, and movie fans waited in line for hours to see Gene Autry in Call of the Canyon. Most of this was superficial, tawdry, and temporary. One of MacArthur’s goals was to turn “the idolatry for . . . the warrior class . . . into hatred and contempt,” but before he left Japan, a vast popular literature would panegyrize Nippon’s wartime heroes. It happened in German}’; it happened, for that matter, in the United States. Nevertheless it is significant, for in their Americanophilia they also adopted institutions of popular government which have survived the pop culture.31
Douglas MacArthur was the most popular man in Japan. He had been the only Allied commander whose name the Japanese people had heard during the war, and in the Missouri surrender ceremony he had made a tremendous entrance into their lives. The very characteristics which troubled Americans—his flair for the dramatic, his insistence on absolute loyalty and unquestioning obedience from his soldiers—appealed to the Nipponese. He projected a Jovian image of decisiveness and absolute authority; if a Japanese man was dominated by a strong-minded wife, his neighbors would say, “Too bad, she’s a macarthur.” The Tokyo Jiji Shimpo warned that the nation’s hero worship was making “a god of General MacArthur,” and indeed, Richard H. Rovere and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., quoted a Japanese as saying, after Hirohito had renounced his divinity: “We look to MacArthur as the second Jesus Christ.” Some U.S. Orientalists were afraid his monocracy might undermine the concept of self-rule, but a Nipponese historian believes that the General’s “imperious aloofness and lordly graciousness” established the prestige of the occupation.32
As his headquarters he had chosen one of the few structures in the capital to withstand the bombings, a six-story insurance building which was situated, in MacArthur’s words, “in downtown Tokyo, across from the moat surrounding the Emperor’s palace.” Equally important, it overlooked the Imperial Plaza, the traditional parade ground of the mikado’s guard divisions, where, Tokyo Rose had assured the world during the war, the General would be publicly hanged. The symbolism was not lost on the Japanese. Overnight the edifice became known as the “Dai Ichi” (“Number One”) building. Hirohito’s new style of reigning led him to move among his people like an English or Scandinavian monarch. They saw him opening flower shows, trade fairs, and baseball games. Newspaper photographs showed him kissing babies on sidewalks, wading in surf with his trousers rolled up to his knees and a fedora perched jauntily on his head, and wandering through public parks, collecting moss and lichen for his laboratory, or seated on a stone bench, writing his bizarre poetry. At the same time that they were discovering that his presence didn’t blind them, they became aware that another man now directed their fate, and they revered him.33
The Nipponese equivalent of “John Q. Public” is “Jinno Tanaka, ” and Tanaka’s curiosity about the General was insatiable. Crowds gathered every day just to see him come and go from the Dai Ichi. Newsweek reported: “The presses can hardly keep up with the demand for the 62-page book General MacArthur. ” There were rumors that he had royal blood, that he was descended from Japanese ancestors, that he had a nisei daughter. Nipponese women wrote him, begging him to serve as their stud so that they might bear great children. That was only part of his correspondence from Japanese; each month they sent him over a thousand letters. Two-thirds were in English, the rest had to be translated. Prostitutes wanted to form a union because “we’re just working girls.” A Buddhist priest explained that he, not Hirohito, should live in the Imperial Palace, because “my throne was deprived me 554 years ago.” Japanese policemen wanted to wear GI combat boots. Victims of chronic illnesses asked for cures. Mothers begged toilet-training advice. Most of these appeals to him arrived in the mail, but many were hand-delivered, sometimes by peasants who had traveled to Tokyo from outlying provinces. Like the weighty submissions from the Gaimusho, the Nipponese foreign office, where the prime minister worked, these were condensed and the condensations placed on the General’s desk. Every correspondent who enclosed his address received a reply.34
“You have a feeling,” C. L. Sulzberger wrote in his diary, “that people almost bow when they mention General MacArthur’s name.” One woman did prostrate herself as she was leaving his headquarters; he picked her up, brushed her off, and admonished her. On another occasion, which became famous throughout Japan, the General was entering the Dai Ichi elevator when a small Japanese, already in it, began to bow himself out. MacArthur signaled him to remain. Later he received a letter which, translated, read: “I am the humble Japanese carpenter who last week you not only permitted but insisted ride with you in the same elevator. I have reflected on this act of courtesy for a whole week, and I realize that no Japanese general would have done as you did.” Newspapers ran the story, a one-act play was written about it, and a Tokyo artist painted a heroic canvas of the elevator confrontation which was reproduced and hung in Japanese homes, like the Iwo Jima flag-raising in the United States. The fact that MacArthur himself was probably behind the campaign to publicize the incident does not diminish its significance.35
In Nipponese eyes, two of MacArthur’s most appealing traits were his austerity and his personal courage. Like a medieval Japanese warrior, the Supreme Commander’s dedication to duty was total: SCAP worked seven days a week, including Christmases and his own birthdays, and never took a vacation, never even toured the country’s scenic wonders. In the five years between V-J Day and the Korean War he left Tokyo just twice, to attend proclamation of independence ceremonies in Manila and Seoul, and in each case he was back before evening. He turned down a million-dollar offer to write his memoirs because he wanted to devote all his energies to the Japanese recovery, which he felt would be the capstone of his career. He never used the private railroad car which the Japanese railways had placed at his disposal. Unless he rode to Haneda airport to greet visiting dignitaries—congressmen, Eisenhower, Marshall returning from his frustrating attempt to mediate the Chinese civil war as Tinman’s special representative—he was seen only when commuting daily between the American embassy and his headquarters in a sleek black 1941 Cadillac which had been acquired from a Manila sugar baron, was now driven by an army noncom, Master Sergeant Odis Edwards, and bore fender flags, and the license number “1” with five silver stars on a bright blue background in front and back.36
Preceded by two white-helmeted MPs on motorcycles, SCAP usually left the embassy at 10:30 A.M., returning there for lunch in the early afternoon and then, after a siesta, motoring back to the Dai Ichi for another work session which would last until night had fallen on Tokyo. Everyone in the city knew of his movements; all other traffic halted as Japanese policemen turned traffic lights green for him and saluted as he passed. Since he always followed the same schedule, he would have been easy prey for an assassin. When anxious aides pointed this out, however, he merely changed the subject. In Australia he had been accompanied by men with submachine guns, but now, even after Tokyo plainclothesmen discovered that Communist terrorists were planning an attempt on his life, he refused to agree to bodyguards. Among themselves staf
f officers decided to have a jeep of armed GIs follow him. Since they didn’t want to incur his wrath, however, the jeep was told to stay a block behind the limousine, where he wouldn’t see it, and where, of course, it was virtually useless. Every officer who tried to raise the issue of security with him was waved away. Finally the staff suggested that an officer ride in the front seat beside the driver. Reluctantly he consented.37
Major Bowers, who drew this duty, thought they could at least cover the mile-long distance quickly. The Cadillac crawled. That seemed to suit the Supreme Commander, who, in the beginning, ignored the major. According to Bowers, the General leaned back on the soft, faded gray upholstery, reading newspapers, or “sat in total repose, like a monk after a successful session of meditation. His white hands were smooth as wax, only blemished by brown spots of age. His fingers were exquisitely manicured, as if lacquered with polish. He held them in his lap, peacefully. His profile, which I knew better than his full face, was granitic. He was always immaculately cleanshaven, and I never saw a nick on him. The skin was tightly drawn and almost translucent. He had large bones, an oversize jaw that jutted a little. From face to walk, from gesture to speech, he shone with good breeding. . . . He was really very beautiful, like fine ore, a splendid rock, a boulder.” Bowers thought him “full of majesty.”38
Like others on the staff he also considered him extremely vulnerable to thugs and snipers. The colonel who had given the major this job as escort had said, “He’s a target slower than a duck at an amusement park,” and another colonel had added, “With the current switched off.” At that time the terrorist threat was great. A band led by a former kempei-tai lieutenant named Hideo Tokayama planned to toss grenades into the car and pour bullets into it as it moved past them. MacArthur was unimpressed. He predicted they would be caught, as they were, but there was no guarantee of that at the time. Everyone was apprehensive except him. He could scarcely have been more nonchalant. He even hummed to himself as they crept along. After several trips Bowers shifted around and said: “Sir, a couple of minor matters. It’s about how fast the driver drives.” The General looked up from the Stars and Stripes and asked: “What’s wrong with it?” The major said: “It’s slow. “ The General: “Leave it be.” The major: “Sir, may I ask another question about security?” The General: “Fire away.” The major: “What does the General feel about carrying firearms?” The General: “Me?” The major: “No. I.” MacArthur, Bowers recalls, “stopped reading. He looked at me. I had the feeling he had never seen me before.” SCAP replied: “Suit yourself. Just don’t make a fuss.” To others the Supreme Commander said: “In the Orient, the man who shows no fear is master. I count on the Japanese people to protect me.” And they did.39