American Caesar

  This vast body of legislation, much of it drafted on the sixth floor of the Dai Ichi, is a far more reliable guide to MacArthur’s political philosophy than his later speeches, when he delivered ritualistic paeans to free enterprise at American businessmen’s dinners. Like the Code Napoleon, to which it may be compared, it represented a determined effort to create rational law which derived its content from what Bonaparte called “sublimated common sense” and its moral justification, not in custom or divine right, but in conformity to the dictates of reason. In postwar Japan, as in Napoleonic France, hereditary nobility and class privileges were abolished. The French commander had scrapped Roman Catholic control; the American commander rejected Shinto. The purpose of the code promulgated in Paris was “to effect a smooth transition from the past to the present.” The same was true in SCAP’s Tokyo. In each case, everything from civil rights and property rights to mortgages and divorce was eventually covered by statute.

  Divorce was one of the first issues the new Diet tackled. MacArthur, outraged to learn that a woman whose soldier husband had returned from Borneo with a native woman and two children had no legal recourse, gave priority to the elimination of sex discrimination. His strong support for the liberation of women may puzzle some—he was a male chauvinist if there ever was one—but his feelings about it were genuine, and ran deep. He was, after all, his mother’s son, and in his ambivalent attitudes toward war, the antiwar side sought allies in those who suffered most from it. His passion for social justice was another likely motive. The General, like Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, was an aristocrat who believed in noblesse oblige. He was jealous of his prerogatives and implacable toward those of his own class who pitted themselves against him. But he believed that rank had responsibilities as well as privileges. A fighting commander exposed himself to enemy fire in front of his troops. A general did not allow officers to drink Scotch when the men had only beer. And a gentleman did not look upon women as inferiors. To do so was, by definition, ungentlemanly. It was more; it was, he told those who disagreed with him, sacrilegious. Women, like men, had souls. Therefore they should be treated equally.95

  In Japan they had never been equal. Concubinage and family contract marriages, consigning wives to servility, had been lawful. Women had been forbidden to own property; indeed, they had had no economic, legal, or political rights at all. Girls had gone to their own schools, if there were any, after the sixth grade. Public-school courses had been segregated by sex—with the curriculum and texts pitched lower for girls—and there had been no colleges for women. Adultery had been licit for husbands but illicit for wives. The new Diet had to face this form of sexism squarely in an early session. Under the MacArthur constitution, the lawmakers had a choice: either both partners to an adultery were punishable, or neither was. After anguished debate, the legislators invited correspondence from their constituents. In the past, voters had never written the Diet; they had read its edicts, trembled, and obeyed. Now, in the new spirit, a blizzard of mail arrived, and after reading it the delegates abolished adultery as a crime.

  Contract marriage went; so did concubinage. Marriage and divorce statutes were rewritten. High schools became coeducational, and twenty-six women’s universities opened. In the provinces women were elected to public office in increasing numbers: 23 to the prefectural assemblies, 74 to city councils, and 707 to town assemblies. By the third year of the occupation a tradition had been established that every national cabinet must include a woman vice-minister, and before MacArthur left Japan, two Diet committees would be chaired by women. Mrs. Kanju Kato, a feminist leader, became a regular visitor to Dai Ichi cubbyholes. Soon fourteen thousand women were serving in villages as social workers, and in Tokyo—this sent a shock wave through all Asia—there were two thousand uniformed women police officers. Girls in shorts began to compete with boys on playgrounds; MacArthur, to his great satisfaction, saw them rapping out hits and chasing flies on the sandlot his Cadillac passed daily.96

  The policewomen, like the male cops, received instructions from MacArthur’s Public Safety Division, whose teachers were led by former New York Police Commissioner Lewis J. Valentine and Oscar Olander, Michigan’s commissioner of state police. Valentine and Olander emphasized respect for the country’s new civil liberties and the tactics of controlling unruly crowds. Some labor unrest had become inevitable after five million Japanese workers (including 1.5 million women) had joined the twenty-five thousand new unions. Their guides in the Dai Ichi were James J. Killen, an American labor official, and Theodore Cohen, a former history teacher. After a brief spurt in the 1920s, collective bargaining had been suppressed in Japan—Tojo had enrolled all workmen in a nationalized company union patterned after the Nazi Labor Front—and Killen and Cohen had to steer a tricky course between the Scylla of the zaibatsu, to whom older workmen still deferred, and the Charybdis of Communism, to which some young veterans accustomed to obeying military orders were turning for discipline.97

  Early bread-and-butter strikes were charmingly Japanese—a chorus line went on half-strike by kicking only half as high as usual—but then the Stalinists became bolder. Killen had told MacArthur that he believed unions were the best defense against Marxism, but he had added: “Labor in Japan must probably learn the hard way by participation in strikes, unrest, and, for a time, false leadership. When the laboring man has been sufficiently fooled by his Communist leaders, he will throw them out.” That was sound liberal theory, and the General nodded in approval. Actual violence in the streets was another matter, however, and as the Reds grew bolder he grew edgier. Not for the last time, he and they had misjudged one another. On the first May Day after the war’s end, thousands of them roistered through the capital. Then, exploiting a food shortage, they massed outside the Imperial Palace, waving red flags, and tried to cross the moat. Yoshio Kodama wrote that their cries “reached into my cell through the barred windows of Sugamo Prison.” Kodama thought he saw the root of the problem. MacArthur had given the Communist party legal existence and tolerated its newspaper. Kodama wrote: “There is, of course, a great difference in the recognition of freedom of activity and support of these activities, but the majority of the Japanese nation had made the mistake of interpreting the freedom given to the Communists as general support. As a result of this grave misconception, numerous Japanese without any critical examination of Communism had supported the Communist Party and had been duped by their tactics.”98

  Increasing in audacity, the Reds acquired control of several unions and, the following January, threatened a general strike unless Yoshida resigned and wages were increased threefold. The walkout was to start at midnight, February 1. Ordinarily the Supreme Commander let his wishes be known through exquisitely worded letters to the prime minister, raising philosophical questions or offering gossamer hints of the course of action he would prefer. A general strike could not be approached obliquely, however. It required direct, decisive action. Even some officers in the Dai Ichi had forgotten how firm MacArthur could be. Now he reminded them.99

  He waited until seven hours before a quarter-million workers were due to leave power plants, utilities, schools, and trains, with another 1.5 million to stage sympathy strikes at dawn. Then he issued a statement: “A general strike, crippling transportation and communications, would prevent the movement of food . . . and would stop such industry as is still functioning. The paralysis which would inevitably result . . . would produce dreadful consequences upon every Japanese home.” Therefore: “I have informed the labor leaders whose unions have federated for the purpose of conducting a general strike that I will not permit the use of so deadly a social weapon in the present impoverished and emaciated condition of Japan, and have accordingly directed them to desist from the furtherance of such action.” On his instructions, Yoshida announced the immediate introduction of a bill banning strikes by public employees. The Communist newspaper Akahata was censored. Literature from Communist countries, and visits to them by Japanese, were sharply
curtailed. It worked; there was no walkout. MacArthur later told C. L. Sulzberger that the Reds had failed and “have been going down ever since.” Kodama agreed. “The defeat of the February 1 strike proved to be a big blow to the activities of the Communist Party,” he wrote, the chief reason for their “loss of ground.”

  They would have been a far greater threat if SCAP hadn’t moved more quickly against the zaibatsu. MacArthur’s encouragement of labor unions had arisen in part from his determination to provide a counterpoise for capitalistic exploitation. One American businessman, offended by the Dai Ichi’s economic policies, demanded to know what possible connection they could have with the Potsdam declaration, the bedrock on which SCAP had been built. The General’s disingenuous reply was that Potsdam enjoined SCAP to destroy sources of militarism, that the planes which had bombed Pearl Harbor had been built in factories, and that he was therefore compelled to make factory owners toe his line. His rationalization for Japanese social security legislation (he proposed, in his words, to ensure “the well being of the entire nation from the cradle to the grave”) was similar. Discontented employees, he reasoned, swelled the ranks of aggressive armies. Social security diminished their discontent and was thus antiwar. Truman and Acheson could have saved MacArthur, themselves, and the American people a lot of grief if they had reflected upon the skill with which their proconsul in Tokyo was finding a military justification for every political act. But in those years they approved his goals and therefore gave him a free rein.100

  Despite Willoughby’s admiration of Spanish Falangists, the mood in MacArthur’s Dai Ichi headquarters reminded Gunther of republican Spain in the early 1930s, before it was hijacked by the Communists and then destroyed by Franco’s counterrevolution. Even the programs were the same, he wrote: “an attempt to end feudalism, drastic curtailment of ancient privilege, land reform, liberation of women, extremely advanced labor legislation, education for the masses, ‘bookmobiles’ out in the villages, abolition of the nobility, wide extension of social service, birth control, public health, steep taxation of the unconverted rich, discredit of the former military, and, embracing almost everything in every field, reform, reform, REFORM.”101

  It is a pity that the Nation, the New Republic, and MacArthur’s other liberal critics in the United States weren’t following his progress more closely. Even I. F. Stone could scarcely have improved upon the General’s drive against reactionary industrialists. He suspended banks which had financed Nipponese imperialism, seized their assets, and ordered all war profits returned to the government. Then he set about smashing the great monopolies. Holding companies, subsidiary and interlocking family directorships were dissolved. The major firms were broken up into independent concerns, most of them run by their prewar managers, whose salaries, with few exceptions, were limited to 36,000 yen ($2,400) a year; the top was 65,000 yen ($4,333) a year. Members of the eleven biggest families were required to exchange their industrial securities for nonnegotiable government bonds, the value of which was reduced by deprivative taxes and the balance frozen for ten years, to give the managers time to consolidate their positions and resist efforts by their former employers to buy them out. In addition to the huge zaibatsu trusts, eighty-three other companies were broken up, and thirty-two of them were completely liquidated.102

  Originally SCAP had planned to dismantle eleven hundred industrial plants and move them to Allied countries, as part of a reparations program. This was being done to Germany’s Schlotbarone in the Ruhr, but the General abandoned the idea as senseless. Japan, on V-J Day, was faced with a stark problem of survival. MacArthur was no Keynesian. He believed in balanced budgets. But that was out of the question in 1945. He later wrote that he had “never seen a more tangled financial mess than that into which the Japanese government had fallen by the end of the war.” Taxes on the poor had been confiscatory, and toward the end the peasants had revolted. Tax collectors didn’t dare appear in some villages. Industrial production was 16 percent of the prewar figure. MacArthur brought in tax experts from the United States and asked Washington for economic aid. He got a lot, two billion dollars, though it is worth noting that the American zone in West Germany, with one-fifth the population of Japan, received, per capita, three times the money sent to Tokyo. Europe’s press, and to some extent America’s, wrote dazzling accounts of West Germany’s industrial recovery—what the Germans themselves called their Wirtschaftswunder, their “economic miracle.” The greater miracle in Japan was virtually ignored. MacArthur, predictably, felt persecuted.103

  Predictably, he also did the job. Under his supervision, Brigadier William Marquat established an economic and scientific section, with over twenty subdivisions, in a rickety little annex of the Dai Ichi. Military government teams supervised the collection of rice, the production of coal, and the fishing industry. Bombed-out shops were rebuilt, machinery reassembled, transportation and communications nets restored, and foreign trade revived. The General invited Joseph M. Dodge of Detroit, a former president of the American Bankers Association, to serve as a consultant to the Dai Ichi. The result was a comprehensive plan leading to stabilization, retrenchment, and realistic budgets. With improved management, technical advice from Americans, a rapidly increasing work force, and a high percentage of savings, Japan’s commerce expanded spectacularly. In three years Japanese imports from the United States were cut in half. In five years, national income had passed the prewar level and Japan’s public debt was two billion dollars, roughly the same as postwar New York City’s. That pleased American conservatives, sustained Yoshida’s moderates, and cut deeply into Communist strength in the cities.104

  Red flags had never appeared in the countryside, because MacArthur’s land-reform program, probably his greatest achievement in Japan, had eliminated the chief source of peasant discontent. He himself called it “extraordinarily successful,” adding, “I don’t think that since the Gracchi effort of land reform in the days of the Roman Empire there has been anything quite so successful of that nature.”* In effect, he preempted the issue which Mao Tse-tung, on the other side of the East China Sea, would soon ride to power. Reischauer, indeed, believes that the General’s objectives went “far beyond those of the Chinese Communists.” He writes the author: “The Japanese land reforms ended up with ninety percent or more of the land in the hands of the people farming it, while the Chinese farmers ended up working on big collective farms with little or no land of their own.” It is ironic that MacArthur should be remembered by millions as a man who wanted to resolve the problem of Communism on the battlefield. Actually his approach to agrarian unrest in Nippon was so radical that it shocked Americans who believed in large corporate farms. Wolf Ladejinsky, the Russian-born expert whom MacArthur employed in 1945 to draft SCAP’s land-reform legislation, was blacklisted by many right-wing groups during the McCarthy years, and Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, fired him, calling him “a security risk.” But Ladejinsky had only followed MacArthur’s instructions.105

  At the beginning of the Supreme Commander’s reign, Nippon’s landscape was checkered with paddies, sloping upward toward the mountainous spines of the islands and worked by peasants for whom the land was urgent, relentlessly demanding, but seldom rewarding. “As late as the end of the war,” MacArthur wrote, “a system of virtual slavery that went back to ancient times was still in existence. Most farmers in Japan were either out-and-out serfs, or they worked under an arrangement through which the landowners exorbited a high percentage of each year’s crops.” Power resided in a rural oligarchy of some 160,000 absentee landlords, each of whom owned, on the average, thirty-six farms. This was feudalism in its purest sense, and the General resolved to stamp it out. In the fourth month of the occupation he told the old Diet to pass the necessary legislation. Intimidated by the threat of political purging, the delegates had rubber-stamped his other demands, but serious land reform meant a total restructuring of rural Japan’s society. They themselves, most of them, belonged to
the oligarchy. So they balked. The law they passed exempted 70 percent of the country’s tenant lands. It left the peasants’ shackles intact.

  Nearly a year passed before the first postwar Diet gave MacArthur and Ladejinsky what they wanted, but it was worth the wait. “I am convinced,” the General said of it, “that these measures . . . will finally and surely tear from the soils of the Japanese countryside the blight of feudal landlordism which had fed on the unrewarded toil of millions of Japanese farmers. . . . The program as finally approved should be acceptable to the most liberal advocate of rural land reforms.” The new act freed Nippon’s farmers by what amounted to expropriation of the gentry’s holdings. All land held by absentee owners was subject to compulsory sale to the government. Because the resale prices did not allow for inflation, they were absurdly low—each acre went for the equivalent of a black-market carton of cigarettes. Then tenants were invited to buy at the same rate. The sum could be repaid over a thirty-year period at 3.2 percent interest. The farms of the new owners, each of whom was required to cultivate his own land, ranged from three cho (seven and a half acres) on fertile Honshu to twelve cho (thirty acres) on barren Hokkaido. Altogether, five million acres changed hands, and when the transactions were complete, MacArthur announced that 89 percent of the country’s farmland belonged to the people who tilled it.106