Chapter 1
Tense Beginnings
World War II ended when the emperor decided that Japan should accept the offer of terms made by the Allied powers. Two gozen kaigi , "meetings with the emperor," were required before the bitter division in the Supreme War Council could be bridged. In this unique crisis, only the emperor could make the decision. And only he had the authority to ensure that it would be carried out. At the first meeting the emperor said, "I cannot bear to see my innocent people suffer any longer." He added that he did not believe his armed forces could repel an invasion. He felt regret for all those who had died in the war and said it would be "unbearable" to see "the loyal fighting men of Japan disarmed" and some "punished as instigators of the war."[1]
After this meeting on the night of August 9, the Japanese government sent a note to the United States stating that it accepted the Potsdam Declaration on the understanding that acceptance would not prejudice "the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler." The United States replied artfully that "the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms." At the second meeting on August 14, the emperor said he thought the U.S. response was "evidence of the peaceful and friendly intentions of the enemy" and reiterated that he could "not endure the thought of letting my people suffer any longer."[2] At this point the United States was intensifying the bombing of Tokyo.
The Japanese then sent a reply accepting the Potsdam terms and giving assurance that they would carry out the surrender arrangements. President Harry S Truman announced the same day that he considered the reply "a full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, which specifies the unconditional surrender of Japan."[3]
The Japanese people heard the voice of their emperor for the first time when he broadcast to the nation on August 15. Despite the stilted court language used by the man known as Tenno to his subjects and as Hirohito to the outside world, his meaning was unmistakable. Speaking of the Allied powers' statement at Potsdam, he said, "Our Empire accepts the provisions of their joint declaration." He did not use the word surrender . He added, perhaps optimistically, that Japan had "been able to safeguard and maintain the structure of the imperial state.[4]
The willingness of the Japanese to respond to "the voice of the crane" by abandoning a policy of militant nationalism and calmly facing an unknown and frightening future was strikingly illustrated that day.[5] Historians debate what caused Japan to surrender, but the intervention of the emperor was crucial. Nevertheless, despite all Japan's troubles, including the shock of the atomic bomb, the emperor's intervention would probably not have been effective or even possible before August 10. After his death in 1989 the Tenno became known as Emperor Showa, meaning "enlightened peace," a title that his deeds in 1945 and afterward may well justify.
A new cabinet was soon organized, headed by Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko, an uncle-in-law of the emperor and. a career army officer. The cabinet's greatest concern was that the armed forces might not obey the emperor's cease-fire order of August 16. Hotheaded rightists might try to seize control of the government, or army forces on the Asian mainland might decide to fight on. But the authority of the imperial order prevailed, and after a few tense days and a number of suicides by recalcitrant rightists or military men carrying out the code of loyalty to ,the throne, compliance was complete throughout the empire.[6]
General MacArthur was at his headquarters in Manila when the war ended. He had been told officially on August 15, 1945, that he would be named supreme commander for the Allied powers to receive the Japanese surrender and command the Allied forces of occupation. He did not return to Washington or receive any special briefing for his new assignment.
Yoshida Shigeru, who had retired from the diplomatic service in 1939, was living at his country home in Oiso, thirty-five miles south-
west of Tokyo, at that time. He was not feeling well, but he was not so sick that he could not get up to Tokyo to celebrate with his friend Prince Konoe Fumimaro. Yoshida, who enjoyed parties and whiskey, got so tipsy that he fell asleep and missed his stop on the train back home.[7]
The first U.S. forces landed in Japan on August 28, two weeks after the imperial pronouncement. That interval provided a respite for both sides, giving time for emotions to simmer down and for future steps to be planned. A sixteen-member Japanese delegation went to Manila on August 19-20 to receive advance copies of the surrender documents and work out details for the ceremony. The businesslike discussions covered all the necessary ground in two meetings. The Americans were firm, but, according to one of the Japanese, they were "gentlemen. "[8]
MacArthur had decided that he would go to Japan at an early time, just as he had accompanied his invading forces during his campaigns in the Southwest Pacific. "To prevent regrettable incidents," the Japanese wanted a longer delay than MacArthur would accept. Although staff members worried about his security, they finally reached a compromise with the Japanese on a three-day delay in the arrival of the advance party—to August 26, with the general to come in on August 28.[9]
Providentially, a typhoon blew up on August 22, and the Americans decided to wait two more days. On August 28 the advance group of 146 communications and engineering specialists landed at Atsugi air base, thirty miles southwest of Tokyo, to make final arrangements for the arrival of the main elements. Two days later, on August 30, U.S. troops arrived in force both at Atsugi and at the big naval base of Yokosuka, fifteen miles east of Atsugi. Every four minutes another big transport plane arrived and unloaded troops and equipment. When MacArthur came in on his command plane, Bataan , at 2 P.M., the sky was bright and Mount Fuji stood out clearly forty miles to the west.[10]
As the plane neared Japan, MacArthur's military aide and close confidant, Brigadier General Courtney Whitney, nervously mused to himself: "Had death, the insatiable monster of battle, passed MacArthur by on a thousand fields only to murder him at the end?" Whitney's worry was not unfounded. The Imperial Army had some 3 million men in Japan's home islands, and 300,000 of its best troops were in the Tokyo area, trained for a last stand. Only 4,200 U.S. soldiers were in the vicinity when the supreme commander slowly descended from his plane at Atsugi. Winston Churchill later termed this act "the outstanding accomplishment of any commander during the war... in the face of several million Japanese soldiers who had not yet been disarmed."[11]
Except for the spirited music offered by the Eleventh Airborne Divi-
sion band, there was no ceremony. MacArthur had wanted no massive display or parades and had passed the word that there should be no delegation of Japanese to meet him, although Japanese reporters and photographers would be permitted to cover his arrival. For the benefit of those assembled there, the general pronounced the less-than-immortal words, "Melbourne to Tokyo was a long road, but this looks like the payoff."[12]
The Japanese press wrote up the event in detail for the intensely interested nation. It made much of the general's informal dress—khaki uniform, open collar, no jacket or ribbons, aviator glasses, and even his corncob pipe. The photo of MacArthur emerging from his plane and calmly surveying the situation attracted worldwide attention. One Japanese writer compared MacArthur's descent from his plane to the well-known actor Kikugoro descending the hanamichi , or passageway to the stage of the kabuki theater. The general always took care that his dramatic arrivals, like the one a year before when his forces invaded the Philippines, were well photographed.[13]
An astute Japanese editor who knew the United States well termed MacArthur's exploit "an exhibition of cool personal courage; it was even more a gesture of trust in the good faith of the Japanese. It was a masterpiece of psychology which completely disarmed Japanese apprehensions. From that moment, whatever danger there might have been of a fanatic attack on the Americans vanished in a wave of Japanese admiration and gratitude."[14]
Nevertheless, the general realized he had taken a big chance. A few weeks later he proclaimed that "probably no greater gamble has been taken in history than the initial landings where our ground forces were outnumbered a thousand to one."[15] But it had been a carefully considered gamble. The parleys at Manila and the treatment of the advance party had given powerful evidence of Japan's determination to cooperate and of its well-known ability to maintain order. Disciplined cooperation with the. occupation forces replaced fear and tension and continued as the order of the day for the next six and one-half years.
The Japanese were taking a gamble, too, although the savage beating they were suffering every day at the end of the war left them little room for bargaining. Japanese moderates had calculated that the United States would not be a vengeful conqueror, and they had all but convinced themselves that the victors would not seek to destroy or mutilate: the emperor system.[16] The initial actions of MacArthur and the U.S. troops reinforced these hopes.
On September 2, two days after MacArthur's arrival, the occupation of Japan formally began with the surrender ceremony on the battleship Missouri . In that interval the general was busy working out Allied surrender arrangements, drafting the two speeches he was to give (one at the ceremony and the other to the people back home) and, most difficult of all, trying to coordinate Allied plans for the surrender of Japanese forces in China, Southeast Asia, and the western Pacific.[17] His office was in the cavernous customs building in Yokohama, which was one of the few big structures in the area to survive the air raids in fairly good shape.
The arrangements for the surrender had given both sides some trouble. The victorious Allies had difficulty in deciding which of them should sign the surrender papers, finally agreeing that representatives of the Big Four—the United States, China, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union—should sign first, followed by representatives from five other Allies. The U.S. Army and Navy had to work out some service differences over which should have the bigger role, senior navy officials believing, not without reason, that the navy had done more to bring about the defeat of Japan than the army had. But since General of the Army Douglas MacArthur had been designated supreme commander for the Allied powers to accept the surrender and carry out its terms, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the navy's top commander in the Pacific, was given the honor of signing as the representative of the United States of America. The navy got the bonus of a decision by President Truman that the event should take place on a U.S. battleship named after his home state and christened by his daughter. The rivalry did not end there, however, because even as the main American units started to land in Japan on the morning of August 30, reports from Yokosuka circulated that navy landing boats were "full of admirals trying to get ashore ahead of MacArthur."[18]
Japan had a more acute problem: no one wanted to sign a "surrender" document. The United States had abandoned its first plan—that the emperor sign—and had accepted a British suggestion that his authorized representatives would be good enough. It then became necessary for two Japanese to sign—one for the government and the other for the military command—to conform with Japan's constitutional division between civilian and military authority. Prime Minister Higashikuni was ruled out because he was a relative of the emperor. The army chief of staff, General Umezu Yoshijiro, threatened to kill himself if he were pressed to sign. The one senior official willing to accept this onus was
the minister of foreign affairs, Shigemitsu Mamoru, who appeared genuinely to believe that surrender was good for the nation and would give it a chance to start over on a wiser course.[19] Under pressure from the throne, Umezu gave in and agreed to sign for the imperial general staff. He and Shigemitsu were accompanied on the Missouri by a group of nine officers and diplomats.
The surrender ceremony was the most photogenic event of the occupation. It was not the dramatic scene John Trumbull portrayed of Washington receiving the British surrender at Yorktown. No band played "A World Turned Upside Down," although this would have been even more fitting for the Japanese in 1945 than it had been for the British in 1781. But the Missouri did have one outstanding historical touch: mounted on a huge bulkhead for all to see was the Stars and Stripes (bearing thirty-one stars) flown by Commodore Matthew C. Perry when his "black ships" entered Edo Bay in 1853 to force the opening of Japan to the outside world. And the American flag that had flown over the U.S. capitol on December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, flew over the Missouri .
The ceremony began at 9A.M. on September 2. The Japanese delegation had come aboard the Missouri a few minutes before. Several hundred Allied officers were waiting along with reporters and photographers, including some Japanese. The U.S. officers, without ties or decorations, contrasted with the other officers, who were in dress uniform, and the Japanese diplomats, who wore formal morning attire with top hats. No one carried side arms. There was no ceremonial surrendering of swords.
General MacArthur presided over the ceremony, which took only twenty minutes. In accepting the surrender, the general expressed the hope that "out of the blood and carnage of the past," a better world would emerge. "Nor is it for us here to meet... in a spirit of distrust, malice or hatred. But rather it is for us, both victors and vanquished, to rise to that higher dignity which alone befits the sacred purpose we are about to serve."[20]
After MacArthur signed the two copies of the surrender documents, one in English and the other in Japanese, the two Japanese representatives signed, followed by the nine Allied representatives. The foreign minister was not sure where to sign and had to be shown. The Canadian representative signed the Japanese copy on the wrong line, forcing the three remaining signatures out of place. When a troubled Japanese official pointed out the error to MacArthur's chief of staff after the
ceremony, a considerable colloquy took place. The chief of staff then inked in and initialed the necessary corrections The performance on the Missouri was at least better than the German surrender four months earlier, when the wrong documents were signed at Rheims on May 7 and a second surrender ceremony had to be held two days later in Berlin to do it right.[21]
The key clauses in the surrender instrument read, "We hereby proclaim the unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers of the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters and of all Japanese armed forces and of all armed forces under Japanese control wherever situated.... The authority of the Japanese Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander." The emperor's rescript of September 2 commanded the Japanese government and armed forces to "faithfully carry out" the provisions of the surrender document.
After the signing ceremony, General MacArthur made a radio broadcast to the American people, which was delayed in transmission so that President Truman could make a speech right after the surrender ceremony. The general was eloquent and statesmanlike: "We are committed by the Potsdam Declaration of principles to see that the Japanese people are liberated from this condition of slavery.... If the talents of the race are turned to constructive channels, the country can lift itself from its present deplorable state into a position of dignity."[22]
The occupation had officially started. The emperor's decision to end the fighting had been indispensable. General MacArthur had set the tone—low-key and businesslike but firm and decisive. The tensions on both sides began to dissipate. U.S. troops went around unarmed. Japanese men and women began to appear again on the streets of Yokohama and Tokyo in their usual numbers. In place of the hostilities of the past, the two countries started to look for ways to resolve in peace the clash of their conflicting purposes and different cultures.
Japan was in bad shape at the end of the war. About two million of its people had lost their lives. Of these some six hundred thousand were civilians killed or injured in air raids, in the fighting on Okinawa, and in the atomic bombings.[23] More than half a million military men were reported missing at the end of the war, most of them captured by the Russians in Manchuria and taken to Siberia as prison laborers. The British also detained a large number of prisoners of war in Southeast Asia and employed them as laborers for several years.
Sixty-six of Japan's larger cities, including Tokyo and Yokohama,
were about half-destroyed. Eight and one-half million persons were homeless. More than one-quarter of Japan's residential housing was wiped out or badly damaged. The country had lost one-quarter of its national wealth, equal to $26 billion worth of its capital stock, such as buildings, machines, and equipment.[24]
During World War II Allied leaders had declared that Japan would be compelled to give up all territory it had "taken by force and greed."[25] Defeat meant that it would lose half its territory, leaving it with only 142,644 square miles, almost identical to what it possessed in 1833 when Commodore Perry first arrived. The loss of the southern Kuriles was a particularly hard blow because Japan had legally established its claim well before its colonial expansion. If Roosevelt and his advisers had known this piece of history, they might have qualified their agreement at Yalta in early 1945 that "the Kurile Islands shall be handed over to the Soviet Union." In August 1945 Washington decided only at the last minute that Soviet forces rather than U.S. forces should occupy the Kuriles.[26] A generation later the Japanese government and many of its citizens were still protesting the loss of the southern Kuriles and the adjacent islands off Hokkaido, the Habomais and Shikotan, that are geologically distinct from the Kuriles but were also seized by the Soviets in 1945.
The United States took control of the Ryukyu Islands in June 1945 after a bloody campaign. The islands were returned to Japanese control in 1972 after twenty-seven years of U.S. administration. Except for the Ryukyus and a few other small islands to the south, including the historic battleground of Iwo Jima, all of which were returned to Japan by the United States, Japan's territory has not changed since the surrender.
At the end of the war Japan's population was about 72 million. Around 7 million more Japanese, military and civilian, were located outside of Japan, mostly in China. About 2 million Koreans and. Taiwanese lived in Japan as conscript laborers or farmers. Soon after the war ended, massive repatriations took place. More than one-half the Koreans and Taiwanese returned to their homelands, although many Koreans came back to Japan because of unsettled conditions in Korea. The net balance of all these shifts in population added more than 6 million to Japan's total in the years after the war, bringing it close to 80 million in 1950.[27]
There had been no panic or breakdown in morale or control during the war. The cohesiveness and discipline of Japanese society, reinforced by strict police surveillance and tight organization by neighborhoods
throughout the country, seemed equal to any disaster. Japanese populations on Saipan and Okinawa had gone to their deaths by the thousands as the U.S. forces swept over the islands, thereby providing strong evidence that the people in the homeland would not waver if they, too, had to face the supreme holocaust. Harry Truman's hope that the United States "could avert an Okinawa from one end of Japan to another" was probably a factor in his decision to use the atomic bomb and seek to end the war quickly.[28]
Forceful resistance to the war had been almost totally absent, although there were many examples of dissatisfaction and noncooperation during the war. Popular opinion was carefully controlled in wartime Japan, the people knew little about the disasters that had befallen the imperial forces, and the few incidents of dissidence that did occur were ruthlessly suppressed. As a result, evidence of revolutionary antiwar resistance was minor. The decision to surrender came as a great blow to most Japanese, even if many of them realized the situation was all but hopeless.
With the war finally over, a flood of emotions swept over the country—fear, humiliation, and even relief. The government tried for a time to whip up a campaign of "national penitence" for the "mistakes of the government, the bureaucrats and the people,"[29] but little came of it. The people seemed to feel little sense of guilt about the war or about what Japan had done. But they did feel the war had been a surpassing disaster, and many thought their military leaders had misled and failed them. People seemed to feel more resentment toward their leaders than penitence about themselves, and some spoke of the Americans as "a liberation army" rather than as conquerors. Other euphemisms soon came into common use: people did not say "the surrender" but "the end of the war," and "garrison force" was used instead of "occupation force."[30]
In contrast to Japan, the United States was at its zenith of power and prestige when the war ended. In defeating the Japanese empire almost single-handedly, the United States had won its greatest victory since the founding of the republic. It was the richest and most powerful nation in the world. It was the sole possessor of the atomic bomb. America had also made a large contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany and was a leading player in Allied negotiations to reach a postwar settlement in Europe. Pax Americana was at hand. Its executor in Japan was Douglas MacArthur.