by Ian Buruma
What made things a little simpler in Japan is that only one of the Allied powers, the United States, was responsible for “demilitarization” and “democratization.” There was no equivalent of SCAP in Germany, not even General Lucius Clay, who certainly would not have received letters such as the one that said, “We look to MacArthur as the second Jesus Christ.”24 But internally divided, in terms of bureaucratic turf and political persuasion, the Americans never really came up with a consistent purging strategy. The actual governing of Japan was left up to a Japanese cabinet, which instructed the bureaucracy to institute its own reforms. While these were perfunctory at best, there was another target which, despite the views of chief prosecutor Joseph Keenan, the American New Dealers took far more seriously. Individuals who “do not direct future Japanese economic efforts for solely peaceful ends” had to be removed, and “industrial and banking combines which have exercised control over a great part of Japan’s trade and industry” must be dissolved.25 These combines, or zaibatsu, were designated as the main economic warmongers.
This came as a shock to the industrialists, who, like the banker Hermann Abs and his colleagues in Germany, cherished their prewar contacts in the boardrooms of London and New York. Before the war was even over, the president of a large steel company, a Harvard graduate, exclaimed (in English) in a secret meeting of industrialists, “Our friend is coming.”26 Japanese business leaders with international experience, many of whom had studied in Europe or the United States, expected to be put in charge of the reconstruction of the Japanese economy by like-minded Americans. Instead, they were ousted and their business conglomerates pulled apart.
To the New Dealers in MacArthur’s military government, this was their proudest achievement—this and the land reforms which broke the back of “feudalism” in rural Japan. Many Japanese leftists felt enormously encouraged by U.S. policies. In the first few years of occupation, Washington was seen as the left’s best friend. Women’s suffrage, the right to strike, collective bargaining, these were all great innovations pushed by the Americans and gratefully acted upon by the Japanese. Communists as well as socialists began to wield considerable power in trade unions and higher education.
But even some Japanese with leftist views who had no warm feelings for the industrialists were a little bemused by the special blame attached to the zaibatsu. In a letter to his friend Donald Keene, Theodore de Bary, then a naval officer, mentions a conversation with a businessman in Tokyo named Miyauchi, who called himself a socialist and a democrat. De Bary asked him about the wartime role of the zaibatsu. Miyauchi replied that they had counted for little with the military establishment. Yes, some of the new zaibatsu, such as Nissan, had done well out of the war, but the “Big Four” old zaibatsu families, Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Sumitomo, and Yasuda, had been co-opted like everyone else: “They were weak, the zaibatsu were weak.”27
De Bary is only half convinced. He had heard this line so often from Japanese that he suspected the influence of military propaganda. He writes: “The army, during the thirties, must have propagated the idea first and then have proved its truth by buying out or intimidating the zaibatsu.”
One thing is certain: by going after the zaibatsu and leaving the bureaucracy more or less alone, the Americans showed that they had not really understood how the Japanese wartime system worked. But this was not just a matter of ignorance or misunderstanding; there was a confluence of views between idealistic American planners, who wanted to help build a new Japan, and the Japanese “reform bureaucrats” who were expecting to continue their wartime grip on the economy, albeit to more peaceful ends.
Not that nothing was done. By 1948, the careers of more than nine hundred thousand people had been screened, and more than one and a half million questionnaires examined. The Home Ministry was dissolved, the armed forces disbanded, and 1,800 bureaucrats were purged. But most of these (70 percent) were former policemen and other officials from the Home Ministry. Economic bureaucrats were hardly touched at all. From the former Ministry of Munitions only forty-two men were dismissed, and from the Ministry of Finance just nine.28 The man who ran the Ministry of Munitions, after being in charge of slave labor in Manchuria, and who then helped to plan the Japanese imperialist enterprise known as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, was arrested but never formally charged with war crimes. His name was Kishi Nobusuke, and his career flourished after his release from prison; he would go on to become prime minister of Japan.
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IN THE HISTORY of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the Philippines occupies a curious place. The country was invaded and occupied by the Japanese on December 8, 1941, ten hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Douglas MacArthur, then officially Field Marshal of the Philippine Army, retreated to Australia in March of the following year, where he asserted, “I shall return.” The Filipino president, Manuel Quezon, also left for Australia and thence to Washington, D.C., where he established a government in exile. This in itself was unusual; there was no Indonesian government in exile, or Burmese government in exile. There was a Thai government in exile, but Thailand was never a colony. By the time the Japanese invaded, the Philippines was somewhere in between a colony and a state. It already had commonwealth status and was supposed to become fully independent in 1946. The Japanese, in spite of promising, as General Homma Masaharu put it, to emancipate the Filipinos from the oppressive domination of the United States, in fact recolonized the country in a more brutal form. Even though the Philippines was formally declared an independent republic in 1943, under president José P. Laurel, the Japanese were fully in charge. Behind every Filipino government official was a Japanese “consultant,” and behind every consultant stood the Japanese army and the dreaded Kempeitai military police. The republic, in short, was a sham.
There was, however, a tough Filipino resistance movement against the Japanese. The most effective anti-Japanese guerrillas, operating in the rural areas of the main island of Luzon, shared the politics neither of Quezon nor of Laurel. The Hukbalahap, meaning People’s Anti-Japanese Army, were barefooted peasant revolutionaries whose enemies were not only the Japanese but also the big Filipino landowning families. Enriched by their vast sugar and coconut plantations, the landlords, masquerading as democrats, ran the country as a feudal oligarchy. The most famous Huk leader, named Luis Taruc, was a son of sharecroppers. Another colorful Huk was a huge and ferocious female warrior named Felipa Culala. Her nom de guerre was Dayang Dayang. Even the Japanese were afraid of Dayang Dayang.
Since many of the landlords had fled their plantations for Manila during the Japanese occupation, the Huks did what communists had done in other countries: they took over the land and set up a kind of state within a state. Their disciplined fighting “squadrons” were ruthless killers of Japanese, but also of any Filipinos suspected of collaboration or indiscipline. Even the formidable Dayang Dayang was punished when she broke the rules. Abiding by her own motto that “those who don’t get rich in this war have liquid brains,” she went on a spree of looting anything from water buffalo to jewelry. She was caught, tried, and shot.29
José Laurel and most of his cohorts in the puppet government, such as Manuel Roxas and Benigno Aquino, were from the elite landowning families, whose power the Huks would have wished to overturn, even without a Japanese occupation. In the sense of serving under the Japanese and promoting an anti-American, pan-Asianist cause, these men were certainly collaborators. But like the collaboration of other Asian nationalists in former Western colonies, their motives were complex. Laurel was an impressive man, a graduate of Yale Law School, a senator, and an associate justice on the supreme court in Manila. Although a member of the colonial elite, he may genuinely have believed that the Japanese brand of militant “Asianism” was needed to wean Filipinos from their dependence on the United States. Similar claims have been made by European quislings, who thought that a new order run by Nazi Germany would restore some vim to th
eir decadent societies. But they were betraying independent nations; Laurel, Sukarno, and others were operating under foreign rule or domination, before and after the Japanese landed.
Laurel remained a prime target for Filipino guerrillas. While playing a round of golf with Benigno Aquino at the Wack Wack Golf and Country Club in June 1943, he was shot in the back by two assailants, one of whom bore the name of “Little Joe.” Later that year, after he had recovered from his wounds, Laurel attended the Greater East Asian Conference in Tokyo, where Asian brotherhood and cooperation were pledged. The following year he agreed to declare war on the United States as the Japanese demanded.
Meanwhile, in October 1944, General MacArthur made good on his promise to the Filipinos that he would return. To heighten the drama of this event, he waded through the surf of Leyte, a scowling figure in aviator glasses. Indeed, he waded through the surf more than once to get the image just right for the newsreels. And he reenacted the same scene in Luzon. In his usual biblical manner, sure to appeal to the Catholic as well as the mystical side of Filipinos, he intoned: “People of the Philippines, I have returned. By the grace of the Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil—soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples . . . Rally to me . . . The guidance of divine God points the way.”
On their long and often bloody slog to Manila, American troops were actively helped by the Huks. The Filipino guerrillas drove out the Japanese from various parts of central Luzon, hoisted the Stars and Stripes along with the Philippine flag, and set up their own administration, expecting U.S. support for the independent Philippine socialist republic. This is not how it turned out, however. Despite some words of admiration for the fighting spirit of the Huks, MacArthur was persuaded to bring back the people he knew best, that is to say, the old landowning elite. Despite his vow to “run to earth every disloyal Filipino,” MacArthur made Manuel Roxas, a loyal member of Laurel’s puppet government, a brigadier general in the U.S. Army.30
The Huks were ordered to give up their arms. When they refused, they were arrested. Some were jailed without formal charges. One of them was Luis Taruc, who shared his prison cell with several former collaborators of the Japanese. When fifty thousand peasants marched in protest to the Malacañang Palace in Manila, Taruc was released, but many of his troops remained in prison. What followed is murky. Arms were twisted, money changed hands. The Manila press came out with stories about Laurel and his colleagues having acted as impeccable patriots during the war, shielding the Filipinos as best they could from the horrors inflicted by Japanese. MacArthur called Roxas “one of the prime factors in the guerilla movement.” Filipinos were admonished to be above “petty jealousy” and “unnecessary misunderstanding,” for such things would only “impede progress.”31
As the first president of the Philippines after World War II, Manuel Roxas declared an amnesty for wartime collaborators. Thousands were released from jail. Luis Taruc took to the hills and the Huks became the Army to Liberate the People, forerunners of the Maoist New People’s Army. And the old landowning families, firmly in charge of their possessions once more, continued to rule Philippine politics. This was still true in 1986, after “people power” had toppled Ferdinand Marcos, inspiring the world with the promise of Asian democracy. The People Power star was Corazon “Cory” Aquino, Benigno Aquino’s daughter-in-law. Her vice president was “Doy” Laurel, José Laurel’s son. As I write, the president is Benigno Aquino III, Cory’s eldest son.
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TO RESTORE LEGITIMACY to a ravaged country, it helps to have a symbolic figure to rally around. This can be a respected monarch, a resistance hero, even a foreign general who can plausibly pose as a savior. General Douglas MacArthur’s style may have been a little too histrionic, even egomaniacal, for some tastes, but he played this role to perfection in both Japan and the Philippines. His use of the Japanese emperor as the symbol of continuity was calculated to complement his own performance as the temporary shogun. Heroism, including MacArthur’s, is often a matter of theater, and in some cases a complete fiction. In North Korea, for example, “the Great Leader” Kim Il-sung was imposed by the Soviet Red Army as a great partisan hero who had single-handedly chased the Japanese from the Korean peninsula. In fact, he had spent most of the war in a Soviet army training camp near Khabarovsk.
When the figureheads of prewar regimes have lost credibility, and legitimacy is contested, you have the basis for civil war. This broke out in full force in Greece, and after a year of shadowboxing and skirmishes, it would soon cut loose in China too.
The Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, known to Americans as the Gimo, and to the U.S. commander in wartime China, General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, as “Peanut Head,” was nominally in control of China. But many parts of the country were clearly beyond his grasp. The Gimo presented himself, and was depicted in American wartime propaganda, as a great national leader, heroically battling the Japanese. But Mao Zedong, holed up with his guerrilla army in the northwest, promoted the idea—not entirely spurious—that Chiang had been passive at best, and a Japanese collaborator against the Communists at worst. The Communists claimed that they were the true resisters, and Mao the national hero. In fact, both sides often regarded the Japanese as a tedious sideshow which the U.S. would eventually take care of. The real enemies were at home. As two hostile Chinese armies squared up for the final battle, one heroic narrative was pitted against another.
The two leaders actually met, just after the war, at an extended meeting in the Nationalist wartime capital of Chungking (now spelled Chongqing). They couldn’t really bear one another, but had a mutual respect for the other’s toughness, like bosses of rival gangs. Mao toasted Chiang at the official banquet and wished him ten thousand years of prosperity. In an attempt to stave off an all-out civil war, polite talks were held about power-sharing, who would occupy which parts of the country, what kind of government might be shared, and so forth. No firm agreement was reached. Mao told his comrades that the statement of peaceful intentions (“democracy,” “one army,” Chiang’s “leadership”) was “a mere scrap of paper.”32 But the U.S. ambassador to China, the mentally unstable Patrick J. Hurley, who disconcerted his Chinese hosts by treating them to whooping Choctaw Indian war cries, still had hopes that he, a man who knew next to nothing about China, would bring the two parties together. Any American who harbored doubts on this issue, including diplomats with far greater expertise, was, in Hurley’s fevered imagination, a traitor and probably a communist.
The New York Times reporter had it right. In a report on October 6, he wrote, “To Westerners who wonder why there is so much haggling, it should be pointed out that troops are the decisive factor in Chinese politics.” Not only that, but arms were decisive too. Which is why Chiang insisted on his sole right to disarm the Japanese, and why Mao chose to ignore this.
In the summer of 1945, Chiang’s Nationalists had an army of about four million men spread all over southern and central China. But they were badly trained, ill disciplined, and often led by corrupt and incompetent officers. “Puppet armies,” set up by the Japanese in Manchukuo, northern China, and Nanking (Nanjing), the old Nationalist capital, numbered more than a million men. They were better equipped than the Nationalists and often superior fighters, and, rather than disarm them, Chiang preferred to absorb them into his own ranks. Then there was an assortment of provincial warlords whose loyalties were self-seeking and always fluid.
Chinese civilians dreaded the arrival of Nationalists in their villages and towns, for the troops tended to behave more like brigands than soldiers, looting property, robbing food, raping women, and shanghaiing peasants into the army. Puppet troops and warlord armies were not much better. The Communists, who had about a million soldiers and two million militiamen, could be ruthless masters too, but they at least understood the value of discipline. Their public relations were better; they realized that a war is partly won by propaganda. Being seen as
a heroic people’s army was one of their greatest assets.
Much of China was not just horribly damaged, but also corrupted by foreign occupation, warlord misrule, and many years of purges and counter-purges in a civil conflict that was often as brutal as the war with Japan. Donald Keene, the Japan scholar, was a young U.S. Navy officer stationed in Tsingtao (Qingdao), a port city on the Yellow Sea, known for its naval base, European architecture, and German-style beer breweries. The Japanese Imperial Navy was still in town when the U.S. Marines arrived, and Keene soon sensed “something fishy in the atmosphere,” a stink of skullduggery and corruption; “the charge of collaborationist is no less pervasive than the generally suspicious character of the city itself.”33
He found that Tsingtao was still run by Chinese who had been appointed by the Japanese, generally louche characters who had done well out of foreign occupation. He found Japanese naval officers bragging of their wartime exploits, and Chinese being purged for collaboration by other Chinese whose records were just as blemished; they simply wanted to loot the suspects’ properties. Tsingtao was a place of seedy carpetbaggers, gangsters, spies with shifting loyalties, and Japanese who still behaved like a master race. None of this was unique to Tsingtao. Keene heard reports from other parts of China about heavily armed Japanese troops being asked by Nationalists to help contain the Communists. These reports were entirely accurate. Some right-wing factions in Chiang’s government actually wanted to start a war with the Communists immediately with active Japanese assistance. The cautious Gimo did not wish to go that far, but large numbers of Japanese troops were used to guard Chinese railroads and many other installations against possible Communist attacks.
There were reprisals against the Japanese here and there, but on the whole, both Nationalists and Communists concentrated on their domestic enemies, and the Nationalists needed Japanese help. Besides, the relationship between Chinese and Japanese was often too tangled for simple solutions.