Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  His years in Japan reflected his skilled use of theatrics. Not by chance did he arrive for the first time at Atsugi airport in Japan unarmed. It was immediately after the Japanese surrender; only a handful of American troops were in the country, and his aides still worried about the possibility of a right-wing rebellion. But MacArthur was serene. Years of service in Asia, he explained later, “had taught the Far East that I was its friend.” Nor was it by chance that he then bided his time and let the Emperor come to him, so that the lesson would be clear to all, most notably the Emperor, that Douglas MacArthur was now the ruler of this country. Lest there be any doubt that the torch had been passed, he permitted publication of the photograph of their meeting. Nothing could be more telling—the Emperor, small, ill-at-ease, in top hat and striped pants; MacArthur, patrician and yet quintessentially the informal American, wearing his khakis without battle ribbons, shirt open at the collar, towering over the Emperor. There could be no doubt who was the conqueror and who was the conquered.

  Though a conqueror, he held no contempt for the conquered and even sympathized with their plight. That made him very much the exception among his associates both in Tokyo and in Washington, where the feeling, after so cruel a four-year campaign against a foe perceived as an oppressor, was rancorous. For many of the senior Allied officers the memories of the Pacific war and what the Japanese had done to their prisoners were vivid. Few generals and admirals could forget the cadaverous figure of Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright, finally released from the hell of a Japanese prison camp, joining them at the surrender ceremonies. Some wanted vengeance in various forms; Admiral William Halsey spoke of riding the Emperor’s white horse down the main streets of Tokyo. But from the start MacArthur saw beyond that. His job was not to punish but to create a society which would never again follow that path. He knew his enemy was ravaged; he then would be the most magnanimous of victors. This was the great chance not only to bring Japan into the modern era but also to fashion a democracy. From the beginning, at the ceremonies aboard the battleship Missouri, he stressed the theme of the generous victor. He had decided on that long before the war was over (although after the outcome was no longer in doubt). In March 1945 he told the writer Robert Sherwood that victory over Japan would make America the most powerful nation in Asia. “If we exert that influence in an imperialistic manner,” he said, “or for the sole purpose of commercial advantage, then we shall lose our golden opportunity; but if our influence and strength are expressed in terms of essential liberalism we shall have the friendship and the cooperation of the Asiatic peoples far into the future.”

  That was his goal. He let the Japanese disarm themselves, thus saving them the humiliation of being disarmed by their conqueror. Knowing that Japan was desperately short of food, he ordered his troops to subsist on their rations and not plunder the local supplies. He canceled Eichelberger’s early orders setting a curfew and creating martial law. When Admiral Halsey, fearing sabotage, prohibited fishermen from crossing Tokyo Bay on their way to their fishing grounds, MacArthur, aware that this was a critical source of food for the country as well as the fishermen’s livelihood, rescinded the order. Sensitive to the importance of the Emperor to the Japanese people, sure that he could use him for his own purposes, he had Hirohito’s name crossed off a list of those to be charged as war criminals. In the early days, when many in Washington would have been content to watch Japan starve, he fought hard for food. “Give me bread or give me bullets,” he cabled home. At that same time he fought against those in the United States and among the Allies who intended to strip Japan of what little industrial capacity it had left. He intended, as a counterbalance to the forces that had brought Japan into World War II, to democratize the society, and to push it, in his words, “left of center.” John Gunther, the liberal journalist, was staggered by the completeness of MacArthur’s vision for Japan. Occupied Japan reminded him of Republican Spain before the Communists moved in. The programs, Gunther wrote, were remarkably similar, “an attempt to end feudalism, drastic curtailment of ancient privilege, land reform, liberation of women, extremely advanced labor legislation, education for the mass, ‘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 military, and embracing almost everything in every field, reform, reform, REFORM.”

  In those years after the war, perhaps nothing was more important than his will, especially his determination to reform Japanese society to his specifications. For postwar Japan was a place of immense turbulence, a society waiting to be redefined. The country was devastated. There was very little housing or food. The essential functioning economy was the black market. Members of aristocratic families, once rich and grand, now fallen on hard times, bartered their heirlooms for a day’s nourishment. Treasured family kimonos were traded for enough rice for two people. Japan became almost overnight a society without form, its traditional hierarchical order turned upside down. Those who had once ruled, both in government and in industry, were contaminated by their wartime experiences. The higher someone had been in the old order, the more likely he was to have been tainted by participation in the war effort; only those at the bottom who had been critical of that effort were legitimized, and many of these, as it happened, were Communists. MacArthur had no use for the special privilege that the prewar Japan had afforded the zaibatsu, the huge, interconnected industrial complexes that had dominated the nation and were believed to have helped push Japan into the war. He said that the zaibatsu, in which government and giant industries were intertwined, represented “private socialism.” He believed that the society had to be changed and that political democratization by itself was not sufficient. Without introducing economic change as well, the Americans would be creating a fertile field for a radical new order. Political change had to be accompanied by economic change—especially the redistribution of land from the large landowners to poor tenant farmers. (Under the orders of the American occupiers, reluctant Japanese landlords finally had to do the unthinkable: sell their land to those who tilled it—a historic step.) He also wanted to limit the power of the zaibatsu and give greater economic power to the average worker.

  The attitude of Washington to all this, in those early years, seemed somewhat ambivalent. In Europe it was clear fairly soon after the war that the Americans intended to rebuild not just their allies but their adversaries as well; in Japan, American intentions were not nearly so benevolent. The amount of American aid to Japan, for example, even in terms of the most basic kind of food, was extremely limited. MacArthur had a considerable respect for the quality of men he had just fought and for their willingness to bear terrible burdens. He was, in fact, among the first of the conquerors to recognize the Japanese work ethic. In 1950, during the Korean War, he told Averell Harriman that the Japanese were remarkable in the way they venerated work. “He spoke,” Harriman noted, “of the great quality of the Japanese; his desire to work, the satisfaction of the Japanese in work, his respect for the dignity of work. He compared it favorably to the desire in the United States for more luxury and less work.”

  It was by no means certain whether Americans other than MacArthur wanted Japan to rise again as an industrial force: Clearly it would not be allowed to rise as a military force. An antagonism which was at least partly racial affected the average American’s view of the average Japanese as it did not affect an American’s perception of the average German. In addition, almost from the moment the war in Europe ended there was a sense of the Soviet Union as a serious adversary; thus there was a need in Europe to bolster the defeated enemy as part of the bulwark against a newer enemy. That same need did not seem to extend to Japan. At the end of the war, China, not yet Communist, was still perceived as a U.S. ally. The Cold War came to Asia some two years after it arrived in Europe.

  MacArthur was seen by his fellow citizens as an archconservative, and so his plan to liberalize Japan was astonishin
g not just to his critics back in the States but to old-time members of the general’s staff. His headquarters staff often seemed divided between the traditionalists, some of whom were very conservative, who had been with him a long time, and who greatly preferred to deal with Japan’s existing business order, and the bright young New Dealers, bent on redoing the old imperial order, who were determined to loosen the power of the zaibatsu and purge some of the prewar business figures. His headquarters was filled with intrigue as both sides struggled for his ear. Much of the tension within the offices of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) centered around the Occupation’s attitude toward labor unions and the rather radical labor leaders who were just beginning to emerge. Among the new freedoms given the Japanese was the right to organize. The Americans viewed this as being not only right and proper, the sort of thing that an egalitarian society should bestow, but also a means of checking the power of the zaibatsu. MacArthur made union membership legal and actively encouraged the unions. Where there had been only 400,000 union members before the war, by May 1946 there were 2.7 million and, by the end of that year, more than 4.5 million. This postwar American idealism did not come without its problems. For one thing, Japan had almost no history of moderate trade unionism. Most of the top labor leaders in that era were in fact Communists.

  There were two quite separate political phases to the MacArthur Occupation. The first, which lasted from 1945 through part of 1947, was the idealistic one, of which the general himself was the primary architect. In that period the Americans, bent on rescuing a physically prostrated Japan and trying to create some basis for a new democratic order, were tolerant of radical political forces they often privately detested. Japanese businessmen who had been leaders in the zaibatsu were purged. Excesses on the part of the unions were condoned. The second phase began in 1949. The policy changed not so much because of events in Japan but because of events in the world. The Cold War had intensified in Europe, the Communists were about to win in China, and Washington, which was already in the process of strengthening and reindustrializing West Germany, suddenly began to see Japan differently: It should become a free-world bastion in Asia. It should be industrialized. Its traditional business structure should be strengthened, not undermined. Assaults upon the zaibatsu were to stop. There was to be pressure against the left, particularly against radical trade unions. All of this had a profound effect on the eventual formation of Japanese unions and their role in their companies. Thus the relationships between Japanese workers and managers that American businessmen in the seventies and eighties found so frustrating were engineered in the late forties and early fifties under the auspices of the American Occupation.

  In that first period MacArthur’s job was doubly difficult, for not only did he have limited support back home, but he was also dealing with a series of governments in Japan that were distinctly unsympathetic to the idea of any kind of reform. The Americans needed a government through which to operate, but their choices were quite limited. The most experienced public figures were from the old order and wanted little change; those who were sympathetic to change either had too little experience or might want not just change but revolution. Faced with this dilemma, the Americans chose to work through surviving politicians of the old order, who were inevitably far more conservative in their vision of the future than MacArthur was. There simply was no alternative as far as SCAP was concerned. It might have wanted a Japanese version of the New Deal, a nice, moderately liberal administration with strong connections to labor and to the masses, but no such group existed. So it happened that the dominant politician of those years was a man that the American officials never particularly liked.

  Shigeru Yoshida headed five cabinets between 1946 and 1954, and that time was known, properly enough, as the Yoshida era. His first priority, the restoration of the old order in Japan, from the beginning brought him in constant conflict with MacArthur and his headquarters. To the Americans, Japan’s militarism had stemmed from significant structural weaknesses that how had to be addressed by American reforms. The Americans were appalled by Japan’s feudal attributes and by the gulf that separated the few who were privileged from the millions who were not. To Allied theorists, Japanese soldiers had behaved brutally in victory as a “transfer of oppression,” a result of the harshness with which they themselves had been treated. A more balanced and more democratic society, the Americans believed, would not so readily have been pulled by its jingoists into so tragic a war.

  Yoshida disagreed fervently. What the Americans were criticizing was what he represented. He was the perfect embodiment of the best of the old order—aristocratic, intelligent, snobbish, politically unreconstructed. Unlike the militarists who came to power in the thirties, who were anti-Western, he was pro-Western (but more Anglophile than pro-American). He had opposed the Pacific war (but not Japanese imperialism in China, which he supported and which he had seen as something that could be conducted in the British colonial tradition, possibly even with British approval). He had regarded Pearl Harbor and the war that ensued as a disaster for Japan. To him the rise of the Japanese military was an aberration. During the war he had been part of a secret group maneuvering for peace; he did this because he knew Japan was losing the war, and he feared not just the inevitable defeat but, even more frightening, the left-wing apocalypse he was convinced would follow if the war dragged on. Because of these activities he had been arrested by the Kempeitai, the secret police, near the end of the war and held for forty days. To a considerable degree that helped validate him in the eyes of the occupiers as a certified antiwar figure. Yet from the start of the American Occupation he accepted on the part of his class no blame for what had happened before and during the war. To Yoshida there was nothing unjust or parasitic about the prewar ruling class. Rather it was paternalistic and high-minded. Japan, in his eyes, should be run by the right people, an old-boy network of men from the right social class who had gone to the right schools. He hated the purge of the zaibatsu carried on by SCAP in the early postwar years, for by and large these were his friends and colleagues who were being eliminated from public life. At one press conference he defended the zaibatsu. Many of them, he said, had worked for the militarists not at a profit but at a loss during the war. The true profiteers were the new rich, whose fortunes had soared because of the war. The old rich, he said, had welcomed the end of the war.

  He was a crusty, abrasive, egocentric, sharp-tongued man who had come from a privileged background. His blood father was descended from the samurai, his mother was probably a geisha. (In his later years he spent a lot of time with geishas himself, and questioned about this, he answered, “Geishas’ sons like geishas.”) His father was in prison for his political activities at the time of his birth, and it was decided that he should be adopted by a friend of his father. Kenzo Yoshida. With that he had gone from being the fifth son of a moderately successful family to the only son in a very rich one. His new father, the operator of a successful shipping agency, had become remarkably wealthy in a very short time; when he died in 1887, he left his adopted nine-year-old son some $6 million. The boy was raised by his mother to be, as he later put it, “proud and egotistical.” “The child,” she liked to say of him, “doesn’t make mistakes.” He was reared as a proper young gentleman of post-Meiji Japan. He was liberal for the society from which he had sprung, not so much in his view of Japanese domestic politics but in his acceptance of the idea of a world beyond Japan itself. He was from the start brilliantly connected; when he married it was to Yukiko Makino, the eldest daughter of Nobuaki Makino, who later became foreign minister and privy seal and one of the Emperor’s closest advisers. As a young and wealthy foreign service officer he had been noted for his arrogance; later he liked to tell of the time when he was consul general in Tientsin, China, and a member of the Diet came by the official residence: “‘I wish to see the consul general.’ ‘The consul general is out,’ I said. ‘Really?’ he asked in disbelief, whereupon I replied: ‘If
the consul general himself says he is absent, then he is really absent.’”

  Yoshida and his wife were probably the closest Japanese friends of Ambassador and Mrs. Joseph Grew in the tense times just before the start of the war. In 1941, when Mrs. Yoshida was dying of cancer, it was the Grews who provided Ovaltine, which was the only nourishment she could take at the time, and gave Yoshida a car so that he could visit his wife in the hospital. When his group lost their struggle with the militarists, Yoshida sat out most of the war until he was arrested. When the war was over, Yoshida, fresh out of political prison, was an attractive figure for the Americans trying to compose a government. He was antimilitarist, pro-Western, and experienced in international affairs. In 1945, when Yoshida was made foreign minister in the Shidehara cabinet, Prince Fumimaro Konoe, the prewar prime minister, said of him: “I am not behind others in my admiration for Yoshida, but Yoshida’s consciousness is the consciousness of the era of Imperial Japan, and I wonder if that can go well in a defeated Japan.”

  True enough, Yoshida’s relationship with the Americans was never easy. MacArthur once spoke of him as “monumentally lazy and politically inept,” a significant misreading of Yoshida, who was neither lazy nor inept, but who did not want the same things as MacArthur and thus became exceptionally skilled at not hearing what he chose not to hear and dragging his feet when the Americans wanted him to move ahead. He saw his job as preserving Japan, not changing it, and to the degree that he could slow down the reformers, he intended to do it. Often he seemed to taunt the conquerors in small subtle ways, deliberately going to Shinto shrines in the postwar years although the Americans felt that Shintoism was part of the reason for Japanese militarism, on other occasions signing letters to the Emperor “your loyal servant Shigeru” when he knew the Americans wanted those in government to be public servants, not servants—as in the past—of the Emperor. Comfortable with the prewar British and their colonialist realpolitik, he found the postwar American policymakers too innocent. He hated the idealists in SCAP (“quite peculiar types,” he said), who seemed to promote what he termed “revolution for revolution’s sake.”