The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (Modern Library War)

by Toland, John

  The announcement that American forces would shortly occupy the country invoked new fears and unrest. Wild rumors made the population panicky: the Chinese were landing at Osaka; thousands of American soldiers were already looting and raping in Yokohama. Girls and family treasures were evacuated to the country or the mountains. Newspapers ran columns of advice on how to get along with the American troops. Women were told: “Don’t go out at all in the evening. Keep watches and other valuables at home. When in danger of being raped, show the most dignified attitude. Don’t yield. Cry for help.” They were cautioned to avoid “provocative acts” such as smoking or going without socks. Some factories issued poison capsules to women workers.

  Soon after dawn on August 28, forty-five C-47’s approached Mount Fuji with the American advance party, commanded by Colonel Charles Tench, a member of MacArthur’s staff. At Atsugi Air Base the lead plane taxied to a stop and the first conqueror ever to step on Japanese soil emerged in the person of Colonel Tench. From the edge of the ramp a mob of shouting Japanese headed for him, and for a moment he thought he was about to be cut down by fanatics. Then he noticed a small reception party near the plane. A short officer stepped forward and announced that he was Lieutenant General Seizo Arisue.* As the two walked toward a tent in the reception area, Japanese cameramen and U. S. Signal Corps photographers recorded almost every step. In the tent Colonel Tench went pale when Arisue offered him orange punch. To show it wasn’t poisoned the general drained a glass of it before Tench hesitantly took a sip.

  Within forty-eight hours Atsugi was occupied in force by the 11th Airborne Division, whose four-engine transports touched down every two minutes for hours. No sooner was the air base secured than another C-54 appeared in the distance. It was Bataan, with General of the Army Douglas MacArthur on board. He was discussing the fate of Japan with his Military Secretary, Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, who had visited the country numerous times. “It’s very simple,” said MacArthur. “We’ll use the instrumentality of the Japanese government to implement the occupation.” Among other things, he was going to give Japanese women the right to vote.

  “The Japanese men won’t like it.”

  “I don’t care. I want to discredit the military. Women don’t want war.”

  The big transport touched down at 2:19 P.M. MacArthur, the first to leave the plane, paused at the top of the ladder and Fellers heard him mutter, “This is the payoff.” He lit his corncob and descended, pipe clenched between teeth. General Robert Eichelberger, who had preceded him by a few hours, came up to him and they shook hands. “Bob,” said MacArthur, grinning broadly, “from Melbourne to Tokyo is a long way, but this seems to be the end of the road.”

  A line of dilapidated cars was waiting to take the MacArthur group to temporary headquarters in Yokohama. At the head of the column was a red fire engine, which reminded General Courtney Whitney of the Toonerville Trolley. It lunged forward with a startling explosion, and the motorcade clanged and crawled the fifteen miles to Yokohama. The entire length of the road was lined with almost thirty thousand Japanese soldiers, who stood on guard, their backs to MacArthur.

  The Americans were quartered at the New Grand Hotel, a luxury establishment erected after the earthquake of 1923. At dinner Whitney warned his chief that the steak might be poisoned, but MacArthur laughed and brushed it off with “No one can live forever.” Later that evening he told his staff, which had congregated in his room, “Boys, this is the greatest adventure in military history. Here we sit in the enemy’s country with only a handful of troops, looking down the throats of nineteen fully armed divisions and seventy million fanatics. One false move and the Alamo would look like a Sunday-school picnic!”

  The following day Lieutenant General Jonathan W. Wainwright was flown in from a POW camp in Manchuria. When MacArthur, who was having dinner, heard that Wainwright was in the lobby, he immediately went downstairs to greet the most famous survivor of Bataan. The officer who had lost through surrender more troops than any other American commander stood haggard and aged far beyond his years. His hair was snow-white, his uniform hung loose on his skeletal frame and he supported himself with a cane. He tried to smile. MacArthur embraced him but Wainwright was unable to speak. “Well, Skinny,” said MacArthur with emotion, putting his hands on the other man’s shoulders.

  Wainwright got out one choked word, “General.” While photographers took pictures, he found his voice: he believed he was in disgrace for surrendering the Philippines.* But MacArthur reassured him; Wainwright could have anything he wanted.

  “General, the only thing I want now is command of a corps,” Wainwright said huskily. “That is what I wanted right in the beginning.”

  “Why, Jim, your old corps is yours when you want it.”

  Only a token occupation force was sent to ravaged Tokyo. The newsmen who accompanied it wanted above all to interview Tokyo Rose. She was finally located by correspondents Harry Brundige and Clark Lee through a Japanese newsman named Yamashita who brought her to the Imperial Hotel on the morning of September 1. She wore slacks and her hair was in pigtails. With her was a solemn young Portuguese-Japanese.

  “This is Iva Ikuko Toguri, your Tokyo Rose. And this is her husband, Philip d’Aquino.”

  “Are you really Tokyo Rose?” Brundige asked.

  “The one and only,” she said with a smile.

  Brundige offered her $2,000 for an exclusive first-person story for Cosmopolitan magazine which he would ghost-write, with the proviso, however, that she stay away from all other correspondents—as well as Army Intelligence and the CIC—until the story appeared. She agreed, and Brundige tapped out seventeen pages of notes on his portable typewriter. What emerged was the ironic story of an intelligent, scholarly young woman with a degree in zoology from UCLA who had sold out the country she loved for the country she hated—for $6.60 a month—because the alternative to propaganda broadcasting was work in a munitions factory.

  After graduation from UCLA, Iva had gone to Japan, under protest, to see her mother’s sister who was ill—her mother was too sick to make the trip. She found she disliked almost everything about Japan, including rice and her relatives, but before she could go back home the war broke out. She supported herself as a secretary, which led to a job as typist with the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation. At the behest of an American Army captain—an ex-radio commentator who had himself been persuaded to return to his old trade, for the other side—she agreed to make fifteen-minute daily broadcasts to the Allied soldiers. In her capacity as disk jockey she met and became friends with American POW’s who were broadcasting propaganda for the Japanese. (They were subsequently pardoned because they had been forced to it under “immediate threat of death or bodily harm.”) Iva used to bring food, medicine, cigarettes—whatever she could scrape up for the prisoners. “It was manna from heaven,” she said later, “to be among people who thought and felt as I did.”

  The editor of Cosmopolitan, however, was astounded that Brundige had negotiated with a traitor and by return cable demanded an explanation. Disgusted, Brundige turned over his scoop to Lee. He submitted his own version to the International News Service, which released it at once.*

  5.

  At Navy Secretary Forrestal’s instigation, the formal surrender ceremonies took place on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, just three days after MacArthur’s arrival. Truman was particularly pleased by the choice. Missouri, one of the four largest battleships in the world, had been named after his own state and christened by his daughter, Margaret.

  On September 1 Commander Horace Bird, Missouri’s gunnery officer, conducted a dress rehearsal on the ship’s deck. He gathered three hundred sailors to represent the dignitaries. Everything went smoothly until the band began the “Admiral’s March,” signaling Nimitz’ arrival. “Nimitz” did not appear. The admiral’s stand-in, a burly chief boatswain’s mate nicknamed “Two-Gut,” was immobilized by his role. He stood transfixed, scratching his head. “I’ll be
damned!” he said in an awed voice. “Me an admiral!”

  The next morning Commander Bird watched the dawn with disappointment. It was cool and gray. At about 7:30 a destroyer lay to, and correspondents from all over the world clambered aboard the battleship. Each was given a position, but the intimidated Japanese alone remained in place. The Russians were particularly obstreperous, roaming around the ship “like wild men.”

  For the Americans the moment brought back vivid memories. Robert Trumbull of the New York Times would never forget the hectic morning in Pearl Harbor when he worked for a Honolulu paper, nor would Webley Edwards, in charge of the pool broadcast on Missouri, who had announced by radio from Honolulu on December 7, “This is the real McCoy!”

  Destroyers pulled alongside Missouri, discharging Allied generals and admirals including Halsey, Helfrich, Turner, Percival, Stilwell, Wainwright, Spaatz, Kenney and Eichelberger. At 8:05 Nimitz was piped aboard, followed shortly by MacArthur. There was so much excitement that the arrival of the two senior American officers went generally unnoticed. Commander Bird rushed ahead of them calling out, “Gentlemen, General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz are approaching.” Bird was ignored. In desperation he shouted, “Attention, all hands!” As one the assembled admirals and generals snapped to attention. In the immediate silence, waves could be heard lapping around the water line.

  Now the destroyer Lansdowne, named after the commander of the dirigible Shenandoah, appeared with the eleven Japanese delegates. There had been a controversy about who would lead the Japanese. It was intolerable to think that Prime Minister Higashikuni, a member of the royal family, should be subjected to such humiliation, and Prince Konoye, who had risked his life for two years for peace, could not bring himself to face the shame of the moment. The onerous responsibility fell on the new foreign minister, Shigemitsu, who regarded it as “a painful but profitable task,” and was honored that the Emperor had entrusted him with it. Army Chief of Staff Umezu was there under duress; it had taken a personal appeal from His Majesty. Navy Chief of Staff Toyoda ordered his operations officer, Admiral Tomioka, to take his place. “You lost the war,” he said, “so you go”; Tomioka acquiesced but had already made up his mind to commit hara-kiri after the ceremonies.

  The Japanese delegates were not even sure of protocol once they were on board. Should they salute, bow, shake hands or smile? Their adviser, Colonel Mashbir, had told the military to salute; the civilians should merely take off their hats and bow. “And I suggest that all of you wear a shiran kao [nonchalant face].”

  Mashbir started up Missouri’s gangway at exactly 8:55, followed by a Japanese civilian in a tall silk hat, cutaway and ascot. He was laboriously pulling himself up, groaning with every step. It was Foreign Minister Shigemitsu, whose left leg had been blown off by an assassin’s bomb in Shanghai years before. His new artificial limb caused him excruciating agony. Bird, watching from above, expected the grim-faced general behind the man in the silk hat to give him a hand—it was Umezu, who regarded Shigemitsu as a detestable “Badoglio” and refused to take notice of his plight. Bird himself stepped down to offer a hand. Shigemitsu shook his head but then stiffly allowed the American to assist him momentarily.

  Shigemitsu’s painful progress across the quarter-deck to the ladder leading to the ceremony deck made him the center of attraction. An American correspondent noted that the onlookers watched him “with savage satisfaction.” Shigemitsu shook off Bird’s further offer of assistance and awkwardly mounted the ladder, his face a mask.

  Once the Japanese were in place, the entire company came to attention for the invocation by the ship’s chaplain. They remained at attention while a record of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played over amplifiers. In the long uneasy pause that followed, Toshikazu Kase (previously Matsuoka’s and now the new Foreign Minister’s secretary), discovered several miniature Rising Suns painted on a nearby bulkhead, apparently to indicate destroyed Japanese planes or submarines. As he counted them, Kase’s throat constricted. Beside him Admiral Tomioka was consumed by wonder and anger—wonder that the Americans showed no sign of contempt for the Japanese and anger at the presence of the Soviet delegates; they were part Asian, yet they had ignored Japan’s plea to act as peacemaker and then stabbed her in the back in Manchuria.*

  General MacArthur appeared, walking briskly with Nimitz and Halsey across the deck to a table covered with documents. The British had offered one used at the Battle of Jutland, but since it was too small, Bird had substituted a battered mess table covered with a coffee-stained green felt cloth; the documents had been arranged to hide the stains. Wainwright and Percival stepped to MacArthur’s side behind the table.

  “We are gathered here,” MacArthur said, “representatives of the major warring powers, to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored. The issues, involving divergent ideals and ideologies, have been determined on the battlefields of the world and hence are not for our discussion or our debate. Nor is it for us here to meet, representing as we do a majority of the peoples of the earth, 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 benefits the sacred purposes we are about to serve, committing all our people unreservedly to faithful compliance with the understanding they are here formally to assume.”

  Tomioka was impressed by the absence of rancor or retribution in MacArthur’s words. General Yatsuji Nagai, who had accompanied Matsuoka to Berlin and Moscow, couldn’t take his eyes away from MacArthur. How young-looking and fit he was in contrast to Umezu! Had the psychological impact of losing the war prematurely aged the Chief of Staff? Colonel Ichiji Sugita, who had interpreted at an earlier surrender ceremony, stared fixedly at another Allied officer, General Percival. Their eyes met and held, both apparently remembering the painful scene at the Ford factory in Singapore.

  “It is my earnest hope,” MacArthur continued,“—indeed the hope of all mankind—that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past, a world founded upon faith and understanding, a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish for freedom, tolerance and justice.”

  Almost as if on cue the clouds parted, and in the distance the peak of Mount Fuji sparkled in the sun. MacArthur indicated a chair at the opposite side of the table. Shigemitsu limped forward and sat down. He fumbled uncertainly with his hat, gloves and cane, giving the impression of stalling. Halsey wanted to slap him and say, “Sign, damn you! Sign!” MacArthur, however, realized that Shigemitsu was confused, and turning to his chief of staff, said sharply, “Sutherland, show him where to sign.” Shigemitsu signed. Next Umezu marched forward stiffly, and without bothering to sit down, scrawled his name. Using separate pens, MacArthur now signed as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. Then in turn Nimitz and the other allies signed for their respective countries: General Hsu Yung-chang for China, Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser for the United Kingdom, Lieutenant General K. Derevyanko for the Soviet Union, General Sir Thomas Blamey for Australia, Colonel L. Moore-Gosgrove for Canada, General Jacques Leclerc for France, Admiral C. E. L. Helfrich for the Netherlands and Air Vice-Marshal Sir L. M. Isitt for New Zealand.

  The dignity of the occasion was marred briefly by an inebriated delegate—it was not an American—who obtrusively began making faces at the Japanese. Shigemitsu stared him down and without expression slowly and deliberately put on his top hat. The other Japanese civilians followed suit. Perhaps it was a coincidence, thought Mashbir, but it struck him as an effective example of Oriental subtlety.

  The last signatures were inscribed and MacArthur again addressed the assemblage. “Let us pray,” he said, “that peace now be restored to the world and that God will preserve it always. These proceedings are now closed.” He walked over to Halsey and put his arm around his shoulders. Bird was close by and thought he heard MacArthur say, “Bill, where in the hell are those airplanes?” As if in answer came a rumbl
e in the distance. Thousands of carrier planes and B-29’s swept over Missouri in an inspiring exhibition.

  MacArthur left the ceremony deck for another microphone which would broadcast his message to America. “Today the guns are silent,” he said. “A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain death—the seas bear only commerce—men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight. The entire world is quietly at peace. The holy mission has been completed.…

  “A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security, and the survival of civilization.… Military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war.…

  “The utter destructiveness of war now blots out this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we do not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.…”

  MacArthur’s words were in a very real sense a pledge that the United States would treat the fallen enemy with understanding and compassion. And throughout Japan itself, the populace was beginning to recover from the anguish of an almost intolerable fate. “If we allow the pain and humility to breed within us the dark thoughts of future revenge,” the Nippon Times advised its readers in words that were meant to be inspiring and proved to be prophetic, “our spirit will be warped and perverted into a morbidly base design.… But if we use this pain and this humiliation as a spur to self-reflection and reform, and if we make this self-reflection and reform the motive force for a great constructive effort, there is nothing to stop us from building, out of the ashes of our defeat, a magnificent new Japan free from the dross of the old which is now gone, a new Japan which will vindicate our pride by winning the respect of the world.”