An Inoffensive Rearmament (19 page)

In the meantime, CASA staff wrote the initial directives for recruiting, deployment, procurement, and training. American officers bargained with Japanese industry for uniforms, tents, mess equipment, and trucks. We even played an influential role in selecting and promoting officers and noncommissioned officers of the initial force. CASA in actuality, if not officially, commanded all NPR operations. Control over new equipment and camp facilities was completely in our hands. It was only after many months had elapsed that command and control was gradually turned over to Japanese commanders and governmental officials.

While the initial NPR camps were being established, American forces were rapidly departing from Japan. After July 1950, only the 7th U.S. Division remained, and it, too, was badly needed in Korea. It could not be sent over, however, until we could organize and deploy the NPR. As the Korean situation deteriorated, the demands for the 7th increased, and it was finally committed to depart Japan on September 10. This became a critical date for the NPR and a nightmare for CASA. When the 7th departed for Korea, a quarter million American dependents, women, and children, would be left behind in Japan.

What was even more disturbing were frightening rumors that the Russians had deployed two Red Japanese divisions on Soviet-occupied Sakhalin, which
lies only a few miles north of Hokkaidō. These rumors were never clearly verified, but reports persisted that the Russians had manned several divisions with Japanese prisoners of war taken during World War II on the Asian mainland. The Sakhalin troops were reported to be well-equipped and bursting with communist indoctrination. Their alleged mission was to invade Hokkaidō as soon as the 7th Division departed for Korea. Though these rumors were discounted by some, the communist capability to do damage was so real that they could not be entirely dismissed.

In any case, CASA received instructions from GHQ to deploy ten thousand NPR personnel to Hokkaidō by September 10, the date scheduled for the 7th to embark for Korea. This was a formidable task. Hokkaidō is lightly populated and most of the ten thousand men had to be recruited in distant parts of Japan. Moreover, uniforms had to be fabricated, Marine boots cut down, and supplies and weapons channeled to meet the inductees. The most critical problem was housing for the troops. Hokkaidō, like Montana, is not very hospitable country in the fall and winter. The Japanese preferred the warmer climate in the south and moved to Hokkaidō only under pressure. Except for the camps occupied by the 7th Division, barrack facilities were extremely limited on Hokkaidō. We had no choice but to wait for the 7th to clear before we could move in the NPR.

Under these difficult circumstances, we scheduled the induction and movement so closely that our NPR trains actually closed in on the American camps in Hokkaidō as the trains loaded with the 7th Division troops and equipment departed their stations for Korea. We viewed the situation so critical that we assigned teams of American instructors on the NPR trains going north to teach the Japanese inductees en route how to load and fire their carbines. Many of the NPR members were recruited off the streets in Tōkyō, processed through their induction centers in two days, loaded into trains, and taught to shoot before they arrived at their destinations. The moves were executed with precision and great skill. Colonel John Drinkent, who was given responsibility for all NPR units in Hokkaidō, and his staff deserve major credit for the operation. On September 10, 1950, ten thousand Japanese assembled on Hokkaidō ready and eager to thwart any ambitions that the communists may have had in the area.

We never had to employ the NPR in a fight against the Red Japanese divisions rumored to be assembled in Sakhalin, but I wondered what kind of performance our Japanese, armed with our brand-new carbines and shod in cut-down Marine combat boots, would have turned in.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ORGANIZATIONAL PROBLEMS

On July 18, 1950, Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsuo Okazaki announced at a press conference in Tōkyō that the prime minister had selected the man to head the National Police Reserve. We were all excited by the announcement, eager to have a Japanese official assume responsibility for the force. As it was, we were making important basic decisions on the NPR with which the Japanese government and the nation would have to live. Moreover, it was extremely awkward for an American staff to commit Japanese funds that under the circumstances were required for immediate supplies for the organization.

We were very pleased when on July 23, Mr. Keikichi Masuhara, a career government official and the governor of Kagawa Prefecture at the time of his appointment, resigned his prefectural office and presented himself to General Shepard as the director general designee of the NPR. For three weeks, while the prime minister delayed promulgation of the Potsdam Ordinance that was to establish the NPR, the director general valiantly struggled to learn his new job. On August 14, 1950, the Diet having recessed, Mr. Masuhara, standing in the presence of the emperor and Prime Minister Yoshida in the Imperial villa at Hayama, was sworn in as the first director general of the National Police Reserve. On the same day, Mitoru Eguchi, a Labor Ministry (Rōdōshō) official, was formally appointed assistant director general. For all intents and purposes, Mr. Masuhara became the first minister of defense of postwar Japan.

Though I have never succeeded in evaluating and understanding Mr. Masuhara, reserving in my mind an unexplained uncertainty about him, I was
favorably impressed when I met him for the first time in General Shepard's office. A handsome Japanese with a strong, expressionless Asian face, his loud voice drew my attention at our first meeting and many times subsequently. He had a tendency to boom out his queries and answers unlike most Japanese, who in conversations with Americans talked in subdued tones, sometimes in an almost whisper. During the two years I worked with the director general, I learned to respect his straightforward answers and inflexible will. On occasion, he was a veritable mule, and he showed signs of intentionally misunderstanding questions. He was, nevertheless, always dignified, displaying a warm sense of humor.

Though formally Japan was still an occupied country, General Shepard received the new director general as a dignified representative of a foreign government, setting thereby a pattern of behavior for the Advisory Group that differed distinctly from the conqueror complex practiced by so many of the SCAP officials. From the first visit, Mr. Masuhara was made to feel that he was the head of a Japanese agency with the American staff organized to assist him. An alert, patriotic Japanese, he accepted his position gracefully, in return setting a pattern of intelligent cooperation for the members of the NPR, which from those early days formed the basis for coordinated U.S.-Japanese operations.

In the initial conferences between General Shepard and Mr. Masuhara, I sat quietly in the office taking copious notes, interjecting an occasional suggestion. It was during these conferences that the fundamental policies regarding organization, procurement, supply, training, and operations were painstakingly developed. These policies reached after slow, deliberate consideration by one of Japan's most practical politicians were truly historic, laying a solid foundation for the future army of Japan. In these talks, the initial spirit of military cooperation between the two countries was born and the basic procedures for the joint employment of our forces carefully developed.

As Mr. Masuhara initially spoke English with difficulty (he learned rapidly) and General Shepard did not speak Japanese, these historic conversations were laboriously conducted through a female interpreter, Nicky Endō. Having served for approximately two and a half years in military government and civil affairs throughout Japan, I had a wide experience in conducting business with the Japanese. I found from this experience that my conversations and negotiations were most effective when I made use of interpreters who were Japanese nationals. I had been disappointed early in Nisei (Japanese-American second-generation)
interpreters because they invariably tried to dominate the Japanese. They did not as a rule know the Japanese language well, and some of them, I regret to say, had their own special axes to grind.

From the very first, Nicky and I became friends, and I had to agree with the general that Nicky was smart and an outstanding interpreter for the chief of the Advisory Group. On several occasions, top Japanese officials purporting to be speaking for Mr. Masuhara urged me to ask the general himself to get another interpreter, but though I used my most persuasive arguments, General Shepard remained loyal to Nicky. I mention this problem with Nicky because interpreters serving as communication mediums play a tremendously important role in discussion between nations.

Because Mr. Masuhara had very little military experience, limited to a short tour as a lieutenant in the Service Corps of the Japanese Imperial Army during the war, he naturally relied on the advice and listened intently to the views of the CASA chief. Recognizing his limitation, Mr. Masuhara asked questions about everything. The discussions accordingly developed into educational seminars, with General Shepard a patient, courteous teacher and the director general an enthusiastic student, eagerly imbibing the words of the master.

Early in the discussions, it became apparent that there was a fundamental difference in what Mr. Masuhara thought the NPR Headquarters should be and our traditional American view of a military department. For a long time, the director general and his assistants did not understand what we were talking about, and we in turn, so accustomed to our own concepts, couldn't comprehend what he proposed.

In the traditional Western view, we envisioned NPR Headquarters in Tōkyō as a defense ministry, with a civilian element and a military staff. The civilian element, as in our own Department of Defense, was to be responsible for the political, budgetary, and overall policy direction of the establishment. The military echelon we viewed as a national headquarters staff responsible for operations of the force. We equated the director general of the NPR with our secretary of defense and considered him the civilian head of the military establishment.

As the discussions went on, it became evident that Mr. Masuhara had either been briefed inadequately or else he did not understand the mission and purpose of the new organization. He viewed himself as the head of a police force and liked to compare himself with Chief Noboru Saitō of the National Rural Police.
Under the circumstances, he saw no purpose for organizing two elements—separate civilian and military echelons—in the NPR. He wanted one large staff under his command to operate the NPR as any police force in the world is operated. We wanted a separate civilian policy staff that would control an operating military headquarters. The distinction was vitally important to us because we wanted to establish in the beginning the principle of civilian control over the military. If we permitted the director general to organize a single control group under his direct command, we were afraid that at some later date, a military man, on becoming head of the force, would be in a position to re-establish the notorious power of the militarists.

Having been indoctrinated for generations in this principle of civilian control of the military, we never considered any other kind of organization for the future army of Japan. More significant, we knew the history of Japanese militarism and wanted to provide legal and policy blocks within the structure of the force to prevent any possible resurgence of that militarism. I was especially aware that from 1936 to the end of World War II, no cabinet could be formed in Japan without an active army officer as minister of war and an active naval officer as a minister of the navy. Mr. Masuhara and the Japanese officials who gradually began to assemble at NPR Headquarters listened politely to our arguments, but we seemed unable to communicate with each other. Moreover, as the Japanese logically argued, since the NPR had no former Imperial officers and its bureaus were being staffed by civilians, why worry about a civilian control element?