Supreme Commander (10 page)

The emperor thanked MacArthur for the Americans' occupying Japan so peaceably; MacArthur responded that this was wholly due to Hirohito's cooperation. Hirohito suggested it would be interesting to know what future historians would say about responsibility for the war; no reply from MacArthur. Hirohito sounded him out on abdication; again no response. The general was being very cagey. In thirty-eight minutes Hirohito had learned nothing about what would come next or what his fate would be.

The meeting was over, and MacArthur escorted the emperor down to his car, then abruptly turned around without shaking hands and walked back into the embassy. The next day the photograph was developed and released. The Japanese government was appalled and banned this picture as insulting to the emperor; MacArthur rejected the ban and ordered the picture to be published in all the newspapers, pronto. It appeared the following day, September 29, and generated a firestorm of controversy: It was “Mahomet going to the mountain.” For the first time in his life the emperor was photographed with no advisor present. MacArthur was big, confident, and dead serious, almost grim; the emperor was small and subservient, a man snapping to attention like a waiter. Such was the fate of an emperor “without peer on the land, the sea, and in the air, the direct descendant of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu.”

Considered by many to be the most influential single political photograph of the twentieth century, this picture became key in persuading the Japanese not to rise up against their powerful occupier, a man who looked more like an emperor than even Hirohito himself.

Douglas MacArthur was off to a good start.

8

What to Do with the Emperor and the Militarists?

W
ITH HIS THREE
bold moves—the Atsugi landing, the surrender ceremony, and the meeting with the emperor—MacArthur had surprised and impressed the enemy. The emperor and the militarists had good reason to be nervous: They knew full well there was tremendous pressure in the United States to try them as war criminals. Even before he arrived as supreme commander, MacArthur was the most feared of all Americans because of what he had done in the war. Leaving Bataan, he had promised he would return. The local people in the Philippines took his words to heart. On folders, blotters, match covers, leaflets, and cards, the magic words “I shall return” appeared. Japanese officials and soldiers found the words scrawled on signs, windows, and buses. Observed one journalist: The Japanese “erased the words, burned them, stomped them into the ground, but they would not be destroyed. It was a psychological weapon MacArthur had forged in the fight and it worked.
I
shall return
was an invisible weapon poised at the heart and brains of the Japanese soldier. It frightened him, worried him, tore down his morale.”

So when the man who uttered those powerful words ended up ruling Japan, he possessed the aura Machiavelli said every prince must have: He was feared.

MacArthur was especially pleased by his meeting with the emperor. He had promised nothing, and he had gleaned useful information confirming he was on the right path. A lot of work and thought had gone into this meeting, a lot more than what most people assumed for such a short encounter. Well before the surrender, he had assigned General Fellers to evaluate the situation concerning the emperor. The report he received included the following:

There must be no weakness in the peace terms. However, to dethrone, or hang, the emperor would cause a tremendous and violent reaction from all Japanese. Hanging of the emperor to them would be comparable to the crucifixion of Christ to us. All would fight to die like ants. The position of the gangster militarists would be strengthened immeasurably. The war would be unduly prolonged. . . . An independent Japanese army responsible only to the emperor is a permanent menace to peace. But the mystic hold the emperor has on his people and the spiritual strength of the Shinto faith properly directed need not be dangerous. The emperor can be made a force for good and peace provided Japan is totally defeated and the military clique destroyed. . . . The Government must have a system of checks and balances. The emperor must be surrounded by liberal civilian leaders. The military must be limited to an internal police force, responsible to the civil authority.

The Potsdam Declaration had implied, but not stated, that the emperor would be spared. In its directive to MacArthur appointing him Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, the Truman administration had made it clear that the final decision would be his.

Should the emperor be allowed to stay or not? It was the question on everyone's mind—and it was one that must not linger. Immediately after the surrender MacArthur had assigned to his latest chief of counterintelligence, Brig. Gen. Elliott Thorpe, the task of confirming that the emperor's support among the Japanese people was as widespread as MacArthur assumed it was. Would the exemplary behavior of the Japanese at Atsugi be likely to continue? When Thorpe responded affirmatively, MacArthur moved to put some pressure on the emperor for a meeting. He did so by having Thorpe arrest and lock up Marquis Koichi Kido, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and personal advisor to the emperor, on charges of war crimes. Naturally this set the alarm bells ringing in the royal household.

Thorpe got a visit from Toshikazu Kase, the bilingual delegate at the
Missouri
surrender signing, offering an invitation for Thorpe to have a geisha dinner with Kido's replacement, Marquis Yasumasa Matsudaira. Thorpe agreed to what he knew would be a session of having his tongue pulled for clues and hints. After a lengthy and lavish dinner enjoyed by all, Thorpe related what had happened: “Did I think General MacArthur would grab the Emperor? The Emperor was worried.” Thorpe responded vaguely, so as to make the emperor's advisors “sweat a bit.” He recalled:

I told Matsudaira straight out that nothing could save the imperial institution if Japan was to be run on the same old lines. I suggested the Emperor and his government get busy and do something about the plight of the people and not sit there bewailing the firmness of General MacArthur's directives. I reminded the group that there had been monarchies in France and elsewhere that had been swept away on the tide of revolution simply because of such oppressive conditions and do-nothingism as existed in Japan. If such a revolution came in Japan, I warned, no one could stop it, not even the occupation forces. Moreover, we would not try to stop it unless it imperiled our own safety. . . . If you love your Emperor so much why don't you get to work and make him a genuine, worthwhile being?

Matsudaira replied: “How could that be done?”

Thorpe told Matsudaira the emperor was being too aloof—he needed to get out and mix more in public, to exercise some American-style public relations.

This was strong advice to give about a man who had never before ventured out in public except in his military uniform and riding his big white horse, but MacArthur was betting on a trait he had noticed about the Japanese that separated them from all the other countries in Asia: their tremendous curiosity about the best way to do things. For decades Japan had sent missions to the West to study the building of railroads, ships, dams, and factories. MacArthur was sure the emperor shared this same desire for improvement. Whatever he suggested in the way of subtle hints, Hirohito would do out of respect for him as a conqueror.

As Thorpe himself admitted, “Otherwise we would have had nothing but chaos. The religion was gone, the government was gone, and he was the only symbol of control. Now, I know he had his hand in the cookie jar, and he wasn't any innocent little child. But he was of great use to us.” By now MacArthur's decision was clear: The emperor would be allowed to stay so long as he provided a symbol of continuity. MacArthur would separate Hirohito from the militarists, retain him as a constitutional monarch (but only as a figurehead), and use him to bring about a spiritual transformation of the Japanese people. MacArthur made his decision official by notifying Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the recently appointed army chief of staff, that the emperor was not responsible for the war.

Just as the militarists had used the emperor as their tool, so would MacArthur. “I could have humiliated him, publicly exposed him, but what for?” he told Faubion Bowers. “I fought the war, he ended it. He deserves respect, the magnanimous gesture a noble defeated enemy deserves. Besides, with him as figurehead, our job is so much more easy.” Several days earlier he had said: “I was born a democrat; I was reared as a liberal. But I tell you I find it painful to see a man once so high and mighty brought down so low.” Of course, not many Americans would have called the Japanese “a noble . . . enemy” or found bringing down the emperor “painful.” “I don't trust the vermin,” said Admiral Halsey of the emperor. MacArthur was willing to do so: It was part of his strategic game plan to overlook inconvenient truths in pursuit of long-term goals. If he was to lead a successful and peaceful occupation, he would need the emperor just as much as the emperor needed him. Looking back many years later, MacArthur wrote in his memoirs: “The Emperor called on me often after that, our conversation ranging over most of the problems of the world. I always explained carefully the underlying reasons for the occupation policy, and I found he had a more thorough grasp of the democratic concept than almost any Japanese with whom I talked. He played a major role in the spiritual regeneration of Japan, and his loyal co-operation and influence had much to do with the success of the occupation.”

However, the emperor still needed to become more assertive and independent. “Hirohito was so controlled by the militarists that he nearly had to get permission to go to the bathroom,” MacArthur observed. Those days were over. MacArthur would put the militarists out of business in due course; right now he needed to give the emperor a gentle nudge. No fool, Hirohito caught on quickly. In a subsequent meeting with the supreme commander he asked permission to leave his 240-acre estate and travel around the country and offer blessings and support for his people. MacArthur nodded and suggested, in the same vein, that it might be a good idea for Crown Prince Akihito, who was twelve, to have an American tutor to educate him in American democratic ways. The emperor concurred, and requested that the tutor be an “American woman of cultural background and maturity.” MacArthur liked this idea, for much the same reason that he would become such a forceful proponent of women's rights: Many Japanese men were militarists; Japanese women were not. Better the boy have a woman tutor than a man. In 1946 a U.S. educational commission came to Japan to upgrade Japan's school system. MacArthur asked the chairman, George D. Stoddard, to recruit a tutor for the crown prince. Stoddard chose Elizabeth Gray Vining, a Quaker teacher and author of several children's books, who immediately came to Japan and ended up staying for four years.

The emperor, following Thorpe's advice, would undergo a major transformation in his role and public image. In just three months, on January 1, 1946, the emperor would announce to the Japanese people that he was not divine (causing a Texas congressman to remark that “the real reason the Emperor came out and said he wasn't God was because he found that MacArthur was”). To humanize Hirohito, SCAP had him go on extensive inspection tours throughout the country and attend concerts, art exhibits, sports events, and other public gatherings. Gone were the uniform and military medals, leaving a man dressed in a business suit like a civilian. The Japanese were shocked to learn that the emperor owned lots of Western suits, military uniforms, and pairs of shoes, and not one Japanese kimono or a pair of clog shoes. Instead of Japanese miso broth and fish for breakfast, he ate bacon, eggs, and toast. Such revelations did nothing to diminish his stature; instead they only endeared him more to the public. Even the news about the American tutor for the crown prince enhanced the emperor's reputation.

Anybody who thought the emperor was getting off easily, however, was mistaken. MacArthur, after his meeting with Hirohito, assigned Elliott Thorpe to be the official custodian of the emperor and his household, meaning that any foreigner who wanted to meet with the emperor had to go through Thorpe. That was for starters. Next, the supreme commander demanded a complete list of all holdings at home and abroad by the Japanese government and its war allies, plus all Allied properties seized during the war. The list had to include the personal holdings of Emperor Hirohito. Whatever alarm bells had rung in the Imperial Palace when MacArthur arrested Kido now turned into shock waves. The days of Hirohito's vast land holdings were numbered. Gone were the days when he had three thousand servants at his beck and call. A new era of democracy and austerity had arrived, and within months most of the servants were let go.

If the emperor and his translator had been less preoccupied when they came to meet the supreme commander for the first time on September 27, they might have noticed lying on the coffee table a copy of the September 17 issue of
Time
magazine. History does not tell us whether the emperor read a translation of this issue, but for sure someone high up in the Japanese government did, and picked up this story about the U.S. State Department's report on Japanese atrocities:

The State Department report was a compilation of some 240 separate protests made to the enemy while the war raged. Behind the stiff, formal language was apparent the rage which must have gripped [State] Secretaries Hull and Stettinius every time a new atrocity account came in. The Department had refrained from public outburst as long as the war was on. But now some of the tale could be told.

It covered the familiar stories of lack of hospitals, lack of food and clothing, vermin-infested camp, corporal punishment of prisoners, death by decapitation of a U.S. airman in New Guinea, name not disclosed. (From Korea came a story of U.S. prisoners on Jap ships, crazed with thirst, biting their arms and drinking their own blood, perishing when the ships were bombed by U.S. planes.)

But among all the cases cited in the long and sickening report, one stood out in its barbaric horror.

The date was Dec. 14, 1944. The place was Puerto Princesa in the Philippines. On that date in that place Jap guards drove 150 U.S. prisoners into air-raid tunnels, emptied gasoline into the tunnel openings and set them afire. The victims, enveloped in flames and screaming in agony, swarmed from the shelters. As they did, they were bayoneted or machine-gunned. About 40 who threw themselves over a 50-ft. cliff onto a beach were attacked by sentries on the shore. Many, moaning in agony, were buried alive.

One who swam into the sea was recaptured. A Jap soldier poured gasoline on his foot and set it afire, finally set fire to his other foot and to both his hands. In the end the Japs bayoneted their victim, poured gasoline over him and watched the flames until his body was consumed.

Last week the pestilential camps of the Japanese Empire continued to disgorge their victims (2,900 from Niigata, 3,495 from Nagoya, 1,100 from Tientsin). The record of horror grew.

The number of Americans killed by the Japanese in World War II was 100,997. Among other nations the toll was far greater. From 1931 to 1945 the Japanese Empire had killed 17.2 million people in fourteen countries, ranging from 10 million in China, 3 million in the Netherlands East Indies, 1.5 million in Bengal . . . down to 10,000 in New Zealand. Even worse than the number of deaths was the brutality of many of these deaths and deliberate attacks on innocents. Among the favorite targets of Japanese warplanes, for instance, were field hospitals, plainly marked with the Red Cross sign.