Year Zero (40 page)

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ON DECEMBER 15, 1945,
the
Saturday Evening Post
featured an article about the occupation of Japan with an extraordinary headline—extraordinary now, not then. It read: “The G.I. Is Civilizing the Jap.” Written by William L. Worden. Dateline: Tokyo, By Bomber Mail.

Above the dateline is a summary of Worden's article: “While the Nipponese wait to be told what to think, and their slippery countrymen duck the job, the living example of the American soldier is proving effective.”

Later on in the piece, the reader is informed that “The average Japanese is a simple person not far removed from the savage—as evidenced in the war.”

But there is some hope, for, “The man who, at the moment, seems to be most effective in democratizing and civilizing the Japanese is the G.I., even as he was so effective in pacifying him.”

This image of the “Jap” as a savage was widespread during the war. After the A-bombs had killed around two hundred thousand people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, President Truman wrote to a friend that “when you have to deal with a beast, you have to treat him as a beast.”
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What is remarkable about the occupation is how quickly such views disappeared. Which is not to say that the idea of reeducating the Japanese to become peaceful democrats was not viewed in some quarters with the greatest skepticism. Experts on Japanese culture and society in the State Department, collectively known as “the Japan hands,” were quick to point out the top-down collectivist nature of traditional Japanese life. The Japanese, they claimed, would never behave like individuals. They were used to obeying orders from people of superior rank. The emperor was revered as a sacred figure. His subjects, in the words of one Japan hand, were “inert and tradition bound.” The Japanese, according to the British representative in occupied Tokyo, were “as little fitted for self-government in a modern world as any African tribe, though much more dangerous.”
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Pitted against the Japan hands, whose theories on the Japanese character were often based on what they heard from their elitist Japanese contacts, were the China hands, frequently people with left-wing sympathies, and New Dealers from the old Roosevelt administration. These were the officials whose opinions prevailed, at least in the first years of the occupation. The pivotal date was August 11, when Joseph Grew, doyen of the Japan hands and former ambassador to Tokyo, was replaced as undersecretary of state by Dean Acheson. Acheson stated in September that “the present social and economic system in Japan which makes for a will to war will be changed so that the will to war will not continue.”
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General MacArthur, a deeply religious man, whose wartime theories about the “Oriental mind” as childlike and brutal were often remarkably crude, was convinced that he had been destined to reeducate the Japanese. His guides in this mission, he liked to say, were Washington, Lincoln, and
Jesus Christ. Ideally, Japanese should be converted to the Christian faith. But in any case—and here MacArthur's ideas concurred with those of Konrad Adenauer—renewal had to be spiritual as well as political, social, and economic. MacArthur, however, went further than anything conceived by the German Christian Democrat. His occupation of Japan, he said, would result in “a spiritual revolution . . . an unparalleled convulsion in the social history of the world.”
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Herbert Hoover, on a visit to Tokyo, rather oddly called MacArthur “the reincarnation of St. Paul.”
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Yet the American viceroy had no interest in exploring Japanese culture, or learning much about the place. He spent most of his evenings at home watching cowboy movies. His translator, Faubion Bowers, later recalled that during MacArthur's five years in Japan, “only sixteen Japanese ever spoke with him more than twice, and none of these was under the rank, say, of Premier, Chief Justice, or president of the largest university.”
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Unlike Germany, Japan was not divided into Allied zones (the Soviets had wanted to claim the northern island of Hokkaido, but made no fuss when the U.S. said no). The Japanese occupation was an American show, and MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, had almost absolute authority, even though he reigned over an elected Japanese government, which did most of the actual governing. There are several possible reasons why the reeducational zeal in Japan was greater than in Germany. It may be that experiences in Germany set the stage for what followed in Japan. Efforts that were frustrated in Germany by the other Allies, or by German recalcitrance or regional differences, had more chance of success in Japan where the U.S. was almighty. But the main reason might be contained in SCAP's idea of the Japanese as childlike savages, as simple souls ripe for conversion. They were not Christians, nor was their culture rooted in Western civilization. As far as the Japanese mind was concerned, this truly seemed like Year Zero.

Considering how vicious the fighting in the Pacific War and how brutal the wartime propaganda on both sides had been, the Japanese were surprisingly willing pupils. The way the Japanese paid tribute to MacArthur when he left Japan in 1951, after he had been dismissed by President
Truman from his post for insubordination in the Korean War, would have been unthinkable in Germany. A law was enacted to make him an honorary Japanese citizen. Plans were drawn up to build a memorial to the Supreme Commander in Tokyo Bay. And hundreds of thousands of Japanese lined his route to the airport, many of them in tears, shouting their thanks at his limousine. One of the main Japanese newspapers exclaimed in an editorial: “Oh, General MacArthur—General, General, who saved Japan from confusion and starvation.”
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Here is a letter to SCAP from a Japanese lawyer with strong communist leanings: “For the future of the Japanese people, [the leaders of the Occupation] have brought the peaceful dawn of liberty, equality, and benevolence. They have ably assisted and conscientiously directed the Japanese in the building of a democratic nation . . . to show our gratitude for their accomplishments, we will hold a mass rally to welcome the occupation forces.”
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And this was written in November, just three months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

One way of reading Japanese behavior is to see it as an example of Oriental flattery, insincere, self-serving, and fitting a long tradition of appeasing powerful rulers. There may have been an element of this, but it is far from the whole story. I am convinced that much of the gratitude was genuine. Compared to most German (non-Jewish) civilians, whose living conditions, fattened by the loot from conquered countries, were not so bad until the last stages of the war, Japanese had suffered more. Not only did most of their cities go up in flames, as was true in Germany too, but the Japanese had been living on hunger rations for several years. And the bullying by Japanese military authorities and security police forces was probably even more intrusive than in Germany. Unlike many Germans in 1945, who still thought fondly of the Führer, few Japanese had anything good to say about their military regime, which had brought them nothing but misery.

So when the Americans—so wealthy, and crisply turned out, so tall, and in the main so free and easy—settled in, they really were regarded as liberators, and many Japanese were ready to be taught how they might
become more free and easy themselves. It wasn't the first time in Japanese history that people decided to learn from a great outside power. China had been the model for many centuries, and Europe and the U.S. had been the examples to emulate since the latter half of the nineteenth century. Militant Japanese nationalism in the twentieth century was in some ways a reaction to an extraordinary run of Westernization, meaning economic liberalism, mass media, Hollywood movies, political parties, Marxism, individualism, baseball, jazz, and so forth. After the disaster of World War II, most Japanese were more than happy to return to modernity, which they associated with the Western world, and, after 1945, with America in particular.

Whether this could really be called reeducation is a moot point. But the new masters, and many of their pupils, clearly thought in those terms. Quite how to “remake” Japan was the question. Japan hands found the whole idea absurd, and the officials most eager to take Japan's reeducation in hand knew very little about the country and its history. To them, there could be no equivalent of denazification, of stripping off a recent layer of toxic ideology from a mature civilization, since Japan was not deemed to have such a thing. Japanese culture itself was thought by reformers to be rotten to the core.

Nevertheless, the need for a total makeover was no more apparent to the old Japanese elites in the imperial court and the bureaucracy than it was to the Japan hands. They would have been perfectly content to stay with small reforms, undertaken slowly. But for Colonel Charles Kades and other New Dealers around SCAP, these reforms wouldn't go nearly far enough. In his words: “[The Japanese leaders] wanted to take a tree that was diseased and prune the branches . . . We felt it was necessary to, in order to get rid of the disease, take the root and branches off.”
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To purge Japan of its “feudal” culture, it was not enough to tear down Japanese rising sun flags (known as “meatballs” to the GIs), or ban the musical or visual celebrations of Japanese military prowess, or even abolish the Japanese armed forces, or indeed write a new constitution banning Japan's sovereign right to wage war.

All these things were thought to be necessary, to be sure; preparations were already made in 1945 to write the pacifist constitution. (Quite who thought of this novelty first is unclear; some say it was Shidehara Kijiro, the Japanese prime minister in 1945, a longtime pacifist, who suggested it to MacArthur.) “Feudal” family laws were abolished and women's rights guaranteed. This was upsetting to members of Japan's governing elites, even men who were relatively liberal, such as the ex-foreign minister Shigemitsu Mamoru (“Shiggy” in the U.S. press), who wrote in his diary: “The occupation army is thinking along lines that are radically different from any mere compliance with the Potsdam Declaration . . . They propose a remodeling of Japan from top to bottom.”
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He was right; that is what the reformers set out to do. All Japanese customs and habits, thought to be “feudal,” had to be rooted out. American soldiers or civilians who spotted Japanese women breastfeeding in public tried to stop this practice at once. Wooden swords in traditional theater productions were confiscated. Kabuki plays featuring samurai heroes were banned. Earl Ernst, who later became a distinguished scholar of the Kabuki theater, walked into the Imperial Theater in Tokyo one night to halt a performance of
Terakoya
, a scene in a famous eighteenth-century play about a former samurai lord who is ordered to sacrifice his son. Out of loyalty to his lord, a former retainer kills his own son instead. This type of theatrical “barbarism” could not be tolerated. Instead, to edify the Japanese public, the theater company was required to stage a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's
Mikado
. Rather than being edified, however, the Japanese public was apparently rather nonplussed.

Nothing that could be remotely associated with “feudalism” was allowed. Even the depiction of Mount Fuji, a sacred spot in the ancient nature religion that is Shinto, was banned, in movies, artworks, and on the tiled walls of public bathhouses, where the Fuji was a popular adornment. Since the nineteenth century Shinto had indeed been transformed into a kind of state cult to promote emperor worship and the notion of the Japanese as a unique race, blessed with divine bloodlines, destined to rule the
lesser breeds in Asia. Prohibiting the use of Shinto as a state religion was actually not a bad idea. The SCAP directive of 15 December stated:

The purpose of this directive is to separate religion from the state, to prevent misuse of religion for political ends, and to put all religions, faiths, and creeds upon exactly the same legal basis, entitled to exactly the same opportunities and protection.
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Ordering Emperor Hirohito to announce on the radio that he was a human being like everyone else did not seem like such a bad idea, either. What the emperor actually said was that his ties with the Japanese people were not “predicated on the false conception that the emperor is divine.” This satisfied the Americans. Most Japanese were hardly surprised by the statement, since they never doubted his humanity. But they saw him as a ruler descended from the Sun Goddess, something he never repudiated. In any case, few Japanese seem to have cared much one way or another. Only ultranationalists were upset, and have remained so ever since, arguing that Shinto should not be treated as any other religion, but as the essence of Japanese culture.

Some of the cultural reeducation was merely irritating, and usually not long-lived, such as the banning of Kabuki plays or swordfight movies. Some of it was so eccentric as to be amusing, like the American soldier in charge of a rural district who thought that teaching the Japanese square dancing would enhance their democratic spirit. But in some things the Americans could go too far, even for the relatively pliant Japanese. For example, the possibility of abolishing Chinese characters and romanizing the Japanese writing system was extensively studied, and then recommended by a U.S. education mission. Nothing came of it. The education system, on the other hand, unlike in Germany, was radically revised. Single-sex elite schools made way for a system of coeducational comprehensive schools, with three years of elementary school, three years of lower secondary, and three years of upper secondary school.

The town of Omi, in the middle of the country, not too far from Kyoto, could serve as the Japanese equivalent of Aachen. In the fall of 1945, a U.S. Army patrol decided to check on a primary school there. The sight of the American soldiers terrified the pupils so much that they started screaming. When asked whether they “liked Americans,” there was a vigorous shaking of heads. Schoolrooms were still decorated with wartime posters showing Japanese soldiers striking heroic poses. One of the teachers was a former army officer. A bloodstained sailor's cap was found in a desk drawer. All this would not do at all, so the school principal was ordered to fire the ex-army officer and make sure all references to the war were removed.