In many outlying areas, there was little more than a token occupation force, which could have been overrun quickly if recalcitrant extremists in the Japanese military had chosen to fight. A report produced by General MacArthur’s headquarters called the occupation “a great, though calculated, military gamble.”58 The Americans wagered that the emperor’s will and authority would cast a psychological spell over the Japanese people, and especially the rank and file of the army and navy, which were not yet disarmed. The gamble paid off in spectacular fashion. Across the length and breadth of the populous country, not a single shot was fired at Allied occupation troops. The shift from war to peace was jarring in its suddenness and totality. Three or four weeks earlier, the Japanese people had been preparing to meet the invaders with bamboo spears and kitchen knives. Now they bowed and grinned and welcomed the newcomers as honored guests.
U.S. Army Sergeant Richard Leonard went ashore at Wakayama on September 11. His platoon made an assault landing from Higgins boats. As they strode up the beach, weapons at the ready, unarmed Japanese civilians welcomed them with warm smiles, and vendors offered trinkets and souvenirs for sale. The sailor James Fahey of the cruiser Montpelier went ashore at nearby Kobe the following day, and explored the area on foot with a few shipmates. The Japanese stared at them in curiosity, but without fear or hostility. A group of women standing in line for sweet potatoes were amused by the freakish height—to their eyes—of the American sailors. “We laughed along with them,” Fahey wrote in his diary. “Everyone had a good time. They were very friendly.”59
Separately, both the occupation forces and the Japanese had been warned against fraternizing with one another. But the prohibition seems to have been widely ignored on both sides. A young Japanese man invited Fahey and another sailor to visit his home and meet his family. Fahey described the visit: “They had a very nice place. I could see that they came from a good class of people. In one room there was a large fancy table and a radio in the corner. They also had a picture of Emperor Hirohito, hanging on the wall. To them he is their God. Before we left we shook hands and waved goodbye.” As a veteran of many ferocious naval battles and kamikaze attacks, Fahey was surprised to find that ordinary Japanese were honest and hardworking, “no different from the people in any other part of the world.”60 Sergeant Leonard agreed. In a letter to his fiancée, he observed that the “average Jap doesn’t give a damn about ‘ruling the world’ any more than you or I do. He’s just an ordinary joker who went to war because he was told to, and he did the job the way he was told.”61 During the war Leonard had hated the Japanese—hated them all—but now he found the feeling dissolving like a half-remembered dream:
I’m pretty skeptical by nature, but who am I supposed to hate? Can I hate the boy who ran alongside my train window for 50 yards to pay me for a pack of cigarettes that I had sold him just before the train left the station? Can I hate the old man who took us to his home for dinner and made us accept his family heirlooms for souvenirs? Can I hate the kids that run up and throw their arms around me in the street? Or a Jap truck driver who went miles out of his way to drive me home one night? Or the little girl (about 4) who ran up to me and gave me her one and only doll for a present? My answer is that I can’t.62
For the Japanese, likewise, the discovery that most Americans were instinctively decent and courteous came as a great relief. Fear had gripped the communities scheduled to receive the first advance units of occupation troops. Civilians still under the influence of wartime propaganda—or perhaps with some inkling of how Japanese forces had behaved overseas—had assumed they would suffer brutality, pillage, massacres, and rape.63 Many women and girls fled to remote mountain villages. Others stayed off the streets, hiding themselves, or disguised themselves as boys, or smeared coal on their faces in the hope of making themselves ugly. Some even carried a sharp blade, intending to take their own lives by severing a vital artery. As American soldiers first arrived in Miyagi, north of Tokyo, a group of evacuated schoolchildren hid in their dormitory and peeked through a hole they had poked in a paper screen. They did not expect to see human beings. “It occurred to us, ‘They must have horns!’ ” one recalled. “We had images of glaring demons with horns sprouting from their heads. We were disappointed, of course. No horns at all.”64 Some of the boys went out and returned in triumph with chocolate bars.
Small acts of kindness were noted by the Japanese. On streetcars, Americans often gave up their seats to pregnant women or the elderly, a custom that had not been common in Japan. It was noted that American officers and enlisted men were on relatively easy terms, and that officers and NCOs did not strike their subordinates. American GIs were instinctively generous with children, who soon learned that begging from the newcomers was a profitable enterprise. They picked up snippets of English: “Gibu me candy,” and “Gibu me chocolate.”65 A Japanese woman told a USSBS surveyor: “During rain, American vehicles try not to splash mud on the pedestrians and I appreciate this.”66 A man pulling a wagon on a narrow street in Tokyo was blocked by an American truck coming in the opposite direction. “They stopped the truck and lifted my small wagon to the other side of their truck,” the man recounted. “Smiling, they said goodbye to me and left. Tears came to my eyes. Yes, they are very much human, aren’t they? It was funny, but I started to pull my wagon with strength that I did not experience before.”67
The Japanese had assumed, as a matter of course, that they would be required to feed the occupying army. In foreign territories occupied by the Japanese, it had been a standard practice to requisition food from conquered populations. But since farm production had been badly disrupted by the war, and the occupiers could be expected to eat heartily, mass starvation seemed inevitable. After the surrender, officials of the Agricultural Ministry and the Economics Board warned that domestic food production would fall far short of minimum requirements for the coming winter. But on August 18, MacArthur’s headquarters announced that the occupation forces would ship in their own provisions.68 Indeed, the occupiers would often provide food relief to local civilians, much of it in unofficial or ad hoc gestures of charity. At Yokosuka Naval Base, shortly after the surrender, the Americans provided “twenty truck-loads of flour, rolled oats, canned goods, and rice” for local civilians, and the next day, another eleven trucks arrived with “medical supplies, blankets, tea, and other goods.”69 At an army barracks south of Tokyo, small, hungry faces pressed against the wire enclosure. Flouting regulations, the soldiers fed the children. Word spread, and more appeared, until queues of women and children formed at the gate each morning, and soldiers passed out canned C-rations from a gunny sack while their commanding officer looked the other way.
In one Tokyo neighborhood, the Americans passed out cans of Sterno, but the function and purpose of the portable cooking canisters did not penetrate the language barrier. Recipients opened the cans and tried to eat the fuel. Spitting it out in disgust, they exclaimed that the Americans had tried to poison them. The theory gained credence when a neighbor who read a little English noted that the word “poison” actually appeared on the can. The confusion was finally cleared up by a Japanese-American woman. “How awed they were to see me strike a match to it!” she said. “Fuel was scarce, and when the people understood the use of the Sterno they were grateful to have it.”70
The occupation was not uniformly friendly and law-abiding. The old hatreds died hard. Many of the soldiers and marines in the occupation forces were veterans of savage battles on Pacific islands. Some found the apparent kindliness of their recent enemies to be bizarre and unnerving, and refused to trust it. The emaciated condition of liberated POWs aroused their fury. Crimes were committed by American and Allied troops in Japan, including robbery, rape, and murder. But the statistics for such crimes are elusive, as the occupying authorities did not allow the newspapers to report them, and did not keep detailed records of their internal military judicial processes. (The subject has received little attention in histories of the occupation, an
d there is little to be found in American archives.) In hopes of limiting incidents of sexual violence, the Japanese government had established a “Recreation Amusement Association,” and recruited thousands of lower-class Japanese women to work as prostitutes in brothels near Yokosuka and other bases. For a time, U.S. authorities tolerated these establishments, and even allowed military doctors to examine the women (as had been done in Hawaii and other locations).71
Many Japanese were scandalized and offended by the sight of Japanese women in the company of occupation troops. The “pan-pan girls,” as they were called, were young Japanese women who wore bright red lipstick, nylon stockings and high-heeled shoes, and were often seen riding with American servicemen on jeeps and trucks. During the hardscrabble early years of the occupation, they obviously ate and lived better than many of their fellow citizens.
According to General Eichelberger, there was only one case of “concerted resistance” to his Eighth Army troops. In Yamata, a community between Yokohama and Tokyo, a vigilante group banded together to keep Allied troops out of Yamata during their off-duty periods. Two Americans were abducted and beaten. Eichelberger ordered a show of force, and “armored vehicles in battle array cruised the streets of Yamata for several hours.” The perpetrators were arrested and imprisoned.72
But such incidents were seen as the exception, rather than the rule, by both the occupiers and the Japanese. By and large, the Japanese embraced defeat and made the most of it. The existing agencies of Japanese government continued to function under the supervision of MacArthur’s headquarters. Japanese military forces accepted the authority of the occupiers, generally with no outward manifestations of hostility or resentment. Military officers cooperated willingly in demobilizing their own forces and destroying remaining warplanes, ordnance, and weaponry. Professional relations were cordial. Captain Tameichi Hara recalled that when he surrendered a suicide speedboat base in Kyushu to a U.S. Navy captain on September 23, “The American captain astonished me by behaving more like a friend than a conqueror.”73 Exceptions were rare. That same day, in nearby Nagasaki harbor, the captain of a Japanese coastal defense vessel “acted in an insolent and provocative manner” to an American naval delegation. When the incident was reported, the offender was arrested and dismissed from the Japanese navy, confirming that the authorities were determined to enforce cooperation.74 The early stages of the occupation proceeded so smoothly that General MacArthur announced, less than a month after the Missouri ceremony, that the total number of Allied troops in Japan would be reduced to 200,000 by July 1946.75
The surprise and relief felt by the Japanese, upon learning that their former enemies were largely decent and honorable, was accompanied by another sensation. With a sudden rush, ordinary Japanese understood how thoroughly deceived they had been by their own leaders. The propaganda was still ringing in their ears—they could hardly forget it—but it all seemed demented in retrospect. The Potsdam Declaration had insisted: “There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest,” and the country must be rid of “irresponsible militarism.”76 The Japanese people would fulfill that condition on their own, regardless of the policies of their postwar government. The wartime military leadership was held in widespread contempt. These attitudes had been prevalent even before the surrender, though never uttered publicly for fear of repression. Now they came to the surface—a potent, instinctive, deeply felt hatred of war, and for those who had plunged Japan into it. “I abhor military men,” said Shigeo Hatanaka, in a typical opinion. “I consider them a separate race of humanity because of education. Military men put on ceremonial uniforms for special occasions. Theirs is childish, simple-minded thinking.”77 As Japanese soldiers were repatriated from overseas, many ordinary civilians learned for the first time of the extent of Japanese war crimes. One young girl overheard soldiers speaking callously of the atrocities they had committed in China, and laughing about the number of women they had raped. She was horrified at the thought that she had supported the war: “Now I couldn’t bear it.”78 As Gwen Terasaki observed, “Looking now at themselves more carefully than they had ever done in their history, the Japanese perceived not only the fanaticism of the militarists but also their own great ignorance in having trusted them. The people’s disillusionment penetrated to the marrow.”79
LOOKING BACK ON THE WAR THEY HAD JUST LOST, Japanese leaders marveled at their own stupidity. Asked to name the turning point of the Pacific War, Admiral Yonai replied: “To be very frank, I think that the turning point was the start. I felt from the very beginning that there was no chance of success. . . . I think to this day that it was not a proper plan in view of the situation, our national war strength.”80 Similar views were expressed by many of the Japanese leaders interrogated by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in the fall of 1945. Their fateful decision to attack the United States and the Allies in December 1941 had been founded upon a catalog of faulty assumptions. They had assumed that the war could be won quickly, averting a prolonged war of attrition in which American economic power would become decisive. They had assumed that Nazi Germany was unbeatable in Europe, and would break Britain and Russia to its yoke; that sea routes linking Japan to its oil supply in the East Indies could be secured against submarine and air attacks; and that the main U.S. naval fleet would charge into the western Pacific to be met and annihilated in a single decisive sea battle, reprising the Imperial Navy’s triumph at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905.
From childhood, the Japanese had been taught that they were a unique race, guided by a divine emperor, watched over by their ancient gods, with a sacred destiny to rule Asia. Indulging shallow stereotypes about American culture and democracy, the Japanese miscalculated the temper and character of their enemy. They assumed that Americans lacked the stomach to fight a long, bloody war on the opposite side of the world. They assumed that their enemies had grown soft and decadent by easy living, and were hopelessly infatuated by popular entertainment. The Americans were a mongrel people, a nation of immigrants, without unity or higher purpose, enfeebled by racial, ethnic, class, and ideological infighting. Women had the vote, and therefore wielded influence in politics—and they would resist sending their sons and husbands to fight on distant foreign shores. The size and strength of the U.S. economy would count for nothing if it could not be mobilized for war, and the capitalist oligarchs would not consent to retool their lucrative industries. The strike on Pearl Harbor was intended to shock and demoralize the American public, so that they would react to the disaster by pressuring Washington to make peace. “We thought that we could easily tackle them,” a leading Japanese officer later admitted, “a race so steeped in material comfort and absorbed in the pursuit of pleasure was spiritually degenerate.”81
If all of these premises had been right, Japan would have won the Pacific War, and might even be the dominant power in the region today. If even some had been right, Japan might have escaped the conflict with its sovereignty intact, and perhaps some remnant of its overseas empire. But as it turned out, all of these assumptions, in some degree, were wrong. In a sense, as Admiral Yonai and others grasped, the outcome of the Pacific War had been foreordained from the start, and Japan’s defeat was plainly foreseeable even in December 1941. Worse, defeat was actually foreseen and even predicted by some of the men who had acquiesced in the fateful decision to launch the unwinnable war in the first place. Above all, the Pacific War was the product of a political failure in Tokyo—a failure of catastrophic proportions, one of the worst in the annals of any government or any nation.
During the Meiji era of the nineteenth century, when Japan’s samurai elite had first set out to modernize and industrialize their isolated and backward country, they had understood that they must secure foreign imports of oil and other commodities that did not exist in their home islands. Foreign trade had met that imperative, especially trade with the United States, Britain, the Netherla
nds, and the Asian territories and colonies they controlled. With full awareness of those basic economic conditions, so vital to the national interest, the military-dominated Japanese regime of 1940 had committed itself to an alliance with two European fascist states, Germany and Italy, that were not major exporters of oil and other raw materials, and that were at war (or soon to be at war) with the nations that did export such products to Japan. In other words, Tokyo set out to make enemies of its primary trading partners, while making allies of nations that could do nothing to make good the inevitable shortfalls, leading to an entirely foreseeable economic and energy crisis. As trade sanctions cut off imports of oil and other materials, the regime compounded its error by attacking a nation (the United States) that was locally weak and unprepared for war, but which possessed at least ten times Japan’s latent industrial-military strength.
The Meiji Constitution had reserved a privileged position for the army and navy, placing them in a direct advisory relationship with the throne. The emperor, in turn, was granted broad powers to command the armed forces, but by the 1930s, this authority had been truncated by legal precedents. (One can only speculate whether a stronger personality than Hirohito might have steered the ship of state into calmer waters.) Both branches of the military wielded hegemonic power over their own budgets and policies, but also over the civilian administration of the state. No cabinet could be formed and no prime minister appointed without the consent of both the army and navy, and that consent could be withdrawn at any time, causing the government to fall. But no mechanism existed to resolve disputes between the two services, and nothing could be done unless army and navy leaders were in accord. Decisions in the inner circle of power were shaped by the need for consensus, which was most readily achieved by serving the parochial interests of both military services simultaneously. This feature of the Japanese regime became more costly in the 1930s, as the rivalry between the army and navy grew more bitter, and the services grappled for advantage in the competition for funds and critical raw materials. Major foreign and defense policies were formulated with an eye toward budgetary goals.
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