Since the seventh century China had exerted tremendous influence on Japan. It had been the model for Japanese governmental and military organization, land reform, religious and ethical systems, art, and literature. From the nineteenth century on, Japan has been bound up with the United States in much the same way it had been bound up with China before. This new relationship has encompassed the booming trade of the 1890s, the agonies of Pearl Harbor and Bataan, the trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the intricate commercial and security arrangements of the postwar era.
“Japan’s decisive century,” to use Yoshida’s phrase, began after the sight of the bristling cannons on the decks of Commodore Perry’s black ships in 1854 helped convince the Japanese that they could no longer resist pressure to join the modern world. Soon a group of reformers abolished the shogunate, which had ruled Japan in the name of a powerless Emperor for 270 years. The reformers restored the Emperor Meiji, whose court had been restricted to the political backwater of Kyoto, to supremacy within the ancient palace walls in Tokyo.
The Emperor Meiji and his counselors believed modernization was the only way Japan could avoid being colonized by western powers as parts of China and Indochina had been. They also believed modern government would help bring economic prosperity. Thus, during the late nineteenth century, the Japanese began to take a long, sophisticated look at the U.S. and the West and soon borrowed principles of education, law, agriculture, and government.
The Meiji reformers created a democracy but of a decidedly limited variety, closer to Bismarck’s Germany than to the U.S. or Britain. The grafting of West onto East was incomplete. Western democracy was introduced, but eastern absolutism, in the form of the Japanese Emperor, was invoked to make it work. The 1930s brought economic crises and increased international hostility toward Japan. A relatively small group of militarists was able to exploit the resulting surge of nationalism and seize the government.
When the militarists—Yoshida called them the “uniformed politicians”—took control, they commanded obedience because they, like the shoguns a century before them, had made a captive of the throne and spoke with its authority.
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Yoshida was born in 1878 in the midst of the upheavals of the Meiji Restoration. Though he was born near Tokyo, his family was from Tosa, a province of Japan’s smallest island. The men of Tosa were lumberjacks and sailors—brusque, rugged individualists in a society that valued consensus and politesse. The Tosans have been called “the Basques of Japan”; Yoshida, as rugged and brusque a son as Tosa ever produced, was later called “One-Man Yoshida” for his high-handed style of government.
Yoshida was the fifth son of a Tosan who was closely identified with Meiji-era politics. In Japan before primogeniture was abolished during the Occupation, sons after the first were often adopted by other families, and Yoshida’s adoptive father was a family friend named Kenzo Yoshida, who died when Shigeru was eleven, leaving behind a substantial fortune.
After he was graduated from college in 1906, Yoshida began a career as a diplomat. Perhaps because of his provincial background, he was at first relegated to the China service, which was then a diplomatic slow track. He spent much of his time spending his inheritance on high living. But Yoshida married shrewdly. His wife, Yukiko, was the daughter of Count Makino, a trusted adviser of the Emperor. When Makino served as one of the Japanese delegates to the 1919 peace conference, he took the forty-year-old Yoshida along with him, which boosted the young diplomat’s stature enormously.
The Japanese went to Versailles full of optimism about Wilson’s Open Door foreign policy. Acting in the Wilsonian spirit, Makino proposed a clause in the treaty affirming the basic equality of the races. But the British, deeply suspicious of the Japanese and their growing power on the sea, vetoed the proposal—with the support of the United States. Yoshida found that the idealism of the Meiji Restoration and the Open Door was no match for the hard realities of postwar international relations. He went home bitterly disappointed.
I met with Yoshida for the last time in 1964, when he invited me to his estate at Oiso for dinner. Then eighty-six, the retired Premier reflected at length about his experience at Versailles. He said that he had often wondered whether the course of history would have been different if the great western powers had been more receptive to the Japanese point of view after World War I. Personally I always found it remarkable that Yoshida never let the experience sour him permanently on Britain and the United States. It was one sign that Yoshida had great character and strong convictions even as a young man.
Nevertheless the peace conference had its effect on him. As international hostility toward Japan increased—the U.S. Exclusion Act of 1924, which banned all Japanese immigration, was an example—he and many other Japanese grew more concerned about ensuring sufficient Asian markets for Japan’s products and sufficient Asian raw materials for its factories. From 1925 to 1928, as Japanese counsel at Mukden, Yoshida played a significant role in preparing the ground for his country’s Manchurian conquests in the 1930s.
However, Yoshida was never one to pay attention to political fashions, and he began to drift away from militarism at the same time Japan was succumbing to it. On a tour of Japanese foreign embassies in 1932 and 1933, he met a man who had also been at Versailles: Colonel Edward House, who had been Wilson’s close aide and adviser during the war. House gave Yoshida the same advice he said he had given the Germans before World War I: If Japan chose violent rather than peaceful means of solving its foreign disputes, it would sacrifice everything it had built up so painstakingly since the time of Meiji.
Having been steeped in the prowestern tradition of Meiji Japan, Yoshida by now had become a vigorous proponent of internationalism in spite of Japan’s increasing nationalism. He returned to Japan and began conveying House’s message to everyone who would listen, a course of action that probably contributed to the “uniformed politicians” growing distaste for him.
After an attempted coup d’etat in 1936 by a group of renegade officers in Tokyo—from which Count Makino barely escaped with his life—the militarists controlled Japan. Yoshida was soon nominated to be Foreign Minister by the new Prime Minister, who hoped to hold the line against the militarists, but the army vetoed him. Yoshida was named Ambassador to Britain instead.
The appointment was lucky for two reasons. First, it took Yoshida out of Japan, where opponents of the army were in danger of harassment by the “thought police,” imprisonment, and even assassination. Also, three years of constant exposure to British politics cemented his moderate, prowestern political philosophy in place. In many ways England was what Japan could have become if the dreams of the Meiji reformers had been allowed to flower: a powerful and influential island nation with a constitutional monarchy, a parliament, and a strong, competent civil service.
Yoshida became convinced that Japan could protect its economic interests in Asia without submitting to angry nationalism. He advocated aggressive diplomacy instead of military aggression. In spite of his antimilitarist views, Yoshida managed initially to stay out of jail when he returned to Japan in 1939. Yoshida was in touch with influential members of the Japanese government, and he struggled in vain to find a way to avert war with Britain and the U.S. Much later he recalled telling Tojo’s Foreign Minister that if he could not “prevent a Japanese declaration of war on the United States, he should resign, an act which would hold up Cabinet deliberations and give even the army something to think about; and that if as a result of such a gesture he should be assassinated, such a death would be a happy one.” After Pearl Harbor he sent an apologetic note to U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew and made sure Grew had enough food while he was being held at the American embassy, two small gestures that took great courage.
During the war Yoshida was a member of the informal network of antimilitarist politicians known as the “peace faction.” Like Konrad Adenauer in Nazi Germany, he avoided the sort of aggressive resistance that might have landed him in jail or w
orse, but at several points during the war he discussed with other antimilitarists the possibility of putting out peace feelers. Finally, in April 1945, he was arrested by the military police. They questioned him about his note to Grew and about his role in a written peace appeal to the Emperor, a copy of which had been discovered by a government spy on his household staff. He was then thrown in jail.
Yoshida endured his forty days in jail with characteristic good humor. With Tojo now out of office, he was confident that no real harm would come to him. His natural father had been a political prisoner at the time when his son was born, and Yoshida decided “a taste of prison life might not be so bad for me either for a change.” He became popular with the other prisoners and the guards by distributing the extra food he received from home. He was transferred to a suburban jailhouse when the military prison suffered a direct hit during the bombing of Tokyo (“I was thinking how unpleasant it would be to be roasted alive,” he wrote later) and was released shortly afterward. He went home to his estate at Oiso, forty miles south of Tokyo, to recuperate, assuming—mistakenly, as it turned out—that he would spend the rest of his life there as a little-known retired diplomat.
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One day early in the Occupation of Japan, Yoshida was driving on a deserted highway between Oiso and Tokyo. “Two American GIs suddenly appeared and signaled my driver to halt,” he wrote later. “I imagined them to be on some kind of marauding expedition, but they turned out to be soldiers returning to Tokyo who had lost their way.” Yoshida offered them a lift, and “we had not proceeded far before they were pressing chocolates, then chewing gum, and finally cigarettes upon me.”
This was one of Yoshida’s favorite stories. “I recall thinking at the time,” he wrote, “that it was this natural way of acting on their part, and the inherent good nature of the average American, which enabled the Occupation of Japan to be completed without a shot being fired.” A group of liberal Japanese intellectuals I met in 1953 seemed to agree. They told me that to the extent there was anti-American sentiment in Japan, it was not caused by the behavior of our troops.
The Americans’ friendliness was certainly one reason the Occupation was a success. Another was the stoic acceptance of defeat by the Japanese and their openness to the change that came with defeat. But it was Douglas MacArthur’s immediate recognition of these qualities in the Japanese that got the Occupation off to such a successful and dramatic start.
On August 30, 1945, MacArthur flew to Yokohama, where he was to establish a temporary headquarters. Nearby were some kamikaze pilots who had refused to surrender and 250,000 armed Japanese soldiers. The fighting had ended only two weeks before, and the two sides still regarded one another with a high degree of understandable suspicion.
Many Japanese expected the victorious Americans to overrun the country, plundering and raping as they went. Many Americans, in turn, worried that the Emperor would take the remnants of his army, flee into the mountains, and wage a lengthy guerrilla war. No one believed that the same army that had conducted the Philippine Death March and had fought to the last man on Iwo Jima and other Pacific islands would surrender quickly.
No one except MacArthur. In spite of his aides’ warnings, MacArthur insisted on landing at Yokohama alone and totally unarmed. He even forbade his aides to carry sidearms. He was convinced that a show of absolute fearlessness would impress any recalcitrant Japanese more than a show of strength. Characteristically it was a gamble; characteristically MacArthur was right. He landed safely. Churchill called it the most courageous single act of World War II.
It was in ways such as this that MacArthur, who had already become virtually a demigod to the people of the Philippines, established a similar relationship with the Japanese—a relationship based on absolute mutual trust. He cemented this relationship for all time with one inspired decision. Many—the British, the Russians, even some in Washington—demanded that Hirohito be tried as a war criminal. The Emperor himself paid an unprecedented call on MacArthur at the American embassy and said that the ultimate responsibility for Japan’s warmaking was his and his alone.
But the general saw that reverence for the Emperor, even in surrender, was what held Japan together. Hirohito’s radio broadcast in August 1945, telling his people to “bear the unbearable” and surrender, was one reason MacArthur was able to land safely at Yokohama. MacArthur also took an immediate liking to the bookish, unassuming yet quietly dignified monarch. The Supreme Commander decided to keep the Emperor in place and throughout the Occupation treated him with respect. Under the MacArthur constitution, promulgated in 1947, Hirohito became a constitutional monarch whose ceremonial role was carefully circumscribed. This decision went against much of the advice MacArthur was receiving at the time. The insight behind it could only have come from a profound understanding of the history and culture of the people he now governed.
In the end MacArthur did not so much abolish absolute political authority as transfer it from the Emperor to himself. He located his own permanent headquarters across from the moat that surrounded the Imperial Palace. Throughout the five years of his rule he remained as aloof and mysterious as Hirohito had before. Each day he was seen only in his office, at home at the American embassy, or en route between the two. Between 1945 and 1951 he left the Tokyo area only twice, both times for destinations outside Japan.
Hirohito, meanwhile, toured factories and farms and appeared at baseball games, mingling with his people as never before. But although power flowed from him to MacArthur and eventually, in 1952, to the people, there was still the sense that the general, like the shoguns and the Meiji reformers before him, was simply ruling at the behest of the Emperor. One Japanese said about MacArthur, “The Emperor couldn’t have picked a better man.”
Although Yoshida was an advocate of parliamentary democracy, he was also fiercely loyal to the Emperor. He thought MacArthur’s treatment of Hirohito was, more than any other factor, responsible for the success of the Occupation. It was also in large part responsible for Yoshida’s remarkable affection for MacArthur.
When Yoshida became Japan’s third postwar premier in 1946 at age sixty-seven, he did so both unexpectedly and reluctantly. As a result of MacArthur’s purge of men who were linked with the militarists, the Liberal (actually conservative) party had found itself without a candidate for Prime Minister. Yoshida had already left Oiso to serve as Foreign Minister, and the leaders of the Liberal party turned to him for the top job only to find him reluctant to accept. He finally said yes, but only after warning the party that he would avoid intraparty squabbles and fund raising. He was expected to be only a caretaker Premier. As it turned out, he served over seven years and seated five cabinets.
He was a decisive and, at times, painfully blunt leader. For instance he had a wary but genuine respect for the contributions scholarship can make to society, but he was not particularly fond of scholars themselves unless they agreed with him. He publicly called one who did not a “prostitute of learning.” A reference in his 1947 New Year’s message to “renegades” in the labor movement helped spark plans for a nationwide strike that MacArthur had to call off personally and that brought down Yoshida’s first government. In 1953, when he called a Socialist Dietman a bakayaro (damned fool) in his exasperation over his opponents’ attempts to prevent him from modifying some of the more unworkable Occupation reforms, his opponents were able to engineer a no-confidence vote in his government. However, he still won the next election and was able to continue his efforts.
The Churchill of Japan governed according to one of the most realistic edicts of the Churchill of England, who once wrote, “People who are not prepared to do unpopular things and to defy clamor are not fit to be Ministers in times of stress.” In the confusion of postwar Japan, when public opinion was fluid and malleable, Yoshida steadfastly went his own way, governing according to his own instincts. As his father-in-law, Count Makino, said admiringly, “Shigeru may not have the most appealing personality, but he has
backbone, and that’s what counts.”
He did not distrust the Japanese people in the same way Konrad Adenauer distrusted the Germans. He blamed only the small militarist clique for the calamity of World War II. A relative of the Premier told me, in fact, that Yoshida trusted his countrymen absolutely and was certain they would be able to rebuild their country as long as their leadership was sufficiently forthright.
Often he donned a beret and inverness and wandered through the streets of Tokyo, listening to what people had to say about him. He was seldom recognized and more than once heard himself described as the “one-man” Premier. He did not seem to take it as an insult. Most of the criticism of his tactics came from the minority parties, which bore the brunt of them, and from the anti-Yoshida press. The people themselves found him inspiring and even entertaining. Other politicians rained abuse on him for calling a Diet opponent a bakayaro, but an American reporter wrote that one could call a taxi driver a bakayaro and “earn a grin instead of a scowl” once Yoshida had sanctified the term.
Yoshida could be as hard on his subordinates as he was on his political opponents. Once he held a dinner in honor of William Sebald, and he also invited a Japanese foreign service officer who was about to take up a diplomatic post in the U.S. The foreign service officer and his wife left the party early so they could catch the last train for their home in the suburbs. A few days later Sebald learned that Yoshida had canceled the man’s U.S. assignment because he had left the party before the guest of honor—an offense that Yoshida considered unconscionable both for a Japanese gentleman and a would-be representative of Japan abroad.
Leaders Page 15
