Despite his occasional high-handedness, Yoshida had a reputation for listening carefully to experts and advisers before making a decision. He was not the sort whose pride or stubbornness prevented him from changing his mind in the face of new evidence or effective arguments. He respected those who had more experience in a field than he did; for instance Yoshida knew he was comparatively weak in the area of economic policy. For his economic advice he was more likely, as was Eisenhower, to turn to businessmen than bureaucrats, and in fact was one of the few Japanese Premiers to appoint businessmen to his cabinets. Most important, like de Gaulle and Adenauer, he chose able Finance Ministers, such as Hayato Ikeda, a Yoshida protégé who later became Prime Minister himself.
While he acknowledged the deficiency of his economics background, Yoshida had a certain intuitive grasp of basic economic questions. For instance he was correct in believing that Japan would need to modernize its industrial base to succeed in the postwar international marketplace. “Fortunately, Japan was reduced to ashes by air raids,” he once said mischievously. “If Japan introduces new machinery and equipment now, it should be able to become a splendid country with productivity far higher than the countries that have won the war. It costs much to demolish machinery, but the demolition was done for us by the enemy.” While Yoshida was being facetious, he was, as it turned out, absolutely right.
In my meetings with Yoshida, from our first talks in Tokyo in 1953 through the dinner he gave for me at Oiso in 1964, I found his private persona differed markedly from his blustery public one. His wit in private was disarmingly subtle. For westerners, unaccustomed to dry Japanese humor, it was at times hard to detect. At a dinner given in our honor in 1953, Yoshida turned to Mrs. Nixon, who was sitting next to him, and remarked that a U.S. destroyer group was docked in Tokyo Bay. “Tell me,” Yoshida said, “are they there to protect you from us?”
With his stern expression and severe crew cut, the Premier at first looked deadly serious. It was only when his eyes twinkled and a faint smile came to his face that we knew he was joking.
Yoshida often put humor to work in his diplomacy. After the war many Asian nations clamored for war reparations. Correctly anticipating these might be on Indonesian President Sukarno’s mind during a state visit to Japan, the Premier took the offensive.
“I have been looking forward to your arrival,” Yoshida said pleasantly. “Your country always sends us typhoons which have caused serious damage to Japan. I have been waiting for your arrival in order to ask for compensation for the damage caused our country by your typhoons.” Yoshida laughed heartily; Sukarno, completely flabbergasted for one of the few times in his life, decided not to raise the subject of war reparations.
Yoshida governed and lived zestfully, with the aplomb that comes only with age and a certain inbred sense of superiority. By six in the morning he was walking in the garden of the Prime Minister’s residence, chopping weeds from around his beloved bonsai trees with a sickle. Recreation was a good conversation—he was a gifted raconteur and a good listener—or a horseback ride. As a youth he had been one of the few children in his neighborhood to ride a horse to school. When he was Prime Minister, he used the Imperial equestrian ground.
He liked food of all kinds, except Chinese, and savored sake and cigars, which he dispatched at a rate of three a day. He enjoyed reading biographies of Japan’s most illustrious diplomats. He also read French and English and was familiar with the literatures of both languages. When he suffered from insomnia, he read himself to sleep instead of taking sleeping pills.
As any proper Meiji Japanese might, Yoshida read The New York Times and The Times of London each day, marking articles and sections he thought his aides should read and sending them around to the various departments. He had less time for the Japanese mass media, which he considered unruly and overly opinionated. He did sometimes meet with individual reporters whose work he admired, but he also often expressed his attitude toward the mass media by quite unmistakable actions. Once he called the police to oust reporters from a chrysanthemum-viewing party, and frequently he was seen fending off photographers with his cane.
Yoshida loved his wife, Yukiko, dearly. She was an amateur poet whose works were praised by Japanese critics for their juxtaposition of Japanese themes against foreign settings, which she no doubt described from her memories of places Yoshida had worked as a diplomat. She died two months before the beginning of the war. When she fell ill, Yoshida was at her bedside each day throughout her three-month hospitalization. Mrs. Joseph Grew, the wife of the U.S. Ambassador, also visited Madame Yoshida daily and brought her homemade soup.
Yoshida never remarried. Once, when somebody asked him for his ideas on women, he said shortly, “Since my wife died, I have no ideas about women.”
After Madame Yoshida’s death, his official hostess was his multi-lingual daughter, Madame Kazuko Aso. She was sometimes called “the power behind the throne,” though she scoffed at the notion. Nevertheless, before our visit to Japan in 1953, William Bullitt, who had served as Roosevelt’s Ambassador to Russia and France, told me that she rated with Madame Chiang Kai-shek at the very top of his list of first ladies on the international scene. She measured up to his evaluation in every way. Highly intelligent and gracious, she was a worthy companion for her illustrious father. She once told me that many leaders were great men but not good husbands. “I would much rather have the latter,” she said. But it was clear that she considered her father to be both.
• • •
By all accounts, while it was not in MacArthur’s nature to reciprocate Yoshida’s effusive public praise of the general, there was a strong personal friendship between the two men.
Each morning MacArthur and his son, Arthur, would romp at the embassy with their pet dogs before Arthur went off to his lessons and the general to his headquarters. A relative of Yoshida told me what happened one day when Yoshida went to MacArthur’s office and found the general in low spirits. One of the dogs, MacArthur said, had suddenly and unexpectedly died.
By then Yoshida had grown to love Arthur as if he were his own son. Not telling MacArthur what he was doing, the Prime Minister managed to get a picture of the pet and gave it to his Agriculture Minister, telling him to find another dog that looked just like it. When one was located at the National Institute of Animal Husbandry, Yoshida took it personally in his car to the American embassy and gave it to Arthur while a delighted MacArthur watched.
Another time Yoshida brought MacArthur an ingenious toy horse that he had bought for Arthur during one of his anonymous walks through the streets of Tokyo. When Yoshida visited MacArthur’s office again a few days later, he saw the toy still sitting on the general’s desk, next to a stand containing his famous corncob pipes. Yoshida asked MacArthur why he had not yet given it to his son. The Supreme Commander answered somewhat sheepishly that he had been having too much fun playing with it himself. Later he reluctantly passed the toy on to Arthur.
Perhaps the most convincing evidence of MacArthur’s regard for Yoshida was that he allowed him to remain Prime Minister. Over 200,000 Japanese, including the man whose place Yoshida took as head of the Liberal party, had been purged by the Occupation, and MacArthur could just as easily have purged Yoshida when the Prime Minister became resistant to one or another of MacArthur’s wishes, as he occasionally did. Instead he was known to purge political opponents of Yoshida at the Premier’s request.
Just as he did not earn the affection of the Japanese people by being polite or nonabrasive, Yoshida did not earn MacArthur’s respect by being submissive. In 1946, while he was choosing the members of his first cabinet, demonstrators filled the streets of Tokyo, protesting the shortage of food. Soon he let it be known that he would not complete his cabinet appointments unless MacArthur promised massive food shipments from the United States. “The Americans,” he said privately, “will certainly bring food to Japan once they see people waving red flags throughout the country for a whole month.”
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p; When MacArthur heard of this, he sent a covered jeep to fetch the new Prime Minister to his office. Yoshida returned twenty minutes later looking noticeably calmer. MacArthur had promised he would not let a single Japanese starve to death while he was in charge of Japan. Yoshida had in turn promised to complete his cabinet that night.
MacArthur still had to sell the idea to Washington, where some were self-righteously opposed to using surplus from Army stockpiles to feed America’s former enemies. He wired, “Give me bread or give me bullets.” Washington sent the food, and MacArthur was able to keep his promise.
As Premier, Yoshida’s position was particularly difficult because it severely limited the extent to which he could exercise personal initiative. His government spent most of its time reacting to directives from MacArthur and his staff. Some reforms he accepted wholeheartedly. Others he resisted but ultimately had to accept. Still others he resisted and eventually reversed.
He was caught in the middle. His opponents called him an American patsy. When I visited Japan in 1953, Ambassador John Allison told me that some of the anti-American sentiment in Japan was actually anti-Yoshida sentiment caused by his strong pro-U.S. posture. At the same time some on the American Occupation staff thought he was a trouble-maker and had tried to keep him out of office in 1948, when he formed his second cabinet.
Yoshida supported MacArthur’s broad aims for Japan: demilitarization, democratization, and revitalization of the economy. The general’s land redistribution program and his new constitution were among his first and most sweeping accomplishments. In swift, decisive strokes he shattered the two fundamental institutional causes of Japan’s militant imperialism: the rural discontent that had filled its armies and the Emperor-centered system of government that had allowed the militarists to take power so easily.
In 1945 most Japanese farmers tilled fields owned by absentee landlords, a situation MacArthur believed amounted to “virtual slavery.” Yoshida, in turn, knew that rural discontent could fuel a Communist revolution in Japan as easily as it had fueled militarism in the 1930s. Working along lines set down by MacArthur, Yoshida’s government devised a sweeping land reform bill. By 1950 ninety percent of Japan’s farmland was owned by the farmers themselves.
The MacArthur land reform gave farmers both a sense of individual worth and an incentive to produce more. After it was completed, communism in Japan became almost entirely an urban phenomenon because MacArthur had stolen the Communists’ big rural issue. As biographer William Manchester notes, “It is ironic that MacArthur should be remembered by millions as a man who wanted to resolve the problem of communism on the battlefield.”
It is also ironic that the Taiwan “economic miracle,” which can be compared in character if not in size to the Japanese “miracle,” was made possible in large part by Chiang Kai-shek’s liberal land reform program, which he instituted soon after he came to Taiwan from the mainland. Had Chiang been able to initiate such programs on the mainland, Mao might not have been able to exploit the rural discontent that contributed to the success of the Chinese Communist revolution.
If MacArthur’s most obvious target was the agricultural system, one of the trickiest was Japan’s top-heavy political system. The Japanese people had no specified political and civil rights, and MacArthur granted them at an astonishing rate. He established habeas corpus. He abolished all restrictions on civil liberties and fired five thousand officers of the secret police.
He also gave women the vote, believing, as he had confided to an aide, that “women don’t like war.” Fourteen million women went to the polls for the first time in April 1946—many apparently thought MacArthur would reprimand them personally if they stayed away—and thirty-nine women, including one well-known prostitute, were elected to the Diet.
Some Japanese politicians, eager for democracy to get off on the right foot, thought the prostitute’s election was inauspicious, and a nervous senior legislator arrived at Occupation headquarters to break the news to MacArthur. The Supreme Commander asked him how many votes she had received; the legislator sighed and said 256,000. MacArthur replied—“as solemnly as I could,” he wrote later—“Then I should say there must have been more than her dubious occupation involved.” He sent all the new Diet members, including the prostitute, letters of congratulations.
The textbook in MacArthur’s school for democracy was the MacArthur constitution. When the pre-Yoshida Japanese government balked at rewriting the Prussianesque Meiji constitution, the general took yellow legal pad in hand and composed his own outline for the new charter. The final product, written by his staff in somewhat awkward Japanese, combined the American executive and British parliamentary systems. It abolished the peerage, renounced war as a means of settling disputes with other countries, and outlined a bill of rights. Most important, it made the Japanese people sovereign and designated the Emperor as the “symbol of the nation.” After it was approved by the Diet, the Emperor proclaimed it the law of the land.
The MacArthur constitution has always had its critics, many of whom say it is illegitimate because it was written by foreigners and forced on a weakened and irresolute public. Still, Japan has so far resisted all attempts to amend it, and most Japanese apparently approve of the Emperor as a constitutional monarch.
• • •
MacArthur had masterfully turned back overt attempts by the Soviets to influence the conduct of the Occupation, in which they were nominally partners. When Stalin’s man in Tokyo said the Russians might occupy the northernmost island of Hokkaido, MacArthur promised to throw him in jail if even one Russian soldier set foot on Japanese soil. He thus saved Japan from the anguish of being divided into a Communist north and a non-Communist south.
But domestic communism was more insidious. When Stalin finally returned Japan’s World War II POWs in 1949, they had been organized into cadres and indoctrinated. Communist-inspired violence escalated the following year when the Soviets ordered the Japanese Communist party to emphasize illegal and terrorist tactics and abandon its policy of seeking a “peaceful revolution.”
When I went to Japan in 1953 I felt strongly that Communist-inspired violence there justified the step of outlawing the Communist party. MacArthur, before his recall in 1951, and Yoshida had already purged party members from government and business. I was surprised to discover, however, that Yoshida—as staunch an anti-Communist as I have ever met—was against outlawing the party outright unless the threat it presented to the stability of Japan increased.
He was typically whimsical about the shift in our own attitudes about communism from 1945 to 1950. “Americans are very interesting people,” he said once. “When you came here in 1945, we had all the Communists in jail. You made us let them all out. Now you tell us to put them back in jail again. That’s a lot of work, you know.”
Yoshida was probably reluctant to take further action against the Communists in 1953 because by then Japan’s economic recovery was in full swing. Land redistribution was complete and farmers were brimming with enthusiasm and vigor, as I found during my conversations with some of them at the time. As a result, the Communist party was doing poorly at the polls.
Still, Yoshida continued to worry about the Communists. During one of our meetings in 1953 he ruminated about “our natural tendency to be sympathetic toward communism.” He was concerned because young intellectuals tended to support left-wing radicals. Madame Aso added that intellectuals supported the Communists because it was the fashionable thing to do. “It just isn’t fashionable to be conservative,” she said. The problem was compounded by the fact that many Communist slogans, the ones about freedom and equality and the rights of workers, only sounded like slightly more strident versions of MacArthur’s reforms. Yoshida believed that many Japanese, lacking an instinctive feeling for what democracy meant, had confused democracy with license and anarchy. MacArthur had set up a giant experiment in democracy, but Yoshida had to keep it from boiling over.
MacArthur, for instance, quite proper
ly wanted to encourage a free labor movement. But his staff, which included many idealistic junior social engineers, recruited Japanese Communists to help them establish new unions, and it was no surprise that they were prone to unreasonable demands, strikes, and violence. When he could, Yoshida modified the new labor laws, over the outraged howls of the Socialist opposition. Eventually most unions turned away from the Communists.
The Americans were also intent on trust-busting—not just the giant combines, or zaibatsu, such as Mitsubishi, but also over a thousand smaller companies. Many on the Occupation staff mistakenly believed that big business was the root of all the evils of the 1930s, in Japan as well as in the U.S. Yoshida correctly believed that Japan would not survive without healthy commercial and industrial sectors and resisted the anti-monopoly drive. Many of the breakup schemes were finally abandoned, and in 1953 Yoshida’s government modified the stringent anti-monopoly laws.
Yoshida was severely criticized by liberals in both Japan and the U.S. for resisting some of the reforms MacArthur’s staff had insisted upon. But in retrospect he was right: Many of the reforms—in areas ranging from labor and business to education and law enforcement—were unsuited to conditions in postwar Japan. Yoshida’s stubborn defense of his nation’s interests against radical reforms at a time when Japan could least afford them was a key factor in the success of MacArthur’s Occupation.
• • •
Yet, as important as Yoshida’s role was in modifying some of the Occupation’s more extreme domestic measures, his greatest legacy was a shrewd foreign policy that had two parts: opposition to large-scale rearmament, a domestic issue with international ramifications; and determined pursuit of a peace treaty and security alliance with the U.S. Together these policies meant that Japan could have national security without paying for it and could devote all of its attention and resources to building one of the greatest economies in the world.
Leaders Page 16
