The Emperor's General

by James Webb

  After several blocks, the sidewalks began to fill with American soldiers moving in small groups. They walked jauntily, passing us in both directions with the cocky, electrified strides of victors on the prowl. Their heads were back. Their hands were in their pockets. Their voices were filled with a sibilant excitement. They paid us no attention as they passed us.

  Finally Father Garvey pointed toward a huge, semidarkened building that sat just on the harbor’s edge.

  “Over there,” he said.

  We crossed the street, heading toward the building. “Does MacArthur know about this?”

  I asked.

  “I informed him,” shrugged Father Garvey. Then he became suddenly defensive. “It was, after all, my duty.”

  “What did he say?”

  “A bunch of gobbledygoop. He told me that his men had been in the jungles for a long time, and that sex is a natural human function. That there was no way to stop it. And that the greatest lesson he’d ever learned from his father was never to give an order that could not be enforced.”

  We finished crossing the street and were now near the building. “Sorry, Father, but you can’t argue with that logic.”

  “That was not my intention!” said Father Garvey, his face intense. “This isn’t fully a religious question! It isn’t even a military question. Just take a look, and tell me what you think, Jay!”

  A steady stream of American soldiers was pouring into and out of the building. Above its entrance, in English, was a large, precisely lettered sign:

  YOKOHAMA

  RECREATION AND AMUSEMENT

  ASSOCIATION

  The door opened into a vast, dimly lit lobby with an uncarpeted concrete floor. A chest-high wooden front desk had been placed just inside the doorway. The reception desk was very likely a portable bar that had been taken from a real hotel to this makeshift building, which looked as though it had recently served as a factory. On the other side of the desk, two stairways led up to four floors of honeycombed rooms. I could see several of the rooms from where I stood. They seemed to have been recently partitioned with lightweight bamboo and paper walls.

  An air of happy chaos reigned on the far side of the reception desk. Giggling, plain-faced Japanese girls waited near the desk as dozens of American soldiers walked among them. The girls were wearing simple cotton kimonos that amply revealed their smooth skin and rounded softness behind the clinging fabric.

  The enchanted soldiers were joking and poking and teasing as they decided on their choices. Other smiling girls were returning from the stairway with clearly satisfied soldiers, some of whom were holding hands as if they had just fallen in love. Soldiers were leaving. Soldiers were coming, some of them yelling loudly with surprised delight when they walked inside and saw this treasure trove of Asian femininity. Girls were waiting. Girls were walking. Girls were waving hello and good-bye.

  Yes, here it was: peace had come to Japan. No booze, no fights, no jealousy, at least not yet. The Yokohama Recreation and Amusement Association was a very happy place, much more so than had been the surrender deck of the USS Missouri a few mornings before.

  A small, fortyish Japanese man wearing a grey wool suit stood behind the desk, alongside an older female assistant. The woman was wearing a full brown kimono and was keeping meticulous records in a large notebook. The man smiled brightly when he saw us. He waved an inviting hand toward the teeming pool of girls and spoke to us in English. “Yes, good evening, gentlemens. We have very good time for you. You choose one girl, sucky-fucky, no problem. She want to know American way of love! Five dollars one half hour. OK? OK?”

  “Are you understanding yet?” asked Father Garvey.

  “Why’d you bring me here?” I answered. “How did this happen?”

  I stood stunned and gaping on the other side of the desk. The Japanese had surrendered less than three weeks before. We had been in Yokohama less than a week. Before our landing at Atsugi we had heard reports that the more proper classes were sending their wives and daughters to the hills, some carrying cyanide capsules to swallow in case they were faced with a rapacious Allied soldier. And yet here before us was a seeming legion of knock-kneed, coarse-featured girls from slums and farmlands and ordinary brothels, collected and organized to render a conduit for the Red-haired Barbarians’ lust.

  Organized. That was the difference. Collected, by the ever-unseen hand, and put into service. A phenomenon wholly distinct from the random, sultry turmoil of Subic, which at bottom had represented nothing more than a crude form of opportunism and false hope. There was design to this, and strenuous effort. This whorehouse was not born of opportunity. Rather, it had been created by government effort. The converted building, the immaculate English-language sign, even the smiling, record-keeping host who now tugged at my arm and gestured toward his lovelies. Up from the ashes, compliments of—who?

  “You like which girl? Tell me. Five dollars, no problem.”

  “You speak very good English,” I said. As we spoke a soldier walked to the desk with the girl he had chosen and paid the man’s assistant. Taking the money, the older woman wrote neatly into a ledger, cataloguing the amount and crediting the girl’s account. Then she casually waved the girl upstairs with the back of her hand.

  “You are surprise I speak your language?” he asked. “I went to school at Boston College, two years.”

  “Boston?” said an amazed Father Garvey.

  “You know Boston College?”

  “It’s my alma mater!”

  “Hey, then we are maybe classmates!” The host gestured again toward the girls. “For you, only four dollars. No problem! Classmate discount.”

  “I’m a priest, you idiot!”

  Another soldier, another girl, another credit to another account, another trip upstairs. Several other soldiers filed past us, finished with their visit, heading back to their bivouac area. One of them reached out and touched me on the shoulder.

  “Hey,” said the soldier. “It’s an officer! I thought this was an enlisted club!” And now a dozen soldiers laughed and pointed, as if Father Garvey and I were there to join in the fun.

  The Japanese man looked at us with fresh clarity, for the first time seeing that we both were officers and also noting the cross on Father Garvey’s collar. A quick confusion seemed to freeze the expression on his face. I began speaking to him in Japanese.

  “We work for General MacArthur,” I said. “Don’t worry. We are only here to inquire about the success of your obviously well-run establishment.”

  “Ohhhh,” he answered, immediately bowing deeply. “Ah so, ah so.”

  “How long has this building been a hotel?” I asked.

  He smiled proudly. “Only ten days. We had to work very hastily! Before this, it was a munitions factory.”

  “You should be congratulated,” I said. “To have been able to convert a building so quickly, and then recruit your ladies, at a time of such great shortage and hardship.”

  “Yes,” he answered proudly. “We had remarkable cooperation. We needed girls with the right—background and experience. It became an important project.”

  “And how many employees do you have here?”

  “More than three hundred,” he answered. “But not all of them at the same time. And not all of them—entertainers. We clean up. Wash towels, wash sheets, bring fresh water. We are working very hard to manage a clean and respectable recreation association.”

  The line before his assistant was now five deep. Hands that had carried rifles against Yamashita’s soldiers in the northern Luzon jungles now were gaining fresh experience as they squeezed the softness of golden skin hidden casually beneath cotton robes.

  “And your business is going well?”

  “Oh, yes!” He checked his register, finding the bottom row of two separate columns. “Today we have had 2,195 customers. Five dollars per customer. This makes—10,975 dollars.”

  Father Garvey gave the man an amazed stare. Behind his bushy eyebrows I could see
him trying to calculate the magnitude of 2,195 acts of copulation, in a world where he was not allowed to play.

  “And where does the money go?” I asked.

  “To the association.” Now the man seemed uncomfortable, as if I had finally probed too far.

  “And who owns the association?”

  His eyes moved quickly to his female assistant and then back to me. “The—association owns the association. I am sorry. I don’t understand your question.” More soldiers, in and out of the busy door. He gave me a deep bow, then switched back to English.

  “We are very busy here, sir. You will please tell General MacArthur that everything is A-OK?”

  We were quiet on the way back to the hotel, but as we neared it Father Garvey suddenly elbowed me, shaking his head with amazement. “And now thanks to your keen insight I finally understand the dilemma, Jay! For us, 2,195 acts of fornication. Sins to be forgiven, if you would. To them, 2,195 contributions to the well-being of the larger group. Blessings, shall we call them? Do I have it correctly?”

  “And some pretty heavy cash,” I added.

  “Right,” said Father Garvey. “And cash. And this is only Yokohama.”

  “What do you mean, Father?”

  “Well, in a few days we’ll be in Tokyo.”

  “Yes.”

  “Led by the famous First Cavalry Division. A grand parade, I’m told.”

  “That’s what the supreme commander is planning.”

  “And I don’t exactly expect the soldiers to be met by enemy fire.”

  “No, in fact the Japanese army will be totally withdrawn from the city, probably tomorrow.”

  “Tokyo is a very large city. As populous as New York, they say.”

  “More or less. I mean, with all the bombing it’s hard to count.”

  “We can expect a great deal of—how did the gentleman, my fellow alumnus, put it? Friendship and cooperation?”

  “No, Father, I believe the precise words were, ‘recreation and amusement.’ ”

  “Yes,” said Father Garvey. “Recreation and amusement.” He walked silently for a while. “So give me some advice.”

  “Me, Father?”

  “Yes.” He looked dubiously up into my face. “As a priest, what should I do about all this?”

  I laughed. It was midnight. We had reached the hotel.

  “Pray, Father.”

  “ ‘Pray,’ he says,” said Father Garvey. “Is that it?”

  “Pray,” I answered. “To the patron saint of lost causes.”

  On September 6, General Courtney Whitney arranged for the American reporters who had beaten MacArthur into Tokyo to be removed from the city, explaining that it was “not American military policy for correspondents to spearhead an occupation.” On September 7, all Japanese regular army soldiers were withdrawn northward out of Tokyo, leaving behind only one division of imperial guards.

  The guards were instructed to dress in civilian clothes. They had been “secretly” kept in the city by the Japanese, with the acquiescence of MacArthur, in order to protect the Imperial Palace. From whom the palace was being protected neither side acknowledged, but MacArthur’s gesture did allow both him and the emperor some quiet saving of face. For MacArthur, despite all his assigned powers, could never have stopped the Japanese from keeping selected soldiers in civilian clothes from remaining, anyway. And what would it have said about the emperor if even the seat of the throne were left naked to anyone who wished simply to cross that sacred moat, subject only to the discretion of some pink-cheeked twenty-year-old MP from Ohio?

  By dawn on September 8, MacArthur’s longtime favorite division, the First Cavalry, had massed at the edge of the giant city, along the road that the supreme commander would take from Yokohama. We joined them at midmorning, then rode behind them in our cavalcade of broken-down cars, marking the General’s formal entry into the capital.

  The drums beat. The old cars popped and backfired as they chugged forward. The soldiers marched smartly through the pink haze and the sea of unremitting rubble. The ragged Japanese gathered near the road to stare and even cautiously wave. And the unspoken but intense preliminaries between MacArthur and the emperor continued.

  Mindful of the quiet but awesome display of imperial power shown by the thirty thousand soldiers the emperor had sent to greet him at Atsugi, MacArthur had instructed the Japanese government that this would be an all-American procession. The entry into the city, watched by hundreds of thousands of bystanders, was the supreme commander’s first show of symbolic force in Tokyo itself. The General had an Asian’s grasp of the impact of ceremony. In this maiden exhibition of his authority he did not want to create any impression that he was being delivered to his quarters through the benevolence of Japanese security.

  But still the hand of the imperial government was never far from us, however hidden in the quiet crowds and broken buildings. At the outskirts of the city the General’s car stuttered, coughed, and finally broke down. As the driver climbed out to check the engine, a dozen hard-eyed plainclothes policemen immediately emerged from the nearby crowd and formed a ring around the car. Silent, stoic, unmovable, and always staring outward, they protected the fuming supreme commander until a different car was brought up from the rear of the column.

  The high-walled American embassy stood on Renanzaka Hill in Akasaka district, not far from the government buildings and only a few minutes from the grounds of the Imperial Palace itself. Reaching it, the First Cavalry continued forward to take up positions throughout the nearby area, including the diet building and the cold, grey-moated walls of the palace grounds. An honor guard from the Seventh Cavalry, remembered since the Indian Wars for having lost its flag with General Custer at Little Big Horn, stayed behind and moved inside the embassy grounds. Our command group moved with them, led by MacArthur and General Eichelberger.

  We assembled around the empty flagpole in the embassy yard. Across from us the yard filled up with an ever more deeply cynical media, still angry at having been temporarily ejected from Tokyo by Court Whitney. The bugles played. The ubiquitous photographers clicked their cameras. And finally MacArthur marched to the flagpole, where he turned to the saluting Eichelberger. The cant and tone of his words themselves seemed to come out of an era gone just as cold and dead as Custer.

  “Have our country’s flag unfurled, and in the Tokyo sun let it wave in its full glory, as a symbol for the hope of the oppressed and as a harbinger of victory for the right.”

  The Imperial Palace being unavailable, MacArthur took the second-nicest villa in Tokyo for his home, moving into the American embassy. The embassy had been closed for nearly four years, but there was no difficulty in recruiting and training qualified employees. He had no need even to ask about them. One by one, without command or advertisement, those who had served in the building before the war crept into its familiar rear entrance, reporting back to work. Nor was there any need to clothe them. They had stored their brown staff kimonos in airtight trunks and left them in the embassy’s attic.

  The dishes were in the cupboards. The linens were in the closets. The cleaning materials were in the storage rooms. Without so much as a stutter the embassy was again vibrant and polished, in the capable hands of its smiling, bowing Japanese staff. It was almost as if there had never been this unpleasant interruption called a war.

  For his headquarters the supreme commander chose the Dai Ichi Insurance building. Six stories high, it was one of the tallest buildings in Tokyo, since after the great Kanto earthquake of 1923 restrictions had been placed against erecting buildings any higher. More important, the white-columned, marble-and-granite structure was just across the street from the southern edge of the Imperial Palace grounds. MacArthur and the emperor would now go about their daily tasks within easy eyesight of each other.

  And emanating as it did from the Dai Ichi, the ordinary Japanese would understand the power of MacArthur’s office. Inside this same building, Japanese political cabals had festered and brewed
for decades. Only a few weeks before, the Dai Ichi had been home to a contrived and symbolic political movement called the Peace Faction, and it had also been the headquarters for the Tokyo Area army. Its security facilities were unequaled elsewhere in Japan and included tubelike slides for escaping to the ground floor in the event of fire or earthquake, or—not that MacArthur seemed worried—an attempted assassination.

  I and several lesser members of the command group were given quarters in a nearby ryokan, a small, traditional Japanese travelers’ hotel that was now being converted into a bachelor officers’ quarters. A raw thrill rippled through me as I hauled my seabag up two flights of steep stairs and walked the dark hallway to the small room that would become my Japanese equivalent of home. MacArthur was finally settling into his latest and perhaps last mansion. The other generals would soon find their villas. Father Garvey had been given quarters more than a mile away. My isolation in the ryokan was a ticket to freedom. Already I was savoring my first true moment of privacy since I had left Manila. I was really in Japan, and I was finally alone.

  My little room had already been fitted with a Western-style bed, a portable wooden closet, and a small mahogany desk. Our ever-anticipating hosts had adorned the desk with a reading lamp and had left me five sheets of writing paper as well as an old quill pen. The pen was set into a sunken inkwell. The inkwell was filled with black India ink. For so long as I stayed in the ryokan the inkwell would be neatly refilled every morning, and my writing papers would be replenished up to exactly five sheets.

  The bathroom area had two tiny rooms. In one was a toilet that consisted of a faucet next to a hole in the concrete floor, over which one was expected to squat and then rinse. In the other stood a small sink, above which the ryokan’s staff had recently hung a little circular mirror, and next to the sink was a chest-deep sunken bath.