The Emperor's General

by James Webb

  Not much, according to MacArthurian standards. But it was far better lodging than had been the corn-shuck mattresses, nighttime chamber pots, and outdoor wells and pumps of Kensett, Arkansas.

  I wearily took off my cap, dropped my seabag onto the floor, then laid back on the bed. The welcome sense of aloneness washed over me like a warm and comforting breeze. I suddenly felt drugged, as though I could fall asleep and not wake up for weeks. The incredible tensions of the past several days had finally abated, if only for an evening, making me realize for the first time how much pressure I really had been under.

  It was as if the past few days had all been an odd dream, and in falling asleep I somehow would finally be awakening to reality. It seemed like decades since I had hugged my mother and brother good-bye and climbed up the ramp of the transport ship on my way to Australia. And it seemed like years since I had last seen Divina Clara run from my arms down the jasmine-cluttered path and disappear inside her darkened home. How long had that really been? Less than two weeks?

  I had mail. I slapped open the upper pocket of my uniform blouse and pulled out the two letters I had been given before departing Yokohama that morning. Still lying on the bed, I examined and then opened the envelopes. One was from my mother, having been written on the day Japan announced its surrender, telling me how happy she was that I would not die, “provided you are still alive, that is.” With the war winding down, she had lost her job at the defense plant. But she hoped that I would be happy because she was marrying the Italian. I resolved to write her the next morning with my quill pen and Japanese paper, to let her know that I was indeed still alive but would not be coming home anytime soon.

  The second was from Divina Clara, written only four days before, its quick delivery helped no doubt by my address as a member of the supreme commander’s immediate staff. I have been thinking about this, she wrote. And I am believing you will come back. Because what did you have to gain if you did not really love me, but only told me that you did? You already had all of me as well as the memories, and that would not change even if you did not return, except that the memories would be cheapened if you had lied. And if you wanted to leave me it would have been simple for you to decide that at Subic. You could have just told me that my grandmother was too forbidding, and that we would have to part. But you did not, and so you do love me. I am sure of this. And I will never stop loving you.

  I smiled fondly. She has been thinking about this. Indeed, she was always thinking. I held the letter to my heart, wishing it somehow were Divina Clara’s face and that I was now running my hands along her cheek and through the silky length of her wonderful, thick black hair. She was the most unusual and intuitive person I had ever met. She had built herself a logic, divined my feelings not from what I had told her so much as from what I did not say.

  Father Garvey had been right. I felt traitorous for not having tried to see her while I was in Manila. I pressed her letter to my face as if I could find her fingers in the writing on the page. And then I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 11

  It was unlike MacArthur, but he had indeed given the larger, grander corner offices of the Dai Ichi building’s sixth floor to lesser-ranking generals and had selected for himself an interior room with a less sweeping view of Tokyo’s landscape. Many on the staff were puzzled by this gesture, but from the first moment I walked into the phoneless, walnut-paneled office I understood why he had chosen it. Pacing in front of its one wide window, he could tamp his pipe each morning and stare past the palace plaza just across the street, where Tokyo Rose had once claimed he would be hanged, over the top of the sacred double bridge called Sakurada that led into the palace grounds, and look directly at the emperor’s home in the Fukiage Gardens, less than half a mile away.

  He was doing just that as I quietly entered his office. His firm, surprisingly youthful face was lost in some mystical quandary as he paced. His slender hands and neatly manicured fingers perfunctorily tamped tobacco into a favorite corncob, taken as always from a nearby rack that held more than a dozen pipes. Outside it was raining. Underneath a lamppost just below us, two rickshaw drivers were sitting knees-up below the bonnets of their little pedicabs, trading cigarettes and stories. The splashing streets were filled with a mix of horse-drawn wagons, rickshaws pulled by tiny men, ancient charcoal-burning Japanese cars, and a host of American and British military vehicles. On the sidewalk below, I saw an American soldier walking with his arm around a young Japanese woman, sharing her pink umbrella. We had entered the city only ten days ago, but Recreation and Amusement had already come to Tokyo.

  The palace grounds were covered with a small forest of carefully cultured trees, in all a gorgeous mix of reaching, heavy-branched pines, sycamore, bamboo, and cypress. As MacArthur continued to stare, the rain filtered through their branches, giving the grounds a steamy, cobwebbed haze. Near us, just in front of the Sakurada Gate, an old bus pulled up. Its dozen or so darkly bundled occupants climbed quickly out. As the rain soaked them they bowed deeply in one collective motion toward the gate and to the unseen emperor on its other side. Then all together they turned and faced the Dai Ichi building, bowing a second time, not quite so deeply, toward the unseen supreme commander. Drenched, they quickly reentered the bus, which continued on its journey.

  MacArthur noticed this. I could see him struggling to fight back a thin, appreciative smile. He was becoming an immensely popular figure throughout Japan. Every public word he spoke was published verbatim in Japanese newspapers. Virtually every Japanese now knew his name and associated it with hope for the future. Women were already naming babies after him, and some were even writing to him asking that he might sire their next child. Groups of schoolchildren sometimes appeared magically on nearby street corners, waving the American and Japanese flags together in one hand.

  It was September 18, 1945. It was hard for me to believe, but it had been only one month to the day since we had hosted General Kawabe and his haggard, shamefaced delegation in Manila, where the cameras had clicked like a million crickets, the rocks had pelted the limousines like hailstones, and MacArthur had preserved the dignity of the royal Chin.

  Only two days before, President Truman had sent a cable inviting the supreme commander home to the United States for a ticker-tape victory parade down Broadway, of the sort already given General Dwight Eisenhower. MacArthur had declined, even though he had not been on the North American continent since his honeymoon in 1937. The reason he gave had frosted the president: “If I were to return from Asia only for a few weeks,” MacArthur had written, “word would spread throughout the Pacific that the United States is abandoning the Orient.”

  The true reasons were less grand but equally pompous. The war was gone, vanished, mere prologue. Who needed the temporary, confetti-filled adulation of New York when he had the full idolatry of Tokyo? Why follow in his former aide Eisenhower’s footsteps, becoming simply another war-hero general, when he stood on the cusp of true historical greatness? Who needed to defer for days in speech and ceremony to this bumpkin Truman, the former haberdasher and political-machine crony from Kansas City who had by the accident of death replaced his urbane friend-enemy and fellow aristocrat Roosevelt, when MacArthur himself was now the semi-sovereign ruler of his very own country?

  And there was another reason. How long would it take to remake Asia? Maybe, just maybe, there would be a run for the presidency in 1948 and MacArthur would want his own grand return to America. Why share the newsreel with Truman?

  I crept slowly forward as MacArthur continued to stare through the window. His eyes were now fixed longingly on the inner palace at the edge of the gardens, where he knew the emperor walked each day to pray at the palace shrine. I wondered again what it was that the General thought of and wished for as he stared out toward the palace and whether the emperor himself was awakening each morning and secretly peering from a palace window, trying to see MacArthur. Had there ever been a moment like this in all of history, where two supreme rulers w
ere perched within easy view of each other, each with undeniable but different kinds of power, each carrying the uncertain fate of the same country in his hands, and neither trying to kill the other? I did not think so.

  At such moments I had learned not to speak lest I incur the supreme commander’s wrath by breaking his train of thought. Stepping ever further into the room, I nodded to Generals Whitney and Willoughby, who sat waiting patiently in two identical worn brown leather chairs. The chairs faced each other from opposite ends of a long, equally scarred leather divan. Between them was a low mahogany end table. Across the room, in front of a bookcase that held an onyx clock and the General’s pipe rack, his personal swivel chair was pushed neatly into a table-desk.

  The desktop was immaculately cleared, save for a fountain pen and a letter opener. Its in-box and out-box were both empty. It was not quite nine in the morning, but the General, a frenetic yet meticulous worker, had already gone through more than a hundred letters, as well as a stack of official cables. As was the case every morning, the paperwork had already been fanned out to key staff assistants for action.

  I remained standing. A seat in MacArthur’s office was taken only when offered. Finally he seemed to notice me, and spoke.

  “What is it, Jay?”

  “Sir, the lawyers are here.”

  MacArthur turned to Whitney, as if he had just been rudely awakened in the middle of a pleasurable dream. “I must tell you, Court, I find this whole process odious and counterproductive.”

  Whitney shot the hulking Willoughby a quick glance, then shook his head, standing up to the supreme commander. “I know how you feel, General, but these are matters of the utmost importance. We can’t put them off, not even for a day.”

  “There are a lot of things we can’t put off!” fumed MacArthur, pacing again before the window. Without looking, he reached into his pocket and took out a box of matches to light his pipe. “It’s going to be a long and bitter winter. I need three and a half million tons of food, that’s what I need! Three and a half million tons, that’s seven billion pounds of food! And if I’m going to implement my reforms, it must happen quickly. You know what Sherman said to Grant before his march toward Atlanta, don’t you? ‘Celerity is the key to success.’ ”

  He stopped pacing. As he lit his pipe I empathized with the enormity of both his assigned chores and his grander desires. He was disarming an entire nation, even as he tried to feed it. He was negotiating a relationship with its government at the same time he was creating a mammoth second bureaucracy designed to oversee its actions. He had publicly pledged that he would rewrite Japan’s Constitution in a way that would cause the country to renounce war and at the same time emancipate its women, press, labor unions, and religions. He had announced that he would institute land reform. Most controversially, he had guaranteed that he would dismantle the zaibatsu, the longtime corporate oligarchy dominated by eleven historically powerful families, most notably the Sumitomos, the two branches of the Iwasakis, who controlled Mitsubishi, and the eleven branches of the Mitsuis.

  And what was it that the Allies wished to see on top of his agenda? War crimes. The one issue that in MacArthur’s eyes would mire these emerging improvements in the vitriol of the past.

  The pipe was lit. He began pacing again. “This is going to be messy. And what I need right now is simplicity.”

  “Yes, sir,” sighed Court Whitney. The General’s chief political adviser looked again at General Willoughby, wordlessly asking for support.

  Finally Willoughby cleared his throat, speaking slowly in his deep, heavily Teutonic accent. “Our War Crimes Board is receiving a great deal of pressure from the other Allies,” said the General’s intelligence specialist. “The entire world is waiting for us to assign accountability. The Australians and the Chinese are especially serious in their demands that the emperor himself be tried.”

  MacArthur waved his pipe angrily into the air. The corncob had already gone out and he was reaching for another match. “It would serve no purpose. In fact, it would defeat our purpose.”

  “We have to address these issues, sir,” said Willoughby. “If we do not, they will grow.”

  “Have I ever said otherwise?” He faced Willoughby as if now speaking before a tribunal or a press conference. “Have we not been addressing them? Did we not create the War Crimes Board as one of our first orders of business? Is Field Marshal Sugiyama not dead, he and his wife both killing themselves when we tried to arrest him? Is not General Tojo in the hospital with a bullet in his stomach after having attempted suicide, the direct result of our decision to make such arrests?”

  “A lousy shot,” panned the irreverent General Whitney. Catching MacArthur’s quick glare, the lawyer gracefully retreated. “It’s the joke on the street among the Japanese, Boss. Tojo shot himself with an American pistol taken from a downed pilot. As far as they’re concerned, if he’d been a real man he’d have slit his stomach with a samurai sword.”

  “A lousy joke, Court.”

  Generals Willoughby and Whitney both looked down, knowing when it was better to remain silent. Finally MacArthur nodded to me.

  “All right, Jay. Bring them in. Let’s get this over with.”

  I stepped outside and returned with the three senior lawyers from the General’s judge advocate staff. They were led by a craggy, balding colonel named, oddly enough, Samuel Genius. I continued to stand as the three nervously sat next to one another on the wrinkled leather divan. Colonel Genius opened up a legal-sized folder. His two assistants, both majors, held legal notepads on their laps and looked attentively at the colonel as he began to speak.

  “Actually, I have some good news, sir,” began Colonel Genius. “The Japanese are just as shaken as we were about Field Marshal Sugiyama and General Tojo. They’ve agreed that if we consult with the Cabinet in advance on war crimes arrests, the suspects we name will turn themselves in.”

  “How would that take place?” asked MacArthur, puffing on his pipe and still standing before the window.

  “We would designate what we call ‘Allied detention points.’ The suspects would turn themselves in to Japanese police, and the police will deliver them to the detention points.”

  “And just what do they mean when they demand that the office of the supreme commander consult with the Cabinet?”

  Court Whitney interjected. “That’s not a problem, General. We’ll tell them. Period. I think their wording is just a matter of face.”

  “Delete ‘consult’,” decided MacArthur. “You consult someone who has greater power than yourself. We will ‘inform.’ We will ‘coordinate.’ And if they so desire, they can ‘consult’ with us.” He shrugged. “In truth, we probably should have been doing that already.”

  Colonel Genius nodded, relaxing a bit as his majors scribbled notes onto their legal pads. “Yes, sir. Excellent point.” He flipped a page inside his folder. “And we have some more good news. When we searched Field Marshal Sugiyama’s home we found his diary. It’s being translated even as I speak. We’re getting some fascinating information from it, I must say.”

  MacArthur seemed guarded. “Regarding what?”

  “Meetings at the highest level, throughout the war,” said Colonel Genius. “Who was at them. Who recommended certain actions. Sugiyama was army chief of staff from well before Pearl Harbor to after the battle of Saipan. We’re picking up notes on who knew what and when, from the emperor on down.”

  The General had begun his inveterate pacing again, but now he stopped and walked slowly to the swivel chair at his desk. He pulled it out and sat down. It was the first time I had seen MacArthur sit during a meeting since I had been on his staff. It was clear to me that he had been caught completely off guard.

  “I will tell you, personally,” began MacArthur, “that for some reason it would unsettle me to be reading through a dead man’s diary.”

  The mention of the emperor had jolted the supreme commander, and the very earnestness of his face told me that this
comment was classic MacArthurian misdirection. It would unsettle him not at all if the contents of Field Marshal Sugiyama’s diary were likely to suit his own desires rather than enlarge the debate over the emperor. “Of what possible use can a diary be in a court of law?”

  “These aren’t ordinary diaries, General.” Genius looked to his left and right, drawing convinced nods from his assistants. “High-level Japanese officials apparently have always used their diaries to record in great detail what actually went on in these meetings. Who said what and why. Who objected and why. It seems they have a constant need to protect themselves from blackmail and political assassination. Intrigues and betrayals are a part of the inner workings of the Japanese system.” Colonel Genius took on an animated look, like a dog on the hunt. “So what we are finding is, in many cases, a day-by-day accounting of how decisions were made throughout the war.”

  “I am of course not an attorney,” said MacArthur, “but as I recall a diary is not admissible in court as evidence. It would be hearsay. People exaggerate when writing to themselves. They fail to remember all the details. They slander their enemies. How do we know that any diary contains the truth?”

  “We find other diaries, and cross-reference,” answered Genius immediately. The lawyer took a slow breath and held it, then threw his hands up into the air, venting his frustration. “General, when the war ended in Germany our people were able to capture voluminous amounts of evidence, and we had people fluent in German who knew how to read it and analyze it. Here, just about the only information we have are the papers the Japanese themselves decided to turn over to us. Can you imagine how bizarre that is? And we’re working overtime trying to find Americans sophisticated enough to be able to read through all the nuance and subtleties of Japanese kanji.”

  “Why haven’t you simply moved in and taken over the files?” asked the supreme commander.