Supreme Commander

by Seymour Morris, Jr.

  If not the historians, certainly the people remembered, and their hearts and minds followed. MacArthur became known as “the Great Emancipator” for bringing freedom from sickness and hunger. They came to trust him even more than their own leaders, who had led them into such misery. Said MacArthur about the Japanese people: “As they increasingly sensed my insistence upon just treatment for them, even at times against the great nations I represented, they came to regard me as not as a conqueror but as a protector.”

  No way, however, was MacArthur running a charity operation. One thing that pleased him no end was how hard the Japanese people were working. “Never have I seen debris from bombing so quickly and cleanly cleared away,” observed a New York Times reporter. When MacArthur returned to Manila for a day in mid-1946 to celebrate Philippine independence, he was depressed to note that the Filipinos seemed primarily interested in what they could extract from the Americans. With the Japanese it was different.

  A major theme of the JCS policy memorandum was to help the Japanese help themselves. For Japan to become self-sufficient in food, land reform was imperative. Only 16 percent of Japanese land was fit for cultivation; the rest was mountains and urban areas. Japanese farmers were dirt-poor, making the bulk of Japanese farmland look like a Far Eastern Appalachia. The rural countryside had been a breeding ground for militarism as hundreds of thousands of young men sought to escape grinding poverty by joining the armed forces (almost all the kamikaze pilots came from impoverished rural areas).

  To strike at the heart of militarism, MacArthur had to address the farmers’ dire straits. For centuries they had toiled like feudal serfs, turning over the bulk of their meager crops to their landlords as rent. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer. It wasn’t just land, it happened in trade and banking, too. In 1945 some fifty families controlled 90 percent of Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP) through the economic monopolies known as zaibatsu. Going after the zaibatsu would have to wait for another day, however; the first priority was land reform.

  Three months after taking over Japan, MacArthur issued a directive ordering the Japanese government to “take measures to insure that those who till the soil of Japan shall have a more equal opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their labor . . . and destroy the economic bondage which has enslaved the Japanese farmer through centuries of feudal oppression.” The landlords, of course, didn’t like this one bit. But what astounded MacArthur as he undertook this social engineering was how he got lambasted by the liberal Left in America. A blistering article in The Nation predicted that the bulk of Japanese farmers wouldn’t be able to afford buying a plot as large as the new maximum of 12.5 acres, and so would slip from tenancy to the even lower status of farmhands. Furthermore, rich landlords could evade this limitation by buying excess land in the name of their relatives. What did SCAP’s reformers from the U.S. Agriculture Department know? the magazine thundered. Their knowledge of land reform could be “balanced on the tip of a chopstick.”

  Frequently being able to see the obvious is more important than having a lot of knowledge. As Gen. William Marquat brusquely put it when he signed off on a proposed land reform program by SCAP agricultural economist Wolf Ladejinsky: “I may be dumb but I am not stupid.” Few people understood how all the numbers would work in trying to resurrect the economy, but one thing MacArthur and Marquat did know: They had to do something, and achieving social reform was more important than balancing the budget. Nothing redistributes wealth like inflation. With Japan in the throes of hyperinflation, farmers could buy the land and pay it back at a fraction of what it would cost in times of price stability. In addition, a lot of farmers had cash because they were getting black-market prices for their food from desperate urban dwellers. This was a unique opportunity to knock out the power of the rural landlords once and for all and encourage broader landownership. Furthermore, farmers, once they had a vested interest in the land, would work harder and adopt improved methods of increasing yield, such as using insecticides and fertilizer and rebuilding irrigation dikes. The result turned out to be a win-win situation: The percentage of land owned by farmers soared from 10 to 89 percent, farmers were able to make their payments (most of them paying the whole amount up front), and they increased their yields to such an extent that by 1950 Japan was self-sufficient in food and people were consuming 1,800 calories a day. It was a five-year miracle: Hunger and famine had been eradicated for good. Admiring MacArthur’s achievement in land reform, Chiang Kai-shek told him in 1950 that if he “could have done in China what [you] did in Japan, I would still be there today.”

  MacArthur, with his acute ear for historical drama, likened Japanese land reform to the efforts of the Roman Gracchi brothers in the second century B.C. “Dad would have liked this,” he said proudly, thinking of his father’s similar work as military governor of the Philippines in 1900.

  MacArthur was not a man interested in the fine arts or the theater, but as an avid reader and book collector who had known the pain of cultural loss when the Japanese burned Manila and destroyed his personal library, he instituted measures to protect the Japanese patrimony. Given the grinding poverty right after the surrender and the widespread selling of antiques by city dwellers to the farmers, the loss of cultural treasures was a potential danger. To stop any vandalism or theft, SCAP ordered the Japanese to compile a list of the more than 150,000 temples and shrines throughout the country, identify the most important ones, and assign policemen to guard them. This was promptly done. In five years not a single important temple or museum was looted.

  Not only the temples and shrines, also the artworks and cultural artifacts of Japan needed protection. Enter the Monuments Men, a group of some 350 soldiers and civilians assigned to protect artwork and cultural monuments in war-ravaged Europe. A handful of these specialists were sent to Japan to serve in the Civil Information and Education Section of GHQ. Led by the enigmatic Langdon Warner, allegedly the model for Indiana Jones, and curator of the Harvard Fogg Museum and advisor to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the group—together with the Japanese Ministry of Culture—conducted an inventory of all Japanese arts and monuments, including temples, buildings, gardens, and national parks; evaluated war damage; and prepared plans for necessary restoration.

  After the Monuments Men completed their work in 1947–48 and returned to America to resume their careers as museum curators, GHQ expanded this effort in an entirely new and imaginative way. Whereas in Europe and America artworks are generally perceived to be paintings and sculptures, in Japan the definition of artwork is much broader, and includes the performing arts (bunraku, kabuki) and crafts (pottery, lacquer boxes, paper making, bamboo weaving, metalwork, fabric dyeing, and embroidery). Exhibiting the Japanese penchant for exactness and detail, these crafts require practitioners of utmost patience and skill (a ceremonial samurai sword, for example, consists of metal worked over and folded several thousand times). Because of the dire economy, there was the very real danger that these crafts would die out and Japanese tradition would be lost forever.

  Concern for the future stirred MacArthur to take action.

  “Curiously,” observed National Geographic magazine, “the idea of recognizing people as national treasures originated not with the Japanese but with an American—General of the Army Douglas MacArthur. Appalled by the wartime destruction of priceless works of art, he persuaded the Japanese to safeguard those who carried on the creative tradition.” In MacArthur’s view, art preservation involved more than just protecting ancient art, it required supporting future art by providing official recognition and financial assistance to living artists. Spurred by the supreme commander, the Diet passed a Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties. Included in the law was a designation of “Living National Treasures” for artists considered “Keepers of Important Intangible Cultural Properties.” Such individuals received grants to enable them to continue their craft, and—most important of all—to hire apprentices and train them to be their successors. Such designa
tion quickly became highly esteemed: artists nominated had to be approved by committees of experts and then by the minister of education, and finally by no less than the full cabinet of the Japanese government. No country in the world developed such a rigorous program for government support of the arts, certainly not America, be it at home or in subsequent military occupations such as Iraq.

  Today, long after the occupation ended, Japanese traditional crafts have continued to flourish—a remarkable feat. “Few countries have inherited more art worth saving,” says one art historian, “and fewer have matched what the Japanese have accomplished since World War Two in preserving their relics and artifacts.”

  All of which was engineered by one man who, when he returned to America, flooded his ten-room apartment with gifts of arts from the Japanese. A Japanese visitor to MacArthur’s New York City premises would have rejoiced at being back home in Japan.

  IN HIS ROLE as protector and builder, MacArthur had to contend with hard-liners in Washington outraged by Japan’s wartime barbarism. The commissioner for reparations in Germany, oil executive Edwin Pauley, was given the job in Japan as well. He came to Japan for an inspection and issued a report to President Truman stating that the Allied Powers “should take no action to assist Japan in maintaining a standard of living higher than that of neighboring Asiatic countries injured by Japanese aggression.” Pauley demanded the immediate seizure of half of Japan’s twenty-seven plants making machine tools, a reduction in the country’s annual steel-making capacity from 11 million to 2.5 million tons, and an even more severe cut in the airplane, shipbuilding, and ball bearing industries—with more restrictions to come later. MacArthur was aghast. Certainly there was merit in eliminating any war equipment manufacturing, but he had no intention of putting Japan back in the Stone Age. Japan was already in desperate straits: All people could think about was where their next meal was coming from. Not that it mattered to America’s Pacific allies on the Far Eastern Commission: they demanded compensation for the havoc Japan had inflicted on them. MacArthur disagreed: He believed that the purpose of reparations was not punishment but security. As far as equity was concerned, to claim that Korea and Formosa should have a standard of living as high as Japan was so ridiculous as not to merit discussion. The Japanese, by dint of their culture, education, and hard work had built up one of the post powerful countries in the world in the forty years since the turn of the century (albeit with help by raiding Japan’s neighbors for raw materials). MacArthur’s job was to put Japan back on track and steer it in the right direction. No way could Korea or Formosa ever match Japan.

  Pauley threw out a load of statistics to document his case. MacArthur, like any general thoroughly versed in logistics, looked at the statistics and found them wanting. The issue was a lot more complex than the numbers suggested, he said. What may work in transporting oil may not work when you’re dealing with an entire country. To break up a huge industrial plant, move it to another country, and reassemble it was fine from an engineering point of view, but how about the support infrastructure? Did Korea or China have the trained labor force to operate such machinery? Who would be the suppliers? Where was the transport/supply network? What about fabrication of spare parts when the machines broke down? Generals managing a massive invasion deal with these issues; most business executives don’t. So MacArthur resorted to a standard bureaucratic stunt: Do nothing and stall for time, even if it meant annoying his adversaries and making new enemies. Over the next four years much of the reform passion died out, and only a few of Pauley’s industrial plants would get moved; the remaining ones stayed where they were, producing materials and equipment for peacetime purposes.

  Besides the impoverished farmers, there was another group the supreme commander had JCS 1380/15 instructions to free: industrial workers. Like tenant farmers, they had been treated like vassals and their wages had fallen far behind the raging inflation. They posed a potential hotbed of trouble. On October 4, 1945, SCAP issued a “Bill of Rights” directive ordering the Japanese government to remove “restrictions on political, civil and religious liberties” and to release all political prisoners, including Communists. Another directive in November provided an expanded basis for collective activity, and a vast union movement was born. In a year’s time the number of workers belonging to a union would skyrocket to more than four million, and workers would begin to hope for better days to come.

  To ensure that they would, MacArthur gave the Japanese a gift, the best one America could possibly bestow: a new constitution. It would consolidate everything SCAP had attempted in land reform, labor rights, and political liberties to free Japan from hunger, fear, and feudalism. A year-end 1945 SCAP report called Summation of Non-Military Activities in Japan spelled out the challenge that lay ahead:

  Political activity is hampered by the concentration of the people on the paramount problems of food, clothing and shelter. Even if the essentials of life were adequate in Japan, it would be unrealistic to expect spontaneous and widespread participation of the people in politics. They would willingly punish the policy-makers and bureaucrats for losing the war, and that is about all.

  As for democracy, they have no experience with it in any way. Dignity of the individual is completely foreign to their background of feudalism and totalitarianism. The millions of peasants and the women in general are politically ignorant. Add to this the fact that real leaders are afraid to speak out, not knowing how long United States troops will be here to protect them against the dreaded secret police, and it will be readily understood why as yet there have been no significant political developments in Japan.

  11

  The Emperor Is Not a Kami

  ON THE PLANE ride to Atsugi, MacArthur made no mention of Shinto, the state religion that extolled Japan’s feudal past and proclaimed the emperor to be the sum of all verities. Yet if MacArthur was to break the hold of militarist sentiments and steer Japan into becoming a democracy, he must do something about Shinto, the national religious cult known as the Way of the Gods. He had his instructions from Washington: “Ultra-nationalistic and militaristic organizations and movements will not be permitted to hide behind the cloak of religion.”

  He made an initial foray with his October 4 civil liberties directive. Titled “Removal of Restrictions on Political, Civil, and Religious Liberties,” it attacked the use of religion as wartime propaganda and ordered the Japanese government to abrogate those laws that restricted freedom of thought, of religion, of assembly, and of speech, “including the unrestricted discussion of the Emperor, the Imperial Institution, and the Imperial Japanese Government.” Then came a public broadcast by John Carter Vincent, chief of the State Department’s Division of Far Eastern Affairs. “Shintoism, insofar as it is a religion of individual Japanese, is not to be interfered with,” said Vincent. “Shintoism, however, insofar as it is directed by the Japanese Government . . . is to be done away with.”

  Proceeding with care—any regulation of religion was a potential minefield, and this was the national religion—it took SCAP two months to finalize its policies. In mid-December it issued the Shinto directive, pronouncing the establishment of religious freedom:

  All propagation and dissemination of militaristic and ultra-nationalistic ideology in Shinto doctrines, practices, rites, ceremonies, and observances of any other religion, faith, sect, creed, or philosophy, are prohibited and will cease immediately. . . . The purpose of this directive is to separate religion from the state, to prevent misuse of religion for political ends, and to put all religions, faiths, and creeds upon exactly the same legal basis, entitled to precisely the same opportunities and protection. It forbids affiliation with the government, and the propagation and dissemination of militaristic and ultra-nationalist ideology not only to Shinto but to followers of all religions, faiths, sects, creeds, or philosophies.

  Particular reference was made to the emperor. The SCAP directive defined militaristic or ultranationalistic ideology as “the doctrine that the Emper
or of Japan is superior to other heads of state because of ancestry, descent or special origin.” Clearly, in trying to separate church from state, a major change had to be made to the role of the emperor. In the Shinto religion there is a fundamental word impossible to translate into English: kami (singular and/or plural), referring to spiritual entities and forces believed to be prevalent in man and in nature. Kami, evoking the deities, spirits, and gods, is and are everywhere, especially in the emperor.

  For the military men in SCAP, dealing with a concept like this was a challenge none of them had ever run into before. When a battlefield commander has an enemy he can’t see or comprehend, he moves gingerly. In their edicts on religion MacArthur and his team were very careful not to impugn the emperor’s position and dignity. Yet it was the emperor’s very position as an august being that had caused many Japanese militarists to accept the belief that war and any service to the state were fully justified. For the Japanese soldier, what higher calling than to fight for the emperor and to die in his service, even to the point of becoming a kamikaze?

  A 1937 government proclamation defined the emperor’s status as follows:

  The Emperor is a deity incarnate who rules our country in unison with the august will of the Imperial Ancestors. We do not mean, when respectfully referring to him as deity incarnate—marvelous deity—or humanly manifested deity, the so-called absolute God, or omniscient and omnipotent God, but signify that the Imperial Ancestors have manifested themselves in the person of the Emperor, who is their divine offspring, that the Emperor in turn is one in essence with the Imperial Ancestors, that he is forever the fountainhead for the growth and development of his subjects and the country, and that he is endlessly a superb august person.