Clearly, something had to be done, but what? Mused MacArthur to Bonner Fellers shortly after his first meeting with the emperor: Wouldn’t it be nice if he relinquished the throne? That wouldn’t happen, of course, but no harm speculating. Hirohito was both the Son of God and the titular head of state, with vague decision-making powers that defied Western logic. For example, in listening to his cabinet’s deliberations on declaring war, was his silence a form of assent, or was it just an opportunity for him to be informed? Such subtleties would be difficult for most outsiders to grasp, certainly for most Americans. If the supreme commander understood the Oriental mind as he boasted, surely he could find a way to clarify the emperor’s role. The emperor’s spiritual role as well as his executive role must be reduced. For the Japanese people to continue to venerate him like a deity, to consider him sacrosanct and indispensable, was unacceptable in a constitutional democracy.
MacArthur’s meeting with the emperor had gone well. Now he must do more, and bring this man down to earth.
Every military organization has spies, which is why MacArthur had Charles Willoughby as one of his top aides. The supreme commander placed great emphasis on “intelligence.” He must use it here. Having only limited options to reach out to the emperor discreetly, he needed help. He needed someone who knew what the emperor was thinking, and he needed a man who could contact the emperor without making it seem that the communication came from MacArthur himself.
The history of heroes and great deeds often turns on the minutest instances of coincidence, where the gods of good fortune (such as they are) exercise their sublime craft. Out of the clear blue, when MacArthur least expected it—he didn’t even know the man—an Englishman appeared who had indirect access to the emperor. Actually, it wasn’t just one man, it was several men—English, American, and Japanese—acting on a chain of events with Dr. Reginald Blyth as the common link. What followed would become known as “the ‘secret history.’ ”
The Japanese have an expression where a man claps his hands loudly and exclaims: “Which hand made the sound?” In what would turn out to be the emperor’s most significant public gesture during the occupation, many hands made the sound. It began in mid-November 1945, when Dr. Blyth, a teacher of English literature, was having discussions with the Civil Information and Education Section of SCAP about potential employment. He and Lt. Col. Harold Henderson, a Monuments Man and Columbia professor, discovered they had a common interest in Japanese literature, and Col. Ken Dyke, the head of the CI&E Section, offered Blyth a position. Several days later Blyth reappeared to thank Dyke and Henderson and to tell them that unfortunately he had decided to accept a position elsewhere at a prestigious private school in Tokyo, the Peers School. He also let them know that he had been requested to help Mrs. Vining tutor the crown prince in English and to act as informal liaison between the imperial household and CI&E. He had no idea what this all meant, if anything, but felt that at least he should tell them this. The two SCAP officers were intrigued, and agreed that such a liaison role could be mutually beneficial, and that Blyth would accept the teaching job and feel free to drop in at CI&E should he have anything interesting to report.
Within days Blyth started arriving at SCAP’s offices twice a week, escorted in a limousine provided by the Japanese government, a form of transportation that undoubtedly raised eyebrows at SCAP. One day Blyth came for his usual meeting with Henderson, only this time he had some hot news. From the minister of the imperial household he had learned that the emperor had decided to renounce his divinity because it had been taken advantage of by the extremists, and such maneuverings had no place in the new world of peaceful coexistence symbolized by MacArthur. More important, said Blyth, neither the emperor nor his advisers knew how to draft such an announcement—almost as if they were indirectly asking him for some suggestions.
Henderson was “flabbergasted.” This was exciting. Because his boss, Ken Dyke, was out of the office on a trip, he proposed they wait a couple of days. That wouldn’t do, Blyth told him, he needed it right away. Operating in a vacuum, Henderson duly wrote out some comments on a sheet of yellow memo paper—taking care not to sign it lest it seem official—and gave it to Blyth. Blyth in turn passed the handwritten note to the principal of the Peers School and a close friend of the emperor, Adm. Kakunoshin Yamanashi. Yamanashi would say little about his role in the unfolding drama, except that “the opportunity being ripe, a heaven-sent door was opened, and contact between the Imperial Household developed very naturally” before everyone was “fully aware of what was happening.” “One or two persons,” he said, making it clear he was talking about Blyth, “acting in great secrecy made an informal voluntary effort.”
The next day held an even bigger surprise for Henderson: Blyth returned with the piece of yellow paper and told Henderson that the palace officials wanted the paper burned in Blyth’s presence, and him to report back that this had been done. Henderson carried out this strange request, wondering what would come next. He didn’t have to wait long. Within twenty-four hours, on December 7, Blyth was back in Henderson’s office, this time with a draft he had cleared with the emperor’s friend Admiral Yamanashi. The draft contained a paragraph almost exactly as Henderson had written it, word for word.
He called in Ken Dyke, who immediately took it to the supreme commander. MacArthur read it, said he was delighted, and handed it back to Dyke to return to the enigmatic Blyth. There the matter rested for several weeks. Other than Christmas greetings, there was no official communication between MacArthur and the emperor or between their staffs about what had just transpired. Everything remained hush-hush.
Meanwhile, activities were taking place in the Royal Palace. For some time the emperor had been reflecting on his imperial role and how it had been abused by aggressive militarists claiming implied approval by the ancestral deities. He even went so far as to exclaim to his aides: “I am not a kami, I am a human being with organs like other human beings!”
The emperor summoned his prime minister, Baron Kijuro Shidehara, for a meeting on December 10. Shidehara, who had a copy of Blyth’s memorandum, which he knew had been seen by the supreme commander, had a good idea what was coming. Hirohito began by telling the story of a previous emperor who had abdicated in 1629 in order to get medical treatment because his own doctors weren’t allowed to touch his holy body. “Wasn’t that absurd?” he commented. The emperor went on to tell the prime minister that extremists had misused his divinity to promote their own ends, and unless the traditional ideas about his so-called divine nature were corrected, he could “never be the emperor of a democratized Japan.” He instructed Shidehara to draft a rescript which he would deliver to the Japanese people on New Year’s Day.
The choice of Shidehara to write the speech was an obvious one. The emperor knew his speech would be read carefully by MacArthur and by the U.S. government in Washington, and nobody in Japan had better command of English than Shidehara. His English was so good, in fact, that when he wrote a speech for a foreign audience, he wrote it in English—and then did the translation into Japanese. Such a man could be counted on to express Japanese thoughts in the simple language the emperor wanted for this epochal announcement.
On the morning of December 30 the cabinet approved the proposed proclamation, which was then relayed to GHQ for the supreme commander’s approval. It was for his ears only—everything verbal, nothing put down on paper and permanently kept. MacArthur listened to the Japanese official reading out loud the English translation, and silently nodded his head. Two days later, on New Year’s Day 1946, the emperor issued his rescript, which stunned the Japanese people. A new era had arrived: The emperor had renounced his divinity. The crucial paragraph, two times approved by MacArthur, read:
The ties between Us and Our People have always stood upon mutual trust and affection. They do not depend upon mere legends and myths. They are not predicated upon the false conception that the Emperor is divine, and that the Japanese people are superior to othe
r races and fated to rule the world.
MacArthur’s role behind the scenes was not what the public heard, nor was a word ever said about the other players involved: Blyth, Henderson, Dyke, Yamanashi, and Shidehara. The New York Times ran a story claiming that the general first learned of the rescript on December 30, and of course it got the story wrong in just the way MacArthur wanted: “That afternoon a representative of the government called the Commander-in-Chief’s office, outlined the terms of the rescript and asked General MacArthur if there were any objections by the Allies. The General then was asked if I would read and approve the terms of the rescript and he promptly refused.”*
The secret mating dance of MacArthur and the emperor had scored again.
It was more than just two men indirectly working in concert. Words matter. Precision of language can be all-important. Hirohito, borrowing from Henderson, was saying that the ties that bound the throne and the nation had always been based on mutual trust and affection and not on mere myth and legend. He was offering to modernize his office and to support whatever political and social changes Japan might be forced by the Americans to undergo; he was flexible and would adapt in the spirit of mutual trust.
A flurry of directives, already under way and with many more to come, would reach into every nook and cranny of Japanese life. The abolition of the military police, the purge of the militarists, the elimination of restrictions on labor, the creation of a new constitution, the enfranchisement of women and the reform of the education system, and the breakup of monopolistic family trusts would usher in a more modern and democratic state. Of all these changes, none was more revolutionary than the separation of church and state. From there on, there would be no more of Japan’s religion of conquest.
FOLLOWING THESE TWO directives on civil liberties and Shinto, SCAP issued one on religious corporations, forbidding government control over the organization and activities of religious groups. This caused an unforeseen problem. Japan had some 46,000 temples and 109,000 shrines, most of which sat on state-owned property. Since the state could longer own religious property, it must sell these land parcels back to the temples and shrines. At what valuation? The temples and shrines, now cut off from any state financial support, lacked the money to pay fair-market value for the land. Either they would have to persuade the state to give away the land for free or, more likely, rely on contributions from individuals for the necessary money. However, people were telling SCAP officials that they didn’t like being pressured by neighborhood associations to make a contribution, and they wanted MacArthur to “do something about it.” It would take several years for SCAP to help resolve this complicated situation, whereby the state gradually relinquished its ownership of over 100,000 parcels of property.
Some of the Shinto shrines had to be treated with the utmost sensitivity. As pointed out by one of the U.S. naval officers in charge of education reform, the Yasukuni Shrine, alleged to represent the souls of the military dead, was revered “in the same way that Americans look on Arlington Cemetery.” Even more formidable was a shrine honoring the war goddess Amaterasu, the mythical founder of Japan: the Ise Grand Shrine, “a Jerusalem, Mount Vernon and Vatican” all rolled into one.
Who owns Mount Fuji? This turned out to be the strangest dispute of all. The Fujinomiya Shrine claimed ownership of the summit—the last 2,000 feet up to the peak—where it had an inner sanctum for holy worship. Allowing the state to own such a place and let the public wander around, it argued, would be a profanity. The Japanese Ministry of Finance, representing the government, disagreed, claiming that the summit belonged to the Japanese people. The case would eventually be decided by the Japanese courts in 1967 in favor of the shrine; then it would go to the Supreme Court, where once again the government lost.
The Japanese people had an interesting reason to wonder about SCAP’s religious policies in December 1945 and the turn of the New Year. It was hardly a festive time for a country still reeling from the war and people freezing in the cold, yet every occupation office building was adorned with bright Christmas lights. Two enormous Christmas trees flanked the entrance of the Dai Ichi Building. MacArthur adopted the position that such decorations were to communicate the festivity of the occasion, and not the religious significance of the Feast of the Nativity. The supreme commander was not a churchman, but he most definitely was religious: In his public utterances he consistently thanked God for divine guidance. In November 1945 he had welcomed four Protestant leaders with great enthusiasm: “Japan is a spiritual vacuum,” he told them. “If you do not fill it with Christianity, it will be filled with Communism. Send me 1,000 missionaries!” He also asked for 10,000 Bibles. His staff members told him this was going too far: What would the Buddhists and Shintoists think? He should speak of “religious principles” rather than “Christian principles.” Taking their advice, he eventually backed off, if only reluctantly. It wasn’t until his New Year’s Day message of 1948 that he managed to speak of religion only in the abstract. He never made public references to Christianity again.
Shinto as the state religion of Japan had ceased to exist. Shinto as practiced through the shrines could remain. All physical symbols of state Shinto were removed from public buildings, and public money could no longer be used to support the shrines. The Japanese people were freed from any state-sanctioned compulsion to believe in Shinto. Public education and all official propaganda were freed of Shinto teaching, and school textbooks were purged of Shinto-inspired nationalism.
In the spring of 1946 a mission of American educators, the Stoddard Commission, visited Japan. In its report to the supreme commander recommending reforms to Japan’s education system, it sought to describe the American approach to reform: to work with the existing system in Japan as much as possible, not tear it all down and start anew. “We believe in the power of every race and every nation to create from its own cultural resources something good for itself and for the whole world. That is the liberal creed,” the commission wrote. “It is the responsibility of all in authority to find out how much can be allowed rather than how much can be forbidden. That is the meaning of liberalism.”
Shortly thereafter, in April of that year, the supreme commander spoke of the forthcoming elections where voters, for the first time, would include women and everyone could vote free of any influence from a state-sponsored religion. It was essential for the Japanese to understand the new ideology of democracy. Following the words of the Stoddard Commission, MacArthur sought to describe the opportunity and responsibility facing the Japanese people: “Pure democracy is immediately a spiritual quality which voluntarily must spring from the determined will of the people. It thus, if it is to become firmly rooted, may not be imposed upon a people by force, trickery, or coercion—nor is it a quality for barter or trade.”
12
Drawing Up a Utopia
TWO WEEKS AFTER the Americans arrived at Atsugi, the Japanese government sent a senior official to meet the supreme commander. He was Prince Fumimaro Konoe, three-time prime minister and a man who had opposed going to war with the United States. Presumably this was meant as a “peace offering” to get relations off to a good start. Konoe’s mission: to sound out MacArthur on his intentions for Japan. The two men met again on October 4, the day MacArthur issued his “Bill of Rights” directive ordering the Japanese government to remove restrictions on political, civil, and religious liberties and to release all political prisoners. Konoe asked if MacArthur had any ideas regarding the organization of the Japanese government and the composition of the Diet. MacArthur gave general responses about his directive issued that day, but on one item he was very specific: “The Japanese Constitution must be revised. It is essential to introduce into government sufficient liberal elements through constitutional revision.” Without such revision, he argued, any reforms would be vulnerable to the whims of future cabinets after the occupation ended.
So startling was MacArthur’s pronouncement that George Atcheson, who was at the meeting, immedia
tely sent a telegram to his superiors at the State Department asking if this was new U.S. policy. The State Department was just as surprised as Atcheson and wanted to know what was going on. Two days later MacArthur sent Atcheson to meet again with Konoe to discuss desired changes in the Japanese constitution.
In the meantime the Lord Privy Seal, Marquis Kido, had selected a new prime minister, a man pulled out of retirement and given his new role largely because of his pro-American views and opposition to the war. He was Baron Kijuro Shidehara, a former foreign minister and ambassador to the United States who had appeared on the cover of Time in 1931 as “Japan’s Man of Peace and War.” His reemergence on the national scene at the age of seventy-five, after being out of the public eye for ten years, caught people by surprise. Some even asked, “Isn’t Shidehara dead?” He came to pay his respects to the supreme commander, expecting this to be a courtesy call. No sooner had the gentleman sat down than MacArthur gave him a list of reforms he wanted put into effect. They included women’s rights and independence, encouragement of labor unions, a wider distribution of income, an end to monopolies, and public ownership of production and trade. Schools should be liberalized and start teaching “a system under which government becomes the servant rather than the master of the people.” Furthermore, there should be an end to “secret inquisition and abuse” by officials. The elderly diplomat made his way home in a daze: Never in his years in Washington had he met an American so predisposed to executive action.
On October 11, following his meeting with the prime minister, MacArthur issued a “Statement” to the Japanese government: “In the achievement of the Potsdam Declaration, the traditional order . . . will be corrected. This will undoubtedly involve a liberalization of the Constitution.” Shidehara responded by creating a subcommittee with an interesting name, the Committee for the Investigation of Constitutional Problems, subsequently usually referred to as the Matsumoto Committee after its chairman, State Minister Joji Matsumoto.
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