Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  Yet for three weeks the two men did not meet.

  —

  MacArthur was unperturbed. Ordering Hirohito to visit “would be to outrage the feelings of the Japanese people and to make a martyr of the Emperor in their eyes,” he told his staff. “No, I shall wait, and in time the Emperor will voluntarily come to me.” Then he smiled sardonically. “In this case, the patience of the East rather than the haste of the West will best serve my purpose.”34

  Instead, he would begin with the foreign minister, Shigemitsu.

  Their meeting on September 2 after the surrender ceremony, was intense. MacArthur told him three proclamations were to be put into effect immediately. The first imposed SCAP’s military control over all Japan. The second ordered that any Japanese who violated the terms of surrender or “does any act calculated to disturb the public peace” would be tried by military court. The third imposed a new military occupation currency to replace the Japanese yen.

  Shigemitsu was “stunned.” Word of these proclamations would set Japanese-American occupation relations on the wrong foot, he told MacArthur bluntly. He pointed out they were addressed “to the people of Japan,” thus completely bypassing the cabinet and existing government. This would shake what was left of the ruling order loose from its foundations. Instead, he urged MacArthur to look for ways to set up close cooperation between the Japanese government, broken and discredited though it was, and SCAP.

  “Should the government fail to fulfill its duties, or should the occupation authorities feel the government’s policies are unsatisfactory,” Shigemitsu said, “then direct orders could be issued by the occupation officials.” But not before, he pleaded.

  MacArthur listened, and then said, “I have no intention of destroying the nation or making slaves of the Japanese people.” The purpose of the occupation was getting the Japanese people back on their feet. “If the government showed good faith, [then] problems could be solved easily.” MacArthur then turned to Sutherland, and told him all three proclamations were to be scrapped.35

  It was a major step forward in occupation relations. To Japanese officials, MacArthur now appeared to be someone amenable to reason, a force to be feared and obeyed but also one willing to listen. Here was a man they could deal with. For MacArthur, it was a lesson in the exercise of absolute power. Three days later, he received a directive from the Joint Chiefs reminding him “our relations with Japan do not rest on a contractual basis, but on an unconditional surrender” and “the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese government to rule the State is subordinate to you as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers,” and “you will exercise your authority as you deem proper to carry out your mission.”36

  Yet there was a difference in having supreme authority over 80 million people in a formal sense, and how it was exercised. MacArthur was determined not to repeat the mistakes that had been made in Germany after World War One; his goal was not just occupation of a defeated nation, but the transformation of its entire culture and society. He decided from the start that it would have to be done with Japanese cooperation, including that of former power-wielders in the old imperial government.

  Still, he was also determined that no one, including those in the United States, mistake restraint for weakness. “I have noticed some impatience in the press based upon the assumption of a so-called soft policy,” MacArthur told a klatch of reporters on September 14. “The surrender terms are not soft and they will not be applied in kid-gloved fashion.” When he learned that Shigemitsu had leaked details about their meeting to the Japanese media, MacArthur refused to have any more dealings with him. The foreign minister was forced to step down from the cabinet.37

  And still the emperor did not come.

  —

  The Dai-ichi Life Insurance Company’s home office was a massive granite building erected just before the war. It had survived the firebombing of Tokyo; even its air-conditioning system still functioned. MacArthur installed himself and his staff on the building’s top floor, while Jean and Arthur moved into the MacArthurs’ personal residence on Renanzaka Hill inside the U.S. embassy compound, just five minutes away by car.

  Like all his offices, MacArthur’s new one was spare. There were two comfortable leather couches in front of a large green-baize-covered desk. On the desk he kept a wooden in-and-out tray, pencils and a notepad, and not much more. MacArthur disliked having a telephone on his desk or an intercom system. He preferred a small buzzer he could use to summon his chief of staff or an aide, depending on the number of buzzes.

  Along the wall were a glass-enclosed bookcase, some upholstered chairs, and a stand with the flags of his various commands, including that of SCAP. Behind his desk hung two portraits, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and in the middle a framed quotation from the Roman historian Livy that read in part:

  I am not one of those who think that commanders ought at no time to receive advice; on the contrary, I should deem that man more proud than wise, who regulated every proceeding by the standard of his own single judgment.

  Balancing that rather humble sentiment was a quotation from Abraham Lincoln mounted under the picture of the sixteenth president:

  If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for business. I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten thousand angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

  For the next six years this office would be the center of MacArthur’s universe. He never traveled to see the rest of Japan; outside of some government officials and some distinguished visitors, he hardly ever ventured out to meet any Japanese people—a source of criticism then and later. Even Jean and Arthur were little more than occasional diversions from the task that confronted him every day on the sixth floor of the Dai-ichi building: how to reconstruct a broken nation almost from scratch.

  The scale of the task was only beginning to sink in; so was the scale of the justice that would have to be meted out to punish Japan for the war crimes it had committed. With the collapse of Japan’s empire had come more and more evidence of hideous atrocities, not only against Asia’s civilians, such as the mass gang rapes and murders in the capture of Nanking in 1937, but also against Allied prisoners of war. Under the Japanese the death rate among British and Dutch POWs was one in four.

  By contrast, the death rate of all Allied soldiers captured by the Germans and Italians was one in four hundred. Among Australians and Americans in Japanese captivity, the death rate was an appalling one in three.38

  MacArthur had seen for himself the horrors inflicted on his men who were captured on Bataan. He had learned how 76,000 American and Filipino prisoners had been force-marched one hundred miles without food or water to POW camps infested with dysentery, typhus, and malaria. The 18,000 prisoners who couldn’t make the Bataan death march had been either shot or beaten to death along the way. At one point Japanese guards herded 150 POWs into a bunker, doused them with gasoline, and set them alight.

  A similar march in Thailand had seen 3,500 POWs starved, beaten, or shot. At Sendakan prison camp in Borneo hundreds were shot or decapitated or even crucified in the last days of the war. There was also shocking documentary evidence of medical experiments on Allied prisoners, including injections of anthrax and other deadly infectious diseases.39

  All this, and much more, demanded a reckoning. Many wartime Japanese leaders knew it, and feared it. General Hideki Tojo, Japan’s premier at the time of Pearl Harbor, was one of forty people that MacArthur ordered arrested for trial as war criminals (General Masaharu Homma, MacArthur’s old antagonist and the man responsible for the Bataan death marches, was another). On September 24, Tojo attempted suicide. American army doctors saved his life.

  Many Japanese were shocked and disgusted that the premier who had issued the order urging that soldiers
“not live to incur the shame of becoming a prisoner” had allowed himself to be a prisoner at all, then attempted suicide with a pistol instead of the traditional samurai sword—and managed to botch it.40

  And still the emperor did not come.

  —

  MacArthur waited three weeks.

  Then on September 27 a large Daimler limousine, flanked by two motorcycle outriders and four other cars pulled out of the Imperial Palace grounds. Inside was a slim middle-aged man in a morning coat, striped trousers, and silk top hat, wearing what one Japanese eyewitness called “an extraordinarily somber expression.”41

  The car crossed the moat and mounted the hill toward the city of Tokyo. At the Toranomon crossroad witnesses saw the limousine do something extraordinary.

  When the light turned red, the car stopped. No one had seen the emperor stop for a traffic light before; his motorcades had always traveled after the route had been cleared of all traffic, an imperial process without halting or pausing.

  Soon the car arrived at the entrance to the American embassy. MacArthur had known Hirohito was coming, and he kept the visit top secret so there were no press or photographers. But he was not there to greet the emperor—another unforgivable breach of imperial protocol in the old days, but now a somber reality of Japan under American occupation.

  Guards opened the Daimler’s doors and Hirohito stepped out. He had a strangely bewildered and forlorn expression, until General Bonner Fellers stepped up with hand extended.

  “Welcome, sir.” It was General Bonner Fellers, who had acted as MacArthur’s chief advisor on things Japanese even before the surrender. Indeed, it was Fellers who had ensured that Hirohito wasn’t at that moment sitting in a prison cell.

  Fellers escorted the emperor upstairs. The imperial retinue of nine officials remained below, looking anxious and surrounded by unsmiling American faces.

  Upstairs, Fellers took the emperor’s top hat and noticed his hands were trembling. He looked “frightened to death,” Fellers remembered.42

  There on the threshold of the drawing room stood MacArthur. He wore his usual khakis, with five stars on the collar and no tie. This casual appearance was another breach of imperial protocol, even an insult—and MacArthur knew it. The Japanese press, when they saw the photos afterward, were horrified. But it sent another vivid, unmistakable message: America was now in charge.

  Hirohito greeted the supreme commander with a deep bow, very low, “a servant’s bow,” Fellers noticed. MacArthur noticed also, and also saw the emperor’s strain. “He was nervous and the stress of the past months showed plainly….[I] tried to make it as easy for him as I could, but I knew how deep and dreadful must be his agony.”43

  MacArthur then dismissed everyone except the interpreter and directed Hirohito toward chairs near the fireplace.

  He offered the Tenno a cigarette, which Hirohito took with thanks—although his hands shook as MacArthur lit it.

  MacArthur noted with a sardonic coyness, “You know, we’ve met before.” Hirohito’s head cocked in mild curiosity. The general explained. It was when he had been visiting his father, Arthur MacArthur, at the close of the Russo-Japanese War, and he had been introduced to the five-year-old prince.

  There was an awkward pause. Clearly Hirohito was not interested in revisiting the remote past. It was the more recent past he was focused on, as he made clear in his first opening sally.

  “I come to you, General MacArthur,” he said, “to submit myself to the judgment of the powers you represent as the one to bear sole responsibility for every political and military move taken by my people in the conduct of the war.”

  Even on this most extraordinary of days, it was an extraordinary thing to say, and MacArthur was startled. Hirohito was taking responsibility for the terrible crimes committed in his name by Japanese soldiers throughout the war, including those against MacArthur’s own men during the death marches from Bataan. Hirohito obviously knew that his former prime minister Tojo was under arrest; would he himself be arrested now? Japan’s divine emperor had no way of knowing.

  The British and Russians, for example, had been clamoring to see him arrested and tried as a war criminal. A congressional resolution to that effect was already circulating in Washington.44 But MacArthur was of a different opinion—and Hirohito’s willingness to take the fall, even on these broad terms, broke the ice.

  MacArthur’s attitude changed from astonishment to relief. “A tremendous impression swept me,” he wrote later. “This courageous assumption of a responsibility implicit with death, a responsibility clearly belied by facts of which I was fully aware”—namely, that Hirohito had largely acquiesced in policies imposed by the military and its allies, rather than vice versa—“moved me to the marrow of my bones. He was an Emperor by inherent birth, but in that instant I knew I faced the First Gentleman of Japan in his own right.”45

  Others were far less sure. Later some would wonder if Hirohito, by his seeming candidness in this first meeting, hadn’t actually dodged a bullet—or at least a hangman’s noose. But MacArthur had no more doubts. He felt he now had a partner in remaking Japan, one who would make sure that what MacArthur was about to do would be sanctioned and obeyed by the Japanese people.

  Then they spoke of the war’s end. MacArthur praised Hirohito’s personal intervention in forcing a surrender—at the risk of his own life. “The peace party did not prevail until the bombing of Hiroshima created a situation which could be dramatized,” Hirohito explained—in other words, that the only alternative to peace was the extinction of Japan itself. On the other hand, Hirohito refused to say that he regarded going to war in the first place as a mistake. “It wasn’t clear to me that our course was unjustified.” Again, his statement showed an astonishing candidness when addressed to the representative of the country whose ships and planes had been attacked at Pearl Harbor.46

  MacArthur, however, was willing to move on. He laid out to Hirohito what he believed would be the overall principles of the American occupation, including the establishment of democracy. “I found he had a more thorough grasp of the democratic concept than almost any Japanese with whom I talked,” MacArthur marveled. Others would be more skeptical.

  They said nothing more about the war. Both were thinking about the future, although no one knows whether MacArthur raised the ticklish subject of the emperor renouncing his own divinity—another of the nonnegotiable demands that the Allies had made and that MacArthur was determined to impose.

  Then the meeting was over. They stepped into MacArthur’s office for photographs. Then the two men headed downstairs, where Hirohito’s retinue waited, enormously relieved to see him safe and alive. MacArthur took the courteous step of escorting the emperor to his car—but did not shake hands, and turned to leave before the imperial motorcade had driven away.

  Back upstairs he met both Jean and Arthur. MacArthur was starting to tell her how the emperor looked, but Jean burst out laughing. “Oh, I saw him,” she confessed. “Arthur and I were peeking behind the red curtains.”

  MacArthur laughed and they left the study. Servants cleared away the remains of the meeting, emptied the ashtrays and stirred the fire.

  One coffee cup stared up at them. It was the emperor’s, still full. MacArthur had poured, but the emperor had left the cup untouched. Was it nerves? Or perhaps fear of being poisoned? Some in his retinue had worried that the Americans might make it happen. Did Hirohito worry as well?

  To this day no one knows. But it was a sign that the bond of trust that MacArthur and Hirohito had started to forge still had a very long way to go.47

  CHAPTER 27

  BEING SIR BOSS

  Asia may yet be destined to exhibit the greatest of political wonders.

  —ARTHUR MACARTHUR, “CHINESE MEMORANDUM,” 1882

  The photograph taken in MacArthur’s office appeared in both Japanese and American papers the next day. It shows a defeated but still-divine emperor in his morning coat and trousers, looking like someone abo
ut to undergo heart surgery with no anesthesia, and a victorious general in casual khakis with his hands on his hips, looking cool and collected with a slightly disrespectful slouch. Some Japanese were shocked by the picture; more-traditionalist ones were outraged. But no one could deny that something totally unprecedented had happened. “It seemed the Son of Heaven had stepped down to a very earthy earth,” wrote one source. “As nothing else could, the imperial homage to MacArthur told the people that Japan was truly beaten.”1

  They were also learning who was now the undisputed master of their country.

  Certainly his instructions from Washington had told MacArthur that. “Your authority is supreme,” Truman’s own brief to him had read. “You will exercise our authority as you deem proper to carry out your mission.” The emperor’s visit had only put the final stamp on it. Now MacArthur and his team could get down to business.

  To any ordinary person, even a five-star general, it would have seemed a gargantuan task—single-handedly running an entire nation of eighty million people—but MacArthur approached it, as he did everything else, with supreme confidence rooted in a faith in his own competence.

  For one thing, military occupations were nothing new to him. “I garrisoned the West Bank of the Rhine as commander of the Rainbow Division at the end of World War One,” he could remind any visitor to the Dai-ichi building. He had also seen his father do the same in the Philippines.

  “At first hand I saw what I thought were basic and fundamental weaknesses” of past American occupations, he wrote. One was the reliance on military instead of civilian authority to get things done, which failed to allow ordinary organs of government to resume or take on functions. Another was “the loss of self-respect and self-confidence by the people [and] the lowering of the spiritual and moral tone of a population [ruled] by foreign bayonets.”