Some Americans were horrified. There were those, like Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, who thought one of the war’s goals should be “almost total elimination of the Japanese as a race.” Gallup polls showed that 13 percent of Americans believed every Japanese should be exterminated. Why should they care if the Japanese starved—and why confiscate the food set aside for our boys overseas to prevent it?
MacArthur’s terse reply was that “the Japanese people are now our prisoners,” no less than the men in Bataan had been Japan’s. How can America claim to punish those responsible for starving and mistreating them if Americans do it themselves? “To cut off Japan’s relief supplies in this situation would cause starvation to countless Japanese,” he told Washington, “and starvation breeds mass unrest, disorder, and violence. Give me bread or give me bullets.”18
MacArthur got the bread—plus rice, powdered milk, tinned corned beef, and mountains of K and C rations that Japan needed to stay alive, while GHQ made sure it was properly distributed across the country. In the end, more than $2 billion worth of food, medicine, and relief goods came to Japan during MacArthur’s tenure, most of it during the critical first year of 1945–46.
To the Japanese, it seemed a miracle. MacArthur’s relief efforts were “like a merciful rain during a drought,” one Japanese yearbook stated at the end of 1945, and “kindled a light of hope” in Japan’s beaten, often homeless masses.19
Food shortages would continue down to the end of the occupation. But after the initial crisis, American aid prevented further outbreaks of malnutrition—or of any civil disturbance. It also sowed the seeds of a new respect for Americans, and especially for the man at their head.
He was going to need it. In October the hammer began to fall on the remains of Japan’s prewar totalitarian order.
—
The first, and most massive, task was demobilizing what remained of the Japanese army. It still amounted to some seven million individuals, grouped in 154 divisions, including 57 divisions inside Japan itself. This could have been a complex, even potentially dangerous job—unlike in Nazi Germany, where at surrender there was virtually no organized army left.
But thanks to the breaking of the Japanese army code, Willoughby’s G-2 had extensive knowledge of where the units were and who commanded them, and both he and MacArthur had had the experience of overseeing the Japanese surrender in the Philippines. They knew that the individual members of this army were largely broken men, bitter and disillusioned toward their former leaders, who had little reason or incentive left to fight on. By October, the peaceful extinction of the Japanese army in Japan was all but complete.20
On the 16th MacArthur could report, “Today the Japanese Armed Forces throughout Japan completed their demobilization and ceased to exist as such…I know of no demobilization in history either in war or peace, by our own or any other country, that has been accomplished so rapidly or so frictionlessly.”21
Repatriating Japanese soldiers from abroad, as well as Japanese POWs and millions of civilians who had been sent out as colonists to places like Korea, Manchuria, and the South Sea Islands but who were now hated and homeless, was a more laborious task. In the end, it required the cooperation of virtually every Allied country, including the Soviet Union. But again the administrative wheels of SCAP took on the task, and by the end of 1945 almost a million Japanese had returned home, including half a million former soldiers—the first wave of a repatriation process that would still be going on three decades later.22
For the Japanese in Soviet hands, the process would be particularly brutal. Perhaps as many as half a million Japanese, both soldiers and civilians, would die in Soviet detention camps. Almost a quarter million of those perished in the Manchurian winter of 1945–46.23 Together with Stalin’s seizure of the Kuril Islands and the Sakhalin peninsula, it was an atrocity that didn’t bode well for Communism’s popularity in postwar Japan—while the prestige of MacArthur and Americans, who sent their own LSTs and former Liberty ships to bring back Japanese, rode correspondingly high.
The next blow to the old order fell on October 4, when MacArthur promulgated a civil liberties directive. The Japanese government was henceforth to abrogate all laws restricting freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and freedom of the press, as well as ending all laws involving discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or political ideology (including Communism); and release from prison all persons who had been incarcerated on the basis of those laws. At the same time, the minister of home affairs, his police chief, and some 5,000 police officials across Japan were dismissed from their jobs.24
This “Magna Carta” for postwar Japan was too much for the sitting prime minister and his cabinet, who resigned en bloc on October 5. MacArthur later insisted that his new ally the emperor had fired them; the truth was they simply could not stomach changes this radical.25 The State Department, on the other hand, wanted the former prime minister arrested as a suspected war criminal. MacArthur said no; in dealing with Japan’s cabinet he was pushing ahead to the future, not settling scores from the past.
The new prime minister, Baron Shidehara, found this out when he was summoned to MacArthur’s office on October 11, where the supreme commander read to him a seven-point memorandum on the reforms he wanted the new government to implement. These included creating free labor unions, the end of child labor practices, “the opening of schools to more liberal education” so that the Japanese people would learn that the government was there to serve them, rather than vice versa, and the end of Japan’s oligarchic economic system.
But the most radical change of all, the one that headed the list, was votes for women.26
This last point must have made the old baron’s glasses steam up and his mustache curl. For Japanese traditionalists, the notion of women having the vote, let alone legal equality, flew in the face of centuries of de jure as well as de facto patriarchalism. But MacArthur was adamant.
It was part of a larger scheme of his, not only to enfranchise women but to transform their status in Japanese life. They would have an important role in reshaping Japanese culture, moving it away from its militarist past and toward a democratic future. That had been one of MacArthur’s goals in Germany in 1919, when he told journalist William Allen White that he saw German women armed with the vote as the principal obstacle to an imperial German revival.
He felt the same way about Japan, and no doubt having strong female role models of his own like his mother and Jean gave him the confidence that when Japan’s women got the vote, it would “change the entire complexion of Japanese political life” for the better. As he wrote in his memoirs, “Of all the reforms accomplished by the occupation of Japan, none was more heartwarming for me than [the] change in the status of women” he had set in motion.27
The other related duty he expected Shidehara to carry out was the writing of a new constitution, one that cleared away the worst authoritarian features of the Meiji constitution drawn up in 1889. The government had already called for a general election by April 1946. Very well, MacArthur told him, it would have to take place under a constitution that embodied the key democratic principles encapsulated in his seven-point memorandum, as well as ending the emperor’s divine status and position as absolute ruler.
Shidehara promised it would, and appointed a committee to oversee the process headed by Dr. Joji Matsumoto, a seventy-year-old former law professor at the University of Tokyo. It was not until early February 1946 that the committee presented its handiwork, and this time it was MacArthur’s spectacles that steamed up. “It turned out to be nothing more than a rewording of the old Meiji constitution,” MacArthur wrote. “The power of the Emperor was deleted not a whit.” The old phrase describing the Tenno’s powers as “sacred and inviolable” was changed to “supreme and inviolable”—hardly a significant difference. Even worse, most of the new rights granted to the Japanese, like freedom of speech and religion, were made subordinate to statutory law, which meant they could be taken away by
passing new laws or by simply changing the constitution.
MacArthur declared the new constitution unacceptable. The Japanese had tried and failed; now it was the Americans’ turn.28
They did not have a lot of time. The deadline for registering to vote in the April election was looming. On February 4 twenty members of the Government Section were called together in a conference room, where Courtney Whitney read them their orders. They had ten days, he said, to draft a new Japanese constitution. The stunned Kades, head of GS, had already told Whitney it was impossible; his section had far too much to do already.
“Lock the doors,” was Whitney’s grim response. “We’re just going into executive session—the whole Government Section.”29
Whitney also passed along to Kades MacArthur’s detailed instructions on what this new constitution would have to look like. First, there was to be a truly representative legislature, elected on the principle of popular sovereignty; second, all titles of nobility and feudal privileges were to be abolished; third, although the emperor was to remain as head of state through dynastic succession, all his powers were to be subordinate to the constitution, while “the budget was to be patterned after the British system.” Finally, “[n]o Japanese Army, Navy, or Air Force will ever be authorized and no rights of belligerency will ever be conferred upon any Japanese force,” meaning the constitution would make renunciation of war a matter of fundamental Japanese law.
All of these were provisions of a new constitution that the State Department had outlined in a memo forwarded on to MacArthur via the Joint Chiefs on January 9. In that sense, the claim that “it was a State Department document that MacArthur put into effect” is perfectly true—except for one provision. That memo (SWNCC 228) includes no mention of making the Japanese renounce war, now and forever. That was entirely MacArthur’s doing; and however understandable, it was the one constitutional provision that would cause the most friction with the powers back in Washington.30
Meanwhile, the GS men went to work in a frenzy. They set up separate committees to draft provisions on the emperor, on civil liberties, on local government, and so on—all of which contributed to those sections of the final constitution. MacArthur’s instruction about British-style budgets caused some head-scratching until someone pointed out that it simply meant the Japanese Diet or legislature was to have full power of the purse, and hence ultimate control over the executive—including the emperor.
Kades and his team had to scramble to find English-language copies of the U.S., Weimar, and French constitutions to serve as models. Someone found a book with extracts from Abraham Lincoln’s speeches; another found a book on constitutions in the University of Tokyo law library. Someone else discovered a copy of the writings of one of the original authors of the 1789 French constitution, the Abbé Sieyès.31
At the end of nine days, the exhausted team had finished. They handed in their draft on April 12. At ten o’clock in the morning on April 13, General Whitney appeared at the home of Japanese foreign minister Shigeru Yoshida, where Dr. Matsumoto and two other officials were also waiting.
In the minister’s study Whitney insisted on sitting with his back to the sun, so he could see every detail of the Japanese reaction. He told them bluntly that the Matsumoto draft “was wholly unacceptable to the Supreme Commander as a document of freedom and democracy.” He then handed them fifteen copies in Japanese of the new draft constitution and left the room.
He wandered down into the garden, where an American plane was passing overhead. He and his assistant turned around to see Matsumoto’s secretary coming to join them.
“Ah,” Whitney said, “we are out enjoying the warmth of atomic energy.” The secretary’s face went dead white as he spoke. It was a cruel, but meaningful reference to Hiroshima—and a reminder of who was in charge and who was not.
At ten minutes to eleven Whitney returned to the house and read the Japanese officials the riot act. Unless the government adopted the SCAP draft, two things were going to happen. First, the case of trying the emperor as a war criminal would be reopened. Second, SCAP would submit the draft to a national referendum, which would mean that the current clique of politicians running postwar Japan would lose control of the constitutional process, possibly even the future of the country.
Matsumoto’s secretary “straightened up as if he had sat on something,” Whitney remembered. “Dr. Matsumoto sucked in his breath. Mr. Yoshida’s face was a black cloud.” All of them “acted as though they were about to be taken out and shot.”32
Still, they did as they were told. Prime Minister Shidehara made one last try on February 21 in a personal meeting with MacArthur to get him to relent on some of the more radical provisions, especially Article 9, renouncing war, which would in effect leave Japan with no military, but MacArthur would not be moved. Shidehara reluctantly gave in and on March 4 submitted the committee’s draft, beginning with “We, the Japanese people,” of the new constitution for SCAP’s, and MacArthur’s approval. They got it; and on March 6 it was unveiled to the world with an eloquent endorsement from the prime minister (few knew that he and his entire cabinet had wept bitter tears as they signed it) and a statement from Emperor Hirohito: “It is…my desire that the constitution of our empire be revised drastically upon the basis of the general will of the people and the principle of respect for the fundamental human rights.”33
On April 10, 1946, Japan had its first modern democratic election—“a true plebiscite,” as MacArthur later wrote—choosing the legislature that would go on to approve, with minor changes, the full constitution on November 3, to go into effect on May 3, 1947.
MacArthur hailed the constitution for showing “how far we have come since hostilities ended. It represents a great stride forward toward world peace and good will and normalcy.” He made no mention of the fact that it had been almost entirely written by a team of Americans sitting in a conference room; although most Japanese, seeing the contrast between Matsumoto’s original draft and the final version, guessed as much. MacArthur was particularly proud of two aspects of the new Japan that the constitution and the election represented. The first was Article 9’s renunciation of war—although that would soon cause almost as much worry back in Washington, which might need an armed ally like Japan if the growing tensions with Communism in Asia became too hot, as it did in Tokyo.
The other was the huge turnout of women, more than thirteen million, for the April 10 election. MacArthur saw it as the first major step forward in their status in Japanese society—although others found in the election results a matter for worry.
“Something terrible has happened,” one Japanese legislator told MacArthur in a crash visit to the Dai-ichi building. “A prostitute, Your Excellency, has been elected to the House of Representatives.”
MacArthur asked, “How many votes did she receive?”
The legislator sighed and said, “256,000.”
“Then I should say,” MacArthur replied with a straight face, “there must have been more than her dubious occupation involved.”
The legislator quickly changed the subject.34
Meanwhile, MacArthur was taking on a far less pleasant task: the purging and punishing of former Japanese officials, starting at the top.
—
On October 29, 1945, a large crowd had gathered in Manila, outside the high commissioner’s residence near the waterfront. In plain sight were the ruins of the Intramuros, where the rubble still held remains of the tens of thousands of Filipinos murdered by the Japanese during the siege of the city.
A car pulled up and guards leapt out. A rear door opened, and the guards helped a stocky figure in cast-off fatigues step onto the pavement. At once the crowd let out a collective howl of rage, pouring torrents of insults on the man’s head. The Manila police held back the crowd of yelling, fist-shaking Filipinos with difficulty, as American soldiers watched silently until the man was inside.
The man in the fatigues was General Yamashita, “the Tiger of Malay
a,” whom MacArthur had bested in the battle for Luzon. Now he was a prisoner of war on trial for what his soldiers had done during the Philippine occupation, in the first of the big Japanese war crimes trials that MacArthur and the victors had set in motion.
His trial was a national sensation in the Philippines. Some Filipino officials were thankful to have Yamashita as a welcome distraction from the postwar problems that were piling up, including charges of corruption, a long-standing problem in the islands which MacArthur’s liberation had no way of resolving.35
For MacArthur himself, the trial of General Yamashita represented a stern call to justice in the name of the innocent. “Rarely,” he remarked later, “has so cruel and wanton a record been spread to public gaze.” But the trial itself became steadily muddied by the public outcry against it, the ceaseless parade of witnesses testifying to horrific crimes that no one could trace to Yamashita himself, and MacArthur’s own actions in trying to speed up justice.
His first was personally drawing up the twenty-two rules under which the trial would proceed, even though he was no criminal lawyer—and even though they included rules permitting entry of hearsay evidence and affidavits from persons not living, as well as evidence that “would have probative value in the mind of a reasonable man” rather than evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.36
Then when the defense asked in November for more time to prepare Yamashita’s case, MacArthur refused, saying he was disturbed at “reports of a possible continuance.” And later, after Yamashita’s guilty verdict was reviewed and sent to MacArthur for final approval, the Japanese general’s lawyers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court issued a decision in February upholding the conviction, although dissenting justices Wiley Rutledge and Frank Murphy, MacArthur’s old rival when Murphy had been Philippines high commissioner, wrote a scathing criticism of the entire proceedings.
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