The case would be helped if inevitable concessions were made pre-emptively. It was clear, for example, from the Potsdam Declaration that Japan’s armed forces would be disbanded. So by imperial order the process was begun. The manufacture of weaponry was sure to be outlawed. So the Ministry of Munitions did away with itself overnight. Adding to a haze over Tokyo produced by trucks and buses converted to run on wood, charcoal and household rubbish went the remains of hastily incinerated government documents, while former ministries with a more peaceful and constructive ring – Commerce & Industry; Agriculture & Forestry – were resurrected. Decades-old plans for land and labour reform were taken out and dusted off.
Enticements were prepared, too, for ordinary Allied soldiers. Advertisements were placed for Japanese women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five who would be prepared to offer ‘comfort’ in exchange for food and shelter. Around 1,500 candidates turned up to the first recruitment meeting for the new ‘Recreation and Amusement Association’ (RAA), ready to be put to use as ‘shock absorbers’ – as one of the scheme’s organizers put it – for the more respectable women of the country.
A devastated Tokyo, seen from the air (above) and from street level (below) Agents, crisscrossing Japan in search of other women who were similarly short of options, found themselves passing through a landscape where the view stretched far further into the distance than it had before. Whole sections of cities had all but vanished. It looked as though everyone had simply packed up one night – houses and all – and gone, leaving behind refuse, rubble and a few stray bits of wood. Only the occasional edifice remained standing, lonely and improbable. Railway stations that until recently had played host to the high emotion and flag-waving fanfare of wartime goodbyes – smartly uniformed schoolchildren singing songs, aproned women plying departees with snacks and warm words – were home now to children without parents, surviving under bridges, in underground passageways or inside the remains of trains and trams. They were joined by war widows, begging, and by girls doing whatever they had to in order to eat. Most of the other 9 million homeless people in Japan were taking refuge with relatives, or else cramming themselves into ramshackle shelters put together with wood or tar-paper or anything else they could find.
Millions more Japanese were sick – cholera, typhoid, dysentery, polio – or were reaching the final stages of starvation. In Osaka, world-class scientists had switched from developing weaponry to researching an emergency diet. People were shown how to make the best of acorns, peanut shells and even sawdust: a fermenting agent, they were told, could be used to break sawdust down into a powder to supplement flour in the making of bread or dumplings. They were advised that if cooked properly, the flesh of mice and rats was perfectly safe, perhaps even a little gamey and bird-like to the tongue. Blossoms, roses and silkworm cocoons, once part of a pleasing and productive natural environment, all now ended up on people’s plates.
Someone was going to have to answer for all this. The race to say who – and to convince a population exhausted by lies – was already up and running. Arguing the Emperor’s line, and taken on now as one of his advisers, was the rather unlikely figure of Ishiwara Kanji, preacher of the apocalypse and provocateur of 1931’s Mukden Incident. Lean and tanned, with his head shaved, Ishiwara was busily touring the country on specially arranged trains. He delivered to crowds of up to 20,000 people at a time a message of repentance – theirs, not his. He had, he pointed out, advised against escalation in China in 1937, and against attacking the United States in 1941. Instead, it was traitors like Tōjō who had brought the nation low. The people of Japan must now turn their backs on the recent fight and join the Emperor in starting the post-war conversation – peacefully laying down their arms, reforming their society – so that they might hope to control it. All being well, Ishiwara told the gathered masses, in a decade or so Japan would be back in business.
For people of all political stripes, variations on this promise of rebirth kept them going over several difficult and otherwise hopeless months. Within days of the surrender, Ichikawa Fusae was busy setting up a Women’s Committee on Post-war Policy. Women must, at long last, have the vote. And rather than bargaining with the country’s bureaucrats, as they had before, they should now enter their ranks: Japan’s state ministries, along with its Diet, must soon, at last, open their doors to women. For now, women should keep wearing their simple, wartime pantaloons, Ichikawa declared, because there was hard work to be done. Food production must be increased, and money must be saved. Japanese soldiers should be welcomed home with warmth, despite the rumours beginning to circulate about what they had done in China – where up to 20 million people had perished – and elsewhere in Asia. When the Allies arrived, they should be met with caution and with pride. Wartime government predictions of the bestial havoc they would wreak, should they make it to Japanese shores, might turn out to have been pure propaganda. Then again, it might not.
Tokuda Kyūichi spent these days in hopeful expectation of seeing daylight again soon, after eighteen years inside a prison cell. Together with Shiga Yoshio, the rambunctious Okinawan and former elementary school teacher had done what he could to run Japan’s communist movement from behind bars. Friends sent them books, writing secret messages in the margins with starch. These could be read with the aid of iodine, obtained from guards on the pretence of injury. A splash of urine would then erase the evidence before the books were returned, now featuring replies written in flour paste. Communication within the prison itself was by means of Morse code. Shiga later claimed to have transmitted the entire text of the Soviet Constitution in this way to a comrade in the cell below him.
While the Emperor and his advisers struggled to get their story straight, in the hope of Allied absolution, the outcome of the war put Japan’s communists in a strong position. They could claim to have been on the right side of history, imprisoned for championing the internationalism on which Japan’s leaders had so disastrously turned their backs. Their very idea of ‘history’ had been vindicated. Time was not the romantic, quasi-mystical cycle proposed by Japan’s pastoral fantasists. It was a linear path towards progress, its future course plottable by means of Marxist theory. In an ‘Appeal to the People’, published from prison while they awaited their release, Tokuda and Shiga claimed that history’s next step was Japan’s embrace of Allied occupation, as the basis for ‘democratic liberation and world peace’.
Plenty of left-wing intellectuals agreed. They were soon calling for a new, ‘objective’ trend in literature: by portraying everyday conditions of life, popular momentum towards changing them would surely begin to build. Other writers focused not on a socialist future, but on what had become of people’s inner lives in the recent past. These seemed to have shrunk and withered, displaced by state-sponsored ‘public’ values. The priority now should be to reverse that direction of travel. Individual will and conscience must be rediscovered, and then allowed to work its cleansing magic on the public realm. Japan’s great political scientist and dissector of ultranationalism, Maruyama Masao, called for a new balance of self-sufficiency with public commitment, the latter dutifully rather than slavishly pursued. He took as his inspiration one of the leading lights of Japan’s first, now soured, experiment with modernity: Fukuzawa Yukichi. The novelist Natsume Sōseki would have served equally well, having lectured his students half a century before on the right kind of ‘self-centredness’.
For the writer Sakaguchi Ango, one of the pioneers of an emerging ‘literature of the flesh’ (nikutai bungaku), the making of new commitments had to begin with honesty about the old ones. Looking around, he saw a toxic brew afflicting the country, of schmaltz, depravity and fantasies of imminent social collapse. There was extreme despondency, at an almost superhuman effort expended by ordinary Japanese apparently for nothing, while the pre-war wealthy seemed to have come through unscathed – they could be heard singing war songs in expensive restaurants. A sentimental, pornographic kasutori subculture was growing up a
round a cheap alcoholic drink made from sake dregs (kasu), featuring images of naked Western women, alongside the spectacle of half-naked Japanese women creating ‘live’ versions of famous foreign works of art by posing inside huge picture frames.
Sakaguchi’s essay ‘On Decadence’ addressed itself to all this. It offered one of the earliest post-war denunciations of the emperor system: look beyond the myth of divinely descended rulers, he wrote, and you find an ignominious history of weak men hauled out of obscurity by self-serving politicians bent on manipulating the easily impressed. In comparison to such false pieties, decadence had its relative virtues: ‘We have become decadent not because we lost the war, but because we are human; we become decadent because we are alive, that is all.’ The Japanese should embrace this fact, counselled Sakaguchi, and even encourage the process. Some amongst Japan’s kamikaze pilots had understood the war as contributing to Japan’s destruction and so its rebirth. Sakaguchi seemed to be hoping for something similar: degeneracy as generative, impurity as ultimately purifying.
*
The likes of Ando Akira spent the days after 15 August 1945 engaged in an ambitious process of wealth redistribution. The army had long been stockpiling the means for around 4 million men to fight an anticipated two- to three-year battle to defend the home islands. But on that day, its leadership issued Secret Instruction #363. Arms and ammunition aside, these supplies – billions of dollars’ worth of food and clothing, fuel and state-of-the-art technology – could all now be ‘civilianized’: delivered ‘free of charge’ to local governments, and on promise of future payment to other interested parties. It was a licence to loot.
Some took along bicycles, and filled backpacks. But the real benefits went to the Andos of the world: quick-thinking bosses at the helm of big organizations, capable of mobilizing thousands upon thousands of trucks and railway cars. Everything from trousers to aircraft engines was scooped up, whisked away and then warehoused, buried, or wrapped up and stashed in lakes. To hide a really large haul, new buildings were constructed over the top. In this way, many a large Japanese company entered the afterlife with not one but two revenue streams: alongside enormous war indemnity payments lavished on business allies by the government soon after 15 August, they could slowly feed their stolen goodies onto a rapidly blossoming black market.
That market had been in operation since the late 1930s, when Japan’s wars abroad first began to take their toll on living standards and people were forced to pay inflated prices for scarce commodities. It was hard to view something as criminal when there was little option and everyone else was at it, at some level or other. A special ‘economic constabulary’ set up to combat the practice made more than 2 million arrests in just fifteen months. Some were caught forging or transferring official price marks, as a way of getting around price controls. Others were making enterprising use of Japan’s omiyage gift-giving tradition: paying the required government price but offering a little present on top.
As life in the cities grew more desperate, trains began to fill up with urbanites making day-trips to the countryside to barter directly with farmers, or to forage for themselves. In mid-August 1945, hundreds of thousands of people boarded trains out of Tokyo every single day, crammed into carriages, hanging off the sides, lying on the top and holding on for dear life. Most were feeding their own families, but others had discovered an essential new source of income: smuggling. Women would coo lovingly at clothfuls of rice, strapped to their backs like babies, as they made their way to one of tens of thousands of open-air markets around railway stations and elsewhere.
The police all but gave up. ‘Madam, your baby has wet itself,’ warned one, with a knowing nod towards the leaky haul on a woman’s back. And as they melted away to fend for themselves, armed gangs moved in. Japan had been home for centuries to pedlars (tekiya) and gamblers (bakuto). The former used a combination of sharp practice and outright intimidation to send customers away with a ‘bargain’ on everything from fake medicine to bonsai trees with no roots. The latter were more easily romanticized: itinerant rogues, swaggering along with swords at their sides, faces mysteriously obscured by sedge hats, capes blowing in the wind.
Both groups operated at the margins, part of parallel societies where an oyabun (‘boss’) lorded it over ranks of kobun (underlings, or apprentices). But some did profitable business with the mainstream. The modern reality of yakuza, as they sometimes called themselves – the word taken from a losing hand in a Japanese card game: 8 (ya), 9 (ku), 3 (za) – was one of violent strike-breakers, corallers of casual labour and practitioners of political thuggery. Like their samurai counterparts, the shishi, they mixed a heavily advertised concern for the ‘little guy’ (excepting recalcitrant trade unionists) with a fierce, foreigner-hating and frequently emperor-centred nationalism.
As of mid-August 1945, the foreigners they hated the most were the sangokujin (‘third-country people’). Hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese, Korean and Chinese men had entered Japan in recent years, run by people like Ando as forced labour to replace army conscripts. Such was the reality of ‘co-prosperity’ in East Asia. Thirty thousand Koreans were now dead or dying in Hiroshima, while others were leaving Japan as fast as they could. Some of those who stayed began to fight for control of the increasingly lucrative black market stalls, against yakuza whose ranks were swollen by demobbed soldiers looking for any kind of work they could find.
Kimura Ihei’s Tokyo Station (1945): people cling to trains in Tokyo, heading out to the countryside to find food Alongside the bakuto and tekiya lineages, a new strain of yakuza had emerged in recent years. Gurentai (‘hoodlums’) were self-made men inspired by nothing more than the opportunities of the war and its immediate aftermath. One such was Kodama Yoshio. Associated in the 1930s with populist, emperor-centred ultranationalism – including a group established by the Tokyo University law professor, Uesugi Shinkichi – Kodama spent much of the war in China and Manchuria. There he ran an intelligence network featuring hundreds of criminals, thugs and members of the Military Police, with whose help he obtained (through a mixture of barter and extortion) an array of war materials for the Navy: radium and nickel, cobalt and copper.
Serving his country served him well. By August 1945, Kodama had approximately $175 million to his name – in diamonds, platinum and cash – to add to the men he controlled, and his mines, fisheries and munitions plants in central China. Now he was turning his talent, money and contacts to empire-building at home. He looted army stores, helped to establish the government’s Recreation and Amusement Association, visited the Imperial Palace to offer advice to the Emperor and struck up conversations with influential pre-war politicians hoping to become influential post-war politicians. A ‘Nihon Jiyūtō’ (Japan Liberal Party) was soon in gestation, with Kodama amongst those providing its financial spark of life.
Meanwhile, another of Japan’s gurentai, equally adept at finding new friends and allies as the times changed, was busy with a pressing new project. Ando Akira was having his gangs of workers refurbish Atsugi airbase, in preparation for a flight due in from the Philippines on 30 August. Aboard was the man whose signed photograph would shortly be given strategic pride of place alongside the mirror and the nude on Ando’s white office walls: General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers.
12
Blue Note
The American jazz pianist Hampton Hawes, serving with the US military in Japan, had never expected to find Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s music making it all the way out here, ‘over oceans, across rice paddies’. But then one day, in Yokohama’s Harlem Club, as he later recalled, ‘this little chick in a kimono sat right down at the piano and started to rip off things I didn’t believe, swinging like she’d grown up in Kansas City’. One future jazz legend was encountering another. The girl at the keys was the Tokyo-Yokohama music scene’s rising star: Akiyoshi Toshiko.
Born in Manchuria, Akiyoshi served as a nurse there towards the end of the war. N
arrowly escaping murder by her own side – she overheard hospital bosses weighing death against the disgraceful prospect of their staff being raped by the advancing Russians in August 1945 – she made it back to her family home only to find it being methodically looted by Soviet troops. Everything but her piano was carried out of the door and sold off to a broker sitting in the village square nearby.
Akiyoshi and her sisters went unharmed. Their mother hurriedly cut their hair, dressed them up in boys’ school uniforms, and hid them away downstairs. But by the time the family escaped to Beppu, on the southern Japanese island of Kyūshū, they had next to nothing left. Desperate to help bring in some money, Akiyoshi went against the wishes of her father, who wanted her to go to medical school, and answered an advert for an amateur dance-hall band, comprising accordion, drums, violin and alto saxophone – with Akiyoshi on piano, adapting her classical training as best she could.
Demand for musicians had never been higher. In late summer 1945, railway lines used just a few months before to whisk young Japanese out to the coast, boarding boats from there out to Asia-Pacific battlefronts, began funnelling a quarter of a million jubilant GIs in the opposite direction. Sixty-five thousand American soldiers had been dying, getting wounded or going missing every month towards the end of the conflict. Tens – possibly hundreds – of thousands more were secretly projected to perish in Operation Downfall: the planned Allied invasion of Japan’s home islands, scheduled to begin in November 1945 with Operation Olympic, directed against Kyūshū. Now able to leave their beds each morning with a reasonable expectation of seeing them again that night, US forces were in the mood to celebrate. Japanese musicians of all kinds found themselves waiting around at train stations, amidst the hungry, the homeless and the black-market buyers and sellers, for American servicemen to pick them up in their trucks. Some nights as many as 350 bands were needed in Tokyo alone, their musicians catching a glimpse of how the conquerors and the wealthy conquered were living – drinking, dancing, multi-course dining.
Japan Story Page 24
