If you could sight-read, you could get gigs. After some early disappointments, a grading system was developed to sort the wheat from the chaff – ‘Special-A’ all the way down to ‘D’. But for American GIs, jazz was ultimately ‘their music’. Creative contributions on this side of the planet were not to be expected. A reasonably faithful facsimile would do: in this, as in so much else, Japan’s education – or re-education – was regarded as only just beginning.
It was an attitude that Akiyoshi found maddening. She fell in love with the music of Teddy Wilson while in Beppu, and began working his fresh, nimble right-hand melodies into her own playing. But graduating from provincial Japanese-only dances to more discerning audiences in Tokyo and Yokohama, she encountered some infuriating distractions: dancers and jugglers, hired as part of the evening entertainment, and a seemingly never-ending stream of American soldiers who thought that jazz ran in their bloodstream or came with their passport. She tried to teach them otherwise, letting them sit in and play when they asked, then rattling through tunes like ‘Fine and Dandy’ so fast that they were forced to bow out.
Akiyoshi’s deeper exasperation, widely shared in Japan, was the notion apparently held by some Americans that they were bringing real rhythm and melody to these shores for the very first time – even bestowing a new quality of humanity upon Japan, like Judy Garland’s Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939) helping Asia’s Tin Man to at last find a heart. There was little interest in Japan’s rich tapestry of musical styles, developed by a music industry with decades of experience combining instruments, scales, vocal techniques and lyrical themes in order to hit an ever-shifting audience sweet-spot: dashes of something new or foreign worked into a familiar existing weave.
In the autumn of 1945, that industry once again struck just the right note. ‘Ringo no Uta’ (‘Apple Song’), from the film Soyokaze (Soft Breeze), became a nationwide hit: not for its lyrics – ‘the apple’s lovable, lovable’s the apple’ – but for the deep resonance with an exhausted population of a glowing young actress (Namiki Michiko) skipping through an orchard, singing about the simple goodness of blue skies and luscious fruit. Blending a homely minor key with Western-style vocals, ‘Apple Song’ hinted at a revived readiness in Japan for new, incoming ideas about the world – if only, like Namiki and her apples, they could be presented in the right way: fresh rather than alien, natural and good, proffered, not forced.
The problem was that American Occupation forces arrived in Japan with plans for their defeated enemy already largely formulated, having started the process of preparing for war’s end just months after it began at Pearl Harbor. Away from crude wartime propaganda depicting a simian collective lost in ignorant, scraping thrall to their Emperor, a subtler take on Japan had been developing in US intelligence and policy circles. The country’s project of modernization had stalled, its journey out of feudalism putt-putting to a halt some way short of the universal human ideal that veterans of Roosevelt’s New Deal saw as embodied – however imperfectly – in American society. US mechanics needed to be sent in to get the thing going again.
The grand, historic scale of this analysis found spectacular, deafening illustration on 2 September 1945 in Tokyo Bay (at the bottom of whose waters were rumoured to lie gold bars, recently ransacked from army stores). Aboard the battleship USS Missouri, Japan’s leaders sat to sign the instrument of surrender while two flags fluttered overhead. One had been flying over the White House the day that Pearl Harbor was attacked. The other had been flown by Commodore Matthew C. Perry when he arrived off Japanese shores nearly a century before. Now, as then, the words were warm but the choreography was as cold as ice. In Perry’s day, three military bands had assaulted Japanese eardrums while ten steam-powered warships waited out at sea, packed with Marines. On this day, the sky itself bore the menace, blackened and rent by the roar of 400 B-29s alongside 1,500 fighter planes. There could be no mistaking the message: ‘Gentleman, shall we try this again?’
*
Concealing herself now and then behind a pillar on the sixth floor of Tokyo’s Dai-Ichi Insurance Company building was a young American woman not long arrived in the country. Beate Sirota had been working in New York for Time magazine when it issued its stark front cover in August 1945: Japan’s rising sun flag, with its central red disc – the ‘meatball’, as GIs called it – crossed out in two simple but eloquent black strokes.
Beate’s joy had been tempered by anxiety. Growing up in Japan, where her Ukrainian-Austrian father, Leo Sirota, was a sought-after concert pianist and teacher, she had been forced to move from the German to the American school in Tokyo in 1936 when her teachers started marking her down. The reason became clear only in retrospect: this was one end of a long continuum of anti-Semitism, at the other end of which lay Auschwitz. There, Beate feared, most of her European relatives had died. Her father and mother might now be all the family she had left, and the only way of getting back to Japan to find out what had happened to them was to join the Occupation.
Fluent in Japanese, and with experience producing wartime propaganda for the US government, Beate was the ideal recruit. Christmas Eve 1945 found her descending towards Ando Akira’s refurbished Atsugi airbase. The pilot circled the area a few times before landing, letting his passengers congregate by the windows to take in the devastation.
‘Occupied Japan’ duly stamped in her passport, Beate made her way through Yokohama in a jeep, passing by blackened ruins amidst which people were trying to make onions and winter radishes grow. Her parents, it turned out, had been moved during the war, along with other members of the ex-pat community, to the summer resort of Karuizawa. There, life had become steadily worse, as food and fuel to heat the uninsulated cottages ran low and local police officers became convinced that someone must be using shortwave radio to communicate with the Allies. Beate’s father had been on the verge of going to prison when he found the Japanese officers replaced by American military police – under whose noses Beate, with the help of a GI admirer, was able to smuggle stolen food to her parents.
Her family fed, and soon to be rehoused, Beate now focused on her work. On 4 February 1946, she was called into a conference room, along with other staff from the Government Section of GHQ (General Headquarters of the Allied Powers). General Courtney Whitney read out a three-part note, dictated to him personally by the six-foot-tall, corn-cob pipe-smoking boss from whom Beate now and again felt compelled to hide. General Douglas MacArthur’s blend of simple speech, authoritarian cast of mind and enormous self-belief made many on his own side nervous of him. His Japanese interlocutors were frequently in awe of a man whom they were convinced ruled on personal whim: purging enemies, dishing out directives and barely leaving his corporate castle, chosen for the way it towered over the grounds of the Imperial Palace across the road.
But the man they called the Blue-Eyed Shogun did, technically at least, take orders like everyone else. His came in the form of a Basic Directive, issued by President Truman and worked up by the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) in Washington DC. It was a blueprint for a new Japan, and it boiled down to what became known as the ‘three Ds’: demilitarization, democratization and decentralization of power. The first was relatively easy. The second two were rather harder. Eventually, all three would go awry.
MacArthur’s February note was characteristically terse:
I
The Emperor is at the head of the State.
His succession is dynastic.
His duties and powers will be exercised in accordance with the Constitution and responsible to the basic will of the people as provided therein.
II
War as a sovereign right of the nation is abolished. Japan renounces it as an instrumentality for settling its disputes and even for preserving its own security. It relies upon the higher ideals which are now stirring the world for its defence and its protection.
No Japanese Army, Navy or Air Force will ever be authorized and no rights of belligerency will
ever be conferred upon any Japanese forces.
III
The feudal system of Japan will cease …
When he had finished reading out the note, Whitney announced that the people in this room were now a constituent assembly. They had until 12 February to turn MacArthur’s words into a Constitution for Japan.
Much had already happened in the five months up to this point, since MacArthur landed in Japan. Gone was the Peace Preservation Law of 1925, restricting people’s liberties – though its rescinding in October 1945 did not come soon enough for prisoners like the philosopher Miki Kiyoshi: disillusioned with what became of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere ideal, he had fallen out with the authorities and eventually been jailed, dying in prison in late September 1945, almost a month into the Occupation. Gone was the Special Higher Police Force, many of whose members simply melted away into other parts of Japan’s vast bureaucracy. Gone were the Japanese Army and Navy, along with the empire they had built: Korea, Manchukuo, Taiwan and territories across mainland China and out into the Pacific. Gone – and in the process of going – were tens of thousands of politicians, police, teachers, publishers and other influential individuals whose names featured on a laboriously researched list of undesirables. And gone, already, were a large number of American GIs: with Occupation turning out to be a much less bloody business than some had feared, one of the two American armies sent to Japan had promptly left again.
There were few signs of popular opposition in Japan to any of these American initiatives. Many people felt little but dismay, even hatred, towards their wartime leaders: for embroiling the country in conflict; for lying about Japan’s prospects and progress as it unfolded; and for failing to protect people against unnecessary suffering by surrendering as soon as the cause was clearly lost.
And yet the language of MacArthur’s February note was replete with bold talk of what ‘is’ and what Japan ‘does’. How could he know? It was reminiscent of Yoshino Sakuzō’s notion of minponshugi from a couple of decades before: offering government ‘for’ the people, catering to interests of which they were presumed to be too uneducated to be aware. So far, under the Occupation, ‘by the people’ involved the fairer hiring of functionaries – from December 1945, women could vote and be voted for in general elections – rather than a fair hearing for people’s post-war aspirations before major constitutional suggestions were made.
Beate Sirota acquired an epoch-making role here, in the most casual of ways. The new Constitution was to have something of which generations of Japanese feminists had only been able to dream: a section on women’s rights. Beate’s boss turned around to her shortly after Whitney’s constitutional announcement and said, simply: ‘You’re a woman. Why don’t you do it?’
Beate did at least have a better claim than MacArthur to know how Japanese women lived and what they might want and need, having grown up in the country. And she took to her task with speed, dashing around Tokyo in an army jeep, ransacking every surviving library she could find for copies of constitutions – the Weimar Republic, France, the Soviet Union – while being careful not to borrow too much from one place, in case someone guessed what she was up to.
From the Weimar Constitution, Beate took ideas about marriage being based on the equal rights of men and women, and the duty of the state to support motherhood and families – something over which Japanese feminists like Hiratsuka Raichō and Yosano Akiko had wrangled before and during the war. From the Soviet Constitution, she borrowed an article on free ‘medical, dental, and optical aid’ for children. All too aware of how the Meiji Constitution had played out in practice, not least when it came to people’s rights, Beate was determined to leave no room in her document for legal gymnastics by future Japanese lawyers – most of whom she expected to be fairly conservative men. The resulting draft was so long that Beate suffered a drastic editing down before the final version of the complete Constitution was presented to Whitney.
Beate Sirota with Ichikawa Fusae As Beate and the rest of the team worked away in an old ballroom, the newspapers carried news of their absent dance partner. US policymakers had decided early on – just as the Emperor and his advisers had hoped – that it made sense to try to govern Japan via, rather than in spite of, its existing institutions. So Japan’s bureaucrats, together with moderate political leaders untainted by the war, had initially been tasked with preparing the new Constitution. But when newspaper leaks suggested they were tweaking the Meiji Constitution rather than tearing it up – imperial prerogatives all but untouched; people’s rights still conditional; armed forces envisaged – MacArthur resolved to go ahead without his Japanese colleagues, and without telling them.
When GHQ officials arrived for a meeting on 13 February with the former diplomat and imperial confidant Yoshida Shigeru, along with Home Minister Matsumoto Jōji, they found the Japanese committee’s draft Constitution spread out on a desk, ready for bargaining to begin. They ignored it, and revealed their own document instead: the Emperor removed from politics; an elected legislature empowered to hire and fire the Prime Minister; religion separated from state; any military capability out of the question; and a wider range of rights for Japanese people than even their American counterparts enjoyed – with guarantees on free universal education, public health and social security, and collective bargaining for workers.
The two stunned Japanese ministers were politely asked to accept all this. And then threats were made. General Whitney suggested that the American draft Constitution was the best way of protecting the position of the Emperor. And it could easily be released directly to the Japanese public – on the assumption, commonly made at GHQ, that Japan was a nation of natural liberals lumbered with conservative leaders. Taking a break in the garden, Whitney watched as a B-29 passed overhead, remarking to one of Yoshida’s aides how much he was enjoying ‘your atomic sunshine’. When he returned inside, the Japanese draft had vanished from the desk.
The threat against the Emperor had been a bluff. MacArthur had long intended to extend to the general Japanese population a version of the psychological warfare tactics that had worked against their military: parting the average Japanese private from his senior officers by appealing to the transcendent goodness (and implied innocence) of the man-god from whom he leased his gun. It was the same strategy used by the early Meiji leaders, and the very one derided by Sakaguchi Ango in his ‘On Decadence’ essay: unknown, barely legitimate leaders grateful for an imperial puppet whose strings could be discreetly pulled.
MacArthur’s bluff went uncalled, and Beate was soon providing English–Japanese interpretation at an intense series of meetings aimed at hammering out a final draft of the Constitution in the latter language. The Japanese delegation used what wriggle room they could find. Concepts like ‘the people’ depended so much on America’s own historical experience that they had only to wait until approximations like shinmin (subject) and jinmin (the public) were ruled out – as too servile and too socialist, respectively – before persuading their exhausted opposite numbers to accept kokumin (national), despite its heavy nationalist undertones. Similar moves had been made months before over the thorny issue of the Emperor’s divinity. The English-language version of a rescript issued on New Year’s Day 1946 had stated plainly that the Emperor was not ‘divine’. The Japanese version said something rather different: he should not be regarded as an akitsu-mikami, a ‘manifest god’. This left artfully open the question of whether Japan’s emperors were or were not descended from the Sun Goddess.
Opinion polls in the spring of 1946, together with draft constitutions drawn up and circulated by ordinary Japanese (just as had happened sixty years before), suggested that although MacArthur had not been big on consultation, most people were at this point broadly in favour of what he had helped to engineer. They wanted inalienable popular rights. And they wanted to keep the imperial institution in some form, while curbing its power – no more than 5 per cent of the population shared the communists’ radic
al republicanism. A series of country-wide imperial tours showcased the new arrangements, the Emperor appearing to his people as a socially awkward middle-aged man, in scuffed shoes and an ill-fitting everyman suit – the work of a tailor forbidden from touching his client. The old mystique was ebbing away. People spoke of a shōchō tennō (symbolic Emperor), even a shiminteki tennō – a ‘people’s Emperor’.
*
A few weeks after the announcement of the draft Constitution in March 1946, a man with a violin was sent packing. He had been caught performing a satirical song about MacArthur and Hirohito: ‘Everybody is talking about democracy, but how can we have democracy with two emperors?’ The authorities were starting to clamp down. American military police and Japanese police walked onstage at the Imperial Theatre together to halt a kabuki performance, over a concern about the risk of feudal backsliding. Cartoonists were forbidden from creating caricatures of MacArthur. A haiku that ran ‘Small green vegetables / are growing in the rain / along the burned street’ was banned, as ‘Criticism of the United States’. Painters were steered away from depicting the distinctive torii gateways to Shinto shrines, because of their nationalist resonance.
Film directors embarked on a frustrating few years. They constantly had to reshoot scenes filmed in Tokyo, to avoid showing GIs, English-language signage, or other evidence of war and Occupation. A character in Ozu Yasujirō’s Late Spring (1949) was forbidden from observing that Tokyo was filled with bombed-out sites. Despite the supreme obviousness of this to the city’s millions of residents and visitors, his line had to be changed to ‘Tokyo is so dusty’. Depictions of Mount Fuji were banned, because of its appearance in wartime propaganda (to news of which one director angrily replied: ‘Why, in that case, did you not bomb Fuji, instead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?’). And Kurosawa Akira saw his film They Who Step on the Tiger’s Tail (1945) banned not once, but twice: first by wartime Japanese censors, as ‘too democratic’, and then by post-war American censors, as ‘too feudal’.
Japan Story Page 25
