Japan Story

by Christopher Harding

  Under the circumstances, a degree of control over the media was essential. The cumulative effect of years of hearing about Anglo-American evil and the necessity for holy war could hardly be expected to dissipate overnight. And with Ishiwara Kanji tipped by some to become Japan’s Führer – plotting a humiliated nation’s return to glory – there remained the prospect of people being cajoled into restarting the conflict. But the work of the Occupation’s Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) went well beyond what was required to ensure basic security. Six thousand – mostly Japanese – operatives checked around 330 million letters and packages (Ishiwara complained that it took three months for letters to reach him). They tracked 800,000 private telephone conversations. They subjected large numbers of newspapers, books and magazines to pre-publication censorship. And they vetted tens of thousands of publications and radio, theatre and film scripts.

  Critics began to wonder why, if democracy was a natural state for human beings, it required quite this level of micromanagement – extending even to positive propaganda. At MacArthur’s first meeting with the Emperor, a photograph was taken showing the former looming powerfully over the latter, who appeared uncomfortably overdressed and looked distinctly out of his depth. Such an image could not have been created during or before the war. Only Imperial Household photographers were allowed anywhere near the Emperor with a camera, and even they had to stay at least twenty metres back and use telephoto lenses, capturing just his upper body and avoiding shots from sideways on because of Hirohito’s slight stoop. This latest photograph was a rare embarrassment, and the Japanese Cabinet quickly tried to ban the media from publishing it. But GHQ not only overturned the ban: they insisted that the photo be published, knowing full well the message that it would send.

  For similar reasons, approved American writers and musicians were actively promoted, while the likes of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath were forbidden. Film-makers were encouraged to show couples kissing, as a means of balancing out bowing: a practice that censors regarded as ingraining inequality and subservience but which they reluctantly reasoned could not be eliminated from Japanese culture by fiat. Soon, all this kissing, alongside a prevalence of escapist over politically incisive film-making, had Japanese conspiracy theorists wondering whether the Americans had secretly devised a ‘three Ss’ policy of cultural containment for their country: sex, sports and screen. Ironically, the Americans suspected something similar of the Japanese. After visiting the milky opulence of Ando Akira’s HQ, along with his notorious Dai-An Club, the Chicago Sun’s foreign correspondent Mark Gayn found himself surer than ever of a ‘shrewd, well-organized and well-financed Japanese campaign to corrupt the Army of the United States … the weapons are wine, women, and hospitality, and the objective is to subvert the starch and purpose of the Occupation’.

  Perhaps the most influential propaganda intervention of all was a sustained campaign to shape the way that the Japanese thought about the recent conflict. In the early months of the Occupation, GHQ’s Civil Information and Education Section (CIE) put together an account of what it insisted had now to be called the ‘Pacific War’, emphasizing America’s place in it over that of East Asia – despite the latter’s military theatre absorbing an overwhelmingly larger number of Japanese men, money and munitions. Beginning on the fourth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, this version of events was systematically disseminated in Japanese newspapers and via a radio series – ‘Now It Can Be Told’ – that purported to offer the Japanese the ‘facts’ of the conflict, at long last, so that they could draw their own conclusions. The narrative was as artfully contrived as the theme music, which blended the shamisen with the score from Hollywood’s Gone With the Wind. This had been a war of pure, naked aggression, the Japanese discovered, in which their country’s political and economic insecurities in the late 1930s and early 1940s had played no catalysing role. Militarists had silenced brave internationalists, and effectively made Hirohito their captive.

  The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, convened in April 1946 to try ‘Class A’ war criminals – those accused of initiating and directing the war – largely ended up supporting this version of recent history. Critical reporting of its proceedings was forbidden, so Japanese audiences ended up hearing little of the concerns raised by a single dissenting judge, Radhabinod Pal from India: that some of the people who were putting Japan’s leaders on trial had themselves violated the rules of war, by indiscriminately bombing Japanese cities and unleashing nuclear weapons on the world. News of what had happened in the months since those bombs were dropped – ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima, ‘Fat Man’ on Nagasaki – was meanwhile carefully suppressed. Japanese film footage of the aftermath was confiscated and flown to the United States for safe-keeping. Important accounts of the bombings did begin, belatedly, to emerge: in prose, poetry, painting and film. But the publishers of Nagasaki no Kane (The Bells of Nagasaki) (1949), written by a Catholic doctor, Nagai Takashi, who died from radiation sickness in 1951, found themselves forced to include in the book, for balance, an American-authored appendix detailing the Japanese army’s ‘Sack of Manila’, in which 100,000 civilians were killed.

  The terms of long-running, post-war conversations about East Asia’s catastrophic mid-century conflict were thus effectively set by the exigencies of Occupation. A more balanced and transparent tribunal might have helped to begin the work of repairing relations in East Asia. As things turned out, left-wing critics and Japanese neo-nationalists alike were later able to use claims of ‘victor’s justice’ to bolster diametrically opposed positions on their country’s political arrangements. And to add to perceptions that crucial details of the war were covered up or exaggerated, there was a sense that if suffering could be seen as equitably distributed – Hiroshima somehow balancing out Nanjing, Nagasaki traded for Manila – then apology or remorse from either party was beside the point.

  In the short term, it was difficult for Occupation leaders to know how these various efforts at shaping Japanese attitudes were going to turn out. Japan’s first post-war elections, held the same month that the Tribunal was convened, were regarded as a particularly risky affair. Some at GHQ had argued that a country still so polarized by war and hunger should not yet be sent to the polls. As it was, teams of American observers were dispatched, watching as ghostly white-haired adults and children – caught in a sanitizing spray of American DDT – milled around listening to endless soapbox speeches, often given by rival candidates standing side by side, in front of walls where the faded remains of wartime propaganda still lingered.

  The country’s two new conservative parties, the Japan Liberal Party and the Japan Progressive Party, found themselves in a novel situation. Just a couple of years before, socialists and communists had been under lock and key. Now they were legally campaigning (reinventing themselves as democrats, to match the national mood), and some of those in power – GHQ New Dealers in particular – seemed actually to be rooting for them. The focal point for much left-wing anger around this time was the portly pre-war internationalist Shidehara Kijūrō, serving as the country’s Prime Minister since Prince Higashikuni stepped down in the wake of the debacle over the MacArthur–Hirohito photograph. Buildings were plastered with anti-Shidehara posters, and he was very publicly denounced at a mass rally of some 15,000 people in Hibiya Park, many waving red flags. The rally turned into a march on his nearby residence, and from there into an assault on it. Three hundred policemen struggled in vain to prevent first the outer gates and then the main door giving way. Punches and missiles were thrown, shots were fired by the police, and in the end a contingent of American military police in armoured jeeps had to be called in to break up the crowd and send them home.

  To help bring that demonstration to an end, Shidehara had agreed to a meeting with the communist leader, Tokuda Kyūichi. After making a series of excuses via an unfortunate aide – he didn’t want cameramen present; he didn’t like floodlights; he didn’t want his voice recorded – Shidehara finally appeared, a
nd was treated to an unprecedented haranguing from Tokuda about conditions out there in the country. ‘Look at you,’ said Tokuda. ‘You’re so fat. You must be buying food on the black market.’ A surreal encounter ended in a chaotic scuffle when one of Tokuda’s delegation thought he spotted a secret service agent concealing a weapon, and Shidehara tried to make use of the diversion to escape from the room.

  In the end, the April elections went reasonably smoothly, and thirty-nine women made a historic entrance into the Diet. The socialist and communist parties had failed to agree on a hoped-for progressive front, and instead the Japan Liberal Party took power, with Yoshida Shigeru becoming Prime Minister. For all the rhetoric of a ‘new Japan’ and excitement at the radical constitutional draft, which the newly elected Diet debated and then passed with only minor changes, it seemed to progressive critics very much as though the same old conservatives had ended up back in power, the wheels of their party machines greased by the same old business and landed interests. An American journalist was told by Japanese colleagues that this new Diet contained as many as 180 war criminals, while in other cases purged former politicians had succeeded in getting their wives or juniors elected in their places. Something similar was said to be going on in the press: an editor at the Asahi Shimbun admitted that an upstairs conference room at his newspaper’s offices was reserved for purged staff members, who continued to draw salaries while loyal underlings took care of the day-to-day running of the paper.

  Ongoing discontent spilled over into a new series of mass rallies. Tens – possibly hundreds – of thousands of people turned out for a May Day parade centred on a plaza right in front of the Imperial Palace. Demands were made for food and for an end to rationing (or at least its fair implementation). At a special ‘food May Day’, held three weeks later in the same place, Tokuda addressed a crowd of some 200,000 people. ‘We are starving!’ he shouted, before turning around to point out the Palace. ‘Is he?’ Mocking the Emperor’s well-known awkwardness when confronted with the general public, he told the crowd that he had recently been refused an imperial audience. ‘We were chased away. Is it because the Emperor can say nothing but “Ah, so. Ah, so. Ah, so?” ’ His delegation had, however, managed to enter the Palace, he said. There they had inspected the imperial fridges and perused the menu: plenty of fresh milk, chicken, pork, eggs and butter.

  MacArthur finally intervened, publically denouncing the ‘growing tendency towards mass violence and physical processes of intimidation under organized leadership’ as a threat to orderly government and to the Occupation itself. It would not be allowed to continue. The limits of people’s new freedoms were suddenly laid bare, but the high tide of left-wing radicalism was in any case beginning to pass. Food aid and a good harvest helped to take the wind out of socialist sails as 1946 wore on, but the most powerful factor by far – and one of the great achievements of the American Occupation – emerged in October that year: an economic revolution on such a scale that only someone with MacArthur’s power, during a time of great flux in Japan’s modern experience, could possibly have seen it through.

  Where pre-war bureaucrats had tackled rural distress by offering aid and encouraging cooperation between landlords and tenants (the latter farming nearly half of Japan’s cultivated land), a radical new Land Reform Law now all but did away with landlords. Believing that ‘feudal’ relationships and harsh agrarian conditions partly explained the rise of Japanese ultranationalism, strongly committed to a broad ideal of ‘democratization’, and concerned about the attractions of communism, GHQ introduced quotas for the amount of land that any one person might legally own or lease. They then bought all the rest at fixed rates and offered to sell it to the people who had been tilling it, via long-term mortgages whose burdens were soon eased by inflation. Some landlords appealed, but lost, and with ex-tenants now dominating the rural vote there was little chance that future Japanese governments would ever be able to risk trying to reverse the policy.

  Back in the capital, meanwhile, as leftist ardour was cooling, MacArthur dug in. In cooperation with Japanese conservatives, he banned a national strike that had been called for 1 February 1947, in which 2.6 million people were poised to protest against low wages. He described it as a ‘deadly social weapon’ whose wielding Japan, in its present condition, might not survive. Politics seemed to be returning to a semblance of its former, pre-war self: a system of managerialism and negotiation, with police and strike-breakers held in reserve.

  Women vote for the first time, in April 1946 *

  Akiyoshi Toshiko and Hampton Hawes quickly became friends after their meeting in Yokohama. They began to plan a tour together. But the American authorities in Japan proved less than enthusiastic. Junior officials had been thrilled at the PR potential of a Japanese girl playing alongside an African-American soldier, in proudly pressed and polished US uniform (Hawes admitted to a weakness, dating back to childhood, for braid and insignia). But then someone higher up vetoed the idea – ‘One of those cracker Texas colonels,’ Hawes suspected.

  The turn of phrase was revealing. In theory, jazz should have been a great way for American Occupation forces to sell their broader political and cultural product in Japan. The US State Department clearly understood that for freewheeling, pan-ethnic Americana there was little that could touch it: they encouraged the likes of Benny Goodman and Dizzy Gillespie to make goodwill tours of Africa, the Soviet Union and the Middle East – from where Gillespie telegrammed President Eisenhower, trumpeting the effectiveness of ‘our interracial group’ against ‘Red propaganda’.

  The pre-war and wartime Japanese authorities had done their bit to set up an association of jazz with freedom, steadily clamping down on records and dance halls from the late 1920s onwards. The latter especially had been big business. Police had looked on with disapproval as men paid around two yen for a booklet of ten tickets, each of which got them a three-minute ride around the dance floor in the arms of one of the professional female ‘taxi dancers’ who sat waiting on chairs or benches. Fast, foreign music, intimate encounters in skimpy clothing and insufficiently patriotic venue managers – some of whom were a little too quick to dry their tears and dust off their cash registers following a period of closure to mourn the Taishō Emperor in 1926 – had occasionally been enough to earn a visit from Japan’s swashbuckling political thugs. Sōshi came swaggering across the dance floor, samurai swords in their belts, determined to recall a trashy and effete clientele to the physical and sartorial standards of true Japaneseness.

  The war turned jazz into a particularly creative form of passive resistance. The dance halls were closed, but listeners hoarded the records they were ordered to hand in, while musicians dutifully laid down their Anglo-American ‘saxophones’ and ‘trombones’ only to pick up instruments whose new Japanese names translated as ‘bent metallic flute’ and ‘sliding bent long gold trumpet’. These they used to play a distinctly jazzy genre called ‘light music’ or ‘national music’. One player later recalled that when they had finished recording a gunka (military music) track, which they were required to produce, they would jam in whatever way they wanted because the police officers outside the building couldn’t tell Duke Ellington from Mozart.

  Why, given all this, were the Americans not more enthusiastic in casting themselves as musical liberators? One of the reasons, hinted at in Hawes’ comment, was that jazz shared with democracy some difficult, potentially dangerous characteristics. Ideally, both were transformative of minds and hearts. But they had a way of adapting themselves to fit an underlying social status quo – for better or for worse. For American jazz in the mid-twentieth century, that meant tensions of race and class. GHQ was already doing its best in Japan to hide these blemishes on a society that it hoped to offer up as exemplary. It censored all talk of race, even while the US military practised the segregation of black GIs stationed in Japan from white enlisted and officer comrades – in barracks and RAA brothels, in the intended audience for different radio programmes
, and in the patronage of entertainment venues: Yokohama’s Harlem Club, where Akiyoshi met Hawes, was a ‘black’ club.

  The last thing the Americans needed was publicity of the sort generated by an incident during a tour of North American jazz talent around Japan. At one of the concerts, Benny Carter and the Canadian pianist Oscar Peterson ended up holding back some GIs in the audience while the jazz impresario Norman Granz punched another soldier in the face for abusing Ella Fitzgerald during her performance. The only upside was that for at least one Japanese member of the audience it became an unforgettable lesson in democracy: he recalled being ‘impressed’ to see a military figure taking a beating from a civilian – something utterly unimaginable a few years previously in Japan.

  Jazz and democracy shared in common a broader dilemma for their exporters and champions. Both were about freedom and flourishing, improvisation and spontaneity. And yet if they failed to take quite specific forms when they travelled, they risked appearing fake, corrupt or superficial. Hence the temptation for Occupation personnel concerned with the state of Japanese politics not just to till the soil and sow the seeds, but to wait and watch and prune – to the point where Yoshida Shigeru began saying that ‘GHQ’ ought to stand for ‘Go Home Quickly’.