Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (134 page)

To help Ishiwara spread this message, Higashikuni diverted railway trains to carry league members to conventions in different cities. In Morioka, Iwate prefecture, on September 14, 1945, Ishiwara (according to a police report) called on the entire nation to
“repent” for having lost the war. He reminded his audience that by the end of the twentieth century, the “final global battle [between the United States and the Soviet Union] will be upon us,” and that the principle of the
hakk
ichiu
(the “eight corners of the world under one roof”) still lived.
¹⁴

Hirohito kept close watch on Higashikuni's actions and appointments and received him in audiences at least once or twice a day from August 16 to September 2. During this crucial two weeks before their conquerors arrived en masse, Hirohito, the court group, and the Higashikuni cabinet focused on the issue that really mattered to them: controlling the people's reaction to defeat and keeping them obedient and unconcerned with questions of accountability. Nevertheless, no matter what they did, the feeling spread that once the foreign occupiers arrived, reform of the monarchy and punishment of those who had led the nation would ensue. The emperor himself, it was rumored, might even have to abdicate to assume responsibility for the war.

II

On August 30, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur, newly appointed supreme commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), arrived in Japan to head the Allied military occupation. He set up his temporary headquarters in Yokohama. Three days later, on September 2, the emperor's representatives, led by Foreign Minister Shigemitsu, signed the formal surrender document aboard the U.S. battleship
Missouri
, moored in Tokyo Bay. Its concluding line was the operative sentence of Secretary of State Byrnes's reply to Japan's acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration: “The authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate these terms of surrender.”
¹⁵
That same day the Foreign Ministry established a “War Termina
tion Liaison Committee,” headed by diplomat Suzuki Ky
man, to obtain information from MacArthur and sound out his intentions. For many Japanese these were the first indications that “preservation of the
kokutai
” might prove harder than previously imagined, and would depend largely on General MacArthur.

On September 17 MacArthur finally established his General Headquarters (GHQ) in the Dai Ichi Life Insurance Building in central Tokyo, directly opposite the Imperial Palace. On the eighteenth, a secret directive arrived from the Pentagon, with the first part of the Truman administration's detailed blueprint for the reform of Japan.
¹⁶
On the twentieth MacArthur let it be known to Foreign Minister Yoshida Shigeru that an informal visit by Emperor Hirohito would not be inappropriate. That same day Grand Chamberlain Fujita Hisanori visited GHQ with a message from the palace: The emperor hoped that the general was enjoying good health; he wished to inform the general that Japan intended to carry out the terms of the Potsdam Declaration.
¹⁷

Within this early occupation period, MacArthur's “military secretary” and former head of psychological warfare operations, Brig. Gen. Bonner F. Fellers, reestablished personal ties with two Japanese Quakers. One, Isshiki (Watanabe) Yuri, he had known from his days at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana; the other, Kawai Michi, a former secretary-general of the YWCA and founder in 1929 of Keisen Girls School in Tokyo, he had met on his first visit to Japan in 1920. During their initial reunion meetings, Fellers spoke frankly of his urgent concern to prove that no grounds existed for holding the emperor responsible for the Pearl Harbor attack. With Kawai acting as his consultant and collaborator, Fellers was soon put into contact with her acquaintance, Sekiya Teizabur
, the high palace official who, since late Taish
, had played a leading role as a liaison between the court and government ministries. Sekiya too wanted to prove that the emperor was “a lover of peace.”
¹⁸

An entirely new, binational stage in the movement to protect Hirohito now began. Out of the interplay of efforts by GHQ, the emperor, Japanese government leaders, and Japanese Christians with prewar ties to influential Americans, came the shielding of Hirohito from war responsibility, his “humanization,” and the reform of the imperial house. Henceforth, in the process of utilizing Hirohito's authority for their own respective purposes, MacArthur and the Japanese leadership would have to misrepresent a vital side of Hirohito's life and identity, just as they been misrepresented before the war.

In response to MacArthur's remark concerning an imperial visit, on the morning of September 27, 1945, the emperor donned formal morning dress complete with top hat, left his palace, and went to the American Embassy to pay a courtesy call on the general. The Japanese people were not informed beforehand of this visit. Neither were they aware of the serious personal crises both men were facing. MacArthur's conduct of the occupation had already come under criticism from the Russians and the British at the Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in London. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes was preparing to yield to Allied pressure for some form of group supervision of the freewheeling supreme commander. The prime minister of New Zealand had warned the American minister that “there should be no soft peace”; “the Emperor should be tried as a war criminal.”
¹⁹

Moreover, the Truman administration had been taken aback by certain statements issued (and later retracted) by MacArthur's GHQ concerning the duration of the occupation and the possibility of drastically downsizing Allied forces in Japan within a single year.
²⁰
Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson had openly rebuked MacArthur, saying “the occupation forces are the instruments of policy and not [its] determinants.”
²¹
Truman was particularly displeased with MacArthur for ignoring State Department policy
guidelines and for failing to return to the United States for consultations, despite having been urged to do so on two occasions by Army Chief of Staff Marshall.

Hirohito's position was also clouded and uncertain. His responsibility for beginning the war had become a controversial issue among the Allies. An unpublished Gallup opinion poll conducted in early June 1945 disclosed that 77 percent of the American public wanted the emperor severely punished.
²²
On September 11, following the first round of arrests of suspected Japanese war criminals, the foreign press started to report rumors of the emperor's imminent abdication. On September 18 Joint Resolution 94 was introduced in the U.S. Senate (and referred to a committee), declaring that Emperor Hirohito of Japan should be tried as a war criminal.
²³
And if these were not reasons enough for the emperor to worry, the Potsdam Declaration itself had deliberately left his future status uncertain: to be decided by “the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.”

But the emperor's position was not all bleak. He and the Higashikuni cabinet, in keeping with their resolve to protect the
kokutai
, had begun disarming and demobilizing the seven-million-strong army and navy even before MacArthur's arrival in Tokyo. Their initiative made the demilitarization of Japan far easier than the Americans had expected or even imagined. President Truman had registered this important fact on September 6, 1945, when he announced the “U.S. Initial Post-Surrender Policy for Japan.” This document instructed MacArthur to exercise his authority
through
Japan's existing governing structures and mechanisms, including the emperor, but only insofar as this promoted the achievement of U.S. objectives.
²⁴

Months earlier, between April and July 1945, MacArthur and Fellers had worked out their own approach to occupying and reforming Japan. In their view the principles of psychological war
fare that Fellers had implemented in the Battle of the Philippines and elsewhere were solidly correct. They had played a key role in lowering Japanese morale, hastening surrender, and preparing the Japanese for occupation. Japanese military leaders alone bore responsibility for the war, and the emperor, the “moderates” around the throne, and the people had been totally deceived by them. All Japanese trusted the emperor. U.S. psychological warfare should build on their trust and turn it against them.
²⁵
These ideas, the “common sense” of American psychological warfare experts in the Pacific, not to mention Chinese and Japanese Communist leaders in North China, had become MacArthur's fixed principles and were woven into his initial occupation plan.

Code-named Operation Blacklist, the plan turned on separating Hirohito from the militarists, retaining him as a constitutional monarch but only as a figurehead, and using him to bring about a great spiritual transformation of the Japanese people.
²⁶
Because retaining the emperor was crucial to ensuring control over the population, the occupation forces aimed to immunize him from war responsibility, never debase him or demean his authority, and at the same time make maximum use of existing Japanese government organizations. MacArthur, in short, formulated no new policy toward the emperor; he merely continued the one in effect during the last year of the Pacific war, then drew out its implications as circumstances changed. More important, as MacArthur was under Potsdam Declaration orders to mete out stern punishment to war criminals, Hirohito's innocence should be established before the machinery for implementing that aspect of the declaration was set up.

Thus, at the very beginning of the occupation the Japanese defensive strategy for protecting the
kokutai
and MacArthur's occupation strategy coincided. The two sides did not yet know each other's thinking; nevertheless, where the emperor was concerned, they were proceeding on parallel tracks.

III