JAPAN: One or Many?

The two poles of power in occupied Japan are the Dai Ichi Building, in downtown Tokyo, and the U.S. Embassy, five minutes’ drive away. General Douglas MacArthur works in the first, lives in the second.

SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) has 45 teams traveling through the countryside, doing the occupation’s spadework, checking on its effectiveness and on Japanese compliance. But MacArthur himself does not travel. In nearly three years of occupation he has not missed a day, including Sundays, at his desk. Douglas MacArthur, brilliant soldier and administrator, great showman, benevolent dictator, steadfast egoist, is SCAP—although the initials as usually employed refer to the whole apparatus of the occupation.

Last week the accomplishments of the occupation, which had seemed to go so well in its first phase, were being called in question as never before. Its aims, which had seemed so clear and simple under the Potsdam Declaration, had apparently shifted under MacArthur’s feet. Once people had asked: “How are we going to hold Japan down?” Now they were asking: “How are we going to hold her up?”—meaning, how are we going to prevent economic collapse and make this floundering, bewildered country economically stable and self-sufficient?

If this question caused him inner perplexity, Douglas MacArthur gave no outward sign. A new advisory commission—known as the Deconcentration Review Board—had just arrived from Washington to study part of the question for him. Their indoctrination had begun at a lunch with MacArthur himself. Now they were being crammed with facts, figures and prophecies by SCAP’s bright young men. Their job might keep them in Tokyo for months.

No Haste. MacArthur himself last week changed to summer uniform—a cherished one he had worn on Corregidor and on his arrival at Atsugi airdrome, in the late summer of 1945, to take over the defeated country. He talked or worked in his office with his shirt collar unbuttoned, applying innumerable matches to one or another of his 17 pipes.

His day is full, but stately and unmarred by haste. He gets up at 7, dons a faded old West Point dressing gown (still bearing the “A” which MacArthur, a two-letter man, won as a baseball player and football manager), talks to his ten-year-old son Arthur. Breakfast is a substantial and leisurely meal. When it is over, at 8:30, he retires to his study, to work on papers brought home from the office.

At 10:30 a black 1941 Cadillac, with a master sergeant at the wheel, is waiting for him at the door. It rolls out the Embassy’s tree-lined driveway past two sentry boxes at which two starched G.I.s come to attention; in the street the car is picked up by an escort of white MP jeeps. On the five-minute ride to work, MacArthur passes a sandlot where Japanese kids play baseball, a number of government buildings (some destroyed), the Sakurada Gate of the Imperial Palace, the green algae-covered Imperial moat. ‘For the general, the traffic lights are always green.

MacArthur goes home for lunch at 2. Afterward, if there are no luncheon guests, he takes a nap. At 4 he drives back to the office. He stays until 8, 9, sometimes 10. Last week he never got away before 9.

Outside of his daily rides to work, Mac-Arthur rarely appears in public. The Japanese have applied to him a name by which they used to call the Emperor: “The man behind the bamboo screen.” It nicely expresses a Japanese feeling that the man of power should be remote and unapproachable.

Every week, of course, the general sees a few important Americans and Japanese. When he holds forth to visitors, they are usually spellbound. Said C.I.O. Representative Willard Townsend: “I’m amazed. The man knows more about labor than I do. His ideas and convictions on labor are more progressive than mine.” Said Roger Baldwin of the Civil Liberties Union: “The man’s amazing. In all my years of civil liberties work, I have never found anybody with a greater understanding and a more sympathetic view toward the things we have been fighting for. Why, he even uses the lingo!”

No Gunfire. MacArthur had long ago learned Japanese ways of thinking. He knew the Japanese thirst for leaders and their love of idols. When he went into Japan in 1945, he capitalized on this knowledge.

The directive he had been given was clear—to obliterate Japan’s capacity to make war, and to start the country on the road to becoming a peaceful and democratic nation. The first months after the landings were a wonderful achievement. The Japanese army, navy and air force were liquidated without a shot fired.

Civil liberties were decreed—freedom -of press, speech, worship, assembly. Terroristic secret societies were ferreted out and abolished. The titles of the peerage were removed. Shintoism was dislodged as the state religion, although the people were permitted to practice it privately. The Emperor was reduced from the status of a god to a symbol of the state and of national unity. Streetcars passing the Imperial Palace no longer stopped so that the conductors could get out and bow. Young Prince Akihito might soon be asking his father what it had been like to be a god.

Equal suffrage was introduced, and the voting age was reduced from 25 to 20. In April 1946, SCAP staged a free election. Three-fourths of the 36 million registrants voted. MacArthur’s critics feared that the elections would be premature, that the people would not turn out to vote, or that extremists, right or left, would win too much power. But the vast majority of seats went to moderates.

MacArthur cajoled the Cabinet and the Diet into creating a new constitution, which was not only a democratic marvel (in form) but also contained a renunciation of war. Labor organizations were set up and encouraged to assert their rights. War criminals were brought to trial. Several of them, on the brink of execution, thanked the U.S. for fair treatment. Ill-famed wartime Premier Hideki Tojo and 24 other top wrongdoers are awaiting sentence. Nobody in Japan, certainly no American, could be sure that these lessons would stick. But the score was impressive.

The Poorhouse. It was not the whole score. Against such successes, other continuing dilemmas stood out. Japanese industry had recovered to 40% of the 19307 34 level. For example, the great Yawata steel plant (a favorite wartime target of U.S. bombers from China) was producing again—62,000 tons of ingots and rolled steel in April; but this was only one-seventh of 1941’s peak production rate.

There was progress from the first days of occupation, but not enough to keep the islands going. The U.S. was spending more than $1,000,000 a day to keep the Japanese barely at subsistence.

There is severe inflation in Japan, and a black market. Communist troublemaking in the unions forced MacArthur to squelch a general strike, later a communications strike. There is not enough shipping, and no visible way of getting large-scale shipbuilding started.

Japan has become a poorhouse living on U.S. bounty.

This fact has a bearing on SCAP’s method of attacking the monopolistic structure of the Japanese economy. It was taken for granted that the Zaibatsu—ihe

Matsui, the Mitsubishi and other great families which had built up an octopuslike control of industry, banking and trade—would be put out of action. Nobody was surprised when ex-Baron Mitsui and the others were forced to turn in their holdings for government bonds—frozen for ten years—and to live dourly on official allotments of $40 a month.

But SCAP’s critics claimed that Mac-Arthur’s young zealots were going too far and too fast. SCAP seemed to be trying not only to break up the big combines but to atomize the Japanese economy as well. In theory, the solution was one of degree. Last week in Tokyo the Deconcentration Review Board was studying the degree.

Export or Die. However the Review Board might rule, there would be no solution to Japan’s long-range problem until she began to trade again. And here the Japanese were still impaled on the horns of their own lamentable modern history.

In 1934 (after swallowing Manchuria but before tackling the rest of China and the world), Japan maintained in her home islands 70 million people. They subsisted as a nation on a thriving trade with Asia and the West. But in 1948 the overseas empire of Japan was gone; and now almost 80 million people were packed into the home islands. As with the British, the cry of the Japanese could well be: “Export or die.”

For the U.S., the German and Japanese occupations have differed in many ways—most notably, in Japan there was no quarrelsome quadripartite situation to deal with, and MacArthur had the field to himself—but in both cases the U.S. learned early that no boot-on-the-neck type of peace would work. Germany could have become a nation of peasants (as she would have under the Morgenthau plan), but her industry was necessary to the rest of Europe. Japanese industry is needed, first & foremost, to keep Japan alive, for on her meager acres she could not possibly feed herself even if everyone worked at it.

Industry required trade. With whom could the Japanese trade? And could they achieve sufficient trade, by any means, to maintain their population without outside doles forever? SCAP was looking for an answer to the first question, at least, last week. For the first time since the occupation began, SCAP trade missions (including Japanese) were out digging up orders. In New Delhi the missioners got a warm welcome. They were garlanded with roses and handed jasmine bouquets; Premier Nehru sent “greetings and good wishes” to the Japanese people. India wanted textile machinery and was willing to give coal, jute and raw cotton.

But in the Philippines the reception was different. Businessmen there were cool to what Japan had to offer, and politicians, sensing the public hostility, were cooler. Said Philippine Congressman Cipriano Primicias: “MacArthur is being deceived … I would not lift a finger to help put Japan again in a position to menace the peace and security of the Far East.”

And China, Manchuria, Korea? The question reminded the men of SCAP that the answer depended on more than the enmity or forgiveness of those peoples. So long as large areas of those countries were Communist battlefields, there would be little chance of restoring trade. Japan might (for a while) continue to subsist on U.S. doles, a prostrate ward. But its long-range prospects as a free nation would be hopeless.

Douglas MacArthur and all the apparatus of SCAP could do very little about this larger challenge. It was becoming much clearer to Americans that the recovery and security of one depended upon the recovery of many. That would require just as much understanding and perseverance—and probably help—in Asia as in Western Europe.