The Press: Gentlemen of Japan

“Here’s a pretty state of things! Here’s a pretty how-de-do!”—The Mikado.

There were so many reporters (300-odd) scrambling around the battleship Missouri in Tokyo harbor last week that they spilled over their assigned space on the ship’s deck. Dozens of the U.S. newsmen were looking for Joe Blow, the local boy who made good. Aboard one destroyer transport, the squawk box ordered all New York men to double to the fo’c’sle to meet the New York Times’s representative. He turned out to be the Times’s general manager himself, Brigadier General Julius Ochs Adler. Lesser reporters, many with the names of their papers lettered on their uniforms hunted down boys from their home towns.

Ashore, U.S. photographers crouched side by side with Domei’s lensmen, shooting the big shots. One Domei cameraman had carrier pigeons to fly his pictures back to his office. U.S. and Jap reporters elbowed each other at press conferences. Jap reporters obligingly gave out interviews, and in turn interviewed U.S. newsmen. (Didn’t they agree that the bombing of Japanese cities was horrible?) The U.P. came up with an eyewitness description of atom-bombed Hiroshima from its onetime Tokyo office manager, Honolulu-born Leslie Nakashima, who went there to look up his mother. Wrote he: “I was dumfounded at the destruction before me. The center of the city . . . was razed and there was a sweeping view to the foot of the mountains. … I found my mother safe. She had been weeding grass in a field about two miles southeast of the city when she saw the flash . . . threw herself face down on the ground.”

American reporters went into Tokyo ahead of the U.S. Army, simply taking a suburban train like thousands of other commuters. (Said an obliging fellow from the Jap Information Bureau: “When young gentlemen wish go Tokyo? Trains every half hour.”) They dropped in at Domei, looked over the busy newsroom, were photographed chatting with the editors. A woman guide (born in California) was assigned to escort one group around. She said she wasn’t Tokyo Rose: that was two other girls from Los Angeles. At the Imperial Palace one newsman got as far as the Emperor’s foreign secretary, who told him politely that Hirohito was not yet accessible for interviews.

Domei continued to pour out propaganda stories, one of them accusing U.S. soldiers of raping Jap girls. At week’s end, U.S. reporters discovered that Domei, far from being put out of business, had signed an agreement with the Chinese Central News Agency to transmit its news to China on the regular Domei propaganda broadcast.

Newsmen trying to find their bearings in the topsy-turvy world were reminded of another key to the Japanese in The Mikado:

“Our attitude’s queer and quaint—you’re wrong if you think it ain’t, oh!”