The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [117]
All had been requisitioned for the Occupation authorities. The journalist James Morris, later Jan Morris, wrote of this strange area in his 1947 travelogue The Phoenix Cup: ‘Marunouchi is a small American island surrounded by a Japanese sea of ashes, rubble and rusted cans. Walking around the blocks, discordant music, from the Armed Forces Radio Station, batters on the eardrums, and ruminating G.I.s off duty stand propped against the nearest convenient wall . . . one might be in Denver . . .’
It was here, in the grandest of these buildings, the Dai-Ichi (Number One) Building, that General MacArthur had his headquarters. The Supreme Commander Allied Powers (SCAP). The Yankee Daimyo.
Iggie arrived two years after the Emperor had broadcast his declaration of defeat in his high falsetto, using a diction and locution unknown outside the court, warning that ‘the hardships and sufferings to which our nation is to be subjected will be great . . .’ In the months since, Tokyo had become used to its army of occupation. The Americans had declared that they would rule with sensitivity.
In the photograph of the General and the Emperor in the US Embassy in Tokyo the relationship was made clear. MacArthur is in khaki uniform, an open-necked shirt and boots. He has his hands on his hips, a ‘big, ribbonless American soldier’, as Life puts it. The Emperor is alongside. He is slight, immaculate, in a black suit with his wing collar and striped tie, caught in convention. Sensitivity and manners, states the photograph, are up for negotiation now. The Japanese press refuse to publish the picture. SCAP makes sure it is published. The day after the photograph is taken, the Empress sends Mrs MacArthur a bouquet of flowers grown in the palace grounds. And a few days later a lacquer box with the imperial crest. Cautious, anxious communications are started with gifts.
Iggie’s taxi took him to the Teito Hotel opposite the Palace. It was not only difficult to get papers to get into Japan and permission to stay; it was then difficult to get lodgings when you arrived, because the Teito was one of only two hotels standing. The non-military expatriate community was tiny. Apart from the diplomatic corps and the press, there were only a handful of businessmen like Iggie and a scattering of academics. He had arrived as the trials of war criminals, including Hideki Tojo and Ryuchi Tanaka, head of the secret police, were just starting at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Tojo, according to the Western press, had ‘the unearthly smugness of the samurai’.
There were constant edicts from SCAP concerning everything from the minutiae of civic life to how Japan was to be ruled, and these often reflected American sensitivities. MacArthur had decided that there was to be a separation between the Shinto religion – deeply implicated in the rise of nationalism of the last fifteen years – and the government. He also wanted the great industrial and commercial conglomerates broken up:
The emperor is the head of the state . . . his duties and powers will be exercised in accordance with the new constitution and responsible to the basic will of the people as provided therein . . . War as a sovereign right of the nation is abolished . . . The feudal system of Japan will cease . . . No patent of nobility will from this time forth embody within itself any national or civic power of government.
MacArthur had also decided that women should get the vote for the first time in Japan’s history and that the twelve-hour day in factories should be reduced to eight. Democracy had come to Japan, SCAP announced. The local and foreign press were censored.
The American