JOHN DOWER

Embracing Defeat

Japan in the Wake of World War II

The ceremony was laden with symbolism. Missouri was the home state of President Harry S. Truman, whose major decisions regarding Japan had been to use the atomic bombs on two Japanese cities and to hold firm to the policy of "unconditional surrender" of his deceased predecessor Franklin D. Roosevelt. One of the flags displayed on the Missouri was the same Old Glory that had been flying over the White House on December 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Another, rushed by plane from Annapolis, was the standard with thirty-one stars used by Commodore Matthew Perry on his flagship Powhatten when his gunboat diplomacy forced Japan to end more than two centuries of feudal seclusion. The appearance of Perry's small, mixed fleet of sailing vessels and coal-fueled, smoke-belching "black ships" in 1853 had propelled Japan onto its ultimately disastrous course of global competition with the Western powers. Now, a shade under a century later, the Americans had returned with a gigantic navy, army, and air force that reflected technology and technocracy of an order Perry could not have envisioned in his wildest dreams — flaunting the commodore's old flag as a reprimand.

Two Japanese officials signed the surrender documents: General Umezu Yoshijiro, representing the imperial armed forces, and the diplomat Shigemitsu Mamoru, representing the imperial government. Shigemitsu had lost a leg in 1932 in a bomb attack by a Korean protesting Japan's colonization of his country, and his awkward gait on the rolling deck of the American battleship conveyed an uncanny impression of a crippled and vulnerable Japan. Those present to sign the surrender documents, however, stood in the shadow of those who were missing: for the emperor did not participate in these proceedings, nor did any representative of the imperial family or the Imperial Household Ministry. This concession on the part of Allied authorities caught observers in the camps of both victor and vanquished by surprise.

Until the end of the war, even unabashedly proimperial American officials such as the former ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew had assumed that the emperor would and should sign the formal articles of surrender. And even after the Japanese learned that the emperor would be personally spared this ordeal, they still assumed that an intimate representative from the court, perhaps blood kin to the sovereign, would be required to sign the surrender documents on his behalf. The emperor's complete exclusion from the great morality play of September 2 was a heartening signal to the Japanese side, for it intimated that the victors might be willing to disassociate the emperor from ultimate war responsibility.7

In his address on the Missouri, MacArthur spoke eloquently about the hope of all humanity that "a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past — a world founded upon faith and understanding — a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish — for freedom, tolerance and justice." In words directed explicitly to his fellow Americans, he reported that "the holy mission has been completed," and warned that the utter destructiveness of modern war meant that "Armageddon will be at our door" if the world did not learn to live in peace. Where defeated Japan was concerned, the supreme commander declared that the terms of surrender committed the victors to liberate the Japanese people from a "condition of slavery" and to ensure that the energies of the race were turned into constructive channels — what he referred to as expanding "vertically rather than horizontally." These were stern but solemn and hopeful words, and their high-minded tone offered a modicum of further comfort to Japanese leaders who were still nervously attempting to gauge what the victors might have in store for them.8

Still, to most patriots the surrender ceremony "spelled doom," as one American general present on the Missouri put it. "Although the inscrutable faces of their representatives gave no indication of their feelings," he recalled, "their demeanor was so extremely somber as to indicate that they fully realized that their once-proud empire had been humbled into dust and that their national hopes and aspirations were at an end."9 The future remained terribly uncertain, and the enormity of the nation's humiliation had only begun to sink in. The country's utter subjugation was reinforced by the dramatic setting of the surrender ceremony itself. The imperial navy had long since been demolished. Apart from a few thousand rickety planes held in reserve for suicide attacks, Japan's air force — not only its aircraft, but its skilled pilots as well — had virtually ceased to exist. Its merchant marine lay at the bottom of the ocean. Almost all of the country's major cities had been fire bombed, and millions of the emperor's loyal subjects were homeless. The defeated imperial army was scattered throughout Asia and the islands of the Pacific Ocean, its millions of surviving soldiers starving, wounded, sick, and demoralized. But Tokyo Bay was clogged with hundreds of powerful, well-scrubbed American fighting ships. At a thunderous theatrical moment, the sky was all but obscured by a fly-by of some four hundred glistening B-29 bombers accompanied by fifteen hundred Navy fighter planes. The imperial soil was being desecrated by the landings of wave upon wave of well-fed, superbly equipped, supremely confident GIs — an army of occupation whose numbers, in a short time, would surpass a quarter of a million. A country that had celebrated its mythic "2,600-year anniversary" in 1940, and prided itself on never having been invaded, was about to be inundated by white men.

In Japanese eyes, the inescapable impression of September 2, 1945, was that the West — which meant, essentially, the United States — was extraordinarily rich and powerful, and Japan unbelievably weak and vulnerable. This was a simple observation, but it carried enormous political implications. The scene in Tokyo Bay, coming in the wake of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, offered a stunning lesson in the kind of material strength and affluence that might be attained under American-style democracy. Although it took a while for this equation of democracy with wealth and power to sink in, it took very little time for the scale of Japan's defeat to become apparent. Nine days after the surrender ceremony, MacArthur observed at a press conference that Japan had fallen to the status of "a fourth-rate nation" — a blunt statement of reality guaranteed to tear asunder the vital organs of every Japanese leader from the emperor on down. From the moment Commodore Perry had forced Japan open, its leaders had been obsessed with becoming an itto koku, a country of the first rank. Indeed, fear that such status was being denied Japan was commonly evoked with great emotion as the ultimate reason for going to war against the West. Japan would be relegated to "second-rate" or "third-rate" status, claimed Prime Minister Tojo Hideki among others, if it failed to strike out and establish a secure imperium in Asia. Like a reopened wound, the term yonto koku — "fourth-rate country" — immediately became a postsurrender catchphrase.10 Shortly after this, MacArthur framed the nation's plight in even more alarming terms, evocative of the wrathful God of the Old Testament. Speaking about the demobilization of Japan's armed forces, he declared that "they are thoroughly beaten and cowed and tremble before the terrible retribution the surrender terms impose upon their country in punishment for its great sins."11

In the weeks that followed, the victors continued to be taken aback by the extent of the country's devastation. In mid-October, in a memorandum to President Truman summarizing conversations with MacArthur and his aides, the special presidential envoy Edwin Locke, Jr. reported that "the American officers now in Tokyo are amazed by the fact that resistance continued as long as it did." Indeed, so great was the economic disarray, he added, that in the opinion of some Americans the atomic bombs, "while seized upon by the Japanese as an excuse for getting out of the war, actually speeded surrender by only a few days." Locke went on to note that "the entire economic structure of Japan's greatest cities has been wrecked. Five millions of Tokyo's seven million population have left the ruined city."12 Later investigative missions from Washington, led by analysts for the prestigious U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, similarly concluded that presurrender estimates of Japan's capacity for continuing the war had been greatly exaggerated.13 This was ex post facto conjecture, but it reflected a common observation that Japan at war's end was vastly weaker than anyone outside the country had imagined — or anyone inside it had acknowledged.

Virtually all that would take place in the several years that followed unfolded against this background of crushing defeat. Despair took root and flourished in such a milieu; so did cynicism and opportunism — as well as marvelous expressions of resilience, creativity, and idealism of a sort possible only among people who have seen an old world destroyed and are being forced to imagine a new one. In such circumstances, it was hardly surprising that few Japanese had the energy, imagination, or desire to dwell on how many other lives they had shattered in the course of carrying out their emperor's holy war.