Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the occupation of Japan
336
Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the occupation of Japan
336eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
A vivid, salutary study of Australia’s little-known participation in the post-war occupation of Japan.
In February 1946, the Australians of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) moved into western Japan to ‘demilitarise and democratise’ the atom-bombed backwater of Hiroshima Prefecture. For over six years, up to 20,000 Australian servicemen, including their wives and children, participated in an historic experiment in nation-rebuilding dominated by the United States and the occupation’s supreme commander, General MacArthur.
It was to be a watershed in Australian military history and international relations. BCOF was one of the last collective armed gestures of a moribund empire. The Chifley government wanted to make Australia’s independent presence felt in post-war Asia-Pacific affairs, yet the venture heralded the nation’s enmeshment in American geopolitics. This was the forerunner of the today’s peacekeeping missions and engagements in contentious US-led military occupations.
Yet the occupation of Japan was also a compelling human experience. It was a cultural reconnaissance — the first time a large number of Australians were able to explore in depth an Asian society and country. It was an unprecedented domestic encounter between peoples with apparently incompatible traditions and temperaments. Many relished exercising power over a despised former enemy, and basked in the ‘atomic sunshine’ of American Japan. But numerous Australians developed an intimacy with the old enemy, which put them at odds with the ‘Jap’ haters back home, and became the trailblazers of a new era of bilateral friendship.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781925113204 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Scribe Publications Pty Ltd |
| Publication date: | 10/27/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Robin Gerster is a professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning study Big-noting: the heroic theme in Australian war writing (1987); the travel book Legless in Ginza: orientating Japan (1999); the critical anthologies Hotel Asia (1995) and On the Warpath (2004), and Pacific Exposures: photography and the Australia-Japan relationship (2018), co-authored with Melissa Miles.
His articles have been published extensively in scholarly journals in both Australia and abroad, and he has been a frequent writer of travel pieces for newspapers and magazines.
Read an Excerpt
Travels in Atomic Sunshine
Australia and the Occupation of Japan
By Robin Gerster
Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Copyright © 2008 Robin GersterAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-925113-20-4
CHAPTER 1
The Long Road
Travellers of a certain vintage still visit Japan with 'the war' on their minds. The novelist Peter Carey, who was born in 1943, remembers, as a child, playing with Occupation money that must have been brought back to Australia as a souvenir. Visiting Japan with his son, he searched 'in every cultural artefact for echoes of the atomic bomb, the firebombing of Tokyo, the American occupation'. But war tourists do not find much concrete evidence in Japan's constantly mutating capital to satisfy their curiosity. What nature and American bombers have not achieved, Tokyo has done to itself. Things get knocked down and put up again, destroyed, replaced, remade. The city, it has been remarked, 'has as much permanence as a Bedouin encampment'.
Overt reminders of the Occupation era are few, and you won't see them advertised in official tourist literature. General MacArthur's spartan offices in the Dai-Ichi building have been carefully preserved, and can be viewed (if you can get past the concierge), though they attract few visitors. Security is heavy at the vast Japan Defence Agency complex at Ichigaya – a couple of kilometres away, by the river – but tours can be arranged. The chief attraction is the Memorial Hall, constructed in 1937, in which Hirohito had once received each fresh batch of graduating military cadets on an elevated platform, to which two sets of stairs had been constructed: one for the dainty feet of the divine emperor, the other to handle common human traffic. From May 1946 to November 1948, this was the venue for the Tokyo war trials, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, presided over by a Queenslander, Justice Sir William Webb. Visitors are ushered to one side of the hall to view display cases showing some innocuous historical material relating to the building. In solitary splendour on the other side, in a cabinet of its own, lies the manuscript of the 'Dissentient Judgment' of Justice Pal, the Indian jurist who refused to go along with the guilty verdicts handed out to General Tojo and his ilk, arguing that the proceedings were victor's justice and that the list of war crimes that were considered neglected to include, for example, the atomic bombings.
But most visitors are more interested in the grisly events that took place in a room upstairs, on 25 November 1970. There, after one last 'banzai!' for the emperor, the celebrated writer and arch nationalist Yukio Mishima committed hara-kiri, choosing as his location a symbolic site of Japanese post-war humiliation. More is made of how Mishima literally lost his head (it being clumsily dispatched according to the ritual) than of the madness of his bungled coup d'état aimed at restoring Japanese military strength.
IN MAY 1946, almost a quarter of a century before Mishima's fatuous performance of emperor worship, a battalion of Australian soldiers marched onto the streets of Tokyo to mount the first BCOF guard on the Imperial Palace. The Tokyo trials had opened just a week earlier. The war's ordeal had seemed to come to a satisfactory end; at last, the Australians could preen. That they were mounting guard on the palace of a figure they wanted brought to justice lent the moment a special pleasure. Even the Americans were impressed. The Pacific Stars and Stripes ran a photograph of 'smart-stepping, arm-swinging' Diggers on its front page, calling them 'top-notch troops' who gave the Japanese yet another glimpse of 'Allied military might' – as if that was necessary after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. John Northcott, the first BCOF commander-in-chief – soon to be rewarded with the honour of being appointed the first Australian-born governor of New South Wales – telegraphed the national government. He had a simple but climactic message to pass on: 'Australian troops took over duties in Tokyo today and mounted guard on the emperor's palace. The end of a long road.'
As one long road ended for Australia, another opened up for Japan. Perhaps Northcott was reading from Hirohito's 'rescript' announcing the termination of the war, broadcast on the radio at high noon on 15 August 1945. The emperor had used the same image while imploring his 'good and loyal subjects' to abstain from 'outbursts of emotion that may engender needless complications' in the wake of their defeat. Hirohito spoke in a shrill singsong to a stupefied national audience that had never heard his voice before, using such a florid and arcane court style that a radio announcer then re-read the entire speech in common language. The message was doleful but determined. The emperor directed the nation to keep its faith in itself, 'ever mindful of its heavy burden of responsibilities, and of the long road before it'.
The trope of 'the road' to signify the war's long travail appears time and time again in the language of the footsloggers on their tours of duty, and in that of the rarefied military leaders who design and direct their itineraries. American GIs photographed in Bougainville in 1944 rest on a large sign bearing the legend, 'Last Stop on Road to Japan', with a large arrow pointed toward 'Main Street Tokyo'. True to form, Supreme Commander MacArthur had personalised the course of the conflict by tracing its trajectory according to his wartime career. Its nadir had been fleeing from Japanese surrounded Corregidor in the Philippines in March 1942, followed by the perilous journey south to Australia, first by boat, and then by decrepit aircraft across the captured enemy islands of the South-West Pacific, with an entourage that included his wife Jean and four-year-old son Arthur. Soon after his arrival in Melbourne, he was appointed Supreme Commander of the South-West Pacific area, after which he famously told the Australian prime minister, John Curtin, 'You take care of the rear and I will handle the front'.
The war's high point, from MacArthur's point of view, was descending upon a vanquished Japan from on high as its unchallenged conqueror, on 30 August 1945. MacArthur had flown from Manila to Atsugi air base, 48 kilometres southwest of Tokyo, into a Japan in which the advance American occupying force was outnumbered 1000 to 1 by trained Japanese troops in the Tokyo vicinity alone. Kamikaze pilots with clipped wings were billeted in the area – Atsugi had been their training base. Stepping briskly from the plane, wielding nothing more dangerous than his corncob pipe, the conqueror returned the salute from General Robert L. Eichelberger, the commander of the US Eighth Army – which was to comprise the bulk of the American occupying force – shook his hand and remarked casually: 'Bob, from Melbourne to Tokyo is a long way, but this seems to be the end of the road.'
The Americans relished both the happy conclusion to the war's proceedings and its aftermath. From the first days, weeks, and months of the Occupation, they mastered post-war Japan with the insouciance that comes when ideological certainty is backed up by absolute military domination. The story of the genesis of the post-war Japanese constitution, as smugly related by the head of SCAP's powerful government section, General Courtney Whitney, is instructive. Early in the new year of 1946, the section was ordered to create a new constitution in secret haste, in order to present the Japanese with a fait accompli before the forthcoming general election. MacArthur sought Japan's renunciation of war and the abolition of its armed forces, and wanted to see the constitutional investment of sovereignty in the people, with the emperor reduced to a figurehead; he sought also the abolition of the peerage system and all forms of feudalism. 'Here,' Whitney wrote, 'was an opportunity to help an entire nation throw off the virus of militarism.'
The team worked in a frenzy for six days to draft the document to meet the deadline of 12 February – Lincoln's birthday. American and European constitutions were studied along with the old Meiji constitution that was to be discarded. At the private residence of the Japanese foreign minister Yoshida (soon to be prime minister), and in company with two senior American officers, Whitney sprang the constitution on members of the Japanese cabinet, who had gathered to debate another draft that they had prepared themselves. Whitney put the document, written in English, on the table, stressing to the Japanese that it had the strong support of the SCAP himself. The Americans then repaired to the gardens of the foreign minister's residence, basking in their serenity. It was a glorious day. After about an hour, one of the flustered Japanese appeared in the garden, apologising for keeping the visitors waiting. 'Not at all,' Whitney replied with a smile. 'We have been enjoying your atomic sunshine.' At that very moment, a B-29 roared overhead; it was as if the Enola Gay was flying a lap of honour.
'For the Japanese', as General Eichelberger cockily ended his memoir Our JungleRoad to Tokyo (1950), 'the Americans are still the giants in the earth'. Douglas MacArthur, as the Occupation's Supreme Commander, was the most gigantic American of them all. The general's first encounter with Hirohito had established the new hierarchy in Japan. The meeting took place not at the Imperial Palace but in the US embassy, on 27 September 1945. To make this circumstance even more humbling for the emperor, whose routes through the capital had always been cleared to facilitate his easy passage, his Daimler was stopped by a red traffic light at the crossroads near the embassy, up the hill in Toranomon, on the northern side of his palace moat. This was no longer his city, let alone his country.
Upon his arrival in the embassy compound, MacArthur's aide, Major Faubion Bowers, thought Hirohito looked 'frightened to death'. His hands were trembling. Meeting MacArthur on the threshold of the drawing room, 'he bowed low, very low, a servant's bow'; his hands were still trembling when he accepted the offer of an American cigarette. The pair met for about 40 minutes. What transpired went unreported; but, on 29 September, GHQ had the Japanese newspapers run an official photograph of the pair, taken by an army photographer. It was a picture that spoke several thousand words. The small, stiff emperor stood frozen in frock coat, cravat, and striped pants. Beside him, less than two feet away and a good foot taller, the unsmiling but disarmingly relaxed MacArthur, a couple of decades his senior, eyeballed the camera. Dressed casually in khaki, with no insignia of rank, hands in pockets, collar open, and hands on hips, he is the at-home host giving his precious time to an ill-at-ease, absurdly overdressed visitor. It was the first of five visits Hirohito made to the general; MacArthur never reciprocated. The demeaning image appalled Japanese police censors, who ordered that the newspapers be confiscated and sought to invoke a national law of 'Crimes Against the Imperial Household'. With totalitarian logic, GHQ quickly rescinded the ban, and ordered the government to cease all efforts to censor or control the media.
The Japanese authorities were right to be concerned about the humiliating impact of the photograph. A pun circulating in Tokyo referred to MacArthur's vast height advantage over the Lilliputian emperor to make a satirical aside about the new place of Hirohito in the Japanese body politic: 'Why is General MacArthur like a navel?' 'Because he is above the chin'. Chin is a first-person pronoun used exclusively by the emperor; Hirohito had employed it, confusingly to many of his subjects, in his momentous broadcast on 15 August. It also happens to be Japanese slang for 'penis'. Hirohito was a pragmatist, and knew that the American interloper had saved his skin by resisting pressure, much of it stemming from the Australians, to have him tried as a war criminal.
Another running Occupation joke was that the once-divine emperor 'stopped claiming to be God when he discovered MacArthur was'. The general was on a pedestal; his towering presence put Hirohito in the shade. In January 1947, an old high-school friend of MacArthur's, Ed T. Coleman, wrote to Hirohito from Plainsville Texas, advising the emperor to honour 'the great man' to whom the Japanese 'owe much', by making his birthday, 26 January, a public holiday to be called 'MacArthur Day'. At 'High Noon', Coleman suggested, all Japanese should face east, a salute should be given, and these words uttered: 'May the spirit of Douglas MacArthur live and endure forever'. There is no evidence that Hirohito dashed off a reply.
The Americans never deviated from their view that their mission in Japan was an act of benevolent redemption. In his study of post-war Japan, Embracing Defeat (1999), John Dower dredges up one of the defining tags of the age of empire in describing the Occupation as 'the last immodest exercise in the colonial conceit known as "the white man's burden"'. Kipling's famous euphemism is even more germane than Dower thinks. In 'The White Man's Burden', first published in 1899, Kipling urged the US to take up the challenge of empire ('to serve your captives' need') previously borne by Britain and other European nations. The poem was written to coincide with the American conquest of the Philippines and acquisition of other former Spanish colonies, such as Puerto Rico and Cuba. What makes the reference so pertinent to Japan is that the first military governor of the newly American-occupied Philippines was none other than Douglas MacArthur's own father and greatest influence, General Arthur MacArthur, who thought it the duty of the 'magnificent Aryan races' to create 'progressive social evolution' in Asia.
Whether the Occupation of Japan was the last American assumption of the white man's burden is debatable; Dower was writing before the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and before the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. Whereas the US started talking of spreading Anglo-Saxon civilisation in the early 20th century, Max Boot writes in The Savage Wars of Peace (2003), 'today they talk of spreading democracy and defending human rights'. The trend started in post-war Japan. Edwin O. Reischauer, the Tokyo-born son of Presbyterian missionaries, who was deeply involved in Occupation policy while working at the state department, wrote in 1950 that – in words that ring a distinctly contemporary bell – 'We are anxious to prove that democracy is an article for export'.
Japan was a wreck when the Americans moved in. Of the more than two million of its people killed in the war, nearly 600,000 were civilians killed outright or fatally injured in the air raids, the atomic bombings, and the fight-to-the-death struggle in Okinawa, in which one-third of the local population perished. Sixty of its cities had been pulverised, napalmed, nuked. The homeless numbered more than eight million; the unemployed, even more. People were displaced and dying of malnutrition. The aftermath of the war almost seemed worse than the war itself, especially in the ruined cities. The humiliation of defeat was ameliorated by an overwhelming sense of relief at the prospect of deliverance.
Exhausted, the country wanted to make a fresh start. It was thus a perfect 'laboratory', as MacArthur himself envisaged, in which to conduct an experiment in national reconstruction. Until the obsession with rooting out 'the Reds' in the liberated Japanese political landscape took hold of American policy, this was a mission civilisatrice of the old-fashioned kind. A 'feudalistic', backward, heathen, inferior Oriental nation was to be recast in the image of the 'free', progressive, Christian, superior West, as most powerfully exemplified by the US.
The Occupation was a military dictatorship informed by an autocratic insistence on 'Democracy'. This was conjoined with Christianity, as the great ideological coupling. While MacArthur talked vaguely about 'the Anglo-Saxon idea', it was specifically America, because of its 'advanced spirituality', which had assumed the mantle as the propagator of Christian virtue in the Far East. MacArthur wanted to augment the reconstructive work of the troops by filling Japan with American missionaries to encourage Japan's 'spiritual regeneration'. The Occupation ordered that ten million Bibles translated into Japanese be issued to the populace. This was an opportunity, through the 'practical demonstration of Christian ideals', to lift up a race 'long stunted' by 'ancient concepts of mythological teaching'. The 'little Japanese', indeed. MacArthur's personification in 1951 of the Japanese as 'a boy of twelve' ('compared with our development of forty-five years') who is ripe for re-education reveals the overweening paternalism of the Occupation.
With the arrogance of moral certainty came an incapacity for self-criticism, which revealed itself very early on. The biggest self-deception of all was that the US was in Japan solely on an errand of mercy. In a speech made to World War I veterans in Washington DC in 1935, MacArthur had described America as a 'pre-eminently Christian' nation that is 'far less militaristic than most nations' and, hence, 'not especially open to the charge of imperialism'. During the Occupation itself, he had remarked that Christianity was imbued with 'spiritual repugnance of war'. These are disarming observations, coming from a man whose whole life and career were associated with combat.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Travels in Atomic Sunshine by Robin Gerster. Copyright © 2008 Robin Gerster. Excerpted by permission of Scribe Publications Pty Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction: Occupying Japan,Part I,
Gulliver in Lilliput: Japanese travails,
1 The Long Road,
2 Approaching Japan,
3 In the City of the Dead,
4 Bile, Spit, and Polish,
Part II,
Occupation Blues: disturbing the peace,
5 Tabi No Haji Wa Kakisute,
6 Crimes and Misdemeanours,
7 Anything Goes,
8 Home Affront,
Part III,
Japanorama: on tour,
9 At the Kawana Hotel,
10 A Passage to Japan,
11 Honoured Tourists,
12 By Ground Zero,
Part IV,
Embracing Japan: conquest and contact,
13 Sleeping with the Enemy,
14 Brides of Japan,
15 Coming to Terms,
16 Cultural Penetrations,
Conclusion: Remembering the Occupation,
Acknowledgements,
Notes,