New Door to Asia

The Open Door was closing fast in China. Once the Reds had slammed it shut, the dust of history would settle on half a century of Western endeavor and propagation of Western ideals on Asia's mainland. Watching the relentless march of the Communists below the Yangtze and south across prostrate China, the U.S. wondered: What next in Asia?

No man knew the answer. But the be ginning of an answer seemed to be in the making. The man who had formulated it, grandiosely and still vaguely, was an American with the face of an aging movie idol, the vision of a statesman and the stature of a great fighter. He was General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) and (in the words of the Japanese), Yankee Emperor of Nippon.

The Prophet. When four years ago MacArthur stood, tieless and ramrod straight, on the veranda deck of the U.S.S. Missouri, accepting Japan's surrender from a group of uniformed and frock-coated little men, neither he nor his nation realized that he had set out on a new war.

Most Americans still do not realize the scope of MacArthur's task in Japan. But one fact is driving itself home; while the U.S. labors on the dam that contains Communism in Europe, the Red tide has risen mightily in Asia and now threatens to engulf half the world's people. In all Asia, tiny, beaten Japan is the one place where the U.S. still has a firm foothold, where it still has a chance to redeem the West's sorry record of failure and confusion in the East.

Between conferences with staff officers, intelligence briefing on the disastrous China situation and talks with Japanese politicians, General MacArthur occasionally finds time to receive a visitor from the States. On these occasions, MacArthur speaks with sweeping eloquence about the great U.S. experiment in Japan. The gist of his discourse:

. . . There are two great principles in the world. One is Christianity. Not just Christian doctrine, but the basic principles of right & wrong, of clean living, of kindness to one's neighbor. The other great principle has many names. Freedom, liberty or democracy--whatever called--its essence is the right and dignity of the individual. To achieve that principle has taken centuries of revolution and bloody battle. In Japan, this principle came so suddenly--and so quietly--that most observers fail to see the scope of the tremendous, bloodless revolution that has been wrought here since the start of the American occupation.

America's frontiers are in Asia. We cannot abandon Asia to Communism any more than we can abandon Europe to Communism. As in the war, so in the peace we must fight on both fronts. In spite of what has happened in China we still have a chance here. We have the unique opportunity of making the Japanese people into a good society. They have an old adage here--as Japan goes, so goes Asia. The history of the next 100 years, perhaps the next 1,000 years, may be decided here in the East . . .

The Ferment. Japan last week scarcely looked like the proper setting for such portentous words. The cherry blossoms were advancing northward through the islands. The first white buds had appeared at Kagoshima, Japan's southernmost and warmest port. Slowly they had taken all of Kyushu Island and, crossing the narrow straits, had established a beachhead on the rocky coast of Honshu. The blossoms last week sprouted near the Kure dockyards and on a thousand drowsy islands dotting the Inland Sea.

For the people this week it was the time of the Hanami (flower viewing). The Japanese left their wretched, paper-thin houses and their half-ruined factories; chattering with delight, they roamed across the broad lawns of their public gardens to view the flowers of spring. City folk flocked to the beaches. Up & down the jagged, black-sanded coast, fishermen pushed off their squat wooden boats. Farmers tirelessly slushed through their rice fields as they had always done.

Yet even in this scene, the country was in ferment. The "bloodless revolution" was in full swing. Just two years ago, the Diet passed Japan's new constitution. MacArthur himself had written the first draft in his clear, old-fashioned hand. It reduced the Emperor from godhead to symbol, abolished the feudal aristocracy, gave the Diet genuine power to make laws, guaranteed popular liberties, decreed sex equality, renounced the nation's right to make war, even for self-defense. It contained such alien concepts as "public servants" (ancient custom made bureaucrats responsible only to the Throne) and "pursuit of happiness" (many a Japanese finds this Jeffersonian concept immoral).

It had paved the way for land reform; the estates of the old gentry had been bought and resold to 5,000,000 new, small, independent holders. It had given Japanese politics a new look; at parliamentary elections for the first time in history, candidates for office had gone hat in hand to solicit votes from ordinary folk.

The new constitution looked fine on the statute books. But what did Minshushugi (the way of the democrats) really mean to a people long accustomed to Shinto (the way of the gods)?

The Japanese find U.S. democracy attractive but elusive. It is strange and foreign to the touch. Schoolboys argue whether Minshushugi means Marx, Lincoln or Adam Smith. Harried housewives wonder how long it will be before belief in true democracy can scale down the price of black-market soap. Said a greying Osaka politician: "We can explain the theory of democracy and even make laws about it. But to feel it, that is the big jump. Let's face it--Japan is being baptized at a very old age."

The lack of force in applying Minshushugi puzzles, and exasperates, some Japanese. "Who are we to choose?" asked a shabby ex-officer. "After all, the Americans are running the occupation."

Enter, Blondie. The coming of democracy has had its greatest impact on Japanese women. Before the war they were virtually without legal rights. Now they vote, own property, attend square dances, go to coeducational schools and eagerly discuss the advantages of love matches over the ancient Japanese custom of marriage arranged by parents. They may smoke if they like. Emancipation has not been confined to the young. A middle aged matron in a Fukuoka leather-goods store explained: "Before the war when my husband and I went out I walked behind. Now we walk side by side."

Democracy has had some strange blossoms. Chic Young's Blondie (see PRESS), which appears with Japanese captions in the Tokyo Asahi, has become the symbol of Minshushugi. Like thousands of her emancipated sisters, Housewife Michiko Yamaga takes time off from her chores each morning to see what Dagwood's wife is doing. "If I had even stopped to read the paper like this in the old days," she says, "my in-laws could have thrown me out of the house for being lazy. Now to read is democratic."

Exit, a God. A sociologist who has spent a lifetime studying the conservative folk of Japan's fishing villages said last week: "Everywhere I go the conflict is the same. It is the young against the old. The old instinctively want to preserve past ways, but they are losing. Now, in the village assemblies the youngsters speak out against their fathers--often violently. The old, rigid family structure is cracking. Where the young will go, what faith they will finally adopt, I don't know."

Everywhere in Japan, the people are suspended between the old, which is no longer considered right, and the new, which they do not yet understand. One day last week, Emperor Hirohito celebrated his 48th birthday. Between morning and nightfall, nearly 400,000 Japanese filed into the palace gardens to pay their respects to the Mikado. Since the Emperor has formally ceased to be a god and has begun to move freely about his realm, he has become even more popular with his people than in the old days. His subjects seem to prefer his humanity to his divinity; at baseball games (he recently attended his first--see cut), among workers, wherever he goes, they take inexplicable comfort from his invariable approving remark, "Ah so, ah so." Yet even in their homage of their constitutional monarch the people are confused.

Amid the gossipy birthday crowds strolling last week across the imperial gardens at Tokyo, a frayed, rustic-looking little man stopped, doffed his hat and made a low bow toward the palace. In the middle of this gesture, once compulsory but now archaic, the little man suddenly became aware that his more modern-minded countrymen were staring at him. Deeply embarrassed, he checked himself in mid-bow, pretended that he was merely scratching his head, and put his hat back on. Then he shyly disappeared into the crowd.

No Safer Way. The little man was the measure of America's task. The little man --and millions like him--wanted to know what he might bow to now. Emperor MacArthur? The American flag? If democracy was the faith of the men who had beaten Japan, it was probably a good thing; he would make obeisance to it, too.

The little man had yet to learn that democracy was not a matter of bowing to any idol but of standing straight and free as a responsible citizen. Unless this lesson sank in, the little man would easily stray from the road of the democrats to the road of the Communists, who had new idols all ready for him to bow to.

The American teachers of democracy could not be .sure where their lessons would end. Once before the Japanese had acquired a veneer of Western progress. They had achieved mass education and mass production. They had learned to forge steel, to fly--and to bomb Pearl Harbor.

It may be argued that in prewar Japan democratic forms were merely superimposed on ancient, rigid social patterns. In Japan today the U.S. is breaking up those social patterns. It is deliberately fostering a social revolution far bolder than anything colonial powers of the past have attempted in Asia. This revolution might lead to real democracy; it might also backfire as badly as Japan's earlier and shallower experiment with Western progress. Americans and Japanese are groping down a dim and dangerous road. But there is no safer way.

The Strange Hills. For the time being, Japan's plain people were still not mainly concerned with the road to democracy; they worried--like people in the best regulated societies--about the road that would lead them to the 'biggest bowl of rice. In a Tokyo saloon last week Mikizo Kawahara, an unemployed counterman, said: "It's useless to talk to me about democracy and new ideals--get me a job first!" A bearded grocer near by put down his cup of watered sake and nodded: "Life here," he said, "is like trying to do business in a prison without bars."

Japan is desperately poor. Miles of gaping ruins still deface the land, though in the big cities jerry-built warrens of small houses and shops hide some of the scars of bomb destruction. The crowds that haggle over prices in Tokyo's Shimbashi market are only slightly better dressed than they were four years ago. High priced Tokyo shops sell "fancy silk ties, brocade purses and delicate chinaware, but few can afford them. The Ginza's humbler stalls have stacks of hardware and kitchen utensils, but still at soaring black-market prices. Chubby new autos (toyoda toyopetto, or "pet cars") chug along streets once monopolized by occupation vehicles--but most Japanese still wait in dreary queues for rickety buses.

The newly rich black-marketeers fling lavish parties in speakeasy restaurants for their geisha girls. Pomaded dandies and taxi-dancers foxtrot in crowded dance-halls to the melancholy strains of ikoku no oka, "the hills of a strange land"--a hit-parade lament about Japan's 400,000 strong P.W.s still held in Soviet Siberia.

The average wage-earner has plenty to be melancholy about at home. He struggles desperately with the inflated cost of living. At official prices an average belt for a man costs 800 yen, a hat 2,000 yen, a pair of shoes 1,500 yen, a suit 4,000 yen. The black-market prices are twice as high, but if a Japanese boycotts the black market he will need a year and a half to accumulate the tickets necessary to buy a suit on his ration card.

Economics of Defeat. When MacArthur took over Japan, the country's economic situation was desperate. For decades, Japan, one of the world's great trading nations, had supported itself from markets around the world; its best customers were the U.S., China and India. By ruthless seizure it was the master of fabulously wealthy Manchuria, the chief prize in the treasurehouse of the "greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." When the war ended, the great trading empire was shattered. Gone also were four-fifths of the Japanese merchant ships that had carried her trade. Eighty-one million people (increasing at the rate of about one million a year) were bottled up on the overcrowded islands of Japan in a space hardly capable of supporting 50 million. The disaster, which Japan had richly earned, was compounded by a U.S. policy which was designed to keep Japan forever from waging another war. As it turned out, the cost was whopping, and it was paid by the U.S. taxpayer, who had to help support a destitute Japan.

A good part of SCAP's first two years was spent in demilitarization and the purge of war-guilty officials. The trusts of the Zaibatsu, big family combines, were broken up. SCAP, however, had nothing to substitute for the old Japanese way of doing business. The Zaibatsu unquestionably carried a heavy share of Japanese war guilt. But instead of punishing individuals for individual offenses, the U.S. economic policy in effect punished the entire Japanese nation because the effect of it was to forestall such limited economic recovery as was still possible. The 1945 basic U.S. occupation directive to MacArthur had stated flatly: "You will not assume any responsibility for the economic rehabilitation or the strengthening of the Japanese economy"

When MacArthur is criticized for SCAP's failure to improve Japan's tragic economic plight, the general replies that he was rigidly bound by the directive, which expressed the will of the people of the U.S. Critics of SCAP, looking at Japan's slow recovery, insist the reply is only partially valid. MacArthur, they argue, had enough stature to go to bat in Washington against any directive he considered wrong.

ECA for Asia? After the demilitarization and purges, occupation policy switched to a new phase--democratization and economic revival. But Russian veto of a peace treaty blocked MacArthur's plan to restore Japanese trade. U.S. trustbusters were still locked in stalemate with the Zaibatsu. Last summer the U.S. State Department intervened. Top Planner George Kennan took a long look at Japan. He recommended a basic change in policy, aimed at Japan's self-government, self-respect and self-support. Last December, a firm economic directive was finally drafted for MacArthur.

Last February, Washington sent slight, straight-talking Banker Joseph Dodge, of Detroit, to help MacArthur get the program started. Last week Troubleshooter Dodge was packing to go home, his mission accomplished. In a busy three months he had persuaded Premier Shigeru Yoshida's government to balance its budget (for the first time since 1931) and set up a realistic yen rate (360 to $1 U.S.). In return for the national belt-tightening that this signified, the Japanese would receive U.S. aid (around $4,000,000 in 1949) along self-helping ECA lines.

The Dodge mission revealed some of Washington's long-range thinking--a Marshall plan for Asia in which Japan might serve as the industrial workshop for a goods-hungry continent. Japanese production might help wean Asia from Red domination. State's blueprint also called for a simplified occupation, a garrison of troops for police duty only and advisory economic experts.

Proclaimed Finance Minister Hayato Ikeda, one of Japan's few competent cabinet members, who had done the spadework with Joe Dodge: "Real political freedom cannot be hoped for where there is no economic independence. If we Japanese prefer to lie idly dependent on the help of foreign countries, we would be disgracing both our forefathers and our children."

Bright & Happy. The trouble with any plans for Japan's economic future was that most of the area with which she needs to trade was either held or threatened by the Communists. The Communists saw the dilemma. Japan's Communist boss, plump little Sanzo Nozaka, good friend of China's Mao Tsetung, found that Marxism has little ideological appeal for his countrymen; but when he promised them more food, more work, more trade, he found that even Japanese businessmen would listen. Last week, viewing Mao Tsetung's victories in China, Comrade Nozaka was the cheeriest fellow in all Japan. Asked what effect recent political events in China were having on Japan, his dead-fish eyes lit up: "Hee, hee, hee," he giggled, "a very great effect, very good."

To harried businessmen and the hapless middle class he burbled: "With the victory of the Chinese Communists, half the world's people are now Communist. Communism is the future. Japan must trade with the rest of Asia to survive, and all the rest of Asia is rapidly going Communist. Trust us ... We will reconstruct Japan and make it bright and happy . . ."

MacArthur thinks he can wipe the smile off little Nozaka's face. This much is certain: the Communists would have far greater cause for mirth if Douglas MacArthur had never come to Japan.

Vanishing American. Although he will be 70 next year, Douglas MacArthur has lost none of the West Pointer's bearing. For the past 34 years, he never missed a day's duty because of illness. In his plainly furnished office, he works seven days a week, composing directives by hand (he does not like to dictate) and buzzing for his aides when he wants them (he has banned telephones from his desk). He looks fit and much younger than his years; his hair, flecked with grey, is usually carefully brushed to cover a bald spot. The General lives sedately with his alert, unaffected wife (19 years his junior) and their sturdy eleven-year-old son, Arthur MacArthur, in the palatial U.S. embassy.

People who have seen him in action call him the greatest one-man show this side of Winston Churchill. He has Churchill's sense of being on intimate terms with history. He also has his sense of danger and drama. He wraps himself in thundering generalities; he sometimes sounds, annoyingly, as though he had just received a special briefing from heavenly quarters. But few people come away without the conviction that he is a great man.

A visitor last week described an audience with MacArthur: "The performance was less exalted than I had expected. He has an avuncular sort of friendliness and at the same time maintains the dignity of age and position. I cannot imagine another U.S. general lowering his voice and, staring musingly into the distance, saying: We may fail here, but all men who truly have religion in their hearts must believe that we can succeed, must stand with respect before the miracle of what has happened in Japan.

"MacArthur not only says it, he gets away with it--in that he carries at least the conviction that he believes what he says. He recalls a very American vanishing type--the philosopher-politician who has been a trial lawyer. His is the manner of the leader of the state bar (say, Virginia) who could leave the courtroom after a performance and settle on the veranda, recount the day to his family, telling what he had borrowed from Plato and what from Sir Walter Scott, and conclude: 'And every word I said to them I know in my heart to be true.' "

Man at a Milestone? When MacArthur sizes up the job the U.S. has done in Japan, he talks about a "milestone in the march of man." To spectators with less sweeping vision, this estimate seemed premature. But many would agree that, in Japan, the U.S. and MacArthur have acquitted themselves creditably in spite of the basic mistakes made in the first phase of the occupation. They were the mistakes of righteous anger and of unfamiliarity with the enormous problem of dealing with a conquered enemy, and in as far as they can be, they are on the way to being redressed.

SCAP is still criticized in some quarters for its cumbersome, red-taped bureaucracy.* There are too many military minds fumbling with unmilitary chores. One American businessman recently complained: "They clutter up any piece of business with the damndest bureaucracy you ever saw. But foreign businessmen here can at least get into SCAP and yell. The Japanese businessmen are even more helpless and paralyzed--and don't even dare go near SCAP."

Man Behind Bamboo. Japanese, on the whole, are deeply grateful to Americans; but they like military government no better than any other people. A popular quip among English-speaking Japanese holds that the letters GHQ on Americans' uniforms stand for: "Go Home Quick."

Japan no doubt could use a more experienced economic administrator than Douglas MacArthur is. But such a gain might be offset by the loss of a leader who has shown that he can be a real inspiration for the muddled Japanese people.

The Japanese call MacArthur the "New Man Behind the Bamboo Screen" (Japan's Mikados used to shield themselves from the common gaze). The people now see more of Hirohito than of MacArthur; but they know who guides their fate. This week, on the second anniversary of Japan's constitution, Douglas MacArthur issued a typically MacArthurian message. It read: "These have been fruitful years . . . Your selected architects and builders have worked arduously to fabricate a citadel of freedom ... In these two years the character of the occupation has gradually changed from the stern rigidity of a military operation to the friendly guidance of a protective force . . . It is my purpose to continue to advance this transition just as rapidly as you are able to assume the attending autonomous responsibility ... I call upon every Japanese citizen ... to safeguard the commonweal by unrelaxed vigilance against the destructive inroads of concepts incredulous of human wisdom, prejudicial to personal dignity and suppressive of individual liberty. There can be no higher human purpose."

Those were pretty big words, and they seemed to come from pretty high up in the clouds. It was doubtful whether many Japanese would understand them fully. But some at least would note their meaning and grasp their import. Here was a man who had beaten them in war and who now offered them, in the name of a great nation, not the bitter bread of defeat nor the galling tutelage of colonial rule, but a new freedom and a new friendship.

This was, perhaps, a greater promise than the West could keep and greater responsibility than Japan and all of Asia was yet ready to bear; but Douglas MacArthur, for one, realized that nothing less would do--if history's door was not to slam shut in America's face.

*Under MacArthur in the field are approximately 30,000 military and civilian Americans. Over and beyond SCAP hovers a constellation of ineffectual advisory, liaison and policymaking bodies: the Allied Council for Japan in Tokyo and its parent body, the Far Eastern Commission in Washington; assorted committees representing Commerce, Agriculture, etc., capped by a mechanism called SANACC (State, Army, Navy, Air Coordinating Committee).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.