Strategic Springboard

If U.S. efforts to help friendly China were a failure, U.S. occupation of her former enemy, Japan, was a success. Chinese Communists and their friends abroad might demand that U.S. Marines get out of China, but in the U.S. and Japan there was scarcely a whisper about America's pulling out of Japan.

Just twelve months had passed since the launching of the strangest military occupation in history. In the postwar world twelve defeated nations have had conquering armies quartered on their soil. Japan, alone among them, appeared to be enjoying the experience. She had not, like Germany, been divided into zones, nor had she lost significant sections of her home territory. She had not, like Hungary, been systematically looted, nor did the triumphant enemy live off and destroy the land.

Unique Benevolence. The Japanese occupation was uniquely benevolent, and the benevolence, uniquely, was according to plan. The plan was the work of one man, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, who, as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, wielded an awesome power (with the full cooperation of the U.S. State Department). Last September MacArthur came to a Japan whose people were imprisoned in feudalism and superstition, whose cities were ashen ruins, whose militarist traditions had no place for such concepts as defeat and war guilt. The Supreme Commander's first job was to destroy what was left of Japan's war potential. But he said: "I am not concerned with how to keep Japan down but how to get her on her feet again."

While he demobilized and repatriated an army of 5,000,000 he set up the machinery to receive, feed and readjust thousands of civilians returning from Japan's crumbled empire in China, the Central Pacific, Malaya and the East Indies.

Jazz and Democracy. By last week the U.S. imprint was strong on Japan. Japanese girls strolled hand in hand with G.I.s beside the imperial moat. Children played with toy models of American "jeepu"; women copied U.S. fashions. In Tokyo a special school taught U.S. slang, and cinema fans queued up to see Hollywood movies (biggest hit: Tall in the Saddle, a Western). In geisha houses, the girls gaily crooned You Are My Sunshine.

The Japs, long used to following the leader, followed American democracy in much the same spirit as they accepted U.S. jazz. When MacArthur ordered them to hold an election, 27 million of them trooped to the polls. They organized Western-style political parties and prepared to accept a Western-style constitution. When they were ordered to cease worshiping their Emperor as a god, they willingly obliged.

But the Japanese capacity for reverence may merely have substituted one god for another. The new deity is General MacArthur himself. The worship has been fed by the General's dramatic aloofness. He lives behind a white concrete wall on a towering hilltop; his paneled office is seldom visited by a Japanese. When he steps out into his long black Cadillac, crowds gather to gaze at the man who, rumor says, is descended from Amaterasu, the sun-goddess.

"Shriek Protest." This looked like evidence that democratic ideas were only skin-deep in Japan. So did the boyish brawling in the new Diet, the failure of the nation to produce real democratic leaders. But there were also signs that democracy sometimes went deeper. Japanese women, awakening from their sheltered stupor, had elected 38 of their number to the Diet, were agitating for an end to concubinage, for liberalized divorce laws, for equal legal treatment. Japanese labor unions had jumped to a membership of 3,000,000 and had organized themselves into a conservative J.F. of L. and leftist C.I.U. (But tactics retained a distinctly Japanese flavor: when a union of railway workers wanted to dramatize a grievance last month, members blew their whistles in a nerve-racking one-minute "shriek protest.")

MacArthur preferred to introduce democratic measures through the established Japanese Government. Under his prodding, the Shinto religion had been severed from the State, laws had been drafted to prohibit woman and child labor in the mines, to free agriculture from the blight of absentee ownership. Other reforms came by direct SCAP decree: the breakup of powerful family industrial combines like the Mitsui, establishment of civil liberties, freeing of political prisoners, purging of war guilty, trials of war criminals.

Bread & Baths. The desperate problem was still food. The defeated Japanese were eating better than the victorious Chinese. But though the U.S. had poured in 550,000 tons of grain in a year, adequate diets in Japan were the privilege of the rich (who could pay inflation prices ten times above last year's level), and of farmers. Black markets battened on scarcity and need. Even public bath houses charged black-market rates for the early hours when the water was clean.

Japanese industrial production is a shadow of what it had been before the war. Unemployment has soared to 7,000,000 and brought to the big cities the familiar signposts of destitution: by day, thousands of vagrant children roaming the streets; after dark, swarms of what Jap newspapers call "angels of the night" offering their wares.

The Job Ahead. No man realized better than Douglas MacArthur the magnitude of the job ahead. A year of ruling a nation singlehanded seven hours a day seven days a week had thinned his face and caused his hand to tremble as he lit his pipe. But it had not dimmed his desire to stay until the work was done. How long this would take was still a guess. MacArthur seemed to be thinking in terms of a generation.

MacArthur was also mindful of the consequences to the U.S. of U.S. withdrawal. He has called Japan a springboard to the future. He has counseled his deputies to fight in the Allied Control Council against Soviet attempts to curb his powers. He has warned the Russians that he will not tolerate their propaganda efforts in Japan. He has kept a firm foot pressed down on Japan's small but vocal Communist movement.

Behind these policies were a promise and a warning: if he were allowed to carry out the occupation in his own way, he at some unforeseeable time could make Japan a democratic friend; if he were thwarted, Japan might become again a dangerous and treacherous enemy.

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