On Sept. 2, 80 years will have passed since representatives of Japan and the Allied powers signed an agreement formalizing the end of World War II aboard the USS Missouri. That document formalized Japan’s surrender and initiated a postwar occupation that would last for seven years.
The goal of the Occupation: reform Japan into a country that would never again wage a war of aggression, and one that would espouse the values enshrined in the recently signed U.N. charter.
The success of the Occupation was not a foregone conclusion, and it is something that has intrigued me ever since I was a child. With a middle name like MacArthur, I suppose it was inevitable that I would wonder why my Japanese great-grandmother would tell her half-American grandson — my father— how Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the Allied powers helped rebuild a new Japan. But more importantly, I always wondered, how is it that bitter enemies could find peace with one another? Why was the Allied Occupation so successful?
Nearly 20 years ago, I asked my grandparents these questions. And on the 80th anniversary of the war’s end this year, I reread their responses just like I do every year around this time. With wars raging around the globe and peace agreements seemingly as tenuous as ever, their insights and perspectives seem ever relevant today.
My grandparents were ordinary people who lived through extraordinary times. My grandfather, Michael A. Bosack, was a young New Yorker when he was drafted into the military. At 16 years old, he wanted to gain full-time employment but could not owing to his age. He forged a birth certificate to claim that he was 18, which in turn made him eligible for the draft. So off he went to the U.S. Army and the “Big War,” as many called it at the time.
He eventually ended up in the Philippines, which is where he fought the Imperial Japanese Army until Emperor Hirohito’s public address about the country’s surrender was broadcast on Aug. 15, 1945. It was at that time that his unit would be selected to be among the first to arrive in Yokohama as part of the Occupation force.
Life under fire
Meanwhile, my grandmother, Makiko Suzuki, was the daughter of a merchant family in Yokohama. Prior to the era of the “runaway military,” her family had done relatively well for themselves, but whatever wealth they had accumulated soon became property of the state to fuel a war of conquest across Asia.
The war was hard on her, just as it was for everyone else around her. There was food scarcity, mistreatment by state security forces and, of course, allied bombing campaigns. She recounted the fear she used to feel: “I was scared when the bombs dropped on Yokohama. We would have to run to the air raid shelters, many times in the middle of the night. I just wished the war would end.”
When the Allied powers moved closer to Japan, the government kept mum on what might happen next. “Only the Japanese military, mostly the military police in the neighborhood — the kempei-tai — would tell us that the Americans would do bad things to us and maybe kill everybody.” To prepare for foreign forces arriving on Japanese soil, the military would sometimes “send someone to train us to fight with bamboo sticks against the Americans when they came.”
But the Occupation would not be her first time interacting with foreigners. Before the war, the bustling port city of Yokohama was an enclave for expatriates. “Mostly British, but also some Americans,” she explained, but “many foreigners, of course, left Japan at the outbreak of the war.”
During the war, she “used to see American POWs who were being held in a school yard.” According to her, they were “very skinny,” so she and her friend would sometimes give them their bread. Even decades later, she remembered “how grateful the POWs were when we gave them food to eat, and how they said, ‘Thank you, thank you.’”
When the time came for Occupation forces to arrive in Yokohama, my grandfather had little knowledge of Japan. He “only knew that they made cheap toys and silk products. Most of the toys were crude and soon broken.” His military higher-ups told him and his fellow soldiers to “be vigilant” and avoid groups of people, because they had no idea what the risk of violence might be. They all carried weapons wherever they went, and at first when they left their camps, they traveled in convoys with armed personnel in multiple vehicles.
My grandfather recalled how his arrival in Yokohama revealed to him the devastation of the Allied bombing campaigns. “About 19 miles from Yokohama Station to Tokyo were completely devastated due to the bombing. Nothing but stone steps and chimneys remained standing. Factories were almost all gone.” He and his fellow troops were billeted in tents and Quonset huts adjacent to an airstrip that the allies built “right down the center of Yokohama.” At night, it was difficult to find where to go because there were no lights, and no means of telling where the streets were.
He lamented the sort of work they had to do when they first arrived: demilitarization and demobilization. This meant going door to door and searching for “any kind of weapons — knives, swords, guns — that had to be confiscated.” Most of these would end up buried or at the bottom of Yokohama Bay.
“We had to rudely enter their homes with our combat boots on, waving our weapons and scaring the heck out of the people,” he wrote to me. “Job had to be done and most of the GIs did it in as pleasant a fashion as they could. Get this now: Most of these men were in combat with the Japanese less than a month or so ago. Of course, there are always a few a-holes — but most of the guys tried to make it go easy. Americans are not Gestapo-like.”
Building trust
My grandfather remembered a major turning point in his relationship with the local community. Soon after arrival, he was responsible for moving vehicles from the port to inland locations. One day, he was driving an armored vehicle with a bulldozer-type blade on the front. As he drove through the streets, he noticed a group of older men, women and children removing stones and debris from the road by hand, so he dropped the bulldozer blade and pushed all the rubble he could as he went through the street.
This drew surprise from the residents. Each time he had to transport a similar vehicle through that area, he would do the same and push more rubble out of the way, and the initial surprise from the locals turned to “lots of smiling and waving.”
The next day, as he traveled through that neighborhood, an old man flagged him down and handed him a package. He thanked the man and waved to the group. They waved back.
When he returned to the port, he chased down a Japanese interpreter he had met to help him understand what had happened, so they opened the package together. It was an onigiri rice ball with seaweed, and the interpreter noted how special it was since it was made of only white rice with no barley in it. As he explained, “the Japanese government was about 12 weeks behind in rice rations in Yokohama.”
My grandfather shared the onigiri with the interpreter, and came up with an idea of how he could reciprocate. He went around different units to collect as many spare C-rations (prepackaged, ready-to-eat meals for soldiers) as possible. He filled laundry bags with them, which he then delivered to his “friendly group” on his next trip through the neighborhood. He summed up the interaction: “They were grateful — food was scarce. A lot of bowing and smiling. Me, big smile. I felt good, and from then on, I always seemed to get along with the Japanese.”
Scarcity and survival
Food scarcity was certainly a major issue in the early stages of the Occupation, something that General Headquarters (GHQ) immediately recognized. It set about procuring rations for delivery to the Japanese population, a move that many in Washington questioned. When MacArthur received a congressional inquiry on the matter, he replied: “Give me bread or give me bullets.”
My grandmother affirmed that food shortages were one of the biggest challenges in the immediate aftermath of the surrender. As a merchant family with a store, they once had “food we had stocked away, but we shared much of it with our neighbors so there was very little left.” To keep her and her family fed, she and her siblings would ride their bicycles to the city of Zama about 32 kilometers away to visit relatives who tended farms to bring back food to eat.
Fortunately, she explained, “right after the end of the war, the Americans dropped pallets of food by parachute.” However, many Japanese people spread rumors that the cans of food “were actually bombs” or “contained poison.” The first time her brothers found cans of food on the ground, “they threw rocks at the cans from a distance. When they did not blow up, they brought the cans home.” Because of those food pallets, my grandmother and her family tasted peanut butter and baked beans for the first time in their lives.
After those initial stages, things settled for the day-to-day Occupation functions, but big social changes were afoot. Among the many mandates of the GHQ was to oversee the promulgation of a new Constitution for Japan.
A new Japan
There were five major reform directives: 1. establishing a parliamentary government with a bicameral legislature; 2. guaranteeing fundamental human rights, including gender equality; 3. renouncing the right of belligerency of the state and prohibiting the maintenance of war potential; 4. reducing the emperor’s role to that of a ceremonial head of state; and 5. implementing land reforms.
The decision to retain the emperor is one that still draws criticism today. But those criticisms fail to understand the nature of the imperial system in Japan, especially during the period of what was known as a “runaway military.” They also ignore the insurgency that broke out on Aug. 14 after the emperor — for the first time in his history of presiding over the supreme council — issued the tiebreaking vote to end the war no matter the personal risk to himself. Following that decision, there was an attempted coup d’etat by Tokyo-based military officers. It was only by some small miracle that a copy of the emperor’s recording of the imperial rescript on surrender made it to NHK studios, because the coup plotters broke into the Imperial Household Agency to steal what they thought was the only version of the record.
Ultimately, the GHQ decided that it was more important for Emperor Hirohito to use whatever influence he had in steering his country away from imperialism and war to democracy and a permanent peace. My grandfather, a wartime combatant and a member of Occupation forces from 1945 to 1950, always maintained that the GHQ’s decision to retain the emperor was one of the most important contributors to the Occupation’s success.
Other GHQ-driven changes had far-reaching impacts on Japanese society. For my grandmother, the constitutional changes related to gender equality were life-changing. “The Occupation was good because it allowed women to work outside the home,” she said. “The Occupation also gave women equal rights and the right to vote.” Japan’s new laws and policies gave them “more freedom; more opportunities; peace.”
These changes were soon reflected in Japanese society. In the first national elections following the promulgation of the Constitution, 50 women won seats in Japan’s parliament — 39 in the Lower House and 11 in the Upper House. Meanwhile, educational opportunities for women expanded. They gained property rights, and jobs available to them exponentially increased.
My grandmother quickly took advantage of these changes. With a knack for the English language, she eventually found herself working as a switchboard operator for Occupation forces.
It was through this work that my grandfather met her — or rather, he heard her voice and found it to be the loveliest he had ever heard. He did not know where the switchboard operators were, so he stole away from work in search of a woman whom he only knew from a voice.
By some miracle, he found my grandmother and asked her if he could walk her home. She agreed, and the two shared a stroll together through the rebuilding streets of Yokohama.
Upon arriving at her home, her mother met the two with a disapproving look. She stormed up to the young GI who had the audacity to walk her daughter home and without a word, rolled up both of his sleeves. She breathed a sigh of relief, looked at him, and said, “No tattoos. OK.”
My grandparents were together for more than 60 years until my grandfather passed away. But to me, they will always symbolize a period where bitter enemies left behind the horrors of war to build a life together anew.
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