AMERICAN. "SH MacArthur, Hirohito and the American Duel with Japan OBERT H ADR WEY From the latter half of the nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth, America and Japan were caught in an extraordinary political, military and economic duel. The clash between one of the newest cultures in the world and one of the oldest was characterized by a cultural incompatibility that was to haunt the relationship between Emperor Hirchito and General MacArthur. Hirohito was a remarkable man. Diffident, uncharismatic and apparently obtuse, he survived as a god-ruler of Japan for some six decades through internal strife, war, defeat, occupation and economic victory. The country he ran was no less extraordinary. In the course of his rule Japan ricocheted from minor power to the greatest empire in Asian history, then through atomic annihilation to eventual rehabilitation as the world’s second strongest economy. He met his equal in General Douglas MacArthur and the superpower he represented. MacArthur’s career spanned an astonishing tranche of American history from the First World War to Korea. Brash and domineering, he wielded massive power and played a key American foreign policy role in Asia. For his single-handed rule over Japan he could even be said to merit the honorary Japanese epithet ‘shogun’ or army leader. In this absorbing dual biography Robert Harvey traces their tense and complex relationship. His broad scope encompasses two great nations in war and peace — a momentous period of history which provides illuminating insight into American actions across the world today. £25 AMERICAN SHOGUN BY THE SAME AUTHOR Portugal: Birth of a Democracy Blueprint 2000 (editor) Fire Down Below: A Journey Across Latin America The Undefeated: The Rise, Fall and Rise of Greater Japan The Return of the Strong: The Drift to Global Disorder Clive: The Life and Death of a British Emperor Liberators: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence, 1810-1830 Cochrane: The Life and Exploits of a Fighting Captain A Few Bloody Noses: The American War of Independence Global Disorder: The New Architecture of Global Security Comrades: The Rise and Fall of World Communism AMERICAN SHOGUN MACARTHUR, HIROHITO AND THE AMERICAN DUEL WITH JAPAN ROBERT HARVEY JOHN MURRAY For my Mother © Robert Harvey 2006 First published in Great Britain in 2006 by John Murray (Publishers) A division of Hodder Headline The right of Robert Harvey to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 1 All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Photographic credits: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27 and 29, Bettmann/Corbis; 2 and 9, Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis; 8, 12, 14, 18, 19, 24, 25 and 28, CORBIS. A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library Hardback ISBN 0 7195 6484 0 Trade paperback ISBN 0 7195 6638 X Book design and type formatting by Bernard Schleifer Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Hodder Headline policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. John Murray (Publishers) 338 Euston Road London NW1 3BH CONTENTS PREFACE INTRODUCTION AUTHOR’S NOTE PROLOGUE PART I: WORLDS APART tla The Little Adjutant ot Or West Point 28 PART II: DAWN OF THE RISING SUN 3: The Heian Period ae : The Shogunate 42 : Aristocratic Revolution 45 : The Meiji Emperor 53 : The Plutocrats 63 : Outward Bound 69 : “Affluent and Humane” fie CF©NfO HN 10: Crown Prince 90 PART III: AMERICAN HERO 11 : The Big Country 99 £22 Growing Pains 107 13 : The Rainbow Division £13 14 : The Amorous Superintendent 120 D5 Eroticism, Grotesquery and Nonsense 124 16: Devouring Manchuria 133 17.3 The Military-Industrial Alliance 140 1S Blood on the Snow 149 19 : Into China 158 20 : The Eagle Stirs 176 6 | AMERICAN SHOGUN PART IV: THE OLD MAN OF CORREGIDOR 21 : Generalissimo of Washington 191 22 : The Two Giants 208 23 : Corregidor and Bataan mek 24 : “I Shall Return” 233 PART V: FIGHTBACK 25 : To the Philippines 249 26 : Dance of Death 256 27 : Little Boy and Fat Man 263 28 : When the Singing Stopped 274 29 : Surrender 287 PART VI: AMERICAN SHOGUN 30 : Conqueror 305 31 : Proconsul a2) 32 : Visionary 340 33 : The Assault on Privilege 353 34 : The Tokyo Trials 365 PaRT VII: FALL OF THE SHOGUN 35 : Counter-Attack 383 36 : Humanizing the Emperor 399 ay 7 Nored 413 38 : Old Soldiers Never Die 428 PART VIII: THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES 39 : Return of the Samurai 441 EPILOGUE 453 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY * 460 INDEX 473 PREFACE |O WE A GREAT DEBT TO MANY WHO HAVE HELPED ME WITH MY TRAVELING and research in Japan, the Philippines, Burma, Thailand, Singapore and the United States. They include Andrew and Cherry Williams, Simon Scott- Plummer, David Warren, David and Sheila Atterton, Lady Pilcher and Raymond Eyre. I am also particularly grateful to the Japanese Embassy in London, the Foreign Press Institute in Tokyo, the Press Department of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, the Self-Defence Agency, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, the Japanese Employers Association and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. In the United States I owe special thanks to the MacArthur Memorial Archive in Norfolk, Virginia, and to Raymond Seitz, former U.S. ambassador in London. I also owe a huge debt to Jonathan Fenby for his invaluable advice about China. I owe special thanks to my agent, Gillon Aitken, for his unflagging encouragement and advice, to my superbly professional editors Peter Mayer and Roland Philipps, and to my tolerant, always cheerful and painstaking assistant, Jenny Thomas, who catches almost all of my errors, and her his- torian husband Geoffrey for alerting me to new research on MacArthur. I also owe my warmest thanks to my mother and sister Antonella, and her husband, Sharif Abdullah al-Hussein for their support during the writ- ing of this book. Finally, most of all I would like to thank my wife Jane and son Oliver, who put up with it all. A bibliography of main sources is included at the end. Certain books stand out as having provided clear signposts to the direction of my research, although responsibility for my judgments and errors is, of course, entirely my own. On the American side they include Douglas MacArthur’s own Reminiscences; Arnold Brackman’s highly readable The Other Nuremberg; 8 | AMERICAN SHOGUN Michael Schaller’s brilliant analysis in The American Occupation of Japan; William Manchester’s readable and microscopic examination of MacArthur’s life, American Caesar; and Geoffrey Perret’s fine military biography, Old Soldiers Never Die. On the Japanese side, deserving special mention are Tashiaki Kawahara’s Hirohito and His Times; the Pacific War Research Society’s Japan’s Longest Day; John Dower’s Embracing Defeat, a magisterial, even-handed and fascinating study of the American occupation of Japan; Herbert Bix’s Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, a well-crafted and well- researched indictment of the Emperor; Karol van Wolferen’s The Enigma of Japanese Power; and Meirion and Susie Harries’s Soldiers of the Sun. The many other scholars I owe a debt to are listed in the bibliography.