Gair tells veterans of Hirohito’s contribution

Press, 27 February 1989, Page 10

Gair tells veterans of Hirohito’s contribution

NZPA Auckland Gratitude for the late Emperor Hirohito’s assistance to postwar occupation forces in taming the Japanese military mood was conceded at a veterans’ reunion in Nelson last evening.

The concession, just two days after the Emperor’s burial, was made in a speech to the J Force and 8.C.0.F. Veterans’ Association by its patron and Opposition M.P. for North Shore, Mr George Gair.

J Force was New Zealand’s contribution to the British Commonwealth Occupation Force that was sent to Japan in 1946.

Mr Gair described as understandable the recent anti-Hirohito protests of “those close to the wartime scene who had been at the cruel end of Japanese action.” However, he made no reference to the scathing attack on the Emperor soon after his death by the Minister of Defence, Mr Bob Tizard. Mr Gair asked the veterans to imagine the task of taming and then changing a Japanese military mood that permeated all ranks, without the symbolic lead of an emperor visibly and willingly cooperating with the Allies. “The Emperor’s compliance made the population’s compliance possible — despite their past, their ingrained culture and, indeed, their very instincts,” he said. Mr Gair said the Japan he and the other veterans helped to occupy was a vastly different country to that which last week marked the funeral of Emperor Hirohito.

“We served in a country devastated by bombing, bewildered by defeat, shocked by social changes the Allies were deliberately imposing on traditional Japanese society.”

“Like a number of you, I have walked the

scorched earth of Hiroshima. I have stood in the shadow of the ruins of the Chamber of Commerce building near the ‘T’ bridge which was target centre.”

As a sergeant for the British Commonwealth Force newspaper, he was the only occupation soldier there on May Day of 1948, among tens of thousands of banner-waving Korean and Japanese Communists. Because of a communi-

cation breakdown, he was unaware that all military personnel had been banned from Hiroshima for that day, because of the big protest expected. He said he believed the Americans were right to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — not only for themselves and their allies, but also for the long-term interests of the Japanese. "Though 44 years later we can properly abhor the very concept of a nuclear war, those two bombs which cost in the order of 100,000 lives each, saved the millions of allied and enemy lives which would have been the_,price of the only alternative,” Mr Gair said. That alternative was the long and costly battle for the occupation of Japan which would otherwise would have had to be waged. “We must remind those who did know war, or who self-righteously choose to forget, that our generation had already paid a ghastly price to beat Hitler and contain Japan,” he said.

“The dramatic shock impact of ‘the bomb’ — never used before in the history of warfare and, we would hope, never to be used again — provided the reason for an immediate and unconditional Japanese surrender which could not have been secured otherwise.” When one reflected on the devastation and years of hatred engendered by total war, the occupation of Japan became a quiet

and largely uneventful affair.

War crimes trials were held and some symbolic executions took place, and the Japanese military was crushed by defeat and disgrace. New political structures were created under the military government of General Douglas MacArthur. Women were also given a voice and the vote.

Mr Gair said he believed Emperor Hirohito was used properly to render these big social changes acceptable to the next generation of Japanese and tolerable to the generation that had fought the war and saw itself accountable for the defeat. “The cardinal sin in the eyes of that generation was not fighting the war, but losing it.” Mr Gair recalled seeing 150,000 Japanese on hands and knees with foreheads touching the ground to the Emperor on his arrival at Shimonoseki Railway Station, two years after his country’s surrender.

There had been an important job to do in Japan after their acceptance of defeat. “How it was done is, in part, reflected in the fact that Japan today is a reborn country whose outreach to the world has been transformed from one of military aggression to one of economic prowess,” he said.

“The then fighting enemy is today’s trading friend — and they do it so well there is much we should be eager to learn from them.”