BACK TO TOKIO

Evening Star, Issue 25676, 27 December 1945, Page 5

BACK TO TOKIO

PROBLEM OF THE JPANESE (By Martin Halliwell, in the ‘ Spectator.’) I landed on Atsugi airfield and have been able to watch from the beginning the occupation of the Japanese mainland—that last bloodless operation of a bloody war, so brilliantly executed at less than three weeks’ notice from a*’base more than 2,000 miles distant.We lived for a fortnight in Yokohama before moving up with General MacArthur’s main headquarters to the Dai Ichi Insurance building in Tokio it-, self. Fire has flattened four-fifths of Tokio and Yokohama. There is nothing standing for miles but chimney stacks, power pylons, tramway standards, derelict safes, firewatchers’ towers, and a few miserable squatters’ shacks thrown together out of rusty corrugated iron sheets. Nevertheless, the J aps have not had to undergo the nerve strain of repeated alerts and high-explosive bombings experienced in Europe. Yokohama, destroyed this year in a single two-hour raid, has suffered less than durnig the 1923 earthquake, in that many of its modern commercial buildings are intact; and there has been little interference with gas, water, electric light, telephone, and rail and tram services. When the natural energy and resourcefulness of the Japanese supersede their present mood of listnessness and diorganisation, recovery should he very much quicker here than in Europe. In Tokio itself there are islands of the old city left untouched by the fire, notably the students’ bookshops in Kanda, and many slum areas .around the docks. Little of the.Ginza is left —excepbt for Mitsukoshi and Takashimaya department stores, both still open and crowded with curio-hungry G.l.s; but most of the modern concrete buildings of Marinonchi, including the fantastic Aztec-style Imperial Hotel, are more or less untouched. The chief change is the sight of American guards sharing duty with Japanese police outside the Imperial Palace and of American aircraft flying Low over the palace itself; previously such sacrilegious flights by Jap. aircraft would have required instant suicide by the pilots on landing. The picture of the devastated areas in Tokio and Yokohama, then, is one of untidy but not hopeless desolation; that in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where the atomic bomhs fell, is .a complete blank. Ground photos displayed in Tokio show whole districts swept clean as if by a gigantic broom, districts where even the foundations of buildings can no longer be traced. In Hiroshima the blast radius was six miles in some places. It is the “ erasure ” of cities about which Hitler boasted in 1940. A European priest on the outskirts of the Hiroshima incident said that few people in the blast area, even in underground shelters, survived the vast heat generated in the explosion, which started a fire instantaneously over a huge area. Official medical reports on the secondary and delayed effects of the bomb have still to be assessed before we can properly appraise this monstrous weapon; but in the meantime no one should suppose that the rase of the atomic -bomb on these t)vo occasions had any marked effect in reducing Japan’s potential for armed resistance; it merely served to save the Emperor’s face among his own people when he came to treat for peace. Though we were slow to believe it at the' time, we now know that Japan was beaten before the atom bombs were released, and the invasion of the Japanese mainland planned for this autumn would have been a walkover.

In themselves the Japanese are still the same uneasy compound of cockiness and obsequiousness that they always have been. The United States air-borne troops who first landed at Ateugi found trays of lemonade awaiting them and the sheets ready turned down in their billets; and it is this ritual ingratiation, together with the smiles,' the bows, the children rushing towards you with the V sign, and all the tourists’ quaintness of Japan, that goes a long way to taking the eye of the occupying forces off the ball. The Japanese do not argue logically from ascertained facts—too often it is considered inartistic to ascertain the facts at all—nor have they much sense of what the world is like outside Japan, so that it may be years before the measure ‘of their defeat is brought home to them. Up to the end they were still being deluded 1 with official stories of wholly fictitious victories, and even the end itself was dressed up not as a defeat but as a charitable proposal by the Emperor to save “ the world ” further bloodshed. In the event the Japanese civilian’s only physical contact with the war, other than air raids, will be with the extremely polite, pacific, and self-con-tained American occupying forces. The most powerful eye-opener is bound to be the return of the beaten Japanese soldiers from abroad—a phenomenon never known before in Japanese history, and a process which will take years to complete, since 7,000,000 are believed to be involved. Next most important is thorough disarmament, even down to the policemen’s sword and preferably including the abolition of all uniforms. Lastly, control by the Allies of the vernacular Press, cinema, and radio must be continued for years; free speech in Japan has never yet meant freedom to criticise, and it will be decades before the Japanese acquire sufficient breadth and independence of judgment to be entrusted again with their own domestic propaganda. American organisation made very short work of the evacuation of our prisoners and internees,, all known camps in Japan being liberated in the first three weeks. Food and medical supplies were air-dropped to the camps at a very early stage, so that prisoners arrived by train at their ports of embarkation in surprisingly good health and spirits. The cheerful commanding general of the United States Eighth Army, Lieutenant-general Eichelberger, met every train he could in person, and sped the prisoners on their way home with a welcoming word. When sixty prisoners from the Osaka group of.camps volunteered to stay behind and do the clerking necessary for the orderly evacuation of their 7.000 fellows, he sent each man a letter of . thanks in his own hand. J found no one who ever wanted to see, Japan again, though those with experience of both were comparing their treatment in Japan favourably with that in, the camps outside, where the Swiss were not allowed to visit and the inmates were entirely at the merev of the Japanese militarv commandant .without supervision. That cold, almost scientific, delight in crueltv for its own sake which lias earned the Japanese the “ hiss of the world ” still lies, I fear, deep down beyond the reach of the most diligent war crimes commission or the most expert schemes for civil re-education.