against Tojo and his fellow defendants. On May 3, the Far East War Crimes Tribunal met under Australia's Sir William Webb in a courtroom established in the former Imperial Army Headquarters, renamed Pershing Heights by the Allied Powers, and opened the trial of twenty-eight wartime leaders on Class A war crimes charges. Arraigned with Tojo were former army ministers Seishiro Itagaki and Sadao Araki, and ex-Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka. Also in the dock was Mamoru Shigemitsu, the foreign minister who signed the surrender documents on the U.S.S. Missouri.
If Moscow had had its way, Emperor Hirohito would have been a defendant, too. But, on June 18, Chief Prosecutor Joseph Keenan crushed the move, saying it would be a mistake to try the Emperor. FCC J members reported every development.
A forewarning of the coming Cold War came from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill when he attacked Russia's "Iron Curtain" on March 5 in a speech at Fulton, Missouri. Trouble brewed also in Asia. In Indochina, Ho Chi Minh opened hostilities to drive France out of Vietnam. In China, an uneasy truce existed between the Nationalists and the Communists.
In his book MacArthur's Japan, Russ Brines described the Tokyo of those days as a dead city groping back to life. "The youngsters were the first to recover, flocking towards the new uniforms. In a few days they were shouting 'Goodbye' as a greeting, and 'Gamu, Joe.'" Adults followed, crowding around on street corners "to stare open-mouthed at the invaders."
For the entertainment of the Occupation troops, SCAP took over the Tokyo Takarazuka Theater across the street from the Imperial Hotel and reopened it on February 24 as the Ernie Pyle Theater. For the Japanese, NHK on January 19 began broadcasting a Japanese version of the popular American radio program "Major Bowes Amateur Hour." A people who delight in singing, Japanese took to this program enthusiastically and lined up for tryouts. Many of Japan's top singing stars of the next two decades climbed to stardom via these programs, including national idol Misora Hibari, who made her debut at the age of ten. So popular was this program that NHK followed on December 3 with another stateside hit program, "Information Please." As they recovered their good spirits, the Japanese became more outgoing.
Added to the problem of food, the nation faced inflation on an unprecedented scale. Every train was crammed with farmers and their wives bent under huge packs of black-market rice and produce which they peddled in residential districts or at open-air stalls at the central railway stations. In the back streets, sushi shops operated like Prohibition-era American bars with an inner chamber where favored patrons could order the best sushi with the freshest of materials and white, polished rice, washed down with the best saké. The ordinary salaried worker had to be content with kasutori shochu, a rotgut potato brew served at street stalls in Shinbashi and Shinjuku.
Ray Falk remembers being taken to one of the better sushi shops by a Japanese friend, and, on making his exit, being accosted by an MP who berated him and checked his military credentials. Ray got off that time, but he still writhes when he recalls the rigid policing correspondents sometimes had to endure.
Ian Mutsu recalls, early in the year, when the official exchange rate was ¥15 to the dollar, buying a new jeep from the army for $1,000, the equivalent of ¥15,000. He received the same sort of grilling when he drove to his home in Kamakura and parked his jeep in front. Military personnel were prohibited from visiting Japanese homes in those days, and MPs couldn't distinguish between servicemen and newsmen.
As yen-prices rose, the dollar's worth rose also, to ¥100 by the end of the year. This was great for servicemen and foreign correspondents, but tough on the Japanese. A series of protest demonstrations followed the May Day riots. As they became increasingly violent, the ranks of the hardcore left-wing agitators were swelled by recruits from the nationwide Zengakuren student federation and newly formed labor organizations.
While inflation doubled and tripled the cost of consumer goods, the arrival of aid packages helped ease the plight of the people. They also found a heady joy in the freedom which anticipated the new constitution even before it became law in May of the following year. Freedom of thought, equality of the sexes, coeducation in schools, abolition of absentee landlords, all were alien concepts to a people subjected to thought control since the February 26 uprising of young officers in 1936 confirmed the rise of Japanese militarism. In 1936, local movie houses had separate seating for men and women. In 1940, a girl and boy merely strolling together on a street near the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo could be called to a halt by a policeman and given a tongue-lashing.
One correspondent who capitalized on this Japanese psyche was Earnest Hoberecht. Earnie, who made himself known among young Japanese as "America's Greatest Writer," was visiting the Shochiku movie studio when a crisis developed. As Weldon James recounted the story in Collier's magazine, the leading lady, Hideko Mimura, had just learned that the script called for her to be kissed before the camera. The twenty-six-year-old actress had never been kissed and wanted no part of it. Japanese censors, to protect the sensibilities of their womenfolk, had until that time scissored kiss scenes from imported films, and the national impression of a movie kiss was of a rapturous couple breathing softly without touching each other's lips.
But Dapper Earnie "seen his duty and done it." He suggested that kissing scenes "would be a step toward democratization." Earnie embraced and kissed Mimura to show her how it was done, and "newspapers throughout the world carried the story," according to James. Earnie described The Kiss as a "prairie-twister." But the results were unexpected. Miss Mimura came out of the clinch in a daze, "promptly downed three or four tablets, retired to her dressing room, and wrote him that after what had happened, clearly they ought not to see each other again."
The Kiss made Earnie famous in Japan. When his novel Tokyo Romance appeared a couple of months later, telling how an American correspondent wooed and won a famous Japanese movie actress, James reported, "It was a smash hit. . . . The first edition of one hundred thousand copies disappeared in less than a fortnight. . . . The lad from Watonga was in." Time magazine's review called Tokyo Romance "the worst book ever published in the English language." Earnie denied this. "I've written worse myself," he said.
Prewar Japanese governments banned coeducation in schools from grade schools on up. Girls went to girls' schools. Period. And so it was big news when the Japanese government made schools coeducational on October 9. Such were the grist of feature stories when correspondents ran out of hard news.
Making its appearance a year after the first Western press description of A-bombed Hiroshima was the book Hiroshima, by John Hersey. Time often lends perspective and depth to mind-searing events such as this. This was especially true in the case of Hiroshima and its victims, where many of the most terrifying after-effects of the bomb appeared long after the event. John Hersey, already well known at the time as the author of Men on Bataan and A Bell for Adano, wrote a report on six survivors of Hiroshima, a report to which the New Yorker devoted its entire issue of August 31, 1946. The article was published that same year in book form under the title Hiroshima. Hersey's report had worldwide repercussions.
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