Japanese became FCCJ members and rendered distinguished services to the Club. Among them, two became life members: Masaru Ogawa-who studied at UCLA and Columbia University's graduate school and Tokyo University, worked at the Domei news agency, and eventually became the executive news editor of the Japan Times-served five years as the Club's second vice-president and on various committees, and Peter "Shin" Higashi of AP, who solved many personnel problems as a member of the Executive Committee. Ken Ishii, of Reuters, AP, and the International Herald Tribune, served as president, as did Naoaki Usui of McGraw-Hill World News. John Fujii of AP and Fairchild was a barrel of fun in the skits he helped put on with the Club's Hamsters. And there was Bob Horiguchi of INS, who until his death also wrote a popular weekly column in the Japan Times. Kay Tateishi, who graduated from Domei to double as writer and photographer for Time-Life and AP, and most recently has served as photo editor for this book, is another.
Preceding them all were Ian Mutsu, who became a charter member in 1946, and Les Nakashima. Some members tried to disqualify Ian on the argument that he was Japanese. Earnie Hoberecht beat back this objection by pointing out that Ian was accredited to SCAP on certification from the British Embassy that his birth in the U.K. gave him U.K. citizenship.
The members elected a new Executive Committee to guide the affairs of the Club during the six-month period beginning July 1. Chosen to head the new Board as president was Walter Simmons (Chicago Tribune); assisted by John Luter (Time), first vice-president; Tom Lambert (AP), second vice-president; Ralph Teatsorth (UP), treasurer, and Burton Crane (New York Times), secretary.
During the Cochrane-Simmons regime, a ruckus arose over the question of relations with General Mac Arthur's headquarters. A vociferous attack against the press policy of General MacArthur and those around him was carried in The Star-Spangled Mikado. The authors, Kelley and Ryan, said the job of Brigadier General Diller had been "to sell MacArthur to the rest of the world." In their book, Kelley and Ryan said, "The General didn't need any selling. . . . He was a leader, a brilliant military man in many ways, colorful, and a personality in his own right. But, with the help of sycophantic correspondents who scrambled for small favors, and aided by a ruthless system of censorship which was political as well as military, the Public Relations Office of MacArthur's headquarters built MacArthur into a demigod."
In wartime, divergent views often develop between the military command's commitment, on the one hand, as to what information can and should be made public, and what information held back, and the dedication of newsmen, on the other hand, to the creed that the public has a right to know. But, this was the Occupation and military censorship was supposedly ended. William J. Sebald, who wrote With MacArthur in Japan with the collaboration of Russ Brines, brings some balance to this picture. Ambassador Sebald became Chairman of the Allied Council for Japan. Examining the failures which led to MacArthur's quarrel with President Truman, he said that the opinions of the Far Eastern Commission, the Departments of State and Army, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Congress, the Allied nations, and SCAP often varied widely, a situation made more difficult by public and private comments of individuals attached to various of these organizations.
Not only did the press report these views, but this sometimes encouraged a situation in which a correspondent who couldn't get near those around SCAP could approach any of the other Allied sources in Tokyo, and often obtain quotes to fit his own particular line of thought. Brines, in a footnote to Sebald's comments appearing in the same book, said in most cases, these skirmishes between MacArthur and the press "were magnified out of all proportion." He did stress, however, that during the early Occupation years, the press corps did have a tightly knit leftist group which sometimes distorted its stories. He insisted, however, that the majority of the correspondents were "conscientious and honest, and covered the Occupation fairly and thoroughly."
Brines saw as one reason for this situation the military mind of the officers around MacArthur and their "sense of supersecrecy." He said that freedom of the press often was curtailed, but he added, "I believe this was due less to MacArthur's policies than to the fact the Occupation was conducted by military men." Mathew Ridgway, who replaced MacArthur in April 1951, was more outgoing and gregarious than MacArthur was, and press relations seem to have improved under his tenure.
1947
1947 FCCJ FACT FILE
• Membership: No record, but 41 members were present at the general meeting on December 2, 1947.
• Professional events: Military briefings, press conferences, and interviews. No record of Club events.
• Social events: Inaugural party, Anniversary party, and New Year's Eve party. No record of other events.
• President January 1-June 30: Tom Lambert (AP); from July 1: George Folster (NBC).
It was in 1947 that Richard Hughes, after an impetuous falling out with his boss in Sydney, wired his resignation, and found himself without a job in Tokyo. "Like most of the significant events in my life, my improbable appointment as manager of the Press Club . . . appears, in retrospect . . . to have reared up and bitten me in the rump like an act of God, unexpected and indeed not necessarily wanted," Dick says in his book Foreign Devil.
He wandered into the Press Club one day just as members were demanding managerial reform and a new deal for the discontented. "A crazy contagious cry was suddenly taken up and stormily repeated . . . I found myself hoarsely echoing the shouts without quite knowing what I was supporting. The hysterical demand was for the appointment of a newspaperman as manager, with dictatorial suzerainty over the gentlemanly Japanese manager, on the theory that a newspaperman would understand and anticipate colleagues' desires and problems. But who? . . . Again, mysteriously and anonymously, at first shyly and then thunderously, the cry was taken up: 'Dick Hughes!' Why, of course, old Dick, good old Dick, out of a job and on his arse."
Dick's regime lasted for eighteen months under three different Executive Committees and three different presidents. "It was often harrowing but it was sometimes rewarding," he said. He had an outstanding Japanese staff in Kei Kawana, the manager, Akimoto-san behind the bar, the Chinese accountant "Mr. Ling," and "the only efficient bilingual telephone switchboard in the Occupation. . . . [W]e ran the show as essentially a pressman's reservation, inn, refuge, tabernacle and rookery, with traditional sanctions and conventions that, in honorable theory, were none the less binding because they were unwritten, but in Shimbun Alley application, were all the more fragile because only erratic vigilante self-discipline operated."
Hughes mentions in his managerial diary, which he kept to depict the passing Japanese scene as then viewed from No. 1 Shimbun Alley, that the unofficial "rule," requiring all visitors and guests to vacate bedrooms at 4 A.M. was quietly rescinded at an Executive Committee meeting in February 1947. He noted that it had already lapsed, unofficially, but it was decided to end it officially.
He expands on this in Foreign Devil: "To escape technical liability for registration as an Occupation 'house of assignation,' the club introduced this regulation in the rough pioneering days of 1945-46, and so mustered a sullen, yawning harem of tousled ladies, in varying stages of undress, into the club lounge each morning to await the breakfast-gong, which eventually