the war, took three hours, said Brines. "The third-class coach was jammed so tightly that we all breathed almost in unison. . . . No one resented my uniform or gave it more than a fleeting glance."
Duncan arrived at Yokosuka naval base with the U.S. 3rd Fleet and caught a train into Tokyo. "Each car was stuffed solid with Japanese," he recalls in his photo-book Yankee Nomad. "When they suddenly became aware of the Americans in their midst, each of them simply bowed, ever so slightly, as though to excuse himself and his countrymen for having so inconvenienced us by providing such crowded transport at a time like this." Pushing their way out of Tokyo Station, the newsmen found the destruction of homes and buildings and the conditions of the people beyond anything they had imagined.
Robert Trumbull of the New York Times, later a Club director, wrote in an article for the FCC J twentieth-anniversary issue of the No. 1 Shimbun, "Around Shinbashi, the Ginza and Marunouchi, Tokyo was still a city; elsewhere it was mostly wasteland, in which one could see for miles in any direction over a desert of rubble."
Added Duncan, "Only the abandoned, rusting safes of long-gone or dead shopkeepers, and the blackened scarecrows of jutting brick chimneys marked what had been the heart of Asia's greatest city." But browsing amid the ashes, Dave found "people lived in holes beneath fallen walls and were farming vegetables in tiny plots of earth."
The official surrender ceremony, staged on September 2 on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri, at anchor in Tokyo Bay, was a model of symbolism. Frank Tremaine, later to become vice-president of United Press, reported that the American flag unfurled as the "Star-Spangled Banner" sounded was the same that flew over the Capitol in Washington on December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day. On a bulkhead was the flag Commodore Matthew Perry flew when he sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 to open Japan to American trading. The casual dress of the American delegation's suntans, no ties and no decorations, on Admiral Halsey's flagship, dated back to "the dismal winter of 1942" when Halsey, upon taking command of the failing Guadalcanal campaign, banned neckties at his South Pacific headquarters in New Caledonia.
There were two surrender documents, canvas-bound for Japan, leather-bound for the Allied Powers, according to William Manchester in his MacArthur biography American Caesar. After General MacArthur signed the papers, he turned and gave two of the five pens he used to two men, emaciated after nearly four years in Japanese captivity, Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright, who surrendered Corregidor to Japan, and Lieutenant General Arthur Ernest Percival, who surrendered at Singapore.
As SCAP, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, General MacArthur's immediate task was to formalize Japan's defeat. Disarming the Japanese forces, getting his occupation machinery off the ground, and implanting the fundamentals of democracy in the government and its people, his duties as Supreme Commander of the Allied Occupation, would come later. In a brief speech before the signing began, UP's Earnest Hoberecht reported, SCAP reminded both victor and vanquished that they were not there to meet "in a spirit of distrust, malice or hatred." He would expect the Japanese to comply "fully, promptly and faithfully" with the surrender terms, while discharging his own responsibilities "with justice and tolerance."
SCAP's moderate words set the tone of the Occupation. A year later, Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, who signed the surrender for the government of Japan, sent a note to Hoberecht from the Sugamo war crimes prison that he had met MacArthur in Yokohama the next day to urge SCAP to let the Japanese government run the nation with the help of the Diet. The meeting was confirmed by Richard B. Finn, Adjunct Professor at American University and a U.S. Foreign Service Officer in Japan at the time, in his book Winners in Peace. To agree to this, MacArthur had to scrap three proclamations which he had already signed.
Landing in Japan, wartime invasion units became peacetime occupation forces. Their new task: to help a former enemy nation find the road to democracy. The combat correspondents and photographers who arrived with them found their daily war diet of danger and tension replaced by the task of reporting a new, perhaps a more complex, war.
Fortunately, in their company were solid veterans of the press wars: Howard Handleman (International News Service), Russell Brines (Associated Press), Frank Tremaine and Earnest Hoberecht (United Press), Walter Simmons (Chicago Tribune), Compton Pakenham (Newsweek) and Lindesay Parrott (New York Times), Richard Lauderback (Time-Life), Robert Martin (New York Post), Joe Fromm (U.S. News & World Report), Charlie Gorry (AP Photos), Charles Rosecrans (INP), and Robert Cochrane (Baltimore Sun), to name just a few.
MacArthur entered Tokyo on September 8 at the head of as force of eight thousand men and established his home in the long-vacant U.S. Embassy. Four days later, he moved his office into the Dai-Ichi Life Insurance Company building staring across the moat at Emperor Hirohito's Imperial Palace. The main offices of his headquarters staff were located in buildings around it. Steps followed to establish the presence of the Occupation in Japanese eyes. In line with this, SCAP:
• Opened a post exchange for Occupation forces in the Wako clock tower building commanding Tokyo's main downtown intersection on the Ginza.
• Stationed a team of husky MPs at the intersection to direct traffic. The MPs, visible symbols of Occupation authority, became a sightseeing attraction for the Japanese who stood for hours on the four corners, marveling at the drillmaster-precision of each MP as he pivoted on his platform box, directing vehicular and pedestrian traffic.
• Requisitioned buildings and private residences, as necessary, to provide working offices and homes for Occupation officials.
• Began Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) broadcasts for the Occupation troops over their own radio network. Japanese listeners as well began to hum the popular tunes played over stateside programs like "The Make-Believe Ballroom."
• On October 5, started publication of the Pacific Stars and Stripes for members of the U.S. Armed Forces. When the British Commonwealth Forces moved into Japan the following year to help with the occupation duties, publication began also of the daily BCON.
(An offer by the Soviet delegate to provide forces to take over occupation duties in Japan's northern island of Hokkaido was summarily refused, with thanks, by SCAP.)
In parallel with these measures, SCAP set about the task of eliminating militarism and democratizing Japan by:
• Dissolving zaibatsu companies, purging their leaders, and breaking up their monopolistic ties.
• Proclaiming a press code on September 10 to promote freedom of speech, religion, and thought. Under this directive, the wartime Domei News Agency was dissolved on October 12 and replaced on November 1 by Kyodo News Service and Jiji Press.
• Issuing a broadcast code on September 20 and applying the press code to broadcasting.
• Ordering five basic reforms: Lowering from twenty-five to twenty the age for the right to vote; establishing equality between sexes, including woman suffrage; giving labor the right to organize; reforming education; removing from office those who collaborated with the military; and democratizing the economy.
• Releasing three thousand political prisoners, including Kyuichi Tokuda, leader of the Japan Communist Party, and lifting the ban on the party and its organ newspaper Akahata (Red Flag).
• Drafting a new democratic constitution.
• Removing Shintoism from state control.
The priorities for the correspondents arriving in Japan were, first, the description of Tokyo after