the war and, second, the story of A-bombed Hiroshima.
Those who rushed down to Hiroshima to file the first report from the atom-bombed city were far too late. The first story had been filed on August 27 by Leslie Nakashima, United Press. Les had an advantage the others lacked, however. The Hawaii-born Nakashima had been a resident of Japan since 1934 and had worked for both the Japan Times and UP. Stranded in Japan after Pearl Harbor, he had gone to work for Domei, where Frank Tremaine had contacted him in September 1945 even before the Allied landing. Frank learned that Les had visited Hiroshima on August 22, two weeks after the bombing, and had an eyewitness account of the destruction ready to go.
The No. 1 Shimbun, in reproducing his dispatch in the Club's twentieth-anniversary issue, reported, "It was the first eyewitness description of Hiroshima to reach print in the West. Nakashima's dispatch was widely published in August 1945 and was quoted in Time Magazine." Les returned to the UP and became an FCCJ member. He was for many years UPI's top sportswriter in Asia, covering the Melbourne, Rome, and Tokyo Olympics from 1956 to 1964, and the Asian Games in Jakarta in 1962.
The drama in Les' story was that just a few days before the bomb was dropped, he had moved his wife and two daughters out of Hiroshima, planning to return to move his mother who lived two miles from the city center. Les arrived at Hiroshima Station and found, "What had been a city of three hundred thousand population had vanished. So far as I could see there were skeletons of only three concrete buildings still standing in the city's chief business center."
He finally reached his mother's home and found it crushed as if by a giant fist. Fortunately, his mother had been working in the fields about two miles to the southeast of the city, and survived unscathed. Les and his mother made their way out of Hiroshima. After that, UP sent Les to Hiroshima on every bombing anniversary to report on the changes in that city and its people.
In 1945, news transmissions were by Morsecasts, and the news agencies, in particular, had their hands full. AP, UP, INS, and Reuters worked twenty-four hours around the clock distributing their worldwide news to Japanese subscribers, and, in the case of all but Reuters, photo services as well. Operators were required to take down the dot-and-dash transmissions and convert them into English. Desk men expanded them into full-fledged news stories. At the same time, the agencies had to compete with the "specials" on the stories out of Japan, as well. They couldn't wait for SCAP's Public Relations Office (PRO) handouts to write about occupied Japan.
One of the first news breaks came when SCAP sent MPs on September 11 to the home of General Hideki Tojo, the wartime prime minister, to arrest him for war crimes. They had to push their way through a noisy crowd of reporters and cameramen trying to interview him. When the MPs appeared, Tojo withdrew into his house and shot himself with a .32 revolver. An excerpt from the book The Fall of Japan, written by William Craig and reprinted in the March 15, 1997, issue of No. 1 Shimbun, describes the chaotic scene with Tojo slumped still conscious on a chair in his study, and photographers moving his head and crossing and recrossing his legs for better camera angles. "His body was just a limp doll to position, an object to photograph," Craig wrote.
Tojo survived his suicide attempt, and stood trial before an Allied military court which found him guilty of war crimes. He was hanged in 1948. Prince Fumimaro Konoye, former prime minister, was more successful when the war crimes staff came to take him into custody on December 17. He died, taking poison with his own hand.
Two other stories which the press pursued avidly were an interview with Emperor Hirohito and running down the mystery of Tokyo Rose. The latter, an Asian counterpart of Europe's Axis Sally, was alleged to have alternately taunted and tantalized men of the Allied Forces with sexy broadcasts over NHK.
The first interviews with the Emperor were nailed down by Frank Kluckhohn of the New York Times, and Hugh Baillie, president of the UP, according to a report by UP's Frank Tremaine carried in the Press Club's No. 1 Shimbun (October 15, 1995). The Japanese ruler replied to their written questions on September 25. "The catch," Tremaine wrote, "was that Kluckhohn would receive his answers shortly before Baillie's appointment so he would be able to get his story out first . . . ." Then the Emperor met the UP chief and after handing him the written answers to his questions, talked to him for twenty-five minutes about golf, baseball, and biology.
Two days later, on September 27, the Emperor called upon General MacArthur at the U.S. Embassy, something unheard of in the annals of Japan. Hearing of the meeting, the correspondents descended on the embassy to cover the story, only to be held back by bayonet-wielding U.S. Marine guards. A U.S. Army cameraman was on the scene to photograph the two together after the conference.
The Domei News Agency received the photograph through the SCAP PRO and distributed prints to the major Japanese newspapers, which splashed it on their front pages only to have the censors step in again, only this time it was the Japanese. The Cabinet Information Board termed the photos "disrespectful" and ordered that the distribution of these newspapers be stopped.
Domei turned for help to Kay Tateishi, California-born nisei and former Domei writer. Kay later became an FCCJ member as a correspondent for Time-Life and AP. Upon Kay's intercession, General Headquarters (GHQ) angrily ordered annulment of the order. Japanese readers were able to view the photograph of the two leaders in their papers the next morning. On the same day, the Cabinet Information Board was axed out of existence.
Japanese newspapers reported that at this meeting the Emperor confirmed his readiness to take the responsibility for the war and accept whatever punishment the Allied Powers chose. His message to the nation three months later officially renouncing his divinity was a follow-up to this statement.
The story of Tokyo Rose, involving the arrest, trial, and conviction of Iva Toguri, the nisei girl who clung stubbornly to her belief in the U.S. and her U.S. citizenship through the war, is described in a twist of history in the fourth decade of this history (see p. 242), together with a disclosure of the gross miscarriage of justice that occurred.
In general, the Japanese greeted the surrender with a sigh of relief, while the full realization of what war had done to their lives began to sink in for the first time. The people were starving. Their clothes were tattered rags. Gasoline, charcoal, even soap, were difficult to obtain. People had to stand in line to get into public bathhouses, because their own homes were destroyed. Those who had been evacuated to rural areas to escape the bombs returned to find they couldn't even locate their own neighborhoods. Yet, they returned because they wanted to be home when sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers returned from the battlefields of Southeast Asia.
To the correspondents, the big question was: Where, in this deserted wreck of a capital, can we find a place to sleep? The lucky ones found vacant cabins in some of the warships lying at anchor in Tokyo Bay. Eventually, most of the newsmen made their way to the Imperial Hotel. Once Tokyo's symbol of the ultimate in class accommodations, the Frank Lloyd Wright structure was dark and smelled of mold. But it was intact except for damage to one wing.
SCAP had requisitioned the Imperial for officers of general rank. But the hotel staff welcomed the newsmen with practiced courtesy. Some correspondents refused to sign the guest register but commandeered rooms anyway. David Duncan and