We left for Japan from Winchester, Virginia, in August of 1950. We travelled from Martinsburg by train. We had one child who was one year old and 17 pieces of baggage. We traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio, where we had to change trains for the three day trip to San Francisco where we would debark for Japan. Our cabin was a small one with barely enough room for us to sit or lie down. Joel had problems with being cooped up so long in such a small space. Edith was pregnant and often sick from the motion of the train. It was not the most pleasant trip of my life.
We finally arrived in San Francisco where we stayed in a hotel for two days until the ship left. The several new missionaries who met there took turns baby-sitting each other’s children so that they would have some chance to tour the city and make final preparations for departure. We embarked on the President Cleveland on or about August 12 for the two weeks voyage. Our accommodations were great and the ship provided us plenty of space to move around, laze about, play shuffle board, horseshoes, deck volleyball, and take walks around the ship. Joel had just learned to walk and could not understand why the surface on which he walked kept bobbing around. The food was exquisite. Our waiter complained, “A banquet every meal” and he was right! We could order as many appetizers, entrees and desserts as we wanted. Mealtime was sometimes quite an experience with a one year old and a pregnant, seasick wife, but I mainly remember how good the food was.
We arrived in Japan on August 23, 1950. Japan was a long way from home in Southampton County, Virginia. Except for the trip on a cattle boat to Europe in 1946, including a brief few days in Poland, this was my first experience outside of the United States. I really knew very little about the land which would be my domicile for most of the next twenty years or so. I knew even less of the Japanese language for it was the philosophy of the Foreign Mission Board that foreign languages were best learned in the country where the missionaries would work. A Japanese actress who had spent most of her life in the United States and was on the President Cleveland returning to her native land to play a leading role in Madame Butterfly took the time to teach those of us who were interested a few phrases in Japanese. So, as I have so often in my life I embarked on an adventure for which I was ill prepared.
I did not at that time fully realize that all those Japanese were not the foreigners but we were. Americans often feel that natives of other lands are the foreigners rather than ourselves when we travel to their countries. Everything seemed so “foreign” to me. The language sounded like nothing I had ever studied or heard. Signs in Japanese had no appearance of familiarity as would have Spanish or German for instance. The many unknowns gave the whole experience an aura of excitement but the predominant feeling was one of awe and uncertainty about what lay ahead. I remember seeing an American flag flying on a ship in Yokohama harbor and feeling a sense of security that we would be living under an occupation which would provide some measure of safety in this strange land to which I have come to live. This proved to be true but I do not remember feeling any anxiety about being mistreated by the Japanese even after the Occupation was over. The Japanese people welcomed us and were gracious to us. They were often rude but not more so to us than to each other it seemed. In fact, they treated us better than they treated each other. We learned soon that an outward politeness was often a cloak for negative feelings but on the whole we were pleasantly surprised that these people who not so long ago had been America’s bitter enemies were now so very friendly to Americans and so eager to learn all they could about their former enemies.
Category Archives: U.S.
New Missionaries to Japan, 1950
Cambodians Profiled in Rocky Mountain News
The Rocky Mountain News is running a 12-part series called The Healing Fields about a Cambodian family in Denver who are trying to help Cambodians back home. Here’s the editor’s introduction. It seems a good example of making the global local, or vice versa.
As you know, the Rocky Mountain News is a local newspaper. The motto we use on our advertisements is “Closer to home,” because we feel it expresses the core of our identity, that we cut closer to your lives and that our emphasis is what happens here, where you – and we – live.
So when Assistant Business Editor Jane Hoback approached me late in the summer of 2003, I have to admit I was somewhat dubious of the value of making a major commitment to Randa and Setan’s story. Many people from this area, after all, help others around the world, as Randa and Setan do.
But then I met them.
As Jane says, “they’re not saints,” but in a visit to my office they struck me as remarkable souls whose story could change the lives of others.
I was struck right away by how their Christian faith would play such an important role in any story we did. We in the secular press are often criticized, even rejected, for our perceived denial of the importance of religious beliefs. I believe in the value of taking seriously what motivates people, why they act and think the way they do. I believe if we can bring understanding, we have done our job well.
And so we began our journey. Jane rarely writes stories for the Rocky. She normally helps polish the work of others. But this story gripped her, and she was determined to tell it herself.
One of our challenges was that so much of this story is history. It is the retelling by Randa and Setan of their ordeal and escape from Cambodia. They were alone. This is what they remember, and the memories are painful. As Jane listened, and we learned more, the more it seemed worth traveling to their homeland, where we could witness Randa and Setan’s program to free women who had been sold or forced into prostitution and give them the chance for a new life.
Jane was joined on that journey by Ellen Jaskol, a talented photographer whose work often graces our Spotlight section.
I had come to see that although we needed to travel halfway around the world to tell it, this was a local story. Not just because Randa, Setan and their extended family live among us, but because it is just such stories that show us how connected we are to a world that is growing smaller and smaller.
This is especially the case in an open Western city such as Denver, where so many of us come from somewhere else.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy for us to cross the cultural barriers in a strange land. But try we must. Jane and Ellen traveled for two weeks with a driver and a translator, following Setan through his past and observing his struggle in the present.
When they returned, the question we faced was how to tell such a sweeping story. The way we approach big projects at the Rocky is to form a team that works together from the start. Nothing is more satisfying than working with a group of people who complement each other’s strengths.
And that’s what happened in this case.
At first, 18-year-old Setan Lee didn’t notice the trucks full of armed soldiers rumbling into the Buddhist temple square in his hometown of Battambang.
On this final day of the Cambodian New Year, music and noisy celebration filled the packed square in Cambodia’s second largest city. Children played in the warm afternoon air. Revelers sprinkled perfumed water onto the temple statues in a blessing ritual intended to bring good luck, long life and happiness.
“We were celebrating,” Setan says. “We were having fun.”
Setan didn’t understand when he saw the grim, black-uniformed soldiers pouring out of the trucks, aiming their rifles wildly and shouting “enemy” over and over.
Setan’s best friend didn’t understand, either. He approached one of the soldiers.
I’m not your enemy, he told the soldier. Why do you call me your enemy?
The soldier’s response was swift and irrevocable.
“Just like that, they shot him and killed him.”
Setan froze in disbelief and terror. He went numb.
“Right away, I know he’s not going to make it. He’s already dead.”
It was April 17, 1975, and in one terrifying moment, Setan Lee – son of a wealthy businessman, youngest student in his medical school class – lost a world of promise and possibility.
Faubion Bowers: Intoxicated by MacArthur
WWII Japanese translator-interpreter Faubion Bowers recalls his boss during the occupation of Japan:
I am often asked what it was like to work closely with Douglas MacArthur. I was his aide-de-camp. Actually, my official title was Assistant Military Secretary to the Commander-in-Chief. MacArthur never hired anyone and never fired anyone. The people around him just sort of drifted into their jobs. Once, when he was complaining to me about how the press always gunned for him–“It’s only me and Patton they pick on “he moaned–I suggested very timidly that, “Perhaps, sir, it’s the people around you that cause a critical press. He answered unequivocally, “Major, if it’s right at the top, it’s right at the bottom.”
For the two years I was near MacArthur, I was absolutely intoxicated by him. He had a grandeur, a greatness, a magnificence that doesn’t exist anymore. There was a de Gaulle, Churchill, Smuts, Nehru, Stalin and MacArthur, that kind of bigger-than-life, old-fashioned razzmatazz belonging to a past era, another century. Certainly MacArthur belonged to the 19th Century, instead of the 20th. All that invoking of “the Almighty,” the grandiloquent vocabulary (“I would be recreant in my duty not to run for the Presidency”), the fulsome references to his “adored wife” (they didn’t sleep in the same bed, and she always called him “General,” even in private) and his public exaggerations regarding his son, whom he saw only briefly in the mornings and who was asleep by the time he got home in the evenings, were just that, exaggerations. The one and only time the General ever visited a hospital during his 6½ years in Japan was not to visit the wounded but to spend 10 minutes with little Arthur, who had broken his arm….
MacArthur always roused controversy. He brought it all on himself, and then whimpered that everyone was out to get him. His was a nature where pride was mortgaged to vanity. The Japanese liked him, because he kept himself aloof. The Emperor liked him, because he was deferential, excessively polite. MacArthur–a man who delighted in humiliating or trying to humiliate his superiors–was extraordinarily affable to Hirohito, the first time he came to call at the Embassy, September 26, 1945, when I was as terrified of his Japanese as he was scared of my Japanese. After the famous meeting, when the Emperor offered himself, his life, to free all the men in Sugamo Prison, MacArthur was terribly moved. He said to Jean, his wife, and me, “I was brought up in a republic, a democracy, but to see a man once so high now brought down so low, pains me, grieves me.” And both Jean and I knew that he was actually speaking of himself. If defeat in war had humbled Hirohito, it took little Truman, with the stroke of a pen, to bring down the mighty, self-consumed MacArthur, who had deliberately insulted the President on Wake Island in 1951.
WWII Japanese Translators: The Hakujin Experience
Faubion Bowers, The Man Who Saved Kabuki, was a Japanese language translator in World War II. He contributed the following memoir to the Japanese American Veterans Association website.
In 1941, the year war with Japan broke out, there were 25 American Hakujin (Caucasians) who could read, speak and write–more or less–the Japanese language. Most of these were older, scholastic men who had spent years in Kyoto among art treasures or were missionaries who had set their minds on converting the Japanese from their heathen ways. Twenty-five is not much of a number when you are planning on an Army and Navy of five million or so against a nation of 100 million. The idea of using Nisei [2nd generation Japanese immigrants to America] or Kibei [Japanese Americans who had returned to Japan (usually for education)] had only begun to glimmer in 1940, and, even then, the idea was roundly rejected by the Navy. It would later use its own method of developing linguists: it would go to the Ivy League colleges, assemble the cum laudes and phi beta kappas and offer them a commission (instead of the draft) in exchange for a year’s intensive language training at Boulder, Colorado. The idea was a good one, because it produced, among others, Donald Keene, Ed Seidensticker and Robert Ward, some of the best Japanese scholars in the world today.
The Army was sloppier. Anyone, any White man, who went to Washington in 1940 or 1941, and said “Ohayo gozaimus,” (“Good morning”) or said he had been to Japan as a missionary’s son or businessman or whatnot, was immediately given a commission in Military Intelligence. I had spent the year from March, 1940, to March, 1941, in Japan and, since there were no other tourists, and foreigners were scarce in that country which had been ostracized for the Shina Ji[k]en (China “Incident”) since 1937 and the capture of all of China’s main cities, I had no alternative but to learn Japanese or die of loneliness. I learned it so well, thanks again to the absence of English speakers in the country that, when I left Japan (reluctantly, but it had become impossible for an American to remain there, as war was drawing near), and I continued my travels on down to Indonesia, the Dutch there assumed I was a Japanese spy and put me under armed guard until a ship could be found to send me back to America.
Back in America, by September 1941, I was drafted. I didn’t know about that trick of going to Washington and saying “Ohayo gozaimus.” At the induction center, I filled out all the forms, and, when it came to languages, I noted that I knew well French, Russian, Japanese and Malay (as Bahasa Indonesia was known in those days). The Army was so screwed up then, that my language ability went unnoticed. I was a private, trained in the Artillery, and, when Pearl Harbor exploded, I was in basic training in Fort Bragg, given a quick leave and readied to be sent to Africa for eventual landing in Italy.
However, mirabile dictu, when I reported back to camp, a Major Dickey appeared out of nowhere and said “Ohayo gozaimus” to me. I immediately answered in astonishment, rather homesick for the language, the people and the country I had come to love. My Japanese was better than Dickey’s, and we continued in English. From then on, Army life was more pleasant. I was instantly transferred to the Presidio in San Francisco, and was surrounded by Nisei and Kibei. All of us were privates, or at least none of us was an officer.
Then, we were sent to [Camp] Savage in cold Minnesota. Savage had been an Old Folks’ Home before the Army took it over, and it was a mess. All of us worked long and hard to clean it out. Then, as our military training continued — long hikes with full gear on our backs, PT, tattoo and taps — we began, rather continued, our studies in Japanese. If the hikes had been John Aiso’s idea, he was so conscientious, the Japanese lessons were an antidote. The instructors were marvelous. There was Tusky Tsukahira, a civilian. There was Tom Sakamoto, a staff sergeant, if I remember correctly, and others. Our classes consisted of Japanese-Americans and about 5 or 6 Hakujin–Matt Adams, Jurgenson, Charlie Fogg–I can’t remember the rest. Some of the students were simply marvelous in Japanese. Others were simply awful.
The Hakujin officers, aside from Colonel Rassmussen and Major Dickey, were splendid men; those Hakujin who had gotten their commissions by going to Washington ahead of the hot pursuit of the draft, well, their Japanese was terrible, to put it politely. Trouble began to brew. Here were the Nisei, brilliant in Japanese far beyond the ken of the Hakujin officers. They were drafted privates or PFCs at best. Their parents were confined in camps, their worldly goods and homesteads sold at fractions of their value. And here they were, serving their country in the most invaluable way possible–intelligence.
Rasmussen and Dickey were alarmed at the growing resentment. They were, in addition to being regular Army officers, experienced men of the world, having been military attaches at various embassies throughout the world, notably Japan. It became imperative that some–the best–Nisei be commissioned. However, the Army moves on precedent, and never in its history had anyone ever been commissioned on the basis of language. Further complicating matters was the prejudice against the Japanese-Americans, who had yet to prove themselves in battle.
So, Rassmussen decided to make me a test case. I was the best of the Hakujin linguists, and he reasoned with the authorities in Washington, that, to keep this poor private a private was a grave injustice. So, I was commissioned on the basis of language and given my little gold bars. Rank mattered a lot in those days, and I well remember having a little tiff with Paul Aurel, one of those Washington “Okayo gozaimus” officers. He barked at me, “Look here, Faub, I’m a first lieutenant, and you’re only a second lieutenant.” That taught me a lot about human nature and the importance–to some–of having a rank. At any rate, Rassmussen championed me, and, once I was an officer on the basis of language, it became possible for the first time in the U.S. Army for all the more deserving, far better than I, Nisei and Kibei to be commissioned. And a rather sticky moment in Army history passed without incident.
I also remember in Australia, it became urgent for a Nisei to be given a medal of some sort. Morale, again, was low. Their work was so invaluable that it had to be recognized in some public way. Finally, in New Guinea, my friend Kozaki was wounded. He was strafed while ducking in a boat, as a Japanese plane flew over. We were all assembled in formation, and the citation–Purple Heart and Silver Star–for bravery for Kozaki was read out loud to all of us. He was wounded in the Hopoi sector of New Guinea, it said, and for the duration, “Hopoi” and “ass” were synonymous at ATIS.
Japanese-speaking Chicano ‘Pied Piper’ on Saipan, 1944
In the 6 June 2004 Honolulu Star-Bulletin, reporter Gregg K. Kakesako profiles Guy Gabaldon, a Chicano kid raised by a Japanese family in East Los Angeles who single-handedly convinced 1,500 Japanese soldiers to surrender on Saipan in July 1944. Of course, being an American reporter in the 21st century, he emphasizes his subject’s victimhood more than his heroism.
Some say “The Pied Piper of Saipan” never got the proper credit for single-handedly capturing 1,500 Japanese prisoners in World War II….
He corralled more than 800 prisoners on July 8, 1944. Gabaldon was only an 18-year-old Marine Corps private first class who had learned the language while growing up with a Japanese family in East Los Angeles.
“The first night I was on Saipan, I went out on my own,” said Gabaldon, who now lives in Old Town, Fla. “I always worked on my own, and brought back two prisoners using my backstreet Japanese.
“My officers scolded me and threatened me with a court-martial for leaving my other duties, but I went out the next night and came back with 50 prisoners. After that I was given a free rein.”
His pitch simply was that the Japanese would be treated humanely….
“I came from such a large Latino family that no one objected when I moved in with a Japanese family. They were my extended family. It was there I learned Japanese, since I had to go language school with their children everyday.”
But when the war broke out his Japanese family was relocated to a detention camp in Arizona and he went to Alaska and worked in a fish cannery and as a laborer until he decided to enlist in the Marine Corps at the age of 17.
Gabaldon’s story inspired the 1960 motion picture “Hell to Eternity” starring no one that looked Chicano. (But at least the Japanese general was played by the prolific Sessue Hayakawa.)
Leigh S. J. Hunt (1854-1933), Adventuresome Capitalist
Iowa State University Library houses a collection of papers from its third president, whose biographical sketch is more than a little intriguing.
Leigh S. J. Hunt was born in Indiana in 1855. He obtained his undergraduate degree through Middlebury College in Vermont via correspondence course. Hunt studied law independently and passed the bar in Indiana. He then taught at public schools in Indiana before moving to Iowa and becoming superintendent of schools at Mt. Pleasant, Iowa (1880) and East Des Moines Independent School District, Des Moines, Iowa (1882). Hunt became the third president (1885) of Iowa State Agricultural College (Iowa State University). His lack of experience and aggressive style of leadership led to conflicts with the students and faculty and he resigned in 1886 after only one year.
Hunt moved to Seattle, Washington, and over the course of his lifetime participated in a wide variety of successful business ventures. He became a newspaper publisher (1886), real estate developer, and president of a bank while in Seattle. Hunt also would operate a gold mine in Korea (1893), grow cotton in Sudan (1904-1910), and eventually pursue mining, agriculture, and land development in Las Vegas, Nevada (1923-1933).
In 1885, Hunt married Jessie Noble (attended Iowa State, 1882) of Des Moines and had two children: Helen and Henry. Leigh Hunt died on October 5, 1933, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Mr. Hunt made a lasting impression on Seattle.
[In 1887,] while Leigh Hunt, editor and publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, was trailblazing along the ridge of what would be called Capitol Hill, he, by his own description, “fell into a deep communion with nature and under the enchanted spell of her visible forms.” Under the influence of this reverie, Hunt next came across the few marked graves at Washelli. Perhaps dreaming of good copy, the editor claimed that a voice came to him demanding “Dispose of the dead elsewhere; this ground is reserved for the enjoyment of the living.”
Promptly the city obeyed the influential publisher. The graves were moved next door to the Lake View Cemetery and the fresh and free acres were held as a reserve for more “deep communion with nature.” The site was eventually named City Park and in 1901, Volunteer Park, to commemorate the patriotic gang of locals who volunteered to fight in the Spanish-American War of 1898-99.
Donald C. Clark’s Living Dangerously in Korea (Eastbridge, 2003) picks up Hunt’s story from there.
After having left Seattle a pauper in 1894, in 1901 he went back and gave a dinner for his creditors, a party that was described in a local newspaper [Seattle Argus, 8 January 1934]: “At the end of what was probably the finest dinner ever served in this city up to that time, Mr. Hunt made a little speech and delivered to each of his guests an envelope containing a check for the amount of his debt, with interest added.”
Korea is where he made all that money. He happened to be in Shanghai when James Morse of the American Trading Company in Yokohama was there looking for investors in a large-scale gold mining project that Korea’s King Kojong was trying to get underway near Unsan, north of Pyongyang. Although Hunt was broke, he had rich friends, one of whom, New York financier J. Sloat Fassett, was willing to commit $100,000. By the summer of 1897, Hunt and Fassett has bought out Morse’s share for $70,000, and Fassett returned to raise more capital and incorporate their venture as the Oriental Consolidated Mining Company, Inc., of West Virginia.
In 1899, they bought out the King’s share for a combination of cash and annual royalties that came to less than $250,000, in return for which they ended up with “a 40-year, tax-free gold mining concession, complete with its own supplies of labor, timber, and water” (p. 226). By 1901, the newly reorganized OCMC was worth $5 million, and included investors in California (William Randolph Hearst, among others), New York, and London. Hunt and Fassett turned profits of about $2 million each. That’s when Hunt decided he could afford to repay his Seattle creditors.
By the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, Hunt was investing in cotton ventures in the Sudan. A report in 2001 by the general director of the Sudan Cotton Co. on “stickiness problems in Sudanese cotton” briefly mentions the same Mr. Hunt in its introductory paragraph.
Cotton production in the Sudan has its roots as early as 1839 when it was introduced by Mumtaz Basha, a Turkish governor of Tokar district during the Turkish colonial rule in Sudan. In 1904 an American investor (Leigh Hunt) was granted a concession at Zeidab area – subsequently the Sudan plantation syndicate, a private company, was authorized to begin experiment with cotton production in 1911 in Tayba which was to become a nucleus for the prospective Gezira scheme. The construction of Sennar Dam in 1925 signaled the real take off for commercial cotton production in Sudan and in that year 80,000 feddans (virtually acres) were irrigated and expansion of area since then progressed in steady rates in Gezira and alongside Blue Nile and White Nile Banks.
Finally, the University of Nevada at Reno’s Walter Hunsaker Collection adds more detail about Mr. Hunt’s contribution to economic development in Nevada:
Hunt was an educator, president of Ames College in Iowa (1885), publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, head of a Seattle Bank, gold mine operator in Korea, developer of Egypt’s long staple cotton industry, personal advisor to President Theodore Roosevelt during the Russo-Japanese War, and mining developer in the Eldorado Canyon District in Clark County, Nevada. Hunt made and lost several fortunes but always recovered after each loss.
Hunt came to Las Vegas in 1923 in search of health [sic]. He became the largest single land-holder in the Las Vegas area and had plans for extensive development of those holdings stimulated by the growth made possible by the cheap power from the nearby Boulder Dam project. His holdings included both land for housing subdivisions and property along the downtown Las Vegas “strip.” In 1929 he hired Walter S. Hunsaker as his confidential secretary and business agent….
NOTE: Leigh S. J. Hunt is not to be confused with J. H. Leigh Hunt (1774–1859), the English Romantic poet, author of this metrically jarring yet delicately indescribable Rondeau (said to be about Thomas Carlyle’s wife Jane).
Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.
Townsville’s Native Labor Co. (Chinese)
If you’re like me, you’ve lost a bit of sleep wondering what happened to the many foreign laborers on Nauru and Ocean Island (Banaba) during the Pacific War. Well, the first volume of The Bayonet of Australia has ended those worries for me.
The original name of the “Native Labor Company (Chinese)”, Base Two, was “Chinese Civilian Labor Company”, Base Two. The group of Chinese who are working in this organization were evacuated from Nauru and Ocean Islands in the Central Pacific during February 1942. They had been firstly employed by the Australian Government for the Mine Department for a period of over eighteen months. During November 1943, they signed themselves over for employment with the U.S. Army through the Chinese Consul. They came to Townsville, Queensland from Hatches Creek, Wauchope and Alice Spring by army trucks as far as Mt Isa and after putting up a night there embarked by train for Townsville. The trip took about four days. After arriving in this town, they were camped at Armstrong Paddock (U.S. Army Camp).
Among the Chinese Company there are a good many skilled carpenters, fitters, turners, motor mechanics, plumbers, electricians, blacksmiths, moulders, interpreters, clerks, cooks and labourers. The initial company consisted of 515 Chinese under the command of Captain Ferne M. Schmalle, who was assisted by eight enlisted men. The Chinese prefer the American treatment to any other in the world. They are being well fed, well clothed, well quartered and well paid, in fact they are better treated than the soldiers. In addition they enjoy the privileges of free hospitalisation, free transport to and from work and free movie shows.
Hmm. Was The Bayonet of Australia edited by Americans? Although no self-respecting Yank would write “firstly employed” I can’t believe any self-respecting Ocker would write, “the Chinese prefer American treatment to any other in the world.” (Maybe hoping they wouldn’t stay after the war was over?) Judging from the inconsistent spellings, I’d guess the 1942 Bayonet must have been written by a bilateral committee.
Korea’s Occupier-in-Chief, Gen. Hodge (Podge)
Compare the general in charge of U.S. occupation policy in Japan with his hapless counterpart in Korea.
Lt. Gen. John Reed Hodge was one of the most important people in recent Korean history. He served as the commander of the U.S. military occupation of southern Korea from September 1945 to August 1948, although he was far from being a prominent U.S. Army officer during World War II. His personal and professional background had a direct and negative impact on his implementation of instructions and his dealings with the Korean people and their political leaders. This article provides evidence that President Harry S. Truman’s decision to appoint Hodge as occupation commander was a serious mistake. His narrow experience and lesser command responsibilities caused him to make decisions that greatly increased political polarization in the divided country, creating the circumstances that would result in the outbreak of the Korean War.
SOURCE: James I. Matray, “Hodge Podge: American Occupation Policy in Korea, 1945-1948,” Korean Studies 19: 17-38
More on KimSoft and in Army Magazine. To quote the latter:
Japanese forces in Korea formally surrendered to Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, the American corps commander, on September 9, 1945. Hodge was then appointed the commander of U.S. Armed Forces in Korea and tasked with the restoration of Korean independence.
In hopes of maintaining civil order, Gen. Hodge kept Japanese officials in charge of Korean civilian affairs. It was a mistake, and his statements and actions led to rioting in the south. To restore peace, Syngman Rhee, the exiled leader of Korea’s independence movement, was asked to return to his home country. Rhee, a nationalist since his days as a student in Seoul, had been jailed and tortured for his views. He escaped from Japanese-occupied Korea to Shanghai and set up the Korean Provisional Government. He was eventually elected president of the Republic of Korea.
Buruma on Japan’s Occupier-in-Chief
Ian Buruma’s chapter on the U.S. Occupation period in his book Inventing Japan: 1853-1964 (Modern Library Chronicles, 2003), begins thus:
General Douglas MacArthur arrived at Atsugi naval airdrome, near Yokohama, on August 30, 1945. Having emerged from his aircraft, the supreme commander for the Allied powers (SCAP) paused at the top of the steps, stuck one hand in his hip pocket, tightened his jaws around his corncob pipe, and surveyed the conquered land through his aviator sunglasses. This trademark pose, casually imperious, had been well rehearsed. It was repeated several times from different angles, so all the press photographers could get a decent shot.
We cannot know exactly what went through SCAP’s mind at that moment, but reports of his monologues on the long flight from Australia suggest that he felt like a man with a mission. MacArthur was no expert on Japan; in fact, he knew very little about the place. But guided, in his own account, by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Jesus Christ, he would deliver this benighted Oriental nation from slavery and feudalism and transform its people into pacific democrats. It was to be the most radical overhaul since the Meiji Restoration, another new dawn to the West. But this time America, and not Germany, would be the model, the only model. Officially, the occupation of Japan was to be shared by the other Allied powers, including the Soviet Union. In fact, it was an American show from the start.
SCAP’s mission began almost one hundred years after Commodore Perry arrived with his black ships. Then, too, “the universal Yankee nation” had come (in Perry’s mind, at any rate) to bring light to Japanese darkness. The guns on the deck of his flagship, Powhatan, made sure the Japanese got the message. This earlier mission was not forgotten at the hour of Japan’s official surrender. Perry’s flag, carefully preserved at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, was flown to Japan for the ceremony on the battleship Missouri. After the old flag was hoisted and MacArthur spoke grandiloquently, like the ham actor he was, of freedom, tolerance, and justice, fifteen hundred U.S. Navy fighter planes and four hundred B-29 bombers roared overhead in tight formation.
The Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were disbanded. Leftover stockpiles and materiel were either destroyed or disappeared into the black markets, thus setting up the careers of well-connected Japanese gangsters, political fixers, and right-wing politicians. Destroying Japan’s military was only the beginning, however. Political institutions had to be reformed and the zaibatsu tackled. The Japanese bureaucracy, on the other hand, was left largely in place to carry out SCAP’s reforms for him. Unlike Germany, Japan was to be administered by the Japanese themselves, with SCAP and his staff as puppet masters, frequently moving in the dark. There was a general election in 1946, and occupied Japan continued to be run officially by Japanese governments under the autocratic gaze of SCAP. Thus, an important link between prewar, wartime, and postwar Japan was preserved. The effect was not all to the good.
Impearls on May Day, the Haymarket Riots, and Capital Punishment
Impearls has a timely look back at the origins of May Day in the 1886 Haymarket Riots in Chicago, which serve as an object lesson in a polemic about the dangers of capital punishment.
Today is May Day, May 1st. People in America are often vaguely aware that other regions of the world, especially Europe and leftist-impressed parts, celebrate May Day as the occasion for a pro-labor holiday, the equivalent of the U.S.’s Labor Day held in the fall. Few Americans, however, recall that this day actually commemorates events which occurred in the United States, in Chicago, on and after May 1, 118 years before this day.
Fifteen years ago, three years after the centenary, I posted a progenitor of this polemic on the Usenet (aka Newsgroups), which rather than emphasizing the labor aspect of the day in history, treated it as an abject example of the dangers of application of the death penalty by society, and the certainty that innocents will be executed in error if capital punishment is employed to any significant extent. I believe the subject is even more pertinent today than it was back then.
Read the rest.
Filed under U.S.
Far Outliers 