American Shogun

500 Pages·2006·28.486 MB·English

by  Robert Harvey

AMERICAN.
"SH
MacArthur, Hirohito and the
American Duel with Japan
OBERT H ADR WEY
From the latter half of the nineteenth century through to
the mid-twentieth, America and Japan were caught in an
extraordinary political, military and economic duel. The clash
between one of the newest cultures in the world and one of the
oldest was characterized by a cultural incompatibility that
was to haunt the relationship between Emperor Hirchito and
General MacArthur.
Hirohito was a remarkable man. Diffident, uncharismatic and
apparently obtuse, he survived as a god-ruler of Japan for
some six decades through internal strife, war, defeat,
occupation and economic victory. The country he ran was no
less extraordinary. In the course of his rule Japan ricocheted
from minor power to the greatest empire in Asian history, then
through atomic annihilation to eventual rehabilitation as the
world’s second strongest economy.
He met his equal in General Douglas MacArthur and the
superpower he represented. MacArthur’s career spanned an
astonishing tranche of American history from the First World
War to Korea. Brash and domineering, he wielded massive
power and played a key American foreign policy role in Asia.
For his single-handed rule over Japan he could even be said to
merit the honorary Japanese epithet ‘shogun’ or army leader.
In this absorbing dual biography Robert Harvey traces their
tense and complex relationship. His broad scope encompasses
two great nations in war and peace — a momentous period of
history which provides illuminating insight into American
actions across the world today.
£25
AMERICAN
SHOGUN
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
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Cochrane: The Life and Exploits of a Fighting Captain
A Few Bloody Noses: The American War of Independence
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AMERICAN
SHOGUN
MACARTHUR, HIROHITO AND
THE AMERICAN DUEL WITH JAPAN
ROBERT HARVEY
JOHN MURRAY
For my Mother
© Robert Harvey 2006
First published in Great Britain in 2006 by John Murray (Publishers)
A division of Hodder Headline
The right of Robert Harvey to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by
him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
1
All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law no part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or
by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise
circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and
without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Photographic credits: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27 and 29,
Bettmann/Corbis; 2 and 9, Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis; 8, 12, 14, 18, 19, 24, 25 and
28, CORBIS.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Hardback ISBN 0 7195 6484 0
Trade paperback ISBN 0 7195 6638 X
Book design and type formatting by Bernard Schleifer
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CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PROLOGUE
PART I: WORLDS APART
tla The Little Adjutant ot
Or West Point 28
PART II: DAWN OF THE RISING SUN
3: The Heian Period ae
: The Shogunate 42
: Aristocratic Revolution 45
: The Meiji Emperor 53
: The Plutocrats 63
: Outward Bound 69
: “Affluent and Humane” fie
CF©NfO HN
10: Crown Prince 90
PART III: AMERICAN HERO
11 : The Big Country 99
£22 Growing Pains 107
13
: The Rainbow Division £13
14
: The Amorous Superintendent 120
D5 Eroticism, Grotesquery and Nonsense 124
16: Devouring Manchuria 133
17.3 The Military-Industrial Alliance 140
1S Blood on the Snow 149
19 : Into China 158
20 : The Eagle Stirs 176
6 | AMERICAN SHOGUN
PART IV: THE OLD MAN OF CORREGIDOR
21 : Generalissimo of Washington 191
22 : The Two Giants 208
23 : Corregidor and Bataan mek
24 : “I Shall Return” 233
PART V: FIGHTBACK
25 : To the Philippines 249
26 : Dance of Death 256
27 : Little Boy and Fat Man 263
28 : When the Singing Stopped 274
29 : Surrender 287
PART VI: AMERICAN SHOGUN
30 : Conqueror 305
31 : Proconsul a2)
32 : Visionary 340
33 : The Assault on Privilege 353
34 : The Tokyo Trials 365
PaRT VII: FALL OF THE SHOGUN
35 : Counter-Attack 383
36 : Humanizing the Emperor 399
ay 7 Nored 413
38 : Old Soldiers Never Die 428
PART VIII: THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES
39 : Return of the Samurai 441
EPILOGUE 453
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY * 460
INDEX 473
PREFACE
|O WE A GREAT DEBT TO MANY WHO HAVE HELPED ME WITH MY TRAVELING
and research in Japan, the Philippines, Burma, Thailand, Singapore and
the United States. They include Andrew and Cherry Williams, Simon Scott-
Plummer, David Warren, David and Sheila Atterton, Lady Pilcher and
Raymond Eyre. I am also particularly grateful to the Japanese Embassy in
London, the Foreign Press Institute in Tokyo, the Press Department of the
Japanese Foreign Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, the Self-Defence Agency,
the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, the Japanese Employers
Association and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. In the United
States I owe special thanks to the MacArthur Memorial Archive in
Norfolk, Virginia, and to Raymond Seitz, former U.S. ambassador in
London. I also owe a huge debt to Jonathan Fenby for his invaluable advice
about China.
I owe special thanks to my agent, Gillon Aitken, for his unflagging
encouragement and advice, to my superbly professional editors Peter Mayer
and Roland Philipps, and to my tolerant, always cheerful and painstaking
assistant, Jenny Thomas, who catches almost all of my errors, and her his-
torian husband Geoffrey for alerting me to new research on MacArthur.
I also owe my warmest thanks to my mother and sister Antonella, and
her husband, Sharif Abdullah al-Hussein for their support during the writ-
ing of this book. Finally, most of all I would like to thank my wife Jane and
son Oliver, who put up with it all.
A bibliography of main sources is included at the end. Certain books
stand out as having provided clear signposts to the direction of my research,
although responsibility for my judgments and errors is, of course, entirely
my own. On the American side they include Douglas MacArthur’s own
Reminiscences; Arnold Brackman’s highly readable The Other Nuremberg;
8 | AMERICAN SHOGUN
Michael Schaller’s brilliant analysis in The American Occupation of Japan;
William Manchester’s readable and microscopic examination of MacArthur’s
life, American Caesar; and Geoffrey Perret’s fine military biography, Old
Soldiers Never Die.
On the Japanese side, deserving special mention are Tashiaki Kawahara’s
Hirohito and His Times; the Pacific War Research Society’s Japan’s
Longest Day; John Dower’s Embracing Defeat, a magisterial, even-handed
and fascinating study of the American occupation of Japan; Herbert Bix’s
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, a well-crafted and well-
researched indictment of the Emperor; Karol van Wolferen’s The Enigma
of Japanese Power; and Meirion and Susie Harries’s Soldiers of the Sun.
The many other scholars I owe a debt to are listed in the bibliography.