JAPAN: Strategic Springboard

If U.S. efforts to help friendly China were a failure, U.S. occupation of her former enemy, Japan, was a success. Chinese Communists and their friends abroad might demand that U.S. Marines get out of China, but in the U.S. and Japan there was scarcely a whisper about America's pulling out of Japan.

Just twelve months had passed since the launching of the strangest military occupation in history. In the postwar world twelve defeated nations have had conquering armies quartered on their soil. Japan, alone among them, appeared to be enjoying the experience. She had not, like Germany, been divided into zones, nor had she lost significant sections of her home territory. She had not, like Hungary, been systematically looted, nor did the triumphant enemy live off and destroy the land.

Unique Benevolence. The Japanese occupation was uniquely benevolent, and the benevolence, uniquely, was according to plan. The plan was the work of one man, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, who, as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, wielded an awesome power (with the full cooperation of the U.S. State Department). Last September MacArthur came to a Japan whose people were imprisoned in feudalism and superstition, whose cities were ashen ruins, whose militarist traditions had no place for such concepts as defeat and war guilt. The Supreme Commander's first job was to destroy what was left of Japan's war potential. But he said: "I am not concerned with how to keep Japan down but how to get her on her feet again."

While he demobilized and repatriated an army of 5,000,000 he set up the machinery to receive, feed and readjust thousands of civilians returning from Japan's crumbled empire in China, the Central Pacific, Malaya and the East Indies.

Jazz and Democracy. By last week the U.S. imprint was strong on Japan. Japanese girls strolled hand in hand with G.I.s beside the imperial moat. Children played with toy models of American "jeepu"; women copied U.S. fashions. In Tokyo a special school taught U.S. slang, and cinema fans queued up to see Hollywood movies (biggest hit: Tall in the Saddle, a Western). In geisha houses, the girls gaily crooned You Are My Sunshine.

The Japs, long used to following the leader, followed American democracy in much the same spirit as they accepted U.S. jazz. When MacArthur ordered them to hold an election, 27 million of them trooped to the polls. They organized Western-style political parties and prepared to accept a Western-style constitution. When they were ordered to cease worshiping their Emperor as a god, they willingly obliged.

But the Japanese capacity for reverence may merely have substituted one god for another. The new deity is General MacArthur himself. The worship has been fed by the General's dramatic aloofness. He lives behind a white concrete wall on a towering hilltop; his paneled office is seldom visited by a Japanese. When he steps out into his long black Cadillac, crowds gather to gaze at the man who, rumor says, is descended from Amaterasu, the sun-goddess.