Year Zero (26 page)

Things did not go entirely as planned. The Americans, despite British protestations, still insisted that Abs should be arrested as a suspected war criminal. But once he was locked up in jail, Abs refused to give the British further financial advice unless he were released. It took the British three months to convince the U.S. authorities to let him go.

Alfried Krupp, who met his American captors in the hall of his country estate in Essen with the words “This is my house, what are you doing here?” was put on trial in Nuremberg. As was the industrialist Friedrich Flick. When the British came to arrest Baron Georg von Schnitzler, director of I.G. Farben, responsible for slave labor in Auschwitz, among other things, he greeted them suavely, dressed in a golfing outfit cut from the finest Scottish tweed. It was such a pleasure, he declared, to be free once more to resume his old friendships with Lord X and Lord Y, as well as the Du Ponts of Wilmington, Delaware. They were such wonderful friends and it had been most painful to be cut off from them in the last few years.
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He was sentenced to five years for “plunder and spoliation.” Schnitzler returned to business and society after one year. Krupp was sentenced to twelve years for slave labor, and served three. Flick, too, was released from the comfort of Landsberg Prison after serving three years of his seven-year sentence. During his time in captivity, Flick had sought and received financial advice from Hermann Abs, who went on to take a leading role in the reconstruction of West Germany, sitting on the boards of the Deutsche Bank, Daimler-Benz, and Lufthansa, among many other companies. When control of the Krupp company was transferred to a foundation in the 1960s, one of the main supervisors of this transaction was Hermann Abs.

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AT LEAST SOME OF HITLER'S
industrial elite had spent some time in prison, albeit with access to good food and very acceptable wines. Their Japanese colleagues were spared even that fate. The purges in Japan, apart from arrests of suspected war criminals, were meant to be “preventative,” not “punitive.” What they were meant to prevent was the resurgence of “militarism.” The problem was that the Americans were unsure whom to purge, and too much inclined to view Japan as an Oriental version of the Third Reich.

Who exactly had “misled the people of Japan”? Not the emperor, since SCAP had already decided he was innocent. The military organization that most closely resembled a Nazi-type outfit was the military police,
the
Kempeitai
, much feared by Japanese and non-Japanese alike for its expert use of torture and murder. About forty thousand
Kempeitai
officers lost their jobs; few Japanese tears were shed over them. Other patriotic organizations, having to do with the Shinto religion, emperor worship, martial arts, or wartime economic planning, may have looked like Nazi organizations, but were not really the same at all. Nor was the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, founded in 1940 as a reformist political umbrella group to mobilize politicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals for the war effort. It lacked a coherent ideology, and some of its founders were actually socialists. The War Planning Board included a few left-wing economists too. Even the policy on what to do with officers in the armed forces was unclear. First it was decided that all officers down to the rank of major had to be purged. Surely no one lower than that could have been in a position to mislead anyone. When Major General Richard Marshall, deputy chief of staff, got wind of this, he erupted in a fury. In his experience, Japanese captains and lieutenants had been the worst fanatics. If they were not added to the list, he said, they would mislead the Japanese people again. So they were added to the list as well.
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In short, SCAP's Americans didn't have much of a clue.

If any institution had played a major role in the Japanese war effort, it was the bureaucracy: the Home Ministry, in charge of policing dissent, but also the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (absorbed during the war into the Munitions Ministry), in control of wartime industrial planning. And even the Ministry of Finance, which had a big hand in exploiting the resources of conquered Asian countries. Industrial bureaucrats had been responsible for massive slave labor operations, in the puppet state of Manchukuo, in other parts of China, and in Japan itself, where large numbers of people were put to work in factories and mines, mostly in atrocious conditions. But the U.S. Occupation guidelines for dealing with these cases were vague. Senior figures in the top ranks were to be removed from office. Lower-ranking figures could remain in their jobs. The purged officials were not supposed to exert any more influence. It
was never exactly clear how they could be prevented from meeting their former subordinates for informal consultations. And so they usually did.

It was on the question of what to do with the business and industrial elites that the U.S. administration was most divided. The Supreme Commander, in his typical pompous manner, intoned: “It was these very persons, born and bred as feudalistic overlords, who held the lives of the majority of Japan's people in virtual slavery, and who . . . geared the country with both the tools and the will to wage aggressive war.” They, he insisted, had to be “removed from influencing the course of Japan's future economy.”
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MacArthur actually said this in 1947, a year after the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (formally the International Military Tribunal for the Far East) had been convened, modeled on the Nuremburg trials. Other Americans took a very different view. The chief prosecutor of the Tokyo tribunal, Joseph B. Keenan, a former director in the U.S. Justice Department, said in that same year: “We have neither been offered nor have we found evidence of instances where prominent business and industrial leaders conspired with anyone to plan or initiate the war.”
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How the Japanese themselves felt about purges depended on their politics. One letter writer to SCAP wanted him to understand that “99 percent of the Japanese people, at least until now, were absolute fanatics and militarists.”
²²
Another, more temperate correspondent claimed that the “bureaucrats are unprincipled, to the extent that they even allowed a fascist and a war criminal like . . . the former home minister, to keep his office. Even if there were a liberal among them, he would be timid and passive.”
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What made things a little simpler in Japan is that only one of the Allied powers, the United States, was responsible for “demilitarization” and “democratization.” There was no equivalent of SCAP in Germany, not even General Lucius Clay, who certainly would not have received letters such as the one that said, “We look to MacArthur as the second Jesus Christ.”
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But internally divided, in terms of bureaucratic turf and
political persuasion, the Americans never really came up with a consistent purging strategy. The actual governing of Japan was left up to a Japanese cabinet, which instructed the bureaucracy to institute its own reforms. While these were perfunctory at best, there was another target which, despite the views of chief prosecutor Joseph Keenan, the American New Dealers took far more seriously. Individuals who “do not direct future Japanese economic efforts for solely peaceful ends” had to be removed, and “industrial and banking combines which have exercised control over a great part of Japan's trade and industry” must be dissolved.
²⁵
These combines, or
zaibatsu
, were designated as the main economic warmongers.

This came as a shock to the industrialists, who, like the banker Hermann Abs and his colleagues in Germany, cherished their prewar contacts in the boardrooms of London and New York. Before the war was even over, the president of a large steel company, a Harvard graduate, exclaimed (in English) in a secret meeting of industrialists, “Our friend is coming.”
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Japanese business leaders with international experience, many of whom had studied in Europe or the United States, expected to be put in charge of the reconstruction of the Japanese economy by like-minded Americans. Instead, they were ousted and their business conglomerates pulled apart.

To the New Dealers in MacArthur's military government, this was their proudest achievement—this and the land reforms which broke the back of “feudalism” in rural Japan. Many Japanese leftists felt enormously encouraged by U.S. policies. In the first few years of occupation, Washington was seen as the left's best friend. Women's suffrage, the right to strike, collective bargaining, these were all great innovations pushed by the Americans and gratefully acted upon by the Japanese. Communists as well as socialists began to wield considerable power in trade unions and higher education.

But even some Japanese with leftist views who had no warm feelings for the industrialists were a little bemused by the special blame attached to the
zaibatsu
. In a letter to his friend Donald Keene, Theodore de Bary, then a naval officer, mentions a conversation with a businessman in
Tokyo named Miyauchi, who called himself a socialist and a democrat. De Bary asked him about the wartime role of the
zaibatsu
. Miyauchi replied that they had counted for little with the military establishment. Yes, some of the new
zaibatsu
, such as Nissan, had done well out of the war, but the “Big Four” old
zaibatsu
families, Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Sumitomo, and Yasuda, had been co-opted like everyone else: “They were weak, the zaibatsu were weak.”
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De Bary is only half convinced. He had heard this line so often from Japanese that he suspected the influence of military propaganda. He writes: “The army, during the thirties, must have propagated the idea first and then have proved its truth by buying out or intimidating the
zaibatsu
.”

One thing is certain: by going after the
zaibatsu
and leaving the bureaucracy more or less alone, the Americans showed that they had not really understood how the Japanese wartime system worked. But this was not just a matter of ignorance or misunderstanding; there was a confluence of views between idealistic American planners, who wanted to help build a new Japan, and the Japanese “reform bureaucrats” who were expecting to continue their wartime grip on the economy, albeit to more peaceful ends.

Not that nothing was done. By 1948, the careers of more than nine hundred thousand people had been screened, and more than one and a half million questionnaires examined. The Home Ministry was dissolved, the armed forces disbanded, and 1,800 bureaucrats were purged. But most of these (70 percent) were former policemen and other officials from the Home Ministry. Economic bureaucrats were hardly touched at all. From the former Ministry of Munitions only forty-two men were dismissed, and from the Ministry of Finance just nine.
²⁸
The man who ran the Ministry of Munitions, after being in charge of slave labor in Manchuria, and who then helped to plan the Japanese imperialist enterprise known as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, was arrested but never formally charged with war crimes. His name was Kishi Nobusuke, and his career flourished after his release from prison; he would go on to become prime minister of Japan.

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IN THE HISTORY
of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the Philippines occupies a curious place. The country was invaded and occupied by the Japanese on December 8, 1941, ten hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Douglas MacArthur, then officially Field Marshal of the Philippine Army, retreated to Australia in March of the following year, where he asserted, “I shall return.” The Filipino president, Manuel Quezon, also left for Australia and thence to Washington, D.C., where he established a government in exile. This in itself was unusual; there was no Indonesian government in exile, or Burmese government in exile. There was a Thai government in exile, but Thailand was never a colony. By the time the Japanese invaded, the Philippines was somewhere in between a colony and a state. It already had commonwealth status and was supposed to become fully independent in 1946. The Japanese, in spite of promising, as General Homma Masaharu put it, to emancipate the Filipinos from the oppressive domination of the United States, in fact recolonized the country in a more brutal form. Even though the Philippines was formally declared an independent republic in 1943, under president José P. Laurel, the Japanese were fully in charge. Behind every Filipino government official was a Japanese “consultant,” and behind every consultant stood the Japanese army and the dreaded
Kempeitai
military police. The republic, in short, was a sham.

There was, however, a tough Filipino resistance movement against the Japanese. The most effective anti-Japanese guerrillas, operating in the rural areas of the main island of Luzon, shared the politics neither of Quezon nor of Laurel. The Hukbalahap, meaning People's Anti-Japanese Army, were barefooted peasant revolutionaries whose enemies were not only the Japanese but also the big Filipino landowning families. Enriched by their vast sugar and coconut plantations, the landlords, masquerading as democrats, ran the country as a feudal oligarchy. The most famous Huk leader, named Luis Taruc, was a son of sharecroppers. Another colorful Huk was a huge and ferocious female warrior named Felipa Culala. Her nom de guerre was Dayang Dayang. Even the Japanese were afraid of Dayang Dayang.

Since many of the landlords had fled their plantations for Manila during the Japanese occupation, the Huks did what communists had done in other countries: they took over the land and set up a kind of state within a state. Their disciplined fighting “squadrons” were ruthless killers of Japanese, but also of any Filipinos suspected of collaboration or indiscipline. Even the formidable Dayang Dayang was punished when she broke the rules. Abiding by her own motto that “those who don't get rich in this war have liquid brains,” she went on a spree of looting anything from water buffalo to jewelry. She was caught, tried, and shot.
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