Читать книгу Foreign Correspondents in Japan - Charles Foreign Corresponden - Страница 12
Оглавление1945-1954
OVERVIEW
Demilitarization, democratization, and reconstruction were the three major objectives of the Allied occupation of Japan. These policies, implemented indirectly through the Japanese government, initially focused on the first two objectives. In 1947, the focus shifted to reconstruction, the mainspring of Japan's early postwar economic development, and from 1948 on the Japanese government was gradually given greater decision-making authority. As the Cold War developed, occupation policy shifted away from demilitarization and Japan increasingly became a strategic ally. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 saw a relaxation of policies to prevent monopolies in the interest of speeding economic recovery, while enormous quantities of "special procurements" by the U.S. military contributed greatly to Japan's economic recovery. Japan signed a peace treaty with the U.S. and forty-six other countries in 1951 and the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty; it regained its independence in 1952. With the end of the Korean War boom, quantitative reconstruction tailed off and Japan turned to modernization and new technologies to expand its economy more qualitatively into the next decade.
This was the decade when the tough newsmen who had covered the fighting of World War II, and who often fought the military for the freedom of the public to know, moved into their new clubhouse at No. 1 Shimbun Alley-where they created the legends and traditions for which the FCCJ stands today. Their reports began to inform the world about Japan and its transformation under the tutelage of the Occupation forces; their example prepared the way for the generations of journalists who were to follow. And in the process, they also passed on to their Japanese associates the language of democracy. With less news to cover during the Occupation, the number of correspondents dropped, threatening the existence of the Club. The Korean War in 1950 brought another surge, with membership passing the 350 mark, and added more legends and traditions. The Club after the armistice in 1953 again began to wane, until the news value of Japan's economic recovery and return to world affairs brought a growing stream of correspondents
Day (Hiroshi) Inoshita, born in Los Angeles, came to Japan in 1936 to study Japanese. His first journalistic assignment was in Shanghai with the Domei News Agency, where he spent the war years. Afterward, he returned to Japan to work for Reuters, United Press (now UPI), and the Associated Press (AP). In 1966, he helped establish Universal News (Japan) as the Japan representative of UNS in London.
Chapter One
1945
1945 FCCJ FACT FILE
• Officially listed founding members . . . 58
• Professional events: Military press briefings, press conferences, and interviews.
• Social events: Opening party for No. 1 Shimbun Alley, New Year's Eve party.
• President from October through December: Howard Handleman (INS)
Ordeal ends
The war in the Pacific ended to all intents and purposes when the world's first atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 15, nine days after the first bomb all but wiped out Hiroshima, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender. His reedy voice was broadcast throughout Asia over NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation). Diehard nationalists erupted in grief-stricken protest: "No surrender. Choose seppuku, the way of our fathers." Fortunately, by this time, except for a few, the Japanese people trusted their Emperor to know better than their leaders; they turned their backs on The Way of the Samurai.
The advance guard of General MacArthur's forces landed at Atsugi air base, thirty miles southwest of Tokyo, on August 28; General MacArthur arrived on August 30 and moved into temporary headquarters in Yokohama as Supreme Commander Allied Powers (SCAP) in charge of the Occupation forces. Meanwhile, Admiral Halsey's 3rd Fleet put its forces ashore at the Yokosuka naval base, at the mouth of Tokyo Bay.
Two hundred newspapermen and photographers arrived with these advance units. General MacArthur had ordered all troops, and correspondents, too, to stay out of Tokyo until the 8th Army had secured it. But the correspondents wouldn't trust their own mothers not to scoop them in a situation like this. Who was the first with a story out of Tokyo? Frank Robertson, an Australian correspondent with the International News Service, received a special citation from the Overseas Press Club in New York for this feat. Others weren't far behind.
Russ Brines of the Associated Press and Carl Mydans of Life set foot on Japan at Atsugi. David Douglas Duncan, a marine lieutenant and photographer, later to work with Carl on the Life staff, came ashore at Yokosuka. Although the Allied landing forces and the correspondents were blissfully unaware of it at the time, MacArthur's fears were justified. On the night of August 14, fanatic rebels led by Major Kenji Hata-naka had shot and killed the commander of the Emperor's Konoe-hei elite guard and broke into the Imperial Palace in a futile effort to destroy the recording of the Emperor's surrender message. Taking responsibility for their actions, Army Minister General Korechika Anami committed seppuku (hara-kiri, if you prefer). Four members of the rebel group blew their brains out. Assassinations and other suicides followed. An estimated thirty Japanese disemboweled themselves on the open square facing the Imperial Palace (from Robert Guillain of Agence France Presse, in his book I Saw Tokyo Burning).
Newsmen find a desert of rubble
Contrary to initial fears, however, the landing forces and newsmen found no sign of hostility or resentment. Only a calm, even courteous, reception. The Japanese, for their part, found the victors weren't the blood-thirsty, sex-crazed maniacs they had been led to expect. At Atsugi, interpreters and automobiles were waiting at the airport, as directed by MacArthur when he met a surrender team of officers from Tokyo in Manila on August 20. Russ Brines, who had been AP bureau chief in Tokyo in 1941, went to Atsugi Station wearing a .45 on his hip. Brines was handed free tickets to Tokyo for himself and his interpreter. As he passed through the gate, he relates in his book With MacArthur in Japan, "a stiff colonel marched by, his samurai sword twisting at his side, and saluted."
Mydans went from Atsugi to Yokohama with a reconnaissance unit which secured the port city for General MacArthur's arrival. From Yokohama he attempted to jeep his way into Tokyo, but was turned back by U.S. military roadblocks. In the end, most of the correspondents chose, like Brines and Mydans, to board one of the jam-packed trains from Yokohama into Tokyo. Wearing khaki uniforms and sidearms, they rubbed shoulders with Japanese in shabby wartime clothes. The latter eyed them curiously and nodded courteously. The ride from Atsugi to Tokyo, one hour before the war, took three hours, said Brines. "The third-class coach was jammed so tightly that we all breathed almost in unison. . . . No one resented my uniform or gave it more than a fleeting glance."
Duncan arrived at Yokosuka naval base with the U.S. 3rd Fleet and caught a train into Tokyo. "Each car was stuffed solid with Japanese," he recalls in his photo-book Yankee Nomad. "When they suddenly became aware of the Americans in their midst, each of them simply bowed, ever so slightly, as though to excuse himself and his countrymen for having so inconvenienced us by providing such crowded transport at a time like this." Pushing their way out of Tokyo Station, the newsmen found the destruction of homes and buildings and the conditions of the people beyond anything they had imagined.
Robert Trumbull of the New York Times, later a Club director, wrote in an article for the FCC J twentieth-anniversary issue of the No. 1 Shimbun, "Around Shinbashi, the Ginza and Marunouchi, Tokyo was still a city; elsewhere it was mostly wasteland, in which one could see for miles in any direction over a desert of rubble."
Added Duncan, "Only the abandoned, rusting safes of long-gone or dead shopkeepers, and the blackened scarecrows of jutting brick chimneys marked what had been the heart of Asia's greatest city." But browsing amid the ashes, Dave found "people lived in holes beneath fallen walls and were farming vegetables in tiny plots of earth."
Surrender on the U.S.S. Missouri
The official surrender ceremony, staged on September 2 on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri, at anchor in Tokyo Bay, was a model of symbolism. Frank Tremaine, later to become vice-president of United Press, reported that the American flag unfurled as the "Star-Spangled Banner" sounded was the same that flew over the Capitol in Washington on December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day. On a bulkhead was the flag Commodore Matthew Perry flew when he sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 to open Japan to American trading. The casual dress of the American delegation's suntans, no ties and no decorations, on Admiral Halsey's flagship, dated back to "the dismal winter of 1942" when Halsey, upon taking command of the failing Guadalcanal campaign, banned neckties at his South Pacific headquarters in New Caledonia.
There were two surrender documents, canvas-bound for Japan, leather-bound for the Allied Powers, according to William Manchester in his MacArthur biography American Caesar. After General MacArthur signed the papers, he turned and gave two of the five pens he used to two men, emaciated after nearly four years in Japanese captivity, Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright, who surrendered Corregidor to Japan, and Lieutenant General Arthur Ernest Percival, who surrendered at Singapore.
As SCAP, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, General MacArthur's immediate task was to formalize Japan's defeat. Disarming the Japanese forces, getting his occupation machinery off the ground, and implanting the fundamentals of democracy in the government and its people, his duties as Supreme Commander of the Allied Occupation, would come later. In a brief speech before the signing began, UP's Earnest Hoberecht reported, SCAP reminded both victor and vanquished that they were not there to meet "in a spirit of distrust, malice or hatred." He would expect the Japanese to comply "fully, promptly and faithfully" with the surrender terms, while discharging his own responsibilities "with justice and tolerance."
SCAP's moderate words set the tone of the Occupation. A year later, Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, who signed the surrender for the government of Japan, sent a note to Hoberecht from the Sugamo war crimes prison that he had met MacArthur in Yokohama the next day to urge SCAP to let the Japanese government run the nation with the help of the Diet. The meeting was confirmed by Richard B. Finn, Adjunct Professor at American University and a U.S. Foreign Service Officer in Japan at the time, in his book Winners in Peace. To agree to this, MacArthur had to scrap three proclamations which he had already signed.
From combat troops to occupation force
Landing in Japan, wartime invasion units became peacetime occupation forces. Their new task: to help a former enemy nation find the road to democracy. The combat correspondents and photographers who arrived with them found their daily war diet of danger and tension replaced by the task of reporting a new, perhaps a more complex, war.
Fortunately, in their company were solid veterans of the press wars: Howard Handleman (International News Service), Russell Brines (Associated Press), Frank Tremaine and Earnest Hoberecht (United Press), Walter Simmons (Chicago Tribune), Compton Pakenham (Newsweek) and Lindesay Parrott (New York Times), Richard Lauderback (Time-Life), Robert Martin (New York Post), Joe Fromm (U.S. News & World Report), Charlie Gorry (AP Photos), Charles Rosecrans (INP), and Robert Cochrane (Baltimore Sun), to name just a few.
Occupation settles in
MacArthur entered Tokyo on September 8 at the head of as force of eight thousand men and established his home in the long-vacant U.S. Embassy. Four days later, he moved his office into the Dai-Ichi Life Insurance Company building staring across the moat at Emperor Hirohito's Imperial Palace. The main offices of his headquarters staff were located in buildings around it. Steps followed to establish the presence of the Occupation in Japanese eyes. In line with this, SCAP:
• Opened a post exchange for Occupation forces in the Wako clock tower building commanding Tokyo's main downtown intersection on the Ginza.
• Stationed a team of husky MPs at the intersection to direct traffic. The MPs, visible symbols of Occupation authority, became a sightseeing attraction for the Japanese who stood for hours on the four corners, marveling at the drillmaster-precision of each MP as he pivoted on his platform box, directing vehicular and pedestrian traffic.
• Requisitioned buildings and private residences, as necessary, to provide working offices and homes for Occupation officials.
• Began Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) broadcasts for the Occupation troops over their own radio network. Japanese listeners as well began to hum the popular tunes played over stateside programs like "The Make-Believe Ballroom."
• On October 5, started publication of the Pacific Stars and Stripes for members of the U.S. Armed Forces. When the British Commonwealth Forces moved into Japan the following year to help with the occupation duties, publication began also of the daily BCON.
(An offer by the Soviet delegate to provide forces to take over occupation duties in Japan's northern island of Hokkaido was summarily refused, with thanks, by SCAP.)
In parallel with these measures, SCAP set about the task of eliminating militarism and democratizing Japan by:
• Dissolving zaibatsu companies, purging their leaders, and breaking up their monopolistic ties.
• Proclaiming a press code on September 10 to promote freedom of speech, religion, and thought. Under this directive, the wartime Domei News Agency was dissolved on October 12 and replaced on November 1 by Kyodo News Service and Jiji Press.
• Issuing a broadcast code on September 20 and applying the press code to broadcasting.
• Ordering five basic reforms: Lowering from twenty-five to twenty the age for the right to vote; establishing equality between sexes, including woman suffrage; giving labor the right to organize; reforming education; removing from office those who collaborated with the military; and democratizing the economy.
• Releasing three thousand political prisoners, including Kyuichi Tokuda, leader of the Japan Communist Party, and lifting the ban on the party and its organ newspaper Akahata (Red Flag).
• Drafting a new democratic constitution.
• Removing Shintoism from state control.
The priorities for the correspondents arriving in Japan were, first, the description of Tokyo after the war and, second, the story of A-bombed Hiroshima.
City of 300,000 wiped out
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.
Suicides, failed and successful
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.
Interviewing the Emperor and Tokyo Rose
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.
"Homeless" press
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 his companions signed with name, rank, organization, and the tongue-in-cheek postscript: "Present bill to Japanese Embassy, Washington, DC."
Some of the correspondents had been guests of the Imperial before Pearl Harbor. Staff members who knew him from those days came up to greet Russ Brines and ask about his wife Barbara. When he arrived in Tokyo somewhat later, another favored guest was Hessell Tiltman, the respected correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and three-time Club president. A doyen among the newsmen, Tiltman enjoyed the special esteem of Tetsuzo Inumaru, the Imperial's president, and obtained many favors from him for the Club.
When an army colonel finally came to check on accommodations, the friendly hotel staff shuttled the correspondents from room to room. Eventually, however, the army caught up with the journalists, and most of them moved into the nearby Shinbashi Dai-Ichi Hotel. The trouble was that this hotel, constructed for the aborted 1940 Tokyo Olympics, had been designated as the billet for colonels and majors.
So the question still hanging over the newsmen was: Where do we sleep? The Occupation forces had made no arrangements for their billeting. As quarters for the press, the Shinbashi Dai-Ichi would have been ideal. It was a two- to three-minute walk from the NHK Building (or "Radio Tokyo," as it was referred to then), in which the SCAP PRO office had taken up quarters. And GHQ had made offices available on the second floor for the major news media accredited to SCAP.
While enjoying the military privileges at the Dai-Ichi, the correspondents found hampering the military regulations which prevented them from bringing freely into the premises the Japanese contacts, assistants, and news sources they needed to help them with their work. Moreover, as new waves of colonels and majors flowed in from Washington and elsewhere to beef up the Occupation administration, SCAP made no secret of its feeling that the newsmen were unwelcome. A screen erected around one section of the dining room carried the sign "Reserved for Colonels Only."
To speed things up, Brigadier General LeGrande Diller, headquarters public relations officer, imposed a "quota" on the number of newsmen entering Japan and Korea and restricted access to press briefings and interviews. This was the same Diller who was accused by the authors of The Star-Spangled Mikado of calling the correspondents a bunch of "two-bit palookas and sportswriters." Diller's "quota" was regarded as especially discriminatory to the British, granting spots to only four of the specials and shutting Reuters out of Korea.
"No. 1 Shimbun Alley"
Boiling-mad correspondents met in a workroom of the Radio Tokyo Building on October 5 and formed The Tokyo Correspondents Club, which was to be the forerunner of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan (FCCJ) that we know today. Elected to head it were Howard Handleman of INS, president; Don Starr (Chicago Tribune) and William J. Dunn (CBS), first and second vice-presidents, respectively; Ralph Teatsorth (UP), treasurer; and Cornelius Ryan (London Daily Telegraph) as secretary.
General MacArthur rescinded the Diller "quotas," but a subsequent general meeting refused to leave the Dai-Ichi "until the club has been repaired and put in shape to the satisfaction of the committee representing the correspondents." But the members agreed to be responsible for "housing and feeding any newsman who comes to Tokyo providing he is a legitimate working journalist. It may not be good housing or feeding but, at least, the newsman will have somewhere to live and work in."
The correspondents had already decided upon their new home, an old five-story, redbrick building leased by the Marunouchi Kaikan from the Mitsubishi Estate Company. It was located in a narrow alley in the central business district of Tokyo, within a few minutes' walk of the major Occupation offices, including General MacArthur's desk in the Dai-Ichi Life Insurance Company building. Operated as a restaurant until early 1945, the building was dirty and grimy, all its windows were broken or nonexistent, but it was in as good a condition as could be expected in bombed-out Tokyo. And its layout suited the newsmen.
On the first floor were the lounge, dining room, and bar. In the basement, the kitchen. The third floor was a fairly spacious party room, with stage. The second, fourth, and fifth floors were private dining rooms, with tiny service kitchens on each floor. With a few modifications, the basement, first and third floors could be used almost as they were. The Club partitioned the other floors into sleeping rooms. The biggest problem was putting in shower heads and replacing the Japanese squatter-type toilets with Western sit-down models.
Handleman's administration set to work on the project. General Diller, stimulated by the prospect of the early departure of the newsmen from the Dai-Ichi, arranged to fly in beds and bedding from Manila and accompanied Club representatives to a meeting with the Japanese owners and tenants. According to the Club minutes, he "made it clear that if the Japanese refused to accept a fair offer, the army would take it over." The rent for the whole building was set at ¥8,000 (around $530, at the ¥15:$1 exchange rate accepted at that time) per month, and the Japanese side agreed to pay for the repairs as well. Club members agreed to contribute toward expenses by paying an initial levy of $100 per member, of which $75 would be refunded when the member left the Club. The fees were as modest for monthly dues, room rent, and meals.
And by the way, the beds brought in from Manila for the Club by MacArthur's staff were for hospital use and stood waist high. That's all the Club had, according to John Rich.
Ad for staff attracts 2,000
The next problem was staff. The army agreed to provide a chef and an assistant. Hired as overall manager was Ludwig Frank, Japan-born of English-German parentage, and a fluent Japanese speaker. His Japanese manager was a Mr. Kobayashi, whose wife was an Englishwoman. An advertisement for jobseekers attracted a line of two thousand Japanese stretching from the Press Club building to the nearby Central Post Office. Most of the applicants were rank amateurs who couldn't speak a word of English. Out of these, Cochrane and Ryan selected sixty of the best for jobs ranging from bootblack and stewards to waitresses and switchboard operators. The two bartenders were promptly dubbed Jackson and Smitty.
For a while, the Club had no access to PX facilities, but this was remedied in the following year. Meanwhile, Tom Shafer of Acme Newspictures loaded up two weapons carriers with goods from a ship leaving for home, according to The Star-Spangled Mikado, and set up a store in the lobby. He also provided a dice table and cleared more than $1,000 for the house in the first week. The house took in $2,000 by mid-December, getting the Club off to a good start. Soon, the bar also had five slot machines and a pool table and dice boxes appearing on every table.
Army nurse Rosella Browning of New York City created dining room curtains and aprons for the waitresses out of parachute cloth. Los Angeles-born Marchioness Chie Hachisuka produced shoes and materials for their uniforms.
Among the new staff members hired the following year was a smiling, fresh-faced young man who had been discharged from the Japanese Army in the Philippines as a corporal before he saw any fighting, and had subsequently attended an English language school operated by the Foreign Office. His name was Kotaro Washida. He was hired as a night switchboard operator. But he was such a gifted young man that he was quickly given other duties to perform as well. Eventually, Washida-san became the Japanese manager after Kei Kawana left, serving several generations of Press Club members in this capacity.
Other Japanese staffers whose services date from these early days include such names familiar to old-timers as "Smiley" Matsuoka, Hajime "Jimmy" Horikawa, and "Mister Ling," the Chinese accountant who kept order in the Club's chaotic financial affairs. Later came a whole slew of librarians, and Mary Ushijima, the California born nisei woman who "mothered" the Press Club members for thirty-eight years, from 1950 to 1988. The switchboard staff Mary headed was known to all and sundry as "The Best Bilingual Switchboard Staff in Japan."
In an important edict, Frank Kelley (New York Herald Tribune), Rules Committee chairman, opened full membership to all women correspondents who met the requirements of regular members. The new rules also made the wives of correspondents eligible to become nonresident members. Nothing was said, however, about residential status for women.
In November, before the repairs were completed, the correspondents said goodbye to the Dai-Ichi and moved into their new quarters. According to Hessell Tiltman, the Club had approximately 170 members at that time. By popular acclaim, the correspondents picked as the address of their new home "No. 1 Shimbun Alley." (No. 1 because what else could it be but "No. 1?" And Shimbun, because shimbun is the Japanese word for newspaper. Although the Club has moved three times since then, to this day, a letter addressed to "No. 1 Shimbun Alley" will reach the Club without fail.)
Those were the days
The opening was a noisy, boisterous affair establishing for the Club a reputation that few others could match. This "informal" party was followed a few weeks later by a formal opening, featuring a dinner and dance. Close to six hundred guests attended. The anniversary parties of the Tokyo Correspondents Club became Tokyo's Event of the Year, an occasion for celebration not only by its members in Tokyo but also by members, former members, and friends in outposts all over the world.
A sidebar on this party is the tale of the disappearing piano. The Club had borrowed a piano for the occasion from NHK, but, mistaking the date, had promised to return the piano two days earlier. When movers came to pick up the piano, Club officers swore they had no piano. When the movers began a search of the premises, the members moved the piano into an elevator, and kept moving it up and down until the movers finally gave up and went home in disgust. NHK got its piano back the next day.
In the tradition of Freedom of the Press, members have always felt free to express their own opinions about the Club. What did they say? Kelley and Cornelius Ryan said it succinctly in their Star-Spangled Mikado: "The club became famous for three things: . . . the food. . . the bar. . . and overcrowding." Tiltman wrote in 1965: "The Club is still infused with a unity and esprit de corps, dating back to Shimbun Alley days, that transcends all barriers of nationality and race. . . ." It has evolved "into one of the world's largest and most representative press clubs."
Correspondent and former Club Manager Richard Hughes, beloved in press club bars throughout Asia as "Your Grace" and admired for his irreverent and eloquent speech, called it "The Liveliest Club in the World." (Hughes always had a group of correspondents gathered around him as if he were holding court. One of his habits was to address a listener as "Your Grace." They turned it around and applied it to him and forever afterward he was known as "Your Grace" wherever newsmen gathered in Asia.) He described it as combining "some of the features of a makeshift bordello, inefficient gaming-house and a black market center, with the basic goodwill and bitter feuds of any press hostelry anywhere." Hughes, who was fired during a Club economy drive while he was on leave in Australia (to a bitter outcry from his supporters), described its membership as consisting of "war-weary correspondents, the world's best reporters and combat photographers, liberal, conservative and radical commentators, and some of the world's most plausible rogues and magisterial scoundrels."
"Those were the days," agrees AP's Jim Becker. Jim lost half of a mustache to pranksters while sleeping off a hangover on a sofa in the lounge. Becker, after wartime military service, joined the AP in New York in 1946, and was a center of fun and good fellowship in the Club during his days of service in Korea and Tokyo. He recalls a time when one member got locked in a telephone booth while befuddled and could think of no other way to extricate himself than to telephone his office eight thousand miles away. His office phoned "Jimmy" Horikawa, who walked thirty-five feet, pulled the stuck door open, and let their man out.
"Ah, there were drinking men in those days," Jim says with a nostalgic sigh in an article that the No. 1 Shimbun issued on the FCCJ's twentieth anniversary. "They drank in the lobbies, in the bar and in their rooms. Yes, there were rooms in the Old Press Club . . . and fellows kept things in them, like Korean War uniforms, bottles and girls."
In a more sober mood, Rutherford Poats, United Press, who was Club president from September of 1954 to June of 1955, recalls, "The Press Club was the center of social life in Tokyo for much of the Western community during its first decade, especially for Western diplomats and some professionals (lawyers, consultants, etc.) who did not feel at home among the American Club's foreign traders' set). The Club's anniversary party and New Year's Eve party were the most coveted social invitations of the year among nonpress Westerners."
Ray Falk, chief of the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) bureau in Tokyo and one of the oldest active members, said, "Newcomer correspondents could listen and learn from the veterans." He adds, "Though the members could be boisterous, they respected age and experience."
Hal Drake, who started out as a cub reporter and became executive editor of the Pacific Stars and Stripes, retired in 1996 to a home in Australia. He echoed Ray's views. "I bird-dogged club pros like Gene Kramer and Robert Trumbull, carefully listening as they framed those trapdoor questions for chiefs of state, learning, learning," he wrote in a farewell article to the No. 1 Shimbun on the Club's fiftieth anniversary. This was a view repeated time and again by other Club members.
Too crowded?
When the Club first opened, the idea had been one member to a room, but there were more members than rooms. The only sensible solution was to provide more than one bed to a room. Soon, this didn't seem as much of a problem as first envisaged. Double occupancy turned in emergencies into triple and sometimes quadruple occupancy.
When the Ginza began to come to life, and nightspots like Mimatsu, Marigold, and later Ginbasha sprang up, they became natural oases for journalists seeking R&R from their busy duties. From these nightspots to taking guests, including the Japanese hostesses, to after-hours snacks at the Club was but a short step. And, after that? Members were never at a loss for ideas.
Complaints led to a Club rule: No women on the second floor and above. Then they modified this to read: No women upstairs after 12 midnight. Soon, this was modified to: "between the hours of 4 and 6." This led in turn to an era when the Club was treated to the sight of a stream of resident members and their companions in various states of dress sleepily wending their way downstairs and lolling around the lounge until the all-clear was sounded, when they would find their way up again. On some of these occasions, Al Cullison recalls waking up the bar boys who slept behind the counter with a "Wake-Up Song" ("Open up the bar, boys, open up the bar"), when the assorted members and their guests resumed their libations.
However, lest readers think all members were "the rogues and scoundrels" painted by the honorable Mr. Hughes, AI Kaff of the United Press, Club president in the 1967-68 years, points out the Club did have upstanding members of the caliber of Father Patrick O'Connor, an Irish priest who wrote for Catholic publications and was a popular member of the Press Club during its early No. 1 Shimbun Alley days.
"Father O'Connor sometimes objected to the profanity and sex stories that he heard in the Club's lounge and its adjoining bar," recalls Al. "So, in an effort to rehabilitate his colleagues, the good father presented the Club with a Bible, and for several years the Good Book was prominently displayed next to rows of bottles on the back bar. To more than one member, Patrick, as we called him, suggested a Bible reading. No one was offended by this evangelism in the Press Club bar, and Patrick always remained a member of the gang, well liked and admired. But few of his colleagues asked the bartender to hand them the Bible."
Ah, yes. Another deterrent to excessive enthusiasm and mayhem on the part of members was the Club's own Larry Tighe. A correspondent for ABC, this personable young man with the friendly smile also was a welterweight boxer of some renown in Golden Gloves history. Club presidents made it a point to station Larry at their side when facing a particularly obstreperous member or guest. As far as the records show, no one ever challenged the "Bouncer."
Chapter Two
1946
1946 FCCJ FACT FILE
• Membership as of June: 40, of whom 35 were resident.
• Professional events: Military briefings, press conferences, and interviews. No record of Club events.
• Social events: Inaugural party, Anniversary party, and New Year's Eve party. No record of other events.
• President from January 1-June 30: Robert Cochrane (Baltimore Sun); from July 1-December 31: Walter Simmons (Chicago Tribune)
Emperor gives up divinity
Less than two months after the correspondents moved into their Press Club, a new administration under Bob Cochrane of the Baltimore Sun took over for the next six months of 1946. Emperor Hirohito got the year off to a jump start, choosing New Year's Day to issue an Imperial Rescript telling the people he was not a God-Emperor and should not be the object of worship. For a people taught to revere their ruler with reverence as The Supreme Being, the repository of their trust and confidence, this was like the end of the world. For Club members, it meant getting out of bed, taking a hangover pill, and filing the story.
Cochrane, as president, was assisted by Frank Robertson, INS, as first vice-president, Morris Landsberg of AP in the second vice-president slot, and Ralph Teatsorth of UP and Guthrie Janssen of NBC as treasurer and secretary, respectively. With the war ended, head offices were transferring their personnel to new centers of action. Uncertain when a correspondent might be moved out of Tokyo, the Club limited directors to six-month office terms. As it was, even before the first term expired, Lands-berg had been assigned to Korea and Janssen to Shanghai. The Club replaced them with John McDonald (London Daily Mail) and Burton Crane (New York Times), respectively.
While the Japanese wondered what the future held for them, survival was their biggest problem. Taking note of their plight, the U.S. Department of the Army on January 3 announced that Japan needed three million tons of food urgently. This set in motion a massive U.S. aid program, which started with a shipment of California rice arriving in Yokohama on March 24 and reached a peak of 450 tons of milk, clothing, and other goods on November 30 from LARA (Licensed Agency for Relief in Asia).
Changing Japan
SCAP's second priority after disarming Japan was democratizing the nation. On January 4, SCAP initiated a purge of militarist Japanese leaders from public office, then broke up the zaibatsu business cartels and their network of interlocking companies, expelling their top leaders.
Left-wing groups were elated by the return to Japan of Japan Communist Party leader Sanzo Nozaka on January 26. Nozaka received a tumultuous welcome after sixteen years away from his homeland, most of the time in Mao Tse-tung's stronghold in Yenan. His return multiplied the effect of SCAP-ordered measures lifting the wartime bans on labor unions and their May Day gatherings. In line with Occupation directives, meanwhile, the Japanese government set to work drafting a new constitution incorporating these and other democratic principles.
Japan's first postwar election, held on April 10, was a test of the changes introduced by the Occupation. Though not yet incorporated into Japanese law, the draft prepared with Occupation input doubled the number of franchised voters by lowering the voting age from twenty-five to twenty and recognizing woman suffrage. Women were also permitted to run for office. To woo the newly enfranchised, the political parties emphasized women and younger candidates in their slates.
The Hatoyama affair
The lead-up to the April 10 election was where the Press Club first became entangled in Japanese politics. The Club invited the leaders of the four main parties to a series of pre-election dinners, where they could explain their platforms. Invited to one of these dinners was Ichiro Hatoyama, president of the newly formed Liberal Party. Hatoyama was a personal friend of Ian Mutsu, the British-born grandson of Count Munemitsu Mutsu, Japan's Meiji-era foreign minister. Ian, a Press Club member since early 1946 on the sponsorship of UP's Miles Vaughn, added his persuasion and Hatoyama came, bearing a gift of saké in accordance with Japanese etiquette. Instead of the friendly reception he had expected, however, Hatoyama was met with hostile questions, some planted by the newly reinstated Japan Communist Party.
Hugh Deane, BBC correspondent, Mark Gayn (Chicago Sun), and David Conde, a stringer for INS and Reuters, came primed with material, including charges that Hatoyama had written a book which praised Hitler and Mussolini as examples for Japan in Asia.
In the eyes of most Japanese, Hatoyama was a liberal who favored equality and hated Communism. Occupation officials themselves were divided over Hatoyama, with his supporters contending that his hatred of militarism and devotion to parliamentarism could, under wise Occupation guidance, lead to good government. Leftists painted him as a symbol of militarism, big-business domination, and ultranationalism. Mutsu, who had to interpret, was mortified at the treatment Hatoyama received.
The outcome of the affair was a spate of stories picked up by the leftist Japanese press, questioning Hatoyama's qualifications to lead Japan. Despite these articles, Hatoyama was elected to the Diet. Since his Liberal Party received a clear majority in the chamber, it was assumed he was a shooin for prime minister. However, SCAP stepped in and purged him before he could gain this office. Harry Emerson Wilde reported in his book Typhoon in Tokyo: The Purifying Purge that Hatoyama fell into "verbal traps laid for him by guileful interviewers. . . . The Japanese press, then largely leftists, misrepresented him." General Mathew Ridgway finally lifted Hatoyama's purge in 1951, clearing the way for him to become prime minister.
The Left's opposition to Hatoyama backfired. Its immediate result was the election of Shigeru Yoshida, prewar ambassador to Great Britain, as president of the Liberal Party and prime minister. A stocky, outspoken man whose trademark was a cigar clenched firmly in his mouth, Yoshida became the dominant leader in Japan's early postwar politics. As for the election results, thirty-nine women won Diet seats for the first time ever, setting a precedent for the rise of Japanese women to equality with men.
Democracy, but . . .
Japan's new democratic constitution, incorporating these and other changes, passed the Diet on October 7, 1946, was promulgated on November 3, and came into force on May 3, 1947, which thereby became Japan's Constitution Day and a holiday. Under its provisions, the power of the State reposed in the people, the Emperor became the symbol of the State, and, by Article 9, Japan renounced war as an instrument of policy. Since then, leftists have cited this "No War" article as a weapon to block Japan's rearmament.
Japan's first May Day in eleven years was a wild one. Two million people, celebrating the lifting of the ban on public demonstrations, paraded in gatherings all over Japan. In Tokyo, five hundred thousand took part, massing outside the Imperial Palace, waving red flags, trying to cross the moat into the inner palace grounds. Their mistake, William Manchester pointed out in his book American Caesar, was in misinterpreting the freedom SCAP gave to the Communists as "support" for their activities. Police beat them back.
War crimes trials
The headline story of the year, however, was the start of the war crimes trials against Tojo and his fellow defendants. On May 3, the Far East War Crimes Tribunal met under Australia's Sir William Webb in a courtroom established in the former Imperial Army Headquarters, renamed Pershing Heights by the Allied Powers, and opened the trial of twenty-eight wartime leaders on Class A war crimes charges. Arraigned with Tojo were former army ministers Seishiro Itagaki and Sadao Araki, and ex-Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka. Also in the dock was Mamoru Shigemitsu, the foreign minister who signed the surrender documents on the U.S.S. Missouri.
If Moscow had had its way, Emperor Hirohito would have been a defendant, too. But, on June 18, Chief Prosecutor Joseph Keenan crushed the move, saying it would be a mistake to try the Emperor. FCC J members reported every development.
A forewarning of the coming Cold War came from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill when he attacked Russia's "Iron Curtain" on March 5 in a speech at Fulton, Missouri. Trouble brewed also in Asia. In Indochina, Ho Chi Minh opened hostilities to drive France out of Vietnam. In China, an uneasy truce existed between the Nationalists and the Communists.
Tokyo: dead city comes to life
In his book MacArthur's Japan, Russ Brines described the Tokyo of those days as a dead city groping back to life. "The youngsters were the first to recover, flocking towards the new uniforms. In a few days they were shouting 'Goodbye' as a greeting, and 'Gamu, Joe.'" Adults followed, crowding around on street corners "to stare open-mouthed at the invaders."
For the entertainment of the Occupation troops, SCAP took over the Tokyo Takarazuka Theater across the street from the Imperial Hotel and reopened it on February 24 as the Ernie Pyle Theater. For the Japanese, NHK on January 19 began broadcasting a Japanese version of the popular American radio program "Major Bowes Amateur Hour." A people who delight in singing, Japanese took to this program enthusiastically and lined up for tryouts. Many of Japan's top singing stars of the next two decades climbed to stardom via these programs, including national idol Misora Hibari, who made her debut at the age of ten. So popular was this program that NHK followed on December 3 with another stateside hit program, "Information Please." As they recovered their good spirits, the Japanese became more outgoing.
Added to the problem of food, the nation faced inflation on an unprecedented scale. Every train was crammed with farmers and their wives bent under huge packs of black-market rice and produce which they peddled in residential districts or at open-air stalls at the central railway stations. In the back streets, sushi shops operated like Prohibition-era American bars with an inner chamber where favored patrons could order the best sushi with the freshest of materials and white, polished rice, washed down with the best saké. The ordinary salaried worker had to be content with kasutori shochu, a rotgut potato brew served at street stalls in Shinbashi and Shinjuku.
Ray Falk remembers being taken to one of the better sushi shops by a Japanese friend, and, on making his exit, being accosted by an MP who berated him and checked his military credentials. Ray got off that time, but he still writhes when he recalls the rigid policing correspondents sometimes had to endure.
Ian Mutsu recalls, early in the year, when the official exchange rate was ¥15 to the dollar, buying a new jeep from the army for $1,000, the equivalent of ¥15,000. He received the same sort of grilling when he drove to his home in Kamakura and parked his jeep in front. Military personnel were prohibited from visiting Japanese homes in those days, and MPs couldn't distinguish between servicemen and newsmen.
As yen-prices rose, the dollar's worth rose also, to ¥100 by the end of the year. This was great for servicemen and foreign correspondents, but tough on the Japanese. A series of protest demonstrations followed the May Day riots. As they became increasingly violent, the ranks of the hardcore left-wing agitators were swelled by recruits from the nationwide Zengakuren student federation and newly formed labor organizations.
Heady freedoms
While inflation doubled and tripled the cost of consumer goods, the arrival of aid packages helped ease the plight of the people. They also found a heady joy in the freedom which anticipated the new constitution even before it became law in May of the following year. Freedom of thought, equality of the sexes, coeducation in schools, abolition of absentee landlords, all were alien concepts to a people subjected to thought control since the February 26 uprising of young officers in 1936 confirmed the rise of Japanese militarism. In 1936, local movie houses had separate seating for men and women. In 1940, a girl and boy merely strolling together on a street near the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo could be called to a halt by a policeman and given a tongue-lashing.
Earnie teaches them how to kiss
One correspondent who capitalized on this Japanese psyche was Earnest Hoberecht. Earnie, who made himself known among young Japanese as "America's Greatest Writer," was visiting the Shochiku movie studio when a crisis developed. As Weldon James recounted the story in Collier's magazine, the leading lady, Hideko Mimura, had just learned that the script called for her to be kissed before the camera. The twenty-six-year-old actress had never been kissed and wanted no part of it. Japanese censors, to protect the sensibilities of their womenfolk, had until that time scissored kiss scenes from imported films, and the national impression of a movie kiss was of a rapturous couple breathing softly without touching each other's lips.
But Dapper Earnie "seen his duty and done it." He suggested that kissing scenes "would be a step toward democratization." Earnie embraced and kissed Mimura to show her how it was done, and "newspapers throughout the world carried the story," according to James. Earnie described The Kiss as a "prairie-twister." But the results were unexpected. Miss Mimura came out of the clinch in a daze, "promptly downed three or four tablets, retired to her dressing room, and wrote him that after what had happened, clearly they ought not to see each other again."
The Kiss made Earnie famous in Japan. When his novel Tokyo Romance appeared a couple of months later, telling how an American correspondent wooed and won a famous Japanese movie actress, James reported, "It was a smash hit. . . . The first edition of one hundred thousand copies disappeared in less than a fortnight. . . . The lad from Watonga was in." Time magazine's review called Tokyo Romance "the worst book ever published in the English language." Earnie denied this. "I've written worse myself," he said.
Prewar Japanese governments banned coeducation in schools from grade schools on up. Girls went to girls' schools. Period. And so it was big news when the Japanese government made schools coeducational on October 9. Such were the grist of feature stories when correspondents ran out of hard news.
Making its appearance a year after the first Western press description of A-bombed Hiroshima was the book Hiroshima, by John Hersey. Time often lends perspective and depth to mind-searing events such as this. This was especially true in the case of Hiroshima and its victims, where many of the most terrifying after-effects of the bomb appeared long after the event. John Hersey, already well known at the time as the author of Men on Bataan and A Bell for Adano, wrote a report on six survivors of Hiroshima, a report to which the New Yorker devoted its entire issue of August 31, 1946. The article was published that same year in book form under the title Hiroshima. Hersey's report had worldwide repercussions.
Women correspondents allowed
The gender problem and the question of access to the Club's upper floors continued to nag the Cochrane administration. A general meeting on March 14 found members at loggerheads over prohibiting women on the upper floors between certain hours. The meeting finally passed a proposal that until a suitable rule could be drafted and enforced, no woman should be allowed above the street floor of the Club between the hours of 12 midnight and 9 A.M. In fact, these hours were changed from time to time, varying between 2 and 4, and 4 and 6, to the accompaniment of much grumbling.
On June 20, Mrs. Lee Martin, wife of Robert (Pepper) Martin (Time-Life), put her foot down and demanded that women correspondents be allowed to live in the Club. A motion that they be given space on the third floor, with the use of the shower there, was tabled when Joe Fromm said this required amendment of the constitution, which could only be carried out by a referendum. On June 27, the referendum was duly approved, 19-10, and women correspondents finally gained practical equality with the men. By another referendum on July 29, the members went all the way, passing unanimously a change in the Rules to give "full membership" to "all women correspondents who meet the definition of a member."
Though this made it official, apparently women correspondents were residents of the billets before then. The minutes for the general meeting held on May 7, under the chairmanship of the secretary Burton Crane, carried a statement by three women members, Gwen Dew, Margaret Parton, and Martha Ferguson, protesting against "filthy" and crowded conditions in the bathrooms. They proposed two bathrooms for women: "1. One bathroom for American women and one for Japanese, or 2. One bathroom for women members of the club and associate members, and one for all other women guests, resident and nonresident."
The document is intriguing, less for its insistence upon women's rights than its reference to "associate members." No documentation previously mentioned a category for "associate members." There had been speculation that certain people active in the Club's affairs, like William Salter, who gave advice on Club finances, was an "associate" before such a category was created in 1955. Salter later was voted a "life member." Rutherford Poats states categorically that there were "associates" in 1947, although it may not have become an official membership category until later.
Honor Tracy, of the Observer, couldn't see what was so great about the Press Club billets anyway. In her book Kakemono (Hanging Scroll), she wrote that her room was sparsely furnished and located between, on one side, the room of a male correspondent with "a somewhat complicated private life," and, on the other, the quarters of the female Japanese staff, who chattered late into the night. She didn't like the crowded showers and washroom, shared by women correspondents, correspondents' wives, Japanese maids, and a shifting population of women "friends" of the male correspondents. She was turned off also by the "plump, cheeky rats" who invaded her room and fed on her foodstuff. One pair, she wrote, even encroached upon the pillow beside her and stared at her with "bright, malignant eyes."
In defense of the Club's nonhuman rodent population, it should be pointed out that every big city has nonhuman as well as human rats. The poor Press Club rats previously had been forced to live on crumbs from an inferior wartime Japanese diet, then had been driven out of their homes by bombs which turned their nests into rubble. To them, the Press Club was heaven. Not only was the food a thousand times better, but the residents were more generous in leaving it lying around, as did Honor.
Of the role of No. 1 Shimbun Alley as a residential rooming house, however, Rud Poats recalls, "Several couples, including Lee and Pepper Martin, Helen and Bill Costello, and others awaiting permanent housing, had rooms upstairs and reported freely on the antics of the (temporarily) single reporters and their short-time girlfriends. One of the skits at an anniversary party featured Lee and Helen peering down into a large wooden o furo (bathtub) at a naked male member's lower anatomy and agreeing that "he's not even a member of the club."
"Members returning from a drunken evening and losing their way upstairs often evoked gossip. Greg McGregor (New York Times) fell over the swinging half-door beside the receptionist's counter and remained draped across the door in a drunken stupor. As other members arrived, they gave Greg a push and kept him swinging there for much of the evening." Always the problem of the Club's perennial problems was finances. The state of the Club's treasury soared and dipped with the wars. Armed conflicts brought an influx of newsmen, and funds. But when wars end, the correspondents leave, creating a financial problem.
Good humor and nonchalance prevail
In general, the Club displayed a rather light-hearted attitude toward its financial condition. The minutes for a general meeting held on April 30 said: "The Treasurer reported, with admirable insouciance, that the Club lost money in April, that the Club never has paid any rent, and that the Club may have to raise its rates on meals and rooms one of these days. Amid light-hearted laughter, Mr. Hennessey moved and Mr. Bickow seconded that the report be approved. It was."
In any case, members had no lack of humor. The minutes for April 30 noted: "The secretary, in a high nasal voice, read a letter which the Executive Committee proposed sending to General MacArthur to acquaint the Supreme Commander with the curious concatenation of circumstances under which the correspondents seemed to be getting the dirty end of whatever stick was available. After some discussion, Mr. Teatsorth moved and Mr. Berrigan seconded a motion that the letter be dry-cleaned by the Rules Committee before presentation. This was approved and the meeting adjourned."
On May 7, President Cochrane had some good news for a change. The Executive Committee, he said, called on General MacArthur who promised to: (1) Make dependent housing available to them on the same basis as officers, and on a system of ratings made out by the Club; (2) Give correspondents the right to buy articles at the officers' PX; (3) See to it, even though it may require Congressional approval, that the correspondents do not lose food, clothing, and medical care privileges; (4) And provide jeeps to correspondents when they need them, with the right to buy fuel at military prices.
But then there was still a bit of bad news that hot summer. A bar had been set up on the roof because of the lack of air conditioning inside the Club. The location was somewhat precarious because the surrounding wall was not too high. One of our more prominent members, after drinking a considerable amount of beer, nonchalantly relieved himself over the side, which unfortunately happened to be over the front entrance just as a high-ranking guest was entering. The member was temporarily suspended for this indiscretion.
Who qualifies for membership?
A second source of trouble in the Club was membership. Hal Drake complained in an article written in later years: Newsmen working for the Pacific Stars and Stripes were barred, outlawed because they worked for the U.S. military, whereas correspondents for government news media like TASS and Pravda were members. The bars were lowered a number of years later, Hal was admitted to the FCCJ, and, as he says, "the lively and intelligent company of Max Desfor, Jim Colligan, Richard Pyle, Jack Russell, Bruce Dunning, Pat Killen, so many others."
The rules also said that Japanese newsmen couldn't become members. They were Occupied enemy nationals who could not be accredited to SCAP, and SCAP had a strict rule against Allied personnel "fraternizing" with Japanese nationals. But that rule was a nonrule in the Press Club almost from day one. Correspondents had to have some place to entertain Japanese news sources, and the Club was the place. Besides, compared with the ordinary Japanese fare, the Club provided "a lavish lunch and a stimulating intellectual encounter amidst the grimness of life in Tokyo."
Though the rule itself remained on the books until the Occupation ended, a number of Japanese newsmen and photographers attached to U.N. news organizations did go to Korea and contributed to the war coverage. Since then, the Club has had a large and active Japanese membership, although a Japanese candidate for regular correspondent membership is required to have served three years overseas as a correspondent.
Some Japanese became FCCJ members and rendered distinguished services to the Club. Among them, two became life members: Masaru Ogawa-who studied at UCLA and Columbia University's graduate school and Tokyo University, worked at the Domei news agency, and eventually became the executive news editor of the Japan Times-served five years as the Club's second vice-president and on various committees, and Peter "Shin" Higashi of AP, who solved many personnel problems as a member of the Executive Committee. Ken Ishii, of Reuters, AP, and the International Herald Tribune, served as president, as did Naoaki Usui of McGraw-Hill World News. John Fujii of AP and Fairchild was a barrel of fun in the skits he helped put on with the Club's Hamsters. And there was Bob Horiguchi of INS, who until his death also wrote a popular weekly column in the Japan Times. Kay Tateishi, who graduated from Domei to double as writer and photographer for Time-Life and AP, and most recently has served as photo editor for this book, is another.
Preceding them all were Ian Mutsu, who became a charter member in 1946, and Les Nakashima. Some members tried to disqualify Ian on the argument that he was Japanese. Earnie Hoberecht beat back this objection by pointing out that Ian was accredited to SCAP on certification from the British Embassy that his birth in the U.K. gave him U.K. citizenship.
The members elected a new Executive Committee to guide the affairs of the Club during the six-month period beginning July 1. Chosen to head the new Board as president was Walter Simmons (Chicago Tribune); assisted by John Luter (Time), first vice-president; Tom Lambert (AP), second vice-president; Ralph Teatsorth (UP), treasurer, and Burton Crane (New York Times), secretary.
The press and MacArthur
During the Cochrane-Simmons regime, a ruckus arose over the question of relations with General Mac Arthur's headquarters. A vociferous attack against the press policy of General MacArthur and those around him was carried in The Star-Spangled Mikado. The authors, Kelley and Ryan, said the job of Brigadier General Diller had been "to sell MacArthur to the rest of the world." In their book, Kelley and Ryan said, "The General didn't need any selling. . . . He was a leader, a brilliant military man in many ways, colorful, and a personality in his own right. But, with the help of sycophantic correspondents who scrambled for small favors, and aided by a ruthless system of censorship which was political as well as military, the Public Relations Office of MacArthur's headquarters built MacArthur into a demigod."
In wartime, divergent views often develop between the military command's commitment, on the one hand, as to what information can and should be made public, and what information held back, and the dedication of newsmen, on the other hand, to the creed that the public has a right to know. But, this was the Occupation and military censorship was supposedly ended. William J. Sebald, who wrote With MacArthur in Japan with the collaboration of Russ Brines, brings some balance to this picture. Ambassador Sebald became Chairman of the Allied Council for Japan. Examining the failures which led to MacArthur's quarrel with President Truman, he said that the opinions of the Far Eastern Commission, the Departments of State and Army, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Congress, the Allied nations, and SCAP often varied widely, a situation made more difficult by public and private comments of individuals attached to various of these organizations.
Not only did the press report these views, but this sometimes encouraged a situation in which a correspondent who couldn't get near those around SCAP could approach any of the other Allied sources in Tokyo, and often obtain quotes to fit his own particular line of thought. Brines, in a footnote to Sebald's comments appearing in the same book, said in most cases, these skirmishes between MacArthur and the press "were magnified out of all proportion." He did stress, however, that during the early Occupation years, the press corps did have a tightly knit leftist group which sometimes distorted its stories. He insisted, however, that the majority of the correspondents were "conscientious and honest, and covered the Occupation fairly and thoroughly."
Brines saw as one reason for this situation the military mind of the officers around MacArthur and their "sense of supersecrecy." He said that freedom of the press often was curtailed, but he added, "I believe this was due less to MacArthur's policies than to the fact the Occupation was conducted by military men." Mathew Ridgway, who replaced MacArthur in April 1951, was more outgoing and gregarious than MacArthur was, and press relations seem to have improved under his tenure.
Chapter Three
1947
1947 FCCJ FACT FILE
• Membership: No record, but 41 members were present at the general meeting on December 2, 1947.
• Professional events: Military briefings, press conferences, and interviews. No record of Club events.
• Social events: Inaugural party, Anniversary party, and New Year's Eve party. No record of other events.
• President January 1-June 30: Tom Lambert (AP); from July 1: George Folster (NBC).
Foreign devil
It was in 1947 that Richard Hughes, after an impetuous falling out with his boss in Sydney, wired his resignation, and found himself without a job in Tokyo. "Like most of the significant events in my life, my improbable appointment as manager of the Press Club . . . appears, in retrospect . . . to have reared up and bitten me in the rump like an act of God, unexpected and indeed not necessarily wanted," Dick says in his book Foreign Devil.
He wandered into the Press Club one day just as members were demanding managerial reform and a new deal for the discontented. "A crazy contagious cry was suddenly taken up and stormily repeated . . . I found myself hoarsely echoing the shouts without quite knowing what I was supporting. The hysterical demand was for the appointment of a newspaperman as manager, with dictatorial suzerainty over the gentlemanly Japanese manager, on the theory that a newspaperman would understand and anticipate colleagues' desires and problems. But who? . . . Again, mysteriously and anonymously, at first shyly and then thunderously, the cry was taken up: 'Dick Hughes!' Why, of course, old Dick, good old Dick, out of a job and on his arse."
"Tokyo's No. 1 Shimbun Alley had its first and last press manager."
Dick's regime lasted for eighteen months under three different Executive Committees and three different presidents. "It was often harrowing but it was sometimes rewarding," he said. He had an outstanding Japanese staff in Kei Kawana, the manager, Akimoto-san behind the bar, the Chinese accountant "Mr. Ling," and "the only efficient bilingual telephone switchboard in the Occupation. . . . [W]e ran the show as essentially a pressman's reservation, inn, refuge, tabernacle and rookery, with traditional sanctions and conventions that, in honorable theory, were none the less binding because they were unwritten, but in Shimbun Alley application, were all the more fragile because only erratic vigilante self-discipline operated."
Hughes mentions in his managerial diary, which he kept to depict the passing Japanese scene as then viewed from No. 1 Shimbun Alley, that the unofficial "rule," requiring all visitors and guests to vacate bedrooms at 4 A.M. was quietly rescinded at an Executive Committee meeting in February 1947. He noted that it had already lapsed, unofficially, but it was decided to end it officially.
He expands on this in Foreign Devil: "To escape technical liability for registration as an Occupation 'house of assignation,' the club introduced this regulation in the rough pioneering days of 1945-46, and so mustered a sullen, yawning harem of tousled ladies, in varying stages of undress, into the club lounge each morning to await the breakfast-gong, which eventually signaled the dawn of another day and legitimized return to the bedrooms."
Though the Americans were in the majority, other nationalities were represented in the Club. The British and the Australians were present in full force. The French and Dutch were represented. The Australian contingent was a loyal source of support for Dick Hughes, as were the Asian contingent from China, the Philippines, and India.
Inflation, and a leftist binge
As the Press Club under President Tom Lambert moved into its second New Year, Japan faced two difficult problems, inflation and unrest caused by the newborn, militant left wing aspiring to power. General MacArthur set an example to the Japanese government by crushing the first of these challenges to the ruling authority, and he aced the rising militancy of the labor unions and their left-wing student allies, which sprang up after SCAP removed the bans on them. The National Federation of Government Workers Unions called for a nationwide general strike on February 1 to back its demand for higher wages.
In any case, the Japanese seemed to be adapting to inflation. In mid-February, fleets of pedicabs began appearing in the big cities, making up for the taxi shortage. At a price of ¥10, a two-kilometer ride for two in a bicycle-drawn carriage proved an instant hit, not only with the Japanese, but also with novelty-loving GIs.
If inflation posed a problem to Japan, it also created a headache for the Press Club. The treasurer of the new administration, Hessell Tiltman, warned Lambert and the other members of the Executive Committee (Carl Mydans as first vice-president, Howard Handleman, second vice-president, and Burton Crane, secretary) that "heroic measures" would be needed to keep the Club going. To the questions of finance, membership classifications, and privileges, the committee responded by drafting a test budget for the next three months. At the same time, the Club voted against approaching the army to take over the Club.
Later, on June 20, John Luter, chairman of the Billeting Committee, reported the Club had forty members of whom thirty-five were living in the Club's twenty-four rooms. Among the plans proposed to meet the Club's expenses were a dance every week and increases in the dues. Secretary Burton Crane's minutes for a meeting on February 27 reported that the members approved a resolution to lower monthly dues for associate members from ¥600 to ¥200, while raising monthly dues for resident members from ¥300 to ¥400.
Professional help, charter members, and one-year terms
It was about this time that William Salter, a British naval officer and accountant, became a familiar figure in the Press Club, was asked and did proffer advice on finances, and introduced to them a Chinese accountant, Yu Hsi Ling, who, because of his Chinese nationality, was permitted by SCAP to handle both dollar and yen accounts. "Mister Ling," as he came to be known, worked for the Club as its accountant for close to four decades until he retired on June 30, 1984.
The minutes mention a series of spirited discussions of a proposal to extend special privileges to "charter members" even after they left newspaper work, and a list of them was drawn up at the time. Other measures discussed included special guest cards, the problem of Club property "borrowed" by members, and furniture in need of refurbishing.
These problems were placed in the hands of a new Executive Committee elected for the one-year period from July 1947 to June 1948. George Folster of NBC took over as president. He was backed by Chang Jen-Chung of the Central Daily News, Taipei, as first vice-president, and Ralph Chapman, of the New York Herald Tribune as second vice-president. Hessell Tiltman and Burton Crane remained in their respective posts as treasurer and secretary.
"Mac" calls
From the members' standpoint, however, the major event of Lambert's six-month term was the surprise appearance of General MacArthur at the Club. SCAP had been invited to lunch at the Tokyo Correspondents Club twice before, including the Club's opening, but he had refused, pleading that he could not refuse other invitations if he accepted.
William Manchester reported in his book American Caesar, "At noon on March 17, 1947, he entered unannounced, took a chair, and said he was prepared to talk for the record." Reports by Press Club members indicate that they had advance information he was coming, but were totally unprepared for an on-the-record statement. Most of the newsmen did not even have paper and pens.
MacArthur, Ambassador William Sebald reported in his book With MacArthur in Japan, said the time had come for an end to the Occupation and for a peace treaty. He said the military task had been completed. The political phase is "approaching such completion as is possible under the Occupation." As for economics, he said if the Occupation continued on its current course, it could only enforce economic strangulation. Finally, he suggested that the U.S. exercise control over Japan, a condition that Japan would be willing to accept and would desire. MacArthur said the peace treaty should be negotiated "as soon as possible."
By May of that same year, both Dean Acheson and Herbert Hoover were advocating the immediate conclusion of a separate peace with Japan. Sebald, a seasoned observer with experience in Japan dating from 1925, said, however, that before a peace treaty the Japanese economy had to be allowed to rehabilitate itself and some of the excesses of Occupation control, "particularly the extensive purges," had to be corrected. On this point, Sebald said MacArthur was bucking the military. Among those who speculated about an early peace treaty were Tom Lambert, Howard Handle-man, John Rich, Keyes Beech, and Norman Soong of the Central News Agency.
Russ Brines, however, interpreted Mac-Arthur's remarks as a trial balloon. In his book MacArthur's Japan, Russ wrote: "Mac's insistence upon an early peace treaty did not mean the imminent end of the Occupation, as generally interpreted. He expected military forces to remain in Japan for at least two years after the peace conference began. He had argued consistently that the effective period of a military occupation was between three and five years, after which it ran the risk of losing its influence. He advocated 'supervision' of Japan for at least a generation. But by the third Occupation year, when the Japanese had hoped for sovereignty, economic problems and Japanese incompetence forced SCAP to extend, not diminish, its activities."
If the guessing was rife about the timing of a peace treaty, Joseph B. Keenan, chief of the international prosecution section, silenced any speculation about the Emperor when he later, on October 10, said emphatically that neither Emperor Hirohito nor Japanese industrialists or businessmen would be tried as war criminals.
On May 3, the new, democratic constitution came into force. A poll conducted by the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun the previous year found 85% of its readers supporting the constitution, and 13% opposed. The same 85% approved retaining the Emperor. A preview of popular reaction was the introduction of coeducational classrooms in public schools with the start of the new school term on April 1. Approval was overwhelming.
Labor flexes Its muscle
The trend away from wartime and prewar leaders led to a split among voters in the general elections for the House of Representatives held on April 25, giving the Socialists a paper-thin plurality over the Liberals. Tetsu Katayama, president of the Japan Socialist Party, formed a three-party coalition cabinet when the Liberals opted to stay in the Opposition.
Meanwhile, the easing of restrictions encouraged some elements in Japan to test their new freedom. Leading the way, the Federation of Labor Unions called for a general strike on February 1 to support the wage demands of the government workers' union. Seven hours before the general walkout was scheduled to start, General MacArthur stepped in and ordered it canceled. During this period, the militant labor unions were supported by leftist elements in SCAP and by the Japanese press, which was suddenly taken over by left-wing elements.
In an article written for the twentieth-anniversary issue of the Club paper, No. 1 Shimbun, Mas Ogawa explained the leftist swing among newspapers. At the end of the war, Mas pointed out, the Japanese press was "ill-prepared" to cover Japan's surrender and occupation. It had been "reduced in the years before and during the war to a mere reproducer of the official propaganda line laid down by the Government." SCAP set out to remedy this with its press code, placing the newspapers under the "sometimes capricious censorship" of the Occupation forces.
Certain officials endeavored to get some vitality into the press and to let the newsmen realize that they were indeed free to write within the limits, naturally, of the Occupation's censors. "When the press threw off the bewilderment and lethargy of war defeat, some of its members went on a real binge to the extreme left."
The trouble began when the publisher of a national daily, the Yomiuri Shimbun, was purged. "The managing editor who followed the Communist line closely and his editorial assistants capitalized on the situation to take over virtual control of the newspaper. They were backed by the company-wide labor union." This labor-management clash within the newspaper was matched by a similar battle within SCAP itself.
Some SCAP officials looked upon the labor uprising as a healthy sign of democratic ideas taking hold in the newspaper world. SCAP finally came out on the side of the management, however, ruling that newspapers as public instruments must never be subject to any pressure whatsoever, government, rightist, or labor unionist. "But before the incident was ended, the newspaper was involved in demonstrations and riots which threatened to spread to other papers. It was a wild and woolly period of great disturbances before order was finally restored."
Families restore sanity
Some sanity was brought to the frenetic pace of life in the Club with the arrival of wives and families. A number of correspondents rented rooms close to their offices with Japanese families. GHQ frowned on the practice, but the Japanese homeowners were happy to take them in as roomers, on the logic that the correspondents would provide a defense against the risk of having their homes taken over by the military. Besides, the roomers often brought presents in the form of Stateside food, candy, liquor, and other articles which delighted children and adults alike. Though they were inexpensive at the PX, most Japanese couldn't afford the prices charged at the black-market stalls which sprang up in railway centers, like Shinbashi, Shinjuku, and Shibuya. The more fortunate correspondents were allocated houses by SCAP, though some had a long wait for their homes.
Among these family types were Denis and Peggy Warner. Denis was an Aussie from Tasmania who suffered injuries when his ship was attacked by a kamikaze pilot in the closing stages of the war. While in Australia to recover, he met and married Peggy, another war correspondent. Denis arrived in Tokyo in December 1945, missing the end of the war, and roomed at the Press Club billet with Eddie Tseng, of the Central News Agency.
With most of the stories about Tokyo already covered, Denis spent his early weeks traveling around Japan for the Singapore Straits Times, from Kyoto and Osaka to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Kagoshima. Later, as chief correspondent for the Australian Associated Press, Denis became chief of the Reuters bureau in Tokyo, supervising coverage of the last stages of the Tokyo war crimes trials.
Peggy arrived in Japan almost a year later, with their six-week-old daughter Shelley. The Warners lived at the Marunouchi Hotel, assigned to Commonwealth personnel. For nine months the baby lived "in her wicker basket on top of a dressing-table" at the hotel while they waited for a house to be allocated to them by the Americans. "When we drew House No. 427 in Gotanda, we were overjoyed to find that a tiny scrap of Fuji appeared over the top of a camellia bush," says Peggy. However, the boiler system was unreliable, running hot when they wanted cold, and vice versa. As a result, "We found it necessary occasionally to take baths and meals at the Press Club. . . . It was in this establishment that I met wives of other correspondents who have remained friends over the years, including Mabel Handleman, Marian Walker, and Betty Tseng."
Tom and Helen Lambert also lent the Warners their home for a time during their stay at the Marunouchi. The life the Warners led was more typical of the married correspondents.
Peggy still has a cookbook given her by a Press Club member. "I use it now, fifty years later, when I need a recipe for Fuji-san Delight, a cake covered in ice-cream and meringue and browned in an oven. It was sprinkled with coconut (snow on the mountain) and topped with a cherry (fire in the crater)."
Getting the boot
Several problems shook up the Club during the year. One was the expulsion of David Conde from Japan. Conde, a former SCAP employee, had been working as a stringer for Reuters and INS. But eight months after his change in status, GHQ notified him that his application for accreditation had been denied and that he must therefore leave the theater. Both the Executive Committee and International Committee decided that the Club had no legal status in the matter, but Conde petitioned for a meeting, which was called on March 21. The Club decided to ask GHQ to give Conde an opportunity to clear himself of the charges. But GHQ said Conde had been exceedingly active in the Communist Party of Canada for three years, and it could not stay the expulsion order.
A second problem involved Japanese Manager Fujita. The trouble arose after the new administration was installed in July 1947. For the first time, an Executive Committee took office for a one-year term to June 30, 1948. Headed by George Folster of NBC as president, its other members were Chang Jen-Chung of the Central Daily News, first vice-president; Ralph Chapman, the New York Herald Tribune, second vice; with Hessell Tiltman of the Daily Herald and Burton Crane of the New York Times re-elected treasurer and secretary, respectively.
According to Kotaro Washida, he and Fujita were worried as to how the Club would cover its soaring expenses. Washida suggested that if the Club could not obtain the help of the army, the Japanese government might assist. The prime minister at the time was Tetsu Katayama, head of the Japan Socialist Party. Fujita and Washida met Socialist Party Secretary General Suehiro Nishio at Tokiwaya, the Japanese restaurant across the street from No. 1 Shimbun Alley. Fujita explained the circumstances, and asked if the government could earmark ¥3 million per month for the Club. Nishio replied in the affirmative, but said the Club must apply in writing for financial assistance.
Certain that the Club members would be happy, Fujita reported the gist of the talks to President George Folster. Folster blew up, according to Washida, and said, "We have to protect the freedom of the press. We cannot accept such money." He then fired Fujita on the spot. Washida felt bad because he had been partially responsible, and the two of them had been doing what they thought best to save the Club.
Japan finds something to cheer about
For the Japanese, the second half of the year was beginning to look up. First, Nihon University swimming sensation Hironoshin Furuhashi, eighteen, cheered the nation when he set a world mark of 4:38.8 in the 400-meter free-style, swimming in a 50-meter pool. Because Japan had not yet been accepted as a member of the International Swimming Federation, his time was not recognized. But news of this amazing feat, wired to papers around the world, drew incredulous stares, and such snide statements as, "What do they use for a pool in Japan?"
Tokyo boogie-woogie
In September, Shizuko Kasagi, a bouncing, prancing bundle of energy burst on the entertainment scene and teamed up with composer Ryoichi Hattori on the Japanese version of the boogie-woogie, which was sweeping the States. Shizuko had all Japan dancing her "Tokyo Boogie-Woogie," which became an instant hit, and followed up with other song-and-dance versions which she took on a tour of the States.
Elated at the success of the Nodo Jiman Amateur Hour, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation borrowed another popular American radio program, "Twenty Questions," and began a weekly series called "Nijuu-no-Tobira," or Twenty Doors. It was another winner. So much so that NHK invited a group of Japanese-speaking foreign correspondents to appear on the show. Lee Chia of Central News Agency, Leon Prou of Agence France Presse, John Rich of NBC, Hans Pringsheim, and a few others participated without "ringing the bell," which only happened when the answer was wrong. John Rich says they were "No-bell prize winners, and I still have the silver cigarette case given to me by NHK."
"America's Greatest Writer"
Writing news stories is far from the whole game, as Earnie Hoberecht demonstrated when he taught the Japanese how to kiss. In a story carried in Newsday, the novelist James Michener told about the correspondent who was with Earnie on the same boat shelling the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. Both saw the shells head for what they thought probably was the Japanese island. The other correspondent cabled his story home, but nobody read it because "Earnie really passed a miracle. He told of the shells whining through the air, cutting furrows across the rice paddies and ricocheting through grass-roofed villages. He described old men in wooden sandals fleeing the fires. The carnage was terrible and the effect upon Japanese morale devastating. If you're ever going to bomb anything, let Earnie describe it."
None of this surprises anyone who worked under Earnie at the UP Tokyo bureau. His first advice to a newcomer was: "When you write your lead, think of the headline the editor's going to put on it. Then go to it!" When UP sent you out on a story, you could count yourself lucky if AP had only three men to your one. And you'd better bring home the bacon! In other words, "Keep a tight hold on expenses, but don't come back without the story."
The perennial UP message in those days of cable-ese was "DOWNHOLD EXPENSES." Members of the "Downhold Club" included some of the most competitive correspondents in the business, reporters of the caliber of Bob Miller, Pete Kalischer, Rud Poats, Bob Vermillion, Gene Symonds, Murray Moler, Charlie Smith, and Bud Merick. The list could go on forever.
Earnie learned that SCAP wouldn't let American novels into Occupied Japan to be translated because it could be accused of playing favorites. But SCAP had no objections against Japanese books about America. Earnie, who at the University of Oklahoma kept himself in the money by turning out stories for pulp magazines, resurrected this talent and began churning out pulp magazine stories for translation and publication in Japanese. The Japanese, in their avid curiosity about America, ate them up.
Chapter Four
1948
1948 FCCJ FACT FILE
• Membership: 47
• Professional events: 2, plus military briefings, press conferences, and interviews.
• Social events: Inaugural party, Anniversary party, and New Year's Eve party. No record of other events.
• President until June 30: George Folster (NBC); from July 1: Keyes Beech (Chicago Tribune).
SCAP policy shifts, war crimes trials
While Japan continued its gradual recovery, SCAP regarded with troubled eyes the growing strength of left-wing organizations, which benefited from some aspects of the SCAP-dictated "democratization" reforms, the encouragement of left-leaning elements in SCAP, and intensification of the Cold War overseas. As a result, SCAP found itself subtly easing its own policy toward Japan.
For the nation as a whole, 1948 opened with massive New Year's Day crowds crossing the Double-Spanned Bridge in a holiday mood and entering the inner grounds of the Imperial Palace to pay their respects to the Emperor for the first time since 1925.
For members of the Press Club, however, the story of the year was the Far East War Crimes Trial. The year began when the prosecution, under Chief Prosecutor Joseph Keenan, wound up its case against the defendants in the Class A war crimes trials on April 16.
During the hearings, which began on May 3, 1946, the court heard 416 witnesses. Among them, the one who stirred the greatest interest was Henry Pu-Yi, the last emperor of Manchukuo, whom the Soviets had been holding in custody since the end of the Pacific War. When they produced him in the Pershing Heights courtroom for his testimony, correspondents swarmed to interview him, but he was kept under close guard during his stay in Tokyo.
Of the twenty-eight original defendants, two died during the trial. Another was excused because of illness. Of the twenty-five remaining, seven, including Tojo, were sentenced to death, sixteen were given life, one received a twenty-year prison term, and former Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu received seven years in sentencing on November 11. The executions were carried out at Sugamo Prison on December 23.
Dick Hughes described the sentence pronounced on Shigemitsu as "the biggest travesty of justice." Others, including leaders of the Allied Powers that tried the twenty-eight, attacked the verdict in even stronger terms. Next to Shigeru Yoshida, who served three postwar terms as prime minister, Shigemitsu was credited by William Sebald, chairman of the Far East Council for Japan, with influencing Mac-Arthur to adopt a more lenient policy toward Japan than he had planned in the beginning.
Justice Delfin Jaranilla of the Philippines was quoted by Rutherford Poats as saying, "A few of the penalties were too lenient, not exemplary as a deterrent and not commensurate with the gravity of the offense or offenses committed."
Sir William Webb of Australia, tribunal president, supported the prosecution's decision not to try the Emperor. UP's Earnest Hoberecht quoted him as saying, "The evidence indicates that [the Emperor] was always in favor of peace."
Newsmen covering the sentencing in the courtroom at Pershing Heights phoned the verdicts to news offices in the Radio Tokyo Building, and the sentences went out as flashes and bulletins to waiting news desks in their home offices.
The executions
The press was barred from covering the executions. Reporters could only wait at the Radio Tokyo Building for the announcement to come through the SCAP PRO office. The executions began one minute after midnight in the early morning hours of December 23. As soon as the news was released, newsmen who had been staffing around the clock scrambled to file their flashes through the small KDD (International Telephone & Telegraph) office on the same floor, then staged a furious race by automobile and jeep down Hibiya Avenue to file the details through KDD's main cable office a mile and half away in Otemachi.
Who was first? Stories vary. John Rich of INS was one of these. He had just arrived at Radio Tokyo when a copy of the bulletin hot from the PRO was handed to him by Howard Handleman, who said "Run it." "I was well down the stairway heading for my jeep . . . someone was not far behind, and we raced through the empty streets. At the cavernous KDD building, I didn't wait for the elevator but raced up the stairs. By time I hit the 2nd floor, I could hear heavy footsteps and deep breathing close behind . . . It was a bit like a scene out of 'The Third Man'. On the 4th floor I had just time to pencil in a slug line and hand my copy to the clerk before my competitor burst in . . . I had a four-minute beat."
UP played it smart, according to Rud Poats. He had been standing by all day at the KDD main office with "canned" flashes and bulletins waiting for the word "go" to be telephoned from the Radio Tokyo Building. The call came, he filed, and was "all alone" when he left the KDD building.
Musical chairs
Japan's first Socialist government, a three-party coalition led by Prime Minister Tetsu Katayama, resigned on February 10 after nine months in power. The Liberal party opposition and sniping from left-wing elements in his own Japan Socialist Party proved too much for the Christian Katayama and forced him to quit. Hitoshi Ashida became the new prime minister, at the head of another coalition cabinet, on March 10. But the Ashida Cabinet lasted only seven months before it resigned on October 7 over involvement in the Showa Denko scandal. This game of musical chairs brought Shigeru Yoshida back into power as the head of his second government on October 19.
Spies and counterspies
One aspect of this Cold War noticeable in Tokyo was that the Soviet newspapermen who had shunned the Press Club up to then began to show up more often. Also seen more often among the guests were diplomats from Soviet and other Communist-bloc countries. The Press Club was a convenient place to gather snippets of information, and this trend, once started, began to pick up after the start of the Korean War and was maintained all through the Cold War.
An interesting sidelight on this is the report that Dick Hughes was a double agent for Britain's MI6, peddling disinformation to the Soviets for the spy agency. The authority for this statement was Richard Hughes, Jr., son of our Dick Hughes, in his autobiography Don't You Sing, released in Australia in 1994. A review of the book, written by Michael Perry, was carried in the No. 1 Shimbun in June 1994. According to this story, Dick Hughes, Sr., was approached in 1950 or 1951 by Russians at a party in Tokyo. "They told him that they had been impressed by the accuracy and prescience of his reports for the Sunday Times in London," Dick, Jr. said. "They offered to pay him money if he would pass on some of his classified information to them."
Dick, Sr. told his friend Ian Fleming, creator of the James Bond spy novels and foreign manager of the Sunday Times. Fleming wrote back telling him to take the Russian offer, pass on information which MI6 would send to him, and ask the Russians for double whatever they offered.
"To dad's amusement and delight the Russians fell for it, paid him double the sum," the son wrote. While working his double life, Dick used the code name Altamont, the same name used by Sherlock Holmes in his last adventure. But he never kept any money because it was siphoned off and diverted back to MI6. According to the son, his father was the first Western journalist to interview British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean after they defected to the Soviet Union, and was used as a model character in spy novels by Ian Fleming and John le Carré.
News is where you find it
Between events, there were other stories to keep correspondents busy. One was the Elizabeth Sanders Home, founded by Mrs. Miki Sawada, daughter of the wealthy Iwasaki family which founded the Mitsubishi conglomerate. At the orphanage she started at her home in Oiso, near Yokohama, she took under her care children of mixed-blood parentage, born to U.S servicemen and their Japanese girlfriends. (GHQ enforced a ban on marriages between U.S. servicemen and Japanese women.) Press Club members helped make her good works world-famous.
Elsewhere, this was the year that ten-year-old Misora Hibari, precocious daughter of a fishmonger, appeared on the stage of a Yokohama Theater and belted out jazz songs with an aplomb that lifted her to stardom as Japan's top postwar jazz singer.
In sports, the International Swimming Federation accepted Japan back into its membership, but too late for the Japanese natators to take part in the London Olympic Games. A miffed Japan staged its national swimming championships on the same days as the London Games, and Furuhashi was timed in 18:37.0 in the 1,500-meter, beating out Hashizume by 0.8 seconds, and 20 seconds faster than the winning time at London.
Japan, home of earthquakes, gave correspondents something else to write about. A magnitude 7.2 temblor struck Fukui, a rayon textile industry center on the west coast of Shikoku, on June 28. Carl Mydans and Kay Tateishi happened to be in Fukui on that date.
There was no warning, Mydans recalled in his book More than Meets the Eye. "The concrete floor just exploded with a brute thrust. Tables and dishes and cutlery flew into our faces and we were hurled into a mad dance, bouncing and rebounding about like popping corn." Somehow they struggled outside. The open lawn of the billet where they were staying "was split into great fissures, opening and closing as the ground heaved."
Carl and Kay went back inside to pick up their cameras. Their work enabled Life to beat everyone with their photos and accounts of the disaster which killed 3,895 persons, injured more than 16,000, and destroyed 40,000 homes.
Howard Handleman focused attention on SCAP's work in democratizing Japan, with a story from a provincial township, Minami Kakanezawa. This story, carried in big headlines on the front page of the Japan Times on May 16, told of the rush by farmers to buy the farmland appropriated from absentee landlords and parceled out to the tenant farmers under the American-sponsored land reform program. This was the first time the farmers of Japan were given the opportunity to own their own land.
On the industrial front, a big step in Japan's comeback was launched by an engineer, Soichiro Honda, who founded the company that produced Honda's Dream D motorcycle and made cycling history.
Money, always money
Meanwhile, the Press Club was scratching its head over its perennial monetary troubles. The minutes for February 12 indicated the Club had been discussing with the army the possibility of transferring the club's charges and maintenance costs to the Japanese Government Board of Trade through the Occupation's procurement system. But the negotiations fell through.
Other schemes discussed included money-making parties and arrangements for affiliate members and more guests, but somehow each proposal seemed only to invite more bitter discussion and no long-term working program. The question of affiliate members came up and it was agreed this needed further study. An application for an office by an insurance company was tabled. A proposal that the Club give up its billets and move into smaller premises had no better success.
Another proposal to cut costs was to dismiss the Club's foreign manager, reflecting a growing feeling among some members that the Club could no longer afford the salary of Richard Hughes. The issue came to a head during a critical transition period, when the Folster administration made way at the end of June for a new one, which took charge of the Club beginning in July with Keyes Beech (Chicago Daily News) as president, Allen Raymond (New York Herald Tribune) as first vice-president, John Rich (INS) as second vice, Hugh Deane (Telepress), treasurer, and Earnest Hoberecht (UP) as secretary. In August a group of resident members addressed a letter to the Executive Committee saying, "We, the majority of the resident members, have come to the belief that the Club can no longer afford the relatively expensive services of a foreign manager, valuable as those services have been in the past."
Unfortunately, due to the absence in Tokyo of one or another of its members, the committee later arrived at a final decision at a time when Hughes had taken home leave in Australia. Rich and Hoberecht recall that the committee members were waiting for Dick Hughes to return so they could discuss the problem with him. "But someone suggested it would be kinder to cable Dick their decision so that while still in Australia he would have an opportunity to look for another job," they said.
Club explosion
That cable set off an explosion that almost blew the Club apart. Hughes had many friends inside and outside the Club, and the pro-Hughes contingent demanded a special meeting, which President Beech called on August 26. There he explained the reasons for the decision and for notifying Dick in Australia. But the Hughes supporters refused to be appeased. They demanded to know why the decision had not been discussed with the membership at large and with Hughes in particular.
One of the petitioners for the special meeting, Denis Warner, passed on a letter received from Hughes, who arrived at Kure the following day, August 27. "I have always had and still have a high personal regard for all members of the Executive Committee," Dick said in his letter. "Therefore, I was all the more surprised that they in my first absence from the Club in eighteen months should seize the opportunity to act against me. In Australia we have a very short, sharp, ugly word for such practices. I want to make it clear and I hope all members who voted for me realise that once my attention was drawn to any substantial body of club opinion against my retention as manager, I would not remain for a single day."
Hughes was retired with two months' pay. A number of members resigned, including Denis Warner, but almost all returned later. Hughes also returned to the Club occasionally to regale his friends with stories. But Denis Warner never did. He couldn't forgive the Club. All, as John Rich said, because of a terrible misunderstanding. The Hughes Affair was the low point in the Club's history, but eventually friendships were restored and the Club recovered stronger than ever.
But the Club survived
Ho hum! Trouble! Nothing but trouble! But the Club managed to keep going. Its other activities during the year included la referendum on November 2 that approved changing the bylaws so that Guest Cards could be issued, although limited to Allied personnel with whom members did business; and there were talks with the Overseas Press Club in New York concerning the reciprocal treatment of VIPs from the two clubs when they visited each other's city.
Guest speakers at the Club during the year included Sir William Webb, who headed the Far East War Crimes Tribunal, on July 2, and General Mathew Ridgway, 8th Army commander.
As the start of a Press Club library, Ian Mutsu donated a collection of valuable books from his library at home, a gesture which elicited a vote of thanks from the membership. Gene Zenier commandeered a military truck to transport the books from Ian's home to the Club. In a follow-up to this gesture, Earnie Hoberecht proposed that the Club subscribe to newspapers and magazines for the professional use of the membership.
Closing out its social calendar, the Club celebrated its third anniversary with a party on November 11 attended by 143 members and guests. It produced a profit of $494.63 and ¥35,563.45. Another moneymaker to follow it was a "Gridiron" on November 29 at which the somewhat musical or theatrical members performed parodies of SCAP and Japanese officials. In charge of producing both affairs was Peter Kalischer, UP's refugee from the Great White Way.
Chapter Five
1949
1949 FCCJ FACT FILE
• Membership: No record, but 47 votes were cast in a referendum in April.
• Professional events: Military briefings, press conferences, and interviews. No record of Club events.
• Social events: Inaugural party, Anniversary party, and New Year's Eve party. No record of other events.
• President until June 30: Keyes Beech (Chicago Tribune); from July 1: Allen Raymond (New York Herald Tribune).
Red gains ignite violence in Japan
Banner headlines reported the Red Chinese Army's steady sweep through China and victorious march into the Chinese capital. Among the widely read analyses of these developments were articles written by AP's longtime "China Watcher," John Roderick. John, who in later years served as president of the FCCJ, spent a number of months holed up in the Communist stronghold of Yenan with Mao Tse-tung.
In Japan, inflation and food shortages continued to exact their toll on the Japanese economy, forcing widespread job layoffs. These led in turn to a series of strikes, demonstrations, and acts of sabotage by left-wing groups, strengthened by the intensifying Cold War in Europe and the gains made by Communist power in nearby China and Korea.
The Communist advances in China and Japan's economic troubles put pressure on General MacArthur to rethink Allied Occupation policies in Japan. Should SCAP reinforce Japan's defense as a wall against Communist aggression, even though it was out of the question to enlist Japan as an active ally against the Reds?
In recognition of this change in the situation, General MacArthur declared in a New Year statement that it was not the will of the Allied Powers to deny Japan the right of self-defense. In a parallel move to fortify Japan's economic base, SCAP on January 14 lowered the bars, on a conditional basis, against foreign investments in Japan.
In February, the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education dismissed 246 public schoolteachers for their Communist teachings. In September, Kyushu University followed the same example in ridding itself of Communist-leaning professors, while the National Association of Teachers decided to purge the Reds in its membership.
On July 1, the Government Railway Corporation discharged more than ninety-five thousand employees. Six days after announcement of the railway dismissals, the corpse of Sadanori Shimoyama, president of the corporation, was found severely mutilated near the railway tracks in Tokyo. During the following days and weeks, demonstrations and sabotage followed one after another, resulting in other deaths. In October, the government dismissed almost forty thousand local government workers. Before and after these notices, layoffs on a smaller scale were carried out among various industries.
The violence of the leftists, however, aroused resentment and fear among moderate elements. The latter responded by forming a right-wing labor federation.
"Dodge Line" and austerity
On the other hand, to bolster the economy, Joseph Dodge of Detroit, a former president of the American Bankers Association, arrived in Japan on February 1 as economic advisor to General MacArthur, and instituted a program of stiff financial measures to shore up Japan's lurching financial structure. One step was setting the exchange rate at ¥360 to $1, down from 15-to-l at the beginning of the Occupation. This step led to an inflationary rise in prices and fed demands of workers for higher salaries. Left-wing labor leaders played on this anger to foment strikes and more trouble for the government and big business.
Dennis McEvoy, president of the Japan Reader's Digest and of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, called the "Dodge Line" a major step in the direction of stabilizing Japan's postwar economy.
Dodge was followed in May by Dr. Carl S. Shoup, whose team mapped out farreaching tax reforms to back up the Dodge Line. Despite the extent of the reforms recommended, many foreign businessmen felt greater reductions were needed to encourage foreign investment, according to a report filed by Hoberecht.
Executing this program became the responsibility of Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida. In the general elections held on January 23, the Liberals won a clear majority, while the disorganized Socialists took a beating. As a result, Yoshida's third cabinet came to power, and the prime minister chose Hayato Ikeda, a tough, no-nonsense politician, as his finance minister. It was Ikeda whose unenviable task it was to make the Dodge Line work.
The Soviets raised a few hackles themselves when they announced in Moscow on May 2 that they would repatriate ninety-five thousand people, comprising "the rest" of the Japanese still in their area, by the end of the year. If they thought the Japanese would greet this with wild applause, they were disillusioned. By Tokyo's calculations, the Soviet Army had four hundred thousand Japanese soldiers and civilians still to be accounted for out of the seven hundred thousand they took off to their prison camps during the one week of their participation in the war against Japan. What the Japanese wanted to know was: When are you going to send the others back?
The Miles Vaughn Award
It was around this time that the Press Club lost one of its leading members. On January 30, Miles Vaughn, United Press vice-president and Far East manager, went duck hunting in Tokyo Bay with Teizo Ueda, former president of Dentsu, the predecessor of the Domei News Agency. Ian Mutsu had been scheduled to accompany them as he often did, but by a quirk of chance, a staffer turned up sick at the UP bureau, and Ian was called in to take his place on the Sunday shift. On January 31, the bodies of the two men were found drowned.
In memory of "Peg" Vaughn, who was highly respected in the Japanese newspaper world as well as among foreign correspondents everywhere, the Vaughn Award for International Reporting was established to be awarded every year to the outstanding Japanese newsman in the field of international reporting.
A graduate of Kansas University, Peg joined UP in 1916 and started its bureaus in Tokyo, Manila, Shanghai, and Calcutta. During the Pacific War, he was in charge of the agency's combat correspondents in the Pacific/Asia theater. When the war ended, he became vice-president and general manager of the Far East based in Tokyo.
The first Vaughn Award was split on October 1, 1950, between Goro Teranishi, deputy managing editor of the Kyodo News Service, and Ichitaro Takata, foreign news editor of the Mainichi Shimbun and former chief of the Mainichi's New York bureau.
Subsequently, the theme was changed every year. But the award itself continued to be presented in October during the annual Japan Newspaper Week. It was regarded as the Japanese equivalent of the American Pulitzer Prize, and many Japanese members of the FCCJ were award winners. Recipients of the Vaughn Award included Sadao (Roy) Otake and Ichiro (Dick) Iwatate of Kyodo News Service, Kiyoaki Murata of the Nippon Times, and Minoru Omori of the Mainichi Shimbun. In 1978, the name of the award was changed to the Vaughn/Ueda Memorial Award for International Reporting. Among its winners were Hisanori Isomura, ace television anchorman for NHK, and Masaru Ogawa, Nippon Times executive and Press Club director.
SCAP shifts stance
On March 1, MacArthur referred to Japan as "The Switzerland of the Pacific," a clear hint to Japan that it should be prepared to defend itself from external aggression. Even during the brief years since Japan's surrender, the change in the Allied stance toward Japan had become apparent.
Shigeru Yoshida, the outstanding Japanese statesman of the postwar period, regarded the Occupation policy as divided into three stages. In The Yoshida Memoirs, translated into English by his son Kenichi, Yoshida saw the United States looking upon Japan at the end of the war as ultranationalistic, fanatically aggressive, and warlike. As a result, SCAP emphasized Japan's democratization, in the process leaning toward leniency for the Communists and labor leaders, who had been suppressed by Japan's military clique during the war. The focus of SCAP policy at this time was teaching Japan to protect the rights of the people through the purge of wartime leaders, extending suffrage to women, and carrying out land reforms to help the downtrodden farmers own their own land.
The second stage was marked by realization that the Japanese were sorely in need of food, clothing, and help in restoring their industries. This was the period of vast U.S. financial aid, and cancellation of plans to dismantle factories for war reparations. The third stage came in 1950 with the Korean War, when the United States started arming Japan as a defense bulwark against expanding Communist power in Asia.
Correspondents cope with inflation
Inflation? Logically, one would think that foreign correspondents, being paid in dollars, would find life easier. But that wasn't necessarily true. Not all correspondents were paid in dollars. Meanwhile, the cost of food and beverages, maintenance expenses, and other costs kept spiraling. One headache afflicting the Keyes Beech administration was keeping up with the rise in salaries, while at the same time paying off accumulated debts for rent and utilities.
Because of the shift in emphasis from combat reportage to covering the Occupation, the interest of newspaper editors had switched to other news areas, with a resultant decline in the number of foreign correspondents based in Tokyo, and a dip as well in demand for billets at the Tokyo Correspondents Club.
Some news organizations moved their entire bureau operation into homes that were spacious by comparison with the Press Club billets. Among them were Norman Soong and Eddie Tseng, who moved their Hong Kong-based Pan-Asia News Agency into what they dubbed the Press Nest in the Roppongi area. In 1948, there were sixteen residents, including two Japanese staff members, in the twenty-six rooms of the Club's billets. Among the residents at that time were Bob Frew, Ray Falk, Ian Mutsu, Hugh Deane, Lee Chia, and Nora Wain. In order to meet finances, some were allocated two rooms.
The Executive Committee, which included Allen Raymond as first vice-president, John Rich of INS as second vice, Hugh Deane of Telepress as treasurer, and Earnest Hoberecht of UP as secretary, had its hands full wrestling with the same problems at meeting after meeting. They were faced with amending the constitution and the bylaws, meeting the wage-raise demands of the staff, chasing down delinquent members, negotiating with the Japanese landowners and lessees, and staging money-making parties and other events.
The change in the role of the newsmen from combat correspondent to political and economic writers also required an adjustment in their outlook. Inevitably, correspondents reporting these events often differed from their earlier brethren in the tone of their reports, with approaches varying according to the backgrounds and perspectives of the writers and their sources.
In a step of major importance to the broadcasting media, NHK on March 20 began test TV broadcasts at Yurakucho, in downtown Tokyo.
The Press Club, meanwhile, named a committee to meet representatives of the Overseas Press Club in New York to cooperate in entertaining VIPs who visited each other's cities.
Inflation and monetary problems caused a constant turnover in the Japanese staff. It was in March of this year that "Jimmy" Horikawa, still a high school student at the age of seventeen, joined the staff as a night elevator boy to help pay for his tuition. Later, he became a bartender, where his friendly personality made him a favorite with the members. Jimmy stayed with the club for almost forty years, ending as Japanese manager when Kotaro Washida retired in 1988.
The Club also authorized a study of the long-term gains of remaining at No. 1 Shimbun Alley premises, against the benefits of moving to another location without the billets. Meanwhile, the Club reached an agreement with Marunouchi Kaikan to settle its accumulated rental debt, and voted to raise dues, guest fees, and rents to cover the running expenses.
In the midst of these problems, the Club voted a new Executive Committee into office. Allen Raymond moved up to president beginning July 1. He was backed up by Earnest Hoberecht as first vice-president, A.W. Jessup of Newsweek as second vice-president, Hugh Deane who remained as treasurer, and William Jorden of AP as secretary. Raymond resigned later in the term when he left Tokyo, and Hoberecht moved up to succeed him, with Burton Crane elected to take over his duties as first vice-president. Similarly, when Hugh Deane resigned, Hessell Tiltman was elected to take over as treasurer.
Honors, and a return to normalcy
In other respects, however, life went on in Japan as usual. Beer halls, which had reopened on June 1 in Tokyo and other large cities, flourished for the first time in years. The beer halls were nowhere as fancy as they had been before the war, but boisterous crowds of suds-lovers flocked to them.
At the U.S. National Swimming Championships in Los Angeles on August 6, to which he and teammate Shiro Hashizume were invited, "The Flying Fish of Fujiyama" did it again. Hironoshin Furuhashi set an incredible five world records, including times of 4:33.3 in the 400-meter and 18:19.0 in the 1,500-meter freestyle, leaving the second-place swimmer almost four pool-lengths behind in the 1,500. This was after Japan was readmitted to the International Swimming Federation and received a ticket to the Helsinki Olympics in 1952. Too late, however, to show the Olympic fans the Flying Fish of Fujiyama at his record-breaking peak.
In the academic world, Japanese scholars went into a frenzy of delight when the name of Dr. Hideki Yukawa of Kyoto University was announced on November 3 as winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics.
On October 18, GHQ announced the termination of censorship on Japan's broadcasting companies, and followed this on October 24 with a similar termination of press censorship. On the following day, it announced the end of the war crimes trials in Japan, and disclosed that more than 700 Japanese had been executed while 2,500 were serving life sentences.
GHQ announced a series of measures to encourage Japanese to travel in the United States. They included a program to send representatives of 150 categories of work to travel to the United States and allowing women to take tests for U.S.-sponsored scholarships to study in the United States.
In another indication that some things that were a part of the good old days were returning, the Nichigeki Theater held its first postwar tryout for girls to become members of the Nichigeki Dancing Team.
Chapter Six
1950
1950 FCCJ FACT FILE
• Membership: No records, but Club files indicate that 350 correspondents covered the U.N. forces during the Korean War.
• Professional events: Military briefings, press conferences, and interviews. No record of Club events.
• Social events: Inaugural party, Anniversary party, and New Year's Eve party. No record of other events.
• President until June 30: Allen Raymond (New York Herald Tribune); from July 1: Burton Crane (New York Times).
Consolidation in Japan
Tension over the expanding East-West confrontation spread through Japan after Mao Tse-tung's Communist forces took over Mainland China. General Douglas Mac-Arthur stated on New Year's Day that the Allied Powers would not deny Japan the right of self-defense. This opened the way for Japan to form a national police force to face down the challenge of domestic left-wing groups and, by easing MacArthur's Occupation burden, let him later focus his attention on Korea. For the foreign correspondent, however, early 1950 was a slow period occupied with writing situationers instead of front-page news stories.
Japan was a story struggling to compete in a world dominated by the East-West conflict in Europe and China when war would erupt in Korea and instantly become history's first United Nations stand against aggression.
Food shortages, leftists hamper normalization
In Tokyo, the Yoshida Government, with SCAP's help, focused its efforts on the nation's economic recovery, but progress was proving difficult. Helping lighten its fiscal burden, eighteen thousand travelers visited Japan in 1949, spending $8 million here. But to ease the persistent food shortage, the government increased rations of rice and other staples and lifted price controls on dairy products, fish, and alcoholic spirits.
To complicate matters, the USSR on February 1 repeated its demand for the trial of Emperor Hirohito on war crimes charges, while in the tug-of-war with leftist groups, the Yoshida Government on February 13 fired 246 public schoolteachers as Communist sympathizers. On March 25, some 310,000 coal miners went on strike in retaliation. Five days later, leftist demonstrators attacked five uniformed members of the Occupation forces in front of the Imperial Palace. Police responded by permanently banning demonstrations on the grounds in front of the Imperial Palace and in Hibiya Park, two favorite gathering places for leftists.
Later, on June 6, SCAP struck directly at the source of the unrest, purging members of the Japan Communist Party's Central Committee from public office. Ten days later, the Yoshida Government imposed a total ban on public demonstrations and gatherings throughout the country.
Through all this SCAP pushed the normalization of Japan. On March 7, GHQ introduced a parole system for war criminals, opening the way for the release of former Foreign Minister Shigemitsu on November 21 after he had served four and a half years of a seven-year sentence. To speed up Japan's return to foreign trade, SCAP allowed the Koei Maru to leave Japan on June 22 with a cargo of steel products for South America.
Press Club elections, and a scoop
Foreign correspondents routinely reported Japan's step-by-step recovery, but took time out to elect a new Executive Committee to govern the Press Club for its July 1950-June 1951 term. Burton Crane (New York Times) was chosen president, Roy Macartney (Reuters) first vice-president, A.W. Jessup (Newsweek) second vice-president, Joseph Fromm (U.S. News & World Report) treasurer, and William Jorden (AP) secretary. When Crane later retired with injuries suffered in Korea, he was replaced by Hessell Tiltman.
Correspondents looking forward to another ho-hum weekend were blasted out of their beds by news from Korea. The first flash came into the Tokyo bureau of the United Press on Sunday, June 25, from Jack James in Seoul.
BULLETIN-SEOUL, JUNE 25 (UP): REPORTS FROM THE 38TH PARALLEL INDICATE THAT NORTH KOREA LAUNCHED A GENERAL ATTACK ON SUNDAY MORNING ALONG THE ENTIRE SOUTH KOREAN BORDER.
It was the scoop of the decade, the beat that's the dream of every newspaperman. In his book The Forgotten War Remembered, Bill Shinn of AP ungrudgingly hailed the feat and the UP man who achieved it. In Seoul, Jack James was on his way to the American Embassy press room in the Bando Hotel when he encountered an American intelligence officer. The officer told lack he'd heard the North Koreans had attacked all along the line. Jack immediately got on a phone, obtained confirmation, and phoned in his flash.
In the closing stages of the Pacific War, it had been agreed at Potsdam that Korea should be arbitrarily divided at the 38th parallel so the Russian forces could enter from the north and American troops from the south. After Japan's surrender, Korea was to be unified under a single trusteeship, and later under an independent Korean government chosen in U.N.-monitored elections. The election arrangements were made and a U.N. commission named. But the Soviets barred the team at the 38th parallel. The two occupied zones held separate elections, after which the USSR withdrew its troops in September 1948, and the United States in June 1949, leaving only a military advisory team. That was the situation when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950.
Storm signals had been reported but were ignored. Chief of the United Press bureau in Tokyo Rutherford Poats noted: "Full North Korean divisions were shifted from their northern training camps toward the 38th parallel during May and June. Tanks, guns and ammunition poured into North Korea across the Yalu and Tumen rivers. Reserve units were called up. The strength of Communist forces along the 38th parallel was noticeably increased in some sectors. Most of this ominous activity was reported to Tokyo and Washington, but discounting interpretations were added along the way."
The U.N. Security Council met in an emergency session the day of the North Korean transgression, and, in the absence of the Soviet Union which was boycotting the U.N. in protest against Nationalist China's U.N. membership, passed a resolution demanding that North Korea withdraw north of the 38th parallel. President Truman promised South Korea air and navy support, and later land support as well. The North Koreans sent in thousands of infiltrators as a "fifth column." To infiltrate the U.N. lines, they wore American uniforms or white civilian pantaloons and blouses.
The Communists captured Seoul on June 28, and hammered their way southward down both the east and west coasts against the disorganized Republic of Korea (ROK) forces. President Syngman Rhee and his South Korean government moved to Pusan. Even as the invaders hammered at Seoul's gates, U.S. Air Force planes flew from Japan to Seoul's Kimpo Airport to evacuate two thousand Americans and other foreigners, including members of the United Nations Commission.
Correspondents scramble
Correspondents in Tokyo scrambled to get to Korea. Among the first to arrive were three veterans: Keyes Beech of the Chicago Daily News, Burton Crane of the New York Times, and Frank Gibney of Time-Life. Together with Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune, they made it to the U.S. Military Advisory Group's headquarters in Seoul on the night of June 27 . . . just in time to be told, "They're in the city. Head for Su won."
While the military took Higgins under its wing, the three men commandeered a jeep and made for the safety of the Han River. In an article excerpted by No. 1 Shimbun from Keyes' book Tokyo and Points East, Beech, a marine during World War II who had served as Club president 1948-49, related that they almost made the casualty statistics when they came to a stop on the Han River Bridge, blocked by a stream of refugees. Just at that moment, a South Korean demolition charge-detonated prematurely, it later developed-blew out the center of the span. Crane, who was driving, and Gibney were injured by exploding windshield fragments.
The three men walked back to the American headquarters housing compound on the outskirts of Seoul, picked up two abandoned jeeps, drove back to the Han and down a steep levee into the river waters and onto a raft, which carried the trio and their jeeps safely to the other side. It was another thirty miles through rice paddies to Suwon and safety, but they made it. Keyes later received a Pulitzer Prize for his Korean War reporting.
But talk about luck. Bill Shinn crossed the same Han River Bridge two and a half hours before it was blown up. Ray Falk, who was with ABC at the time, was at Suwon when he saw a cloud of dust in the distance. "That's the ROK headquarters bugging out," he heard a soldier say. "Let's do the same." Ray did, and survived to cover the remainder of the war.
General MacArthur flew to Suwon airstrip on June 29 to survey the situation. With him were four U.N. correspondents, whom the Herald Trib's Marguerite Higgins referred to as "The Palace Guard." They were representatives of the four major news agencies: Brines of the AP, Hoberecht of the UP, Handleman of the INS, and Roy Macartney of Reuters.
Back in Tokyo, MacArthur found waiting for him President Truman's order to send troops from Japan. Transport planes, already waiting at Itazuke Airport, moved two battalions of the 24th Infantry Division to Pusan, on Korea's southeast coast. These 1,000-odd soldiers arrived in Korea on July 1, six days after the North Koreans launched their invasion.
Green troops, horrendous fighting
The U.S. Occupation Command had rotated the bulk of its experienced World War II combat veterans stateside. The troops who arrived in Pusan, according to Rutherford Poats' history of the Korean War, Decision in Korea, "were transplanted from a world of peacetime pleasures and occupation comforts to the unreality of war and sudden death. They had been given little military or psychological preparation for the shock or for the job ahead. Many of them had entered or stayed in the army to see the world, earn credits toward a 'GI Bill of Rights' education, or find the advertised 'security' of a 'peacetime army career.' Their arms and equipment were limited. Only recently had they begun to get realistic unit training in field exercises, and even this was carried out without mental conditioning for war."
On July 2, Major General William F. Dean was named commander of U.S. forces in Korea. Dean had no illusions about what he faced. "When he ordered two green, under-strength battalions northward to meet the main force of the Communist drive, he knew they were in for a bloody beating," Poats said.
On July 5, they met four thousand Communist troops led by forty medium tanks near Osan. Low clouds made American air cover out of the question. "Long before the tanks were within effective range, American bazooka and recoilless rifle crews opened fire," Poats wrote. With ammunition running out, the colonel in command ordered a retreat. Casualties were heavy and many wounded men had to be abandoned on their litters.
The Osan story was repeated again and again as the available American strength from Japan was committed and sacrificed in the name of delaying action, Rud said. "For MacArthur there was no other way. He needed time to ship from Japan two more American divisions, land them in Korea and move them to the front. With this force, some luck in reorganizing the South Korean army, and effective use of his growing air and naval forces, MacArthur believed he had a good chance of stalling the Communists short of Pusan and then destroying them at the end of their overtaxed supply lines."
Aussies to the fore
Some of the best accounts of the Korean War were written by Australian correspondents. With the Australians in Korea, edited by Norman Bartlett, is a collection of stories written by Australian newsmen and combatants. Roy Macartney, chief correspondent for the Australian Associated Press-Reuters in Tokyo, was at Osan, and his article noted that the 2-inch bazookas initially carried by the U.S. troops lacked the punch to knock out Soviet tanks. Dean immediately had a batch of 3.5-inch bazookas rushed to Korea from the States. Macartney said they claimed seven North Korean tanks on the day they arrived. In the air, Australian 77 Squadron Mustangs from Japan joined U.S. planes in action over the perimeter sector.
On August 29, the headquarters and two battalions of the 27th British Infantry Brigade arrived in Pusan from Hong Kong. An Australian ground force of nine hundred men, all "volunteers" and eager for action, either from Australia or from the Australian Infantry Battalion on Occupation duty in Japan, had arrived at Pusan by the end of September. These Diggers were to prove their worth in the fighting that lay ahead.
With the Australians in Korea related the error some North Koreans fell into of mistaking the argyle stocking caps the Aussies sometimes wore for Soviet Army headgear, and welcoming them, with "Russki! Russki!" The Commonwealth forces learned to utilize this mistake to advance openly into a Communist force, then fall on it with guns blazing.
General Dean captured at Taejon
In less than three weeks, the North Koreans had occupied nearly half of South Korea. On July 19, the Communists began attacking Taejon, where Dean had installed his 24th Division's headquarters. Trying to make up for his green troops, Poats reported, "General Dean was everywhere at once, firing rocket-launchers, dueling with Communists at pistol range, shifting and encouraging his men." By nightfall, Taejon was encircled and much of it was in Communist hands. The general led the last Americans on July 21 in a mad dash through the Communist lines toward Yongdong and freedom. When they were blocked, they took to the rice paddies. From that date, the general went "missing in action."
More than one year later, in September 1951, Bill Shinn learned from Korean sources that Dean had been betrayed by two South Korean civilians and captured by North Korean troops about five weeks after he disappeared. Australian Communist correspondent Wilfred Burchett confirmed later that Dean was a prisoner. Nothing more was heard about him until he was repatriated in 1953 in Operation Big Switch after the armistice was signed.
The 24th Division was shattered, but it had delayed the Communists for sixteen days. Its resistance gave the 25th, the 1st Cavalry Division, and marines time to arrive at the front and station themselves astride the main roads north and northwest of Taegu waiting for the North Koreans.
Battle of No Name Ridge
The tide of the fighting began to turn in the battle for No Name Ridge. In Police Action in Korea, Carl and Shelley Mydans put together from the accounts of Time-Life correspondents their picture of the war in Korea. The roads of eastern and central Korea were narrow and muddy, and the terrain mountainous, unsuited for the mechanized warfare and strafing air attacks of the U.N. forces. In August 1950, the U.S. Marines were ordered to take a barren ridge on the Naktong River front. It had no name on their maps, so they christened it No Name Ridge.
Correspondent James Bell was there. According to his story, carried in Police Action, the U.N. forces softened up the Reds by alternating artillery and air attacks before the marines began their assault. As they started up No Name Ridge, they were raked by machine guns, mortars, and automatic weapons. Men dropped all along the line. "The casualties seemed unthinkable, yet the assault force never turned back. It moved, fell down, got up and moved again." The battle continued for more than an hour. As the marines neared the crest, the Reds charged, throwing grenades. Some ten marines reached the northern crest. They fell, and the assault forces were ordered back. But the marines regrouped and charged again, and this time they carried No Name Ridge. "But the cost was terrible."
Pusan Perimeter . . .
The U.N. forces under U.S. 8th Army Commander Walton Walker established a continuous defense perimeter to niches north of Pusan encompassing Taegu and Pohan and held off repeated North Korean attacks through August and early September. The overextended supply lines behind the Communist army failed to give them the support they needed to maintain the initiative.
. . . and landing at Inchon
By pinning down the North Koreans, these U.N. units gave MacArthur time for an amphibious landing at Inchon. It was a gamble, filled with risks, but it worked. Inchon relieved pressure on the Pusan Perimeter, and enabled General Walton's forces to push up the east coast toward the 38th parallel. On the west coast, the Inchon landing corps occupied Kimpo Airport. The U.N. forces moved on Seoul, occupying it on September 28. In bitter fighting, they pushed on past the 38th parallel, into Pyongyang, and beyond it.
Full house at the Press Club
The Press Club was boiling with activity. No more grousing about lack of news and things to do . . . or about finances either. It was like 1945 again, only more so, as correspondents and photographers came pouring in from America, Europe, and Asia to cover a war which officially was still a "U.N. police action" since none of the nations involved had declared war on the other side. Rooms in the Club were filled to overflowing.
Club membership reached an all-time peak of some 350 newsmen and women during the months following the North Korean invasion. One of the early July arrivals was the Denver Post's Bill Hosokawa. When he arrived in Tokyo, he went to the PRO office. "They told me hotel space was virtually nonexistent, and suggested I go to the Press Club in Shimbun Alley," he said. He found the Club "incredibly crowded. People were sleeping on cots set up in the library and elsewhere, but the food was good and inexpensive and the company congenial."
In Taegu, Bill found the correspondents billeted in an old Japanese schoolhouse, with twenty-five to thirty correspondents sleeping there. "Korea was hot and dusty, and we showered with cold water out of a hose outside the schoolhouse." After several weeks in Korea, Bill flew back to Tokyo for R&R. There, he had a cold milkshake, his "first hot shower in weeks," a haircut and a shampoo. "A great base for R&R, with pleasant and obliging staff and a lot of good company," Bill said.
When MacArthur promised the correspondents in 1945 that he would help them find a clubhouse, they promised "housing and feeding for legitimate working journalists" in Tokyo. "It may not be good housing or feeding but, at least, the newsman will have somewhere to live and work in." Hosokawa's experience was proof that the founding correspondents were as good as their word.
A popular and well-known newcomer was James Michener, famous for his many books including Tales of the South Pacific. Michener arrived in Tokyo on the way to Korea, and was promptly driven to No. 1 Shimbun Alley. In a No. 1 Shimbun article commemorating the Press Club's twentieth anniversary, he described the confusion at the Club. "I was thrown into one of the big rooms on the top floor," Michener wrote. "Eight men in space for two, not counting five Japanese girls. . . . The difficulty didn't arise from what you might think. Seems the girls had a habit of lugging in their own hibachis (charcoal braziers), running five separate kitchens and cooking fish heads with their rice.
"Those on the side of law and order, with whom I ranged myself since none of the girls was cooking meals for me, insisted that the hibachis, not the girls, must go . . . .The problem was finally settled on a health-and-sanitation basis. The hibachis went but not the girls, and the forces of moral decency claimed a significant if limited victory."
By early August, 270 correspondents from nineteen countries were reporting the war. The rivalry between Marguerite Higgins and Homer Bigart, another ace correspondent for the New York Herald-Trib, became legendary as they courted danger to outdo each other for headline stories. "Maggie" proved to her peers that she was every bit as good as they were.
War takes its toll
Eighteen correspondents died covering the Korean War, thirteen during the confusion of the first six weeks. Han Kyu-ho, reporter for the Korean newspaper Seoul Shinmun, died on June 29, on the fifth day of the war while covering the withdrawal of ROK forces from Seoul; Corporal Ernie Peeler (Pacific Stars and Stripes) and Ray Richards (International News Service) died on July 10, when their jeep encountered a Communist tank north of Taejon; and Wilson Fielder (Time-Life) was killed by machine-gun fire on July 22, covering the evacuation from Taejon.
Two plane crashes took the lives of seven newsmen on their way from Tokyo to the war front: Maximillen Philokonenko (Agence France Presse), Albert Hinton (Journal and Guide), Stephen Simmons (London Picture Post), and James Supple (Chicago Sun Times) died when their C-47 crashed into the sea on July 27; Frank Emery, writer, and Charles Rosecrans, cameraman, both of International News Service, and Ken Inouye, newsreel cameraman for Telenews, died when their C-54 plunged into a fog-shrouded mountain on September 7. Ken, twenty-three, had married just three days before his departure.
Add to this list William R. Moore of the Associated Press, a former U.S. Army major, killed on July 30 near Chinju while with a U.S. tank unit, and Christopher Buckley (London Daily Telegraph) and Ian Morrison (the Times) who died on August 12 when their jeep hit a land mine near Taegu. The veteran Buckley had been awarded an Order of the British Empire in 1946 for his achievements as a combat correspondent. Morrison, Peiping-born former professor at a Japanese university, had been following in the footsteps of his father, "Chinese" Morrison, who won fame as a Times correspondent in China. Morrison was also reputed to be the correspondent in Han Suyin's A Many-Splendoured Thing.
The news stories and photos of these and other correspondents, and the daring of motion picture cameramen, brought the story of the war to the parents, friends, and neighbors of the fighting men in Korea. Among the outstanding still photographers were David Douglas Duncan and Carl Mydans of Life as well as Max Desfor and Jackson Ishizaki of AP and Ed Hoffman of UP.
Newsreel production fell into a different category from the print and broadcast media. When Ian Mutsu left UP in 1950 to go into newsreels, he formed ZM Productions with the Zenier brothers, Gene and Julie. The Zeniers had their own work for Warner Brothers, while Ian was under contract to Fox Movietone. Together, they did pooler work for a group of newsreel companies which showed their productions in motion picture theaters around the world. These were the days of the heavy 35 mm Eyemo cameras, and cameramen had to be strong and tough to lug this heavy equipment around on their travels. In later years, after commercial television was inaugurated in Japan in 1953 (February 1, 1953, for black-and-white television, October 10, 1955, for color television), cameramen could move around much more easily toting 16 mm cameras.
Japan buildup pays off
In the counteroffensive which drove the North Korean forces from Pyongyang back into the north, SCAP's policy of building up Japan paid off, according to William Manchester's biography of MacArthur, American Caesar. Japanese vessels carried U.N. troops across the straits to Korea; Japanese minesweepers helped clear the waters on both sides of the South Korean peninsula; Japanese stevedores volunteered to help unload the cargo in Korea. Japan provided a safe base for the U.N. operations.
Even as the U.N. forces moved into action in Korea, SCAP, with an eye on the Russian troops based in the northern islands of Sakhalin and the Kuriles, and submarines and other naval units concentrated in Nakhodka, built up Japan's economic and defensive structure. On July 18, MacArthur ordered a permanent ban on the publication of Akahata, the organ of the Communist Party. The U.N. Command also turned increasingly to Japanese industry for many of the supplies and equipment urgently needed in Korea. Japanese newspapers reported that as of October 29, Korean War procurement orders totaled $130 million.
"Mac" meets Truman at Wake Island
On October 15, President Truman met MacArthur on Wake Island. An innocuous communiqué issued after the meeting said that the two leaders found themselves in agreement. It was only later that a dispute arose over what actually had been said and by whom. The question was how far Truman had authorized MacArthur to move north of the 38th parallel. Had MacArthur overstepped the bounds of his orders? On the answer hung the bigger question of who was responsible for Communist China entering the war.
The ROK forces crossed the 38th parallel on October 1 and pushed into North Korea. On October 7, the U.N. General Assembly rushed through a resolution declaring the U.N.'s objective to be the establishment of a unified, independent democratic government in all Korea. A front-wide crossing into North Korea followed. Combined U.N.-ROK forces entered and secured Pyongyang on October 20.
As they rolled northward, the U.N. troops fully expected to be "Home by Christmas," as MacArthur had predicted. Encouraging this euphoria was the welcome awaiting the U.S. Marines when they landed at Wonsan, on Korea's northeast coast, on October 25 to good-natured joshing from comedian Bob Hope and singer Marilyn Maxwell, who were there with assorted air units, ROK forces, and correspondents.
Injecting a disquieting note, some Chinese were among the North Korean prisoners taken by the U.N. forces on both the east and west coasts. They lent credence to intelligence reports that as many as two hundred thousand Chinese Communist "volunteers" already were inside North Korea and three hundred thousand more were massed at the border.
Chicoms enter the war
On November 27, the Chicoms attacked with blaring bugles on a 300-mile front south of the Yalu River. Joining the North Koreans, they drove the U.N.-ROK forces before them. On Christmas Eve, the Red army recrossed the 38th parallel and threatened Seoul once again.
On the day before, Lieutenant General Walton Walker had been killed in a jeep accident near Seoul. Lieutenant General Mathew B. Ridgway succeeded him as commander of the 8th Army. As a U.N. contingent, the 8th Army was a far different animal from the army that arrived in Korea four months before. It now consisted of 365,000 men from sixteen U.N. countries. In addition to the U.S. and the British Commonwealth Forces from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Great Britain, serving under the U.N. flag were contingents from Belgium, Colombia, Ethiopia, France, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, and Turkey. In addition, five nations sent hospital units. That was the situation at the end of 1950, when Ridgway drew back in a "strategic withdrawal" intended to trap the Chinese Reds into overextending their supply lines.
The Club during the Korean War
Describing the Club in those days, Hajime "jimmy" Horikawa recalls that the Club officers and staff had their hands full, straightening out billet assignments, procuring adequate stocks of food and liquor, and keeping the members happy.
Administering the Club was in the hands of capable and conscientious officers under successive presidents Joe Fromm and Bill Jorden. On the other hand, those were hectic times, and Club members had a war to cover. When Korea called, Tokyo and the Club became secondary.
Mary Ushijima was thrown into this maelstrom at its peak in October 1950. Mary, born and reared in Fremont, California, was thirty-three and married when she was hired by Fromm and Costello to manage the switchboard, the heart of the Club's operation. Being on the army signal system, the Press Club had fast and clear communications with Korea and the States.
News agencies and favored specials had offices in the Radio Tokyo Building, where they took calls from Korea. Communications were generally bell-like. But fadeouts and static could make talking to Korea a regression to the days of the crystal radio receiver. Ralph Teatsorth was ordinarily the most gentlemanly, soft-spoken guy alive, but when he hit one of those bad moments on a phone call into the UP Korean War Desk, you could hear his voice clear at the other end of the long, second-floor corridor as he screamed, "What? Repeat that! How do you spell it?"
Working with Mary on the switchboard were a contingent of nisei girls. Among them, she remembers Michi Imori, now living in Los Angeles, and Canadian Patsy Ogawa. Probably because Mary looked the "mother" type, members began to confide in her.
"We did everything from relaying messages between a correspondent and his office, to setting up a date for him at Miyoshi's [more about Miyoshi's later]," says Mary. "Or telephoning a girlfriend to tell her her man was coming back from Korea tomorrow and wanted to see her. Or cajoling reservation clerks to nail down plane and hotel reservations. Most of the members were younger than I was. If their wives or girlfriends were Japanese, they couldn't talk to each other so we had to interpret, telephone messages, and even do secretarial work for them. To avoid charges of favoritism, the Army PRO sent its urgent releases through us. We'd get all the bureaus on one party line and the PRO would deliver the information to them with one call."
Working from 8 A.M. to 6 P.M., the staff dealt with French, German, Chinese, Filipino, Australian, and Turkish correspondents. When a correspondent was hospitalized, Mary took over special fruits and wines. For another correspondent, she remembers staggering hospital visiting hours so the patient's wife and girlfriend didn't come calling at the same time.
She was invited to the Club parties, even appearing in some of the skits. She attended a Press Club reunion in New York, as did Kotaro Washida, longtime Japanese manager, and other old-time Japanese staff members. She was a houseguest of several members in the States, including James Michener. She recalls with special affection Keyes Beech, Hessell Tiltman, John Rich, and LeRoy Hansen, among others, and her enjoyment at speaking to persons she would never otherwise meet, like Edward Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Joe DiMaggio.
Hajime "Jimmy" Horikawa, everyone's favorite bartender, recalls, "There used to be dancing in the small dining room, but no dance parties as such because the party room on the third floor was converted into billets. The music was usually provided by a combo, but sometimes the members arranged private parties, and hired a band, usually from one of the military service clubs."
Entertainment at the Club parties was usually the work of the Entertainment Committee members, notably Joe Fromm, Karl Bachmeyer, and the Zenier brothers. The skits, which gained a reputation for scathing sarcasm, were the work of the "Hamsters," members like Pete Kalischer, Max Desfor, AI Kaff, and Charlie Smith.
Japan bolsters home front
In Tokyo, MacArthur was busy handling a war on two fronts. On July 8, he authorized Prime Minister Yoshida to form a National Police Reserve of seventy-five thousand men, and increase the strength of its Maritime Safety Board by eight thousand men. The Japanese government began recruiting the following month. Ambassador Sebald described Yoshida's prompt agreement as the "greatest help" in carrying out the support of the ROK forces in Korea.
Chapter Seven
1951
1951 FCCJ FACT FILE
• Membership: No records.
• Professional events: Press conferences and interviews. No record of Club events.
• Social events: Inaugural party, Anniversary party, and New Year's Eve party. No record of other events.
• President until June 30: Burton Crane (New York Times); from July 1: Joe Fromm (U.S. News & World Report).
From the killing fields to Panmunjom
In Korea, the killing game continued, wearing down the slugging armies of the North Korean-Chinese Communist forces and ROK-United Nations divisions. The conflict was just as much of a hell for the correspondents and the cameramen, sharing the cold, the danger, and despair with the fighting men whose lives they were depicting. Japan, struggling out of its postwar morass, suddenly saw its economy coming together as it moved toward peace and international acceptance. In this situation, Tokyo was an Elysium compared to the suffering and destruction the correspondents saw on all sides of them in Korea.
Fierce Turks
The Turkish Brigade arrived in Korea in early 1951. Harry Gordon, who reported the Korean War for the Sydney Daily Telegraph, Singapore Straits Times, and other news organizations, tells of the camaraderie that sprang up between the Aussies and the Turks, though they could barely communicate with each other.
With the Australians in Korea relates that the Turks fought with a ferocity which made them something of a legend. One of their first battles occurred in late January 1951. Their orders: to take a steep icy slope about four hundred yards high south of Seoul. The Turkish Brigade attacked at 1 A.M. against the entrenched Chinese. Next morning there were "hundreds and hundreds" of dead Communists on the ridge. That height became known as Turks' Ridge. Six months later, the Turkish Brigade received a presidential unit citation for that action.
In another firefight, Gordon reported, the Turks complained bitterly that the artillery barrage put in to soften up an enemy position before their charge was too heavy. "There weren't enough live Chinese left to make it a decent fight." Their standard solution for a fight was fixed bayonets. When the Turks charged with their bayonets, Gordon reported, "the Chinese ran."
The first Turk correspondent to join the U.N. Forces in Korea was Aladdin Berk, who was sent by a newspaper in Ankara several weeks before the Turkish Brigade arrived. Naturally, they dubbed him Berk the Turk. Berk wrote his first dispatch and took it to the American teletype operator to send to Ankara. But the operator couldn't read Turkish and returned it with an apology. Berk solved his problem by sending all his stories by airmail.
Berk may possibly have been the same Turk correspondent who developed a mania for the five slot machines in the Tokyo Press Club bar. Unable to communicate with him, the staff enlisted the multilingual talents of Dwight Martin of Time, according to Joe Fromm. Martin discovered that the man had a smattering of German, his second language. "It turned out that the Turk's lack of English did not impede his comprehension of the symbols on the slot machines," Joe reported. In those days, members could sign chits at the bar to obtain coins to operate the slots, so when the journalist returned to Turkey he left an unpaid slot machine bill of $800. To his request for payment, Treasurer Ray Falk received a response from the man's incredulous editor: "What is a slot machine and why should Mr. B. want to buy one?" Ray, whose boast was that there never was a bill he didn't collect, kept his reputation unsoiled.
Get-rich-quick scheme
James Michener, in his "Tales of the Korean War" carried in the No. 1 Shimbun, recalls the Japan he saw with affection. "I have often thought, in subsequent years," he said, "that there never was a luckier generation than that which knew Japan in those years. The hardships of World War II were over. The Japanese economy was beginning to open up. For us lucky correspondents travel up and down the land was at last possible without military escort. And that golden P.X. on the Ginza peddled full meals at thirty-five cents, haircuts at fifteen cents, shoe shines at five cents and Kodak film at twenty cents. The more daring of us lived mainly on the Japanese economy and to do so on American incomes was an experience."
Michener also said that some manipulation of the exchange rates allowed the more astute to buy yen at one place at the official rate and convert it back into dollar money orders at a lower rate-until the authorities caught on. And some correspondents had the foresight to buy land, usually through Japanese wives, and later cashed in when real estate prices in land-short Japan started spiraling.
But others lost during the May Day rioting of 1951. John Rich, who had recently acquired "a shiny new black Ford" through the military post exchange, lent it to Irving Levine of NBC on "that fateful day." Irv parked it on Hibiya Boulevard by the moat, across from MacArthur's headquarters. "When the rioters broke out of the palace grounds they began overturning and setting fire to cars, including mine," said Rich. "Max Desfor (of AP) took a photo of my car upside down and blazing, with a young Japanese student standing beside it with club in hand. . . . Max's picture ran on the front page of the New York Times the next day."
And the war ground on
In Korea, the combined North Korean-Chinese forces fought through snow and bitter cold across the 38th parallel into South Korea and reoccupied Seoul in early January. But their momentum had been spent, and the United Nations forces had the advantage of air cover and mechanized transportation in the open plains of southwest Korea, in contrast to the mountainous terrain near Korea's Manchurian border. In February, the 8th Army started its counterattack, retook Seoul on March 15, and at the end of the month, had gained its more or less original positions on the 38th parallel.
In February, John Foster Dulles, visiting Japan as a special emissary of President Eisenhower on a peace treaty for Japan, visited the Press Club as a guest speaker, together with Ambassador William J. Sebald.
In the meantime, the friction between Truman and MacArthur came to a head. The issue: Whether to broaden the war by attacking China. MacArthur openly defied President Truman's policy of confining the war to the Korean Peninsula. He apparently took the fight to the Republican leadership in Congress. On April 11, the President announced that he had "relieved General MacArthur of his commands" and designated Lieutenant General Mathew B. Ridgway to succeed him.
In Japan, the announcement caused profound shock. Emperor Hirohito called at the embassy to express his distress. Prime Minister Yoshida and other leaders reacted with sympathy and sorrow. The two houses of the Diet passed resolutions thanking MacArthur for what he had done for Japan.
William J. Sebald wrote in With MacArthur in Japan that MacArthur's remoteness was "often criticized, but not by the Japanese, who understood or respected the need for aloofness. The critics generally were non-Japanese writers and reporters who had no responsibility for the Occupation and little understanding of MacArthur's methods of dealing with a unique, sensitive, and alien people." As major newspapers extolled MacArthur, a throng estimated at more than two hundred thousand turned out early in the morning to line MacArthur's road to Tokyo's Haneda Airport, wave tiny American and Japanese flags, and call out, "Sayonara."
Battlefield shifts to Panmunjom
On June 23, almost one year after the war had begun, Jakob Malik, Soviet U.N. delegate, suggested that the two sides begin talks for a cease-fire and armistice. On orders from Washington, Ridgway broadcast a proposal for such a meeting to Kim II Sung.
South Korea's President Syngman Rhee, vehemently opposed to armistice talks from the outset, held that Korea's problem would not be solved with the nation divided. Over his protests, the truce talks began on July 10 at Kaesong, a site chosen by the Communist side. Though south of the 38th parallel, Kaesong was held by the Communists.
Meanwhile, in Tokyo . . .
In Tokyo, once again a new administration took over the Press Club as events in Korea moved into a new stage. Joe Fromm, a bundle of energy from the U.S. News & World Report and a key player in the Press Club's birth, took over as president. His Executive Board consisted of A.W. Jessup (Newsweek) as first vice-president, William Jorden (AP) as first vice-president, Dwight Martin (Time-Life) as treasurer, and Don Huth (AP) as secretary.
And still they die
After entering the new year, three more correspondents died before Malik even mentioned a truce, and a fourth died during the armistice talks to bring the Korean War death toll of correspondents to eighteen. AFP's Jean Marie de Premonville was killed by machine-gun fire on February 11 while covering a U.N. patrol action. William H. Graham of the New York Journal of Commerce died on March 31 when his navy plane crashed while taking off from a carrier. Derick Pearcy of Reuters died when his jeep hit a land mine on May 25. Finally, on December 27, 1952, after the armistice talks had dragged on for almost a year and a half, Jorge Teodoro of the Philippines, attached to the U.N. Department of Public Information, was killed when his Greek Air Force C-47 crashed on takeoff from Chinhae.
Three more correspondents were captured by the Communists and languished in prison for close to three years before being released. They were Maurice Chanteloup, AFP news writer; Frank ("Pappy") Noel, AP cameraman; and Philip Deane, London Observer.
Hessell Tiltman of the London Daily Herald, serving as Club president up to June 1951, recalled that the Korean War provided the occasion for two of the Club's noteworthy events. One was a party for the U.N. wounded, the only event of its kind authorized by U.S. Army medical authorities. The cross section of U.N. convalescent cases included Americans, British, Thais, Filipinos, Turks, Australians, and others. Each guest was seated at a table where there was a correspondent who spoke his language.
The commanding surgeon had laid down two conditions: no alcohol for the guests, and all guests to be returned to their hospital beds by 10 P.M. "War correspondents being a hospitable tribe and battle-scarred veterans of whatever nationality only human, ensuring observance of the first condition was not easy," Hessell commented. The elderly president, flanked by two burly colleagues for protection, stationed himself before the elevator and staircase leading to the billets above to prevent well-meaning members from spiriting guests upstairs for a quick one. "But good sense and good humor won out and all the multinational guests were returned to their hospitals in good order and without incident" to Tiltman's relief.
Tiltman's second memorable event was a solemn gathering at which the foreign press corps paid tribute to the memory of correspondent members who had died in Korea or in transit to or from the war zone. Mrs. Jean MacArthur attended on behalf of the Supreme Commander. Later, a plaque listing names and affiliations of the dead was hung "inside the club entrance where it still stands as a reminder of the price paid by those whose duty it was to report the course of the conflict that turned back the Communist attempt to engulf all Korea."
While the Reds stalled the truce talks, fighting erupted again. Ridgway realized he had erred in agreeing to Kaesong as the site of the talks, and insisted on a change to Panmunjom, midway between the two opposing front lines and less vulnerable to Communist machinations. The talks moved to Panmunjom without any improvement. The Communists insisted on withdrawal of foreign troops from Korea as the condition for the talks. Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy replied with a flat no. The Reds backed down at the ninth meeting. But the negotiations followed the same pattern-deadlock, recess, and incidents repeated over and over again.
On December 11, the two sides finally got around to talking prisoner exchange only to find they were far apart on numbers, and then on the issue of giving prisoners freedom to choose whether they wanted to be repatriated. Eighteen months passed before the two sides finally agreed on a POW-release and repatriation plan.
Bob Eunson, AP's Tokyo bureau chief, disturbed by stories of Communist atrocities and mistreatment of prisoners, including the killing of 5,750 U.N. POWs, told Australian newspaperman Wilfred Burchett, writing from Pyongyang for Paris Soir, that he would give Burchett a camera and film to take to Pappy Noel in a Communist prison camp. "Let him take pictures of the prisoners," Bill Shinn quoted Bob as urging. "We'll publish them in the hometown papers and people will start screaming to get them home again." Burchett came back on December 24 with negatives purporting to show Major General William F. Dean, the highest-ranking U.N. prisoner of war, in good health, shadow boxing, doing exercises, and strolling in a forest. When Dean came back to the U.N. side in Operation Big Switch in September 1953, he branded the pictures a lie, saying he had been held in a cave for the past year, not permitted to stand except when he went to the toilet.
Honor roll of combat correspondents
When the negotiations were finally concluded on July 27, 1953, the rolls of the FCCJ listed 457 newspapermen and women who covered the Korean conflict, of whom six won Pulitzer Prizes.
Like people in any line of work, news writers respond, each in his or her own way, to the events they cover. Some see the dangers, thrills, and adventures of war; others are stricken by its tragedies. One correspondent who epitomized the latter category was John Randolph of the AP, Tokyo bureau chief, Press Club president in 1961-62, and a Club director for seven years. John served in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II.
Randolph was a stern critic of the writings of his fellow correspondents as well as his own. In an article contributed to the No. 1 Shimbun, he said that though many wrote books, "not one of us has yet been able to capture the entire course and full, tragic nobility of the Korean War in the kind of words that rise above good journalism with all its virtues and strike deep, generation after generation, into the hearts of men. There was some inhibiting miasma in the Korean War that stifled great creative writing as much as it stifled great creative policy. Even today, some of the best works on the Korean War have been done by people who were not there at the time."
John uses words such as "sad," "treacherous," "unspeakably shabby," "murderous," and "unpitying" to describe this conflict. "Why," John asked, "when so many sensitive and able writers were present before such a wealth of material, did not the Korean War produce truly great masterpieces?" He commented sadly, "Children still play soldiers, but they do not play soldiers of the Korean War."
This was the John Randolph who, with Bernard Ullman of Agence France Presse, was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in action in evacuating wounded soldiers during the Battle of the Imjin in April 1951.
Then there was Rafael (Ray) Steinberg, who came to Asia in March 1951 to cover the fighting for INS and later for Time. In an article which he wrote for Time in July 1953, one of two by Ray later nominated for the Overseas Press Club award, he asked "What makes a hero?"
It takes the newly arrived GI a while to discover what makes a man risk death, Ray said, but eventually he understands "why a medic threw himself between a patient and a grenade," and the private who climbed out of his foxhole to throw back "Chinese hand grenades before they exploded, until he misjudged one." Ray said, "Those were the cool heroes, sacrificing themselves, not to 'halt aggression' or 'fight Communism' but out of elemental loyalty to the outfit and to the other men around them."
Another kind of a hero, he said, "was forged by the heat and pressure of battle." But there also were the men who "went to pieces in the strain of battle, or groveled at the earth in panic."
Rud Poats remarked, "The great sustainers of high morale, and the chief subjects of conversation and hope, were 'R&R,' leave in Japan and the 'Big R,' or rotation home. R&R had various official translations. But it was usually more aptly described by another name for the five-day plunge into the pleasures of Japanese civilization as 'S&S' or Sex and Saké. About every six months, an American could count on a five-day fling in Japan, where he either explored the fleshpots or struggled with his conscience and polished up lies to match the R&R reports of his less inhibited fellows."
Grenades and things
War is never pretty. But the correspondents reported it as they saw it, each in his own way. And their experience and knowledge rubbed off on the younger reporters and photographers who followed them to Tokyo, where they sat and drank with them, soaking it all up.
This was the war the correspondent members lived. And if occasionally some acted a little wild when they gathered with colleagues in the reassuring surroundings of the Club, that was why. They came back to the Press Club with the souvenirs of Korea, ranging from handguns and grenades to Kalashnikovs. And like the cow-pokes in the Wild West movies, sometimes they used them.
The stories about the members get better with each telling, but there is one that has become a Club legend. It's about the correspondent who pulled out a .45 when the Club elevator wouldn't move, and fired a shot at the steel door, making a dent which remained as long as the Press Club stayed there.
Then there was the correspondent who pulled out a grenade, drew out the pin, and still holding it by the handle so it wouldn't explode, held it up high, and asked those in the bar around him, "What kind of a grenade do you think this is?" Before anyone could say a thing, he pulled open a window and tossed the grenade outside. Everyone in the bar, including the prankster, hit the floor. Al Cullison, who is the authority for this story, says the grenade fell on a narrow sidewalk between the Press Club and the Soviet billet next door. There was a mild explosion, and a lot of smoke. The thrower got up off the floor and announced, "It was a concussion grenade." Luckily, no one was walking outside at that hour of the night. But the Club's Russian neighbors were quite upset about it, and lodged a strenuous protest with the Club officials.
Miyoshi's
Bob Vermillion, the jaunty front man for many of the stories they tell about the Unipressers, jumped with the paratroopers during the Munsan operation, broke a leg, and came back to Tokyo with his leg in a cast. Earnie, Rud, and others in the UP bureau made the proper clucking sounds, and offered to get him a hotel. "No," said Bob, "I'll take care of myself." He disappeared for about a month, phoning in from time to time to reassure Earnie.
When he finally turned up, he had shucked his cast, and everyone remarked on how great he looked. Two days later, a well-dressed Japanese lady showed up with a card introducing her as being from "Miyoshi" and presented a whopping bill that made even Vermillion turn pale. She got paid. But it seems that Bob was entertaining quite a few fellow correspondents at his "hotel" which he thought was a "cheap Japanese ryokan." Bob learned the hard way that even a foreign correspondent has to pay for a good time.
"What's Miyoshi's?"
Bob Miller, UPI's bon vivant nonpareil, tells a story about Vermillion that sums it up neatly. It seems Vermillion had had more than a few sips of the cup that cheers in the Press Club bar, and, upon making his exit from the Club, began looking for a cab. The night was dark. Bob spotted a black car parked on the street, with a driver sitting at the wheel. He opened the back door, sat down, and told the driver, "Miyoshi's." A voice from the other end of the back seat asked, "What's Miyoshi's?" Bob was apologetic. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize this car was occupied. I'll get out." "That's all right. What's Miyoshi's?" Replied Bob, "Just the best cat house in town." "What are we waiting for? Let's go. Driver! Miyoshi's. Incidentally, I'm Errol Flynn."
Flynn, who happened to be in Tokyo making a film, took such a fancy to Miyoshi's that his whole film crew moved into its hospitable surroundings for the remainder of their stay in Tokyo.
Miyoshi's is no more, another casualty of Tokyo's constant rebuilding binge. So what was it like? It used to be in an Eastside Tokyo house, according to Al Cullison. It had a big party room with tatami-mat floor, where the girls poured drinks for the guests and made them feel like they were the world's greatest gift to womankind. When you made your exit from this party room, your girl took you across a Japanese garden with a pond and a tiny bridge to a nest of smaller rooms where she would see that her guest was properly bathed, helped into a fresh, cleanly starched yukata, and bedded down in a comfortable futon. And if you had happened to have a broken leg, she'd make such a fuss over you, you'd hope it would never heal. If, after her treatment, you felt, "Now, here's someone who appreciates me," you were only being human. Many of our Korean War heroes learned at Miyoshi's about the mysterious Orient.
The "photographic eye"
There's something about an outstanding photographer that gives him a sensitivity and perception that's the envy of many a newswriter. Carl Mydans is one such photographer. So is David Duncan.
On the front flap of his book More Than Meets the Eye, Carl discusses this photographic third eye that good lensmen seem to possess. He says, "The restless force behind all photographers is an urge to communicate what they see. Much of what they see is in their photographs, often, as well, a good deal of what they feel. But there is always something left over, some spoken word or warmth of sun or smell of death that stays on unrecorded after the picture has been made and printed. These 'extras' of sensation and experience are what make so many photographers tireless storytellers. Not only are they men who think in images; they are subjective about what they see. Unlike the passive spectator, they become involved emotionally as well as physically, in what they report."
He adds, with the undeniable punch of truth, "No camera that was ever late for an assault was ever 'filled in' later by comrades in journalism or survivors of the action. The camera must always be there. And behind it, there must always be a man's eye, and a soul."
When Duncan covered the Japanese surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, he had time to grieve for the humiliation of an enemy, Mamoru Shigemitsu, who had lost a leg to a would-be assassin's bomb in 1932. Shigemitsu, Duncan reports in his photo-book Yankee Nomad, "had a terrible, humiliating, and probably painful time" trying to climb the ship's stair-ladder to the main deck, and then get from there over to the table where he was to sign the surrender document. "No one went forward to help him," David said.
Incidentally, Duncan is the photographer who made the 35 mm Nikon the camera of choice for news photographers all over the world, replacing the heavy, cumbersome Speed Graphic. According to Ian Mutsu, who left UP to start up his own newsreel company about that time, Duncan had heard good reports about the 35 mm produced by Canon. When he arrived in Japan, he became friendly with Jun Miki, the idol of Japanese cameramen. Miki tried to set up a visit to the Canon plant but was rebuffed. Miki then arranged a visit to the Nikon plant, where Duncan was welcomed with open arms, presented with a camera, and a variety of lenses and other accessories, which he tried out in Korea. He was so impressed that on his return, he publicized the Nikon everywhere he went. From that point on, the rest is history.
Speeding up peace for Japan
The gravity of the situation in Korea and elsewhere had brought home to the American people the need for a stronger Japan. Tokyo had already received indications that the peace treaty would be concluded sooner than expected. President Truman had taken the first step in April 1950 by appointing John Foster Dulles peace treaty advisor to the State Department. Dulles made two quick trips to Tokyo in early 1951 to discuss with Prime Minister Yoshida the peace pact and a mutual security agreement. After drawing up drafts based on these talks, Washington sent out copies of the peace draft together with invitations to fifty nations to participate in a peace conference to open in San Francisco on September 4.
During a report explaining these two treaties to the Diet session in August, Yoshida also revealed that he had requested the U.S. security forces to stay after the peace treaty to guarantee Japan's security. On September 8, the peace treaty to officially end World War II for Japan was signed in San Francisco by forty-eight Allied nations and Japan. The Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia refused to sign. India, which did not attend the conference, later signed a separate peace treaty with Japan as did Nationalist China. Immediately after the adjournment of the peace conference, the United States and Japan met separately to sign a bilateral mutual security pact providing a U.S. security umbrella for Japan, with U.S. troops to remain in Japan and use its facilities.
Japan's Lower House ratified both the peace treaty and mutual security pact in October and the Upper House in November. Ratification cleared the way for these treaties to come into force on April 25, 1952. Underlining Japan's coming change in status, the Nippon Times carried the story under a San Francisco dateline and the byline of executive editor Goro Murata as "Special Peace Conference Correspondent." Other Japanese newspapers were represented by their own correspondents in San Francisco.
As SCAP, General Ridgway began the task of transferring to Japan the administrative functions the government had hitherto exercised under SCAP's orders. The Communist-leaning left wing did its utmost to fight back.
On April 27, Ridgway announced that he backed the Yoshida Government's ban on a May Day gathering in front of the Imperial Palace. Reluctantly, the left-wing Sohyo Federation of Labor called off its mammoth central demonstration slated for the Imperial Palace grounds and settled for a number of smaller gatherings. When the government called a Constitution Day rally on the same palace grounds on May 3, however, Sohyo sent five hundred militant demonstrators with red flags to disrupt it. In the resulting melee, police arrested thirty-seven of the Sohyo members.
Subsequently, Ridgway transferred to Japan the right to review laws issued by the government under the Occupation directives, including the purges, education reforms, labor laws, and the police system. With the support of many Occupation officials, who believed the Occupation purges had gone too far, some seventy thousand persons, many of them minor officials, were depurged. Among the big names on this list was Ichiro Hatoyama, former president of the Liberal Party, whose first chance at becoming prime minister was quashed at the Press Club in 1946.
Chapter Eight
1952
1952 FCCJ FACT FILE
• Membership: No records.
• Professional events: Press conferences and interviews. No record of Club events.
• Social events: Inaugural party, Anniversary party, and New Year's Eve party. No record of other events.
• President until June 30: Joe Fromm (U.S. News & World Report); from July 1: William Jorden (AP).
Korea holds news spotlight
While Japan was waking to the realization that peace and a return to the democratic community of nations had their own pitfalls, the attention of foreign correspondents in Japan was focused on Korea, where youths from their countries were dying even as their leaders attempted to negotiate an armistice with a stubborn Communist enemy.
Optimistic talk of "Home by Christmas" had long since been dismissed as a pipe dream by the troops, a far different army from the raw, green boys who had arrived in Korea to face war for the first time a year and a half ago. Now, they knew what war was as they faced death every day in the icy cold of their second Korean winter, fighting an enemy that had prepared for this for years.
The armistice talks on which they had embarked with high hopes a half a year ago were to drag on through all of 1952 and halfway into 1953 while the two armies traded blows in a savage war with neither victor nor vanquished. Even the cease-fires that the negotiators reluctantly called from time to time provided no respite for the men on the front lines, for both the U.N. forces and Communist forces used the lull to strengthen their defenses and replenish their manpower and supplies.
Though the military headquarters directing the forces of the United Nations was located in Tokyo, and Japan was the home base and rest station for the troops, all the action was on the peninsula on the other side of the straits while the key policy decisions were being made in Washington or in the United Nations. The correspondents, concerned only with the action, traveled to Korea in a steady stream from No. 1 Shimbun Alley to report and film the war. Korean correspondents played a major role in gathering the news. It wasn't only the language difficulties involved. The names of Korean newsmen like Bill Shinn of AP, George Suh of UP, and Bang-Yang Lee of UP Movietone, whose names became synonymous with top-line news reporting, had the best contacts and news sources in both the government and military forces of South Korea.
Prisoner issue scuttles hopes
A starting point for the armistice talks in Korea seemed to have been reached on December 3, 1951, when the Communists agreed to the freezing of foreign troop strength in Korea and for the first time agreed to admit inspection teams north of the 38th parallel, and the United Nations reciprocated by dropping its insistence upon aerial inspection and retention of control over U.N.-occupied islands north of the cease-fire line.
The negotiators moved on to the first question on the agenda, prisoner exchange, and came up against a stone wall. The United Nations was committed to freedom of choice: each prisoner should be free to choose whether he wanted to go north or south. The Communists were equally stubborn in demanding that every Red army captive be repatriated to where he came from. Moreover, before discussing exchange rules, the Allied side wanted to know how many Allied prisoners the Communists would release for the 132,000 Communist prisoners in U.N. hands.
To break the stalemate, the negotiators took a step-by-step approach. They decided first to count actual numbers of POWs desiring repatriation and those choosing political asylum. The U.N. began by screening the prisoners held in the giant POW compounds on Koje Island, off the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula.
Koje-do was turned into a prisoner-of-war camp by the U.N. Command early in 1952. On the island, it erected four barbed-wire enclosures, each divided into eight compounds, and confined in them more than 132,000 POWs and 38,000 civilian internees. Though controlled nominally by U.S. and ROK guards, the inmates were infiltrated by commissars and cadres, trained to organize rebellion and unrest. These "bosses" kept the compounds constantly in ferment, with fighting, riots, and murders almost a daily occurrence.
On December 11, when debate on prisoner exchange began at Panmunjom, the U.N.'s figures showed total casualties of 305,000 dead, wounded, missing, or captured, of which 192,000 were South Koreans, 104,000 Americans, and 9,000 from other U.N. countries. By contrast, the U.N. listed in its hands 132,474 Communist POWs, of which 95,531 were North Koreans, 20,700 Chinese Communists, and 16,243 former South Korean troops who were captured and impressed into the Communist army.
Against these figures, the Communists said that they held 11,599 U.N. POWs, consisting of 7,142 South Koreans, 3,198 Americans, and 1,219 other U.N. nationals. This stark contrast with the U.N.'s calculations and the claim of 65,000 captives made by Communist radio in the first months of war led to an angry outburst from the U.N. side.
Despite this, screening began in February at Koje-do, only to be disrupted by a series of violent outbreaks as the Communist commissars attempted to cow fellow inmates into choosing repatriation. Units of the 27th Infantry Regiment sent to preserve order were attacked by 1,000 prisoners who charged out of their barracks wielding spears, knives, and axes. In the resulting melee, one American and 75 prisoners died, and 39 Americans and 139 prisoners were wounded.
The screening revealed that only seventy-five thousand of the POWs at Koje-do wanted repatriation back to Communism. The Reds broke off armistice talks.
POWs capture camp commandant
On May 7, when the prisoners of Compound 76 demanded a meeting with the newly arrived camp commandant, Brigadier General Francis T. Dodd, he stood outside an open gate talking to their leaders when the prisoners charged and pulled him inside the compound. Dodd's aide saved himself by clinging to a gatepost. Shinn's report was sent to AP in Tokyo, and, after the U.N. Command withdrew its hold order, made headlines in America.
Dodd was released three days later after being forced to sign a statement that U.N. forces had killed and wounded some prisoners. Though the U.N. disclaimed the statement, calling it a "lie" made under duress, the incident gave the Communists food for propaganda that was expanded into charges that the U.N. used the prisoners as guinea pigs for bacteriological tests. A mob of correspondents descended on Koje-do to report on the situation there.
When Dodd's replacement arrived to take charge of Koje-do, he broke up the prisoner compounds into smaller groups of five hundred inmates each. During their transfer to their new compounds, another wild melee occurred at Compound 76. U.N. paratroopers, backed by tanks, subdued the prisoners by force.
Talks stalled, fighting continues
During this time, furious battles raged daily along the front of outpost hills which won fleeting fame in newspaper headlines. Though small, they were lethal enough to keep correspondents and photographers busy. Adding to the difficulty of reporting the developments in Korea were the differences on the U.S.-U.N. side over the U.N. goals in entering the war, the question of military strategy versus political policy, strained further by the outspoken insistence of President Syngman Rhee that the goal of the fighting was a united Korea.
A propaganda warfare ensued with the U.N. charging the Reds of being afraid to admit that the Communist prisoners in U.N. hands didn't want Communism. The Reds countered by broadcasting "confessions" of captured American pilots to engaging in bacteriological warfare.
Throughout these exchanges, the Allied soldiers kept their sense of humor. "Just about every dugout carried a sign posted near the entrance," Poats reported. Anything from "Waldorf Towers Basement" to "Home Sweet Home," and "Marilyn Monroe Slept Here." And fallen off a rickety bridge post near the 38th parallel, a sign: "Gateway to Manchuria."
Air power crucial
In the second year of the war, from mid-1951 to mid-1952, the air force stepped up its attacks. This systematic destruction of Communist supply lines "raised the price in man-hours and precious supplies that Communist China and Russia had to pay to support a massive army," according to Rud Poats. Though the U.N. prevented the Communists from launching a new offensive, the Red Army was able to rebuild its strength. "By mid-1952, it outgunned the 8th Army in artillery pieces by nearly two to one and had swollen to nearly one million men, twice its effective strength on the day the truce talks started," Poats reported.
But Allied control of the air denied the Reds the means to harass U.N. troop movements. "Headquarters and installations beyond Communist artillery range could stay above ground, with a minimum of time and manpower spent in camouflage and anti-aircraft precautions."
On lune 23, 1952, the Allies launched the biggest air strike of the war. Without consulting other U.N. Allies, some five hundred U.S. Navy, Air Force, and Marine planes hit the hitherto "off-limits" giant Suiho Dam and three other dams, then threw in two hundred more planes the following day, knocking out North Korea's power supply as well as power to industries in Manchuria.
With the U.S. presidential election campaign moving into its final phase before election day on November 4, the Communists attempted to use Panmunjom as a sounding board to push American public opinion into a mass demand for a quick end to the Korean War. Seeing through these tactics, Major General William K. Harrison, who took over as chief U.N. negotiator from Admiral Joy, called a recess on October 8 and told the Reds he would return to the negotiating table when they had a "constructive" proposal to present. The Panmunjom talks entered a six-month recess which continued over New Year and into the spring of 1953.
The recess at Panmunjom was accompanied by a sudden intensification of Communist attacks on U.N. outposts all along the front as the date of the U.S. presidential elections drew near. On October 6, Communist forces attacked White Horse Hill held by the ROK 9th Corps. Bill Shinn reported that the hill changed hands twenty-four times between October 6 and 15. The South Koreans, showing their newfound discipline and power, inflicted heavy losses on the Chinese and denied the enemy control of the hill.
Outside factor needed
In analyzing the war up to this point, Rud Poats pointed out, "Korea was the battleground but seldom the scene or source of key decisions." The signals sending the North Korean forces over the 38th parallel and Communist China's intervention in 1950 "undoubtedly were called in Moscow." The decision to begin truce talks was made over South Korea's objections by the United States, the United Nations Allies, and the United Nations Secretary General. In the truce talks, "the United States met and negotiated by proxy with its global enemy, Soviet Russia. The military stalemate and the armistice deadlock were reflections of the global balance of titans, afraid of the consequences of bitter war and uncertain of the multiple effects of any settlement short of a clear-cut conference-table victory." If a breakthrough was to develop, Rud said, "a new factor had to enter the picture from outside, a new situation or new assessment of the world situation which justified compromising on the prisoner repatriation issue, plus a new formula for camouflaging the retreat."
The opening came in a compromise formula put forward by India in the United Nations General Assembly in December. A series of other developments occurred outside Korea and, in combination, they created a favorable situation for the break in the stalemate, which came in 1953.
During the U.S. presidential campaign, soldier-statesman Dwight D. Eisenhower had announced that if elected, he would go to Korea for an on-the-site study of the situation. After he defeated Adlai Stevenson, the president-elect did go to Korea on December 3. His party included Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar N. Bradley.
ROK army beefed up
Ike's visit brought into sharp focus the change in the fighting qualities of the ROK troops. In 1950 and 1951, they were under-trained and poorly led, Poats said. When the armistice talks began, only three or four ROK divisions of about twelve thousand men each could be regarded as dependable in the face of heavy attack. General Van Fleet made building a ROK army his major concern. President Rhee himself had been calling on the United States for help in building up a twenty-division army.
By the time of Eisenhower's visit, South Korean troops of the original ten-division army were manning nearly two-thirds of the battle line. And by May 1953, the ROK army's strength was to rise "to sixteen divisions and supporting forces, a total of nearly four hundred thousand troops."
Poats said, "The visit confirmed in Eisenhower's mind the wisdom of a decision made during his election campaign to speed up the development of a big ROK Army and thus lighten the bloody burden borne by American troops. By replacing foreign troops on the battle line with South Koreans, the significance of the war in terms of the world balance of military power would be reduced and the West's ability to 'wait out' a favorable armistice would be increased."
Japan rejoins family of nations
When the San Francisco Peace Treaty came into force on April 28, the Occupation of Japan came to a formal end, and the Occupation headquarters returned to Japan powers and functions which the SCAP GHQ had exercised for six years and eight months. First among these was the handling of diplomatic relations.
Japan found sovereign diplomacy could be troublesome. On January 18, President Syngman Rhee of South Korea proclaimed the establishment of the Rhee Line fisheries zone, which would be closed to fishing by other nations, including Japan. The Japanese Foreign Office lodged a protest, calling the claim a violation of international law. This led to the first formal meeting with the Republic of Korea on the problem in February, but the talks were suspended in April with both countries refusing to back down.
On August 5, Ambassador Robert D. Murphy arrived in Tokyo to present his credentials to Emperor Hirohito and formally reopen the U.S. Embassy. Six days later, Japan signed a civil aviation treaty with the United States. On September 1, the Bank of Tokyo opened an overseas branch in London, Japan's first overseas foreign exchange office since World War II. Japan's application for membership in the United Nations was vetoed in the Security Council by the Soviet Union, but on May 29 Japan's participation in the International Monetary Fund and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development was approved. On June 24. NYK resumed liner passenger service to Europe, via the Suez Canal.
On January 2, Japan rejoined the International Whaling Convention and sent two fleets to the Antarctic, thus resuming whaling operations for the first time since World War II.
Police convert to defense force
Meanwhile, simultaneously with the coming into force of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, the Japan-U.S. Mutual Security Agreement came into effect, laying the groundwork for U.S. forces to remain in Japan to guarantee Japan's security against aggression. The administrative agreement spelling out details governing the status of U.S. troops under the security treaty was negotiated in January when Dean Rusk flew in from Washington as special envoy, and was formally signed on February 28.
With Allied blessings, Japan set about rebuilding its police power and capability to discourage military aggression. In October, the National Police Reserves, created under a directive issued by the Occupation forces, became the National Self-Defense Force and joined the Maritime Safety Force as Japan's weapon against aggressors under the jurisdiction of an agency in the Prime Minister's Office.
Japan also assumed jurisdiction over the entry and departure of airplanes on March 10, took over the authority to administer export trade on March 15, and about the same time lifted the ban on the use of zaibatsu names and trademarks.
Leftist groups were becoming increasingly militant, and Yoshida provided them with a new target in the Anti-Subversive Activities Bill being prepared for presentation to the Diet. May Day came and developed into a bloody demonstration of left-wing strength. Slogan-shouting, flag-waving demonstrators marched onto the grounds in front of the Imperial Palace, which had been banned to them by government order, and clashed with 5,000 police armed with pistols and tear gas. Two demonstrators died, 1,500 were injured, and 1,232 people were arrested. Despite their opposition, the law giving the government powers to suppress subversive elements passed the Diet on July 4.
Correspondents were out in full force reporting the demonstrations which began with orderly parades but quickly disintegrated into unruly mobs as they fought police with stones and bamboo spears. This was only the beginning of a series of strikes and protest gatherings that punctuated the year. In subsequent demonstrations held in many parts of Japan on May 30 and afterward, demonstrators added Molotov cocktails to their arsenal, setting fires to automobiles. Police began arming themselves with metal shields to go with their helmets.
Snap election called
On the political front, three anti-Yoshida conservative factions joined to form the new Progressive Party and persuaded Mamoru Shigemitsu, the highly respected former foreign minister who signed Japan's surrender in 1945, to head the party as president. Yoshida met the challenge by carrying out a snap dissolution of the House of Representatives on August 28. After negotiating and gaining the support of Ichiro Hatoyama, the "grand old man" who had re-entered the political wars after his depurge, he and his supporters expelled the principal leaders of the opposition bloc from the party. In the elections that followed on October 1, the Liberals captured 240 of the 436 seats, giving Yoshida the majority he needed to form his fourth cabinet on October 30.
Two weeks later, however, the prime minister lost his right-hand man, Hayato Ikeda, like Yoshida crusty and outspoken, but lacking Yoshida's finesse. During interpellations in the Lower House on November 12, Ikeda, trade and industry minister in the new cabinet, said it "can't be helped" if small and medium businessmen fail or commit suicide as a result of the cabinet's austerity policy. To still the uproar that followed, Ikeda was forced to resign.
Incomes rise
During the 1952 year, the average personal income of the Japanese rose to 98.6% of the 1934-36 average. With an eye on Japanese businessmen traveling overseas, a BOAC Comet flew into Tokyo's Haneda Airport on July 8. It was the first jet passenger plane to be seen in Japan. December saw the start of reorganization of the Japanese banking system.
Sports and entertainment
In sports and entertainment, Japan continued its comeback. On July 19, the Fifteenth Olympic Games opened in Helsinki with Japan participating for the first time since the 1936 Olympiad in Berlin.
On May 19, Yoshio Shirai defeated Dado Marino of Hawaii for the world flyweight boxing championship. It was Japan's first world boxing title, and Japan was in high spirits. On December 20, Japan opened its first bowling center, in Aoyama, Tokyo. On the musical stage, tiny Eri Chiemi, with word-perfect miming of the English words she learned from the U.S. Armed Services radio broadcasts, sent "Tennessee Waltz," "Shanghai Lil," and "Geisha Waltz" to the top of the hit song charts as screaming teenagers cheered her on. Among the young set, motor scooters were all the rage.
