Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (133 page)

On August 19 the Home Ministry ordered local government offices to establish “Recreation and Amusement Associations” (RAA), funded from the National Treasury. Almost overnight advertisements appeared in the national press and elsewhere informing women in need that food, clothing, and accommodation would be provided to all who volunteered to join. At the inaugural declaration of the RAA, crowds formed on the Imperial Plaza and an estimated fifteen hundred young women gathered on the street outside the temporary headquarters of RAA at Ginza 7 ch
me (in the vicinity of today's Matsuzaka Department Store). There they listened as an RAA official read a declaration stating:

To deal with possible hostile reaction to such measures, the Home Ministry's Police Bureau, on August 23, issued secret “guidelines” for police officials throughout the country, warning them not to permit public criticism of the senior statesmen or of the emperor's decision to surrender. The imperial rescript had been issued, now the country must move forward, complying with the emperor's orders and “reflecting on one thing only: that, ultimately, we troubled the emperor's heart.” The guidelines warned the police to “prevent disputes with the Allied forces by staying cool, calm,
patient, and prudent under all circumstances. By doing these things we shall assuage the emperor's uneasiness and maintain the world's trust.” Should any incident occur with the Allied armies, “it will be difficult to prevent the state and race from being destroyed.”
⁹

Opposition from the defeated armed forces, however, proved largely nonexistent. Morale among troops stationed on the home islands was low before August 15; over the next three weeks it disintegrated. Reports forwarded to the office of Privy Seal Kido from prefectural governors and police officials told of units demanding immediate discharge, of kamikaze pilots loading their planes with food and other supplies and flying off to their home villages, of army doctors and nurses in a hospital in Kagoshima competing with one another to flee their posts, leaving their patients behind. As scenes of military disorder, theft of military stocks, and general unruliness within the armed forces multiplied, civilian respect for the military collapsed. Men in uniform quickly found themselves objects of widespread civilian contempt.
¹⁰

Higashikuni also had to contend with massive theft of government stockpiles of raw materials and goods by civil and military officials at the highest levels. Secret police reports in late July and August indicated thousands of examples of government bureaucrats in the Munitions Ministry, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, as well as the Army and Navy Ministries engaging in black market activities and covering up the sale of government stores by large corporations.
¹¹
The one-sided way civil officials implemented wartime economic controls, arresting only small-scale black marketeers, exacerbated matters, and contributed to the nation's demoralization and its worsening economic plight.

Higashikuni was utterly unable to offer solutions to the problem of the burgeoning black market. In fact, at the start of his cabinet, he appointed as one of his cabinet councillors Kodama Yoshio, a black marketer and right-wing partisan. “Hereafter we're going to obey the commands of General MacArthur, so let's move smartly,”
Kodama told a Diet member from Tsu City who visited him in his Tokyo mansion in early September.
¹²
Kodama took charge of establishing sex and entertainment clubs for the occupation forces. So too did his friend Sasagawa Ry
ichi, leader of the wartime National Essence League, who was not a cabinet councillor. Sasagawa's American Club in Minami Ward, Osaka, was one of the first to open in that city soon after American soldiers began arriving.
¹³

Wittingly or not, the Higashikuni cabinet was laying a basis for the postwar reestablishment of ties between politicians, bureaucratic officials, and the underworld. The prime minister's main concern, however, was to win public support for the
kokutai
preservation movement. To that end, he appointed, as his second “cabinet counselor,” Lt. Gen. Ishiwara Kanji, a man who had retired from active duty in 1941 and thereafter defined himself as an opponent of the T
j
cabinet. Ishiwara was the leader of a new millenarian movement—the T
'A renmei (East Asia League)—whose branches were spreading from northern Honsh
to southern Kyush
.

Like Higashikuni, Ishiwara blamed the defeat on the degeneration of the Japanese people's morals. In his T
'A renmei speeches he hammered home three themes: The gods had willed Japan's defeat in order to make the nation repent and renew its belief in the
kokutai
; the military, the police, and the bureaucracy, by oppressing the people, bore great responsibility for what had happened; and the nation should “surprise the enemy by carrying out reforms” before occupation rule even began. Abolish armaments for the duration of the occupation; get rid of the special higher police; end restrictions on speech and belief. And for the next several years, while in retreat from the world, Japan should learn as much as it could from the United States and imitate American ways.