Under U.S. rule: the occupation of Japan; after World War II, American forces set out to rebuild a shattered, defeated nation.

• Author: Price, Sean
• Position: Times past

Not long after Japan surrendered to the U.S. and its allies, ending World War II, newspapers ran a photograph of U.S. General Douglas MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito standing together. To American eyes, it looked like a ho-hum snapshot. To the Japanese, it was more devastating than the surrender itself.

In the Shinto religion, Japan's largest, the Emperor is regarded as a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, and thus divine. None of Hirohito's 73 million subjects were permitted to stand above him or meet his gaze. Yet here was an "American devil," as wartime propaganda put it, casually towering above him.

Seeing the picture, 17-year-old Tsutsumi Ayako felt numb, she later remembered:

The Emperor [looked] so small ... I felt that I didn't want to look at it, and didn't want to talk about it. It was like something painful which is better not to touch. That pain began a revolution. Japan's proud military had been crushed, its cities lay flattened--two by atomic bombs--and the economy was shattered. Nearly 3 million people were dead and 9 million homeless. Now the Emperor had been humbled.

The U.S. and MacArthur, appointed the country's military governor, were about to help the shell-shocked Japanese. MacArthur had been given emperorlike powers to rebuild and reshape Japan's ancient civilization. The U.S. occupation, from 1945 to 1952, worked so well that Japan quickly re-emerged as a world economic power.

MacArthur, a five-star general, had a famously large ego to match his new title--Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, or SCAP. The acronym stood for both MacArthur himself and his headquarters staff. They worked out of Tokyo's Dai Ichi, or "Big Number One" building. Like the photo with Hirohito, he used it to tell rank-conscious Japanese, "I'm in charge."

FAMINE'S DOORSTEP

MacArthur saw his first task as feeding millions of starving civilians. Japan's small rice crop had been hoarded by farmers for sale on the black market. The U.S. poured in $2 billion in economic aid over six years, Even so, city dwellers lived on famine's doorstep until 1948.

Daikichi Irokawa, then a student at Tokyo University, recalled:

[I] ate a lot of feed that was meant for cows, pigs, and chickens.... We dug up the university lawn and planted yams ... On Sundays we searched for grasshoppers. Prewar Japan was an oppressive place, strongly nationalistic and militaristic. The press was censored, and ruthless secret police snuffed out dissent. A few business...