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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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
