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.
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).
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.
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
