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).
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."
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.
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.
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
