• Began Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) broadcasts for the Occupation troops over their own radio network. Japanese listeners as well began to hum the popular tunes played over stateside programs like "The Make-Believe Ballroom."
• On October 5, started publication of the Pacific Stars and Stripes for members of the U.S. Armed Forces. When the British Commonwealth Forces moved into Japan the following year to help with the occupation duties, publication began also of the daily BCON.
(An offer by the Soviet delegate to provide forces to take over occupation duties in Japan's northern island of Hokkaido was summarily refused, with thanks, by SCAP.)
In parallel with these measures, SCAP set about the task of eliminating militarism and democratizing Japan by:
• Dissolving zaibatsu companies, purging their leaders, and breaking up their monopolistic ties.
• Proclaiming a press code on September 10 to promote freedom of speech, religion, and thought. Under this directive, the wartime Domei News Agency was dissolved on October 12 and replaced on November 1 by Kyodo News Service and Jiji Press.
• Issuing a broadcast code on September 20 and applying the press code to broadcasting.
• Ordering five basic reforms: Lowering from twenty-five to twenty the age for the right to vote; establishing equality between sexes, including woman suffrage; giving labor the right to organize; reforming education; removing from office those who collaborated with the military; and democratizing the economy.
• Releasing three thousand political prisoners, including Kyuichi Tokuda, leader of the Japan Communist Party, and lifting the ban on the party and its organ newspaper Akahata (Red Flag).
• Drafting a new democratic constitution.
• Removing Shintoism from state control.
The priorities for the correspondents arriving in Japan were, first, the description of Tokyo after the war and, second, the story of A-bombed Hiroshima.
Those who rushed down to Hiroshima to file the first report from the atom-bombed city were far too late. The first story had been filed on August 27 by Leslie Nakashima, United Press. Les had an advantage the others lacked, however. The Hawaii-born Nakashima had been a resident of Japan since 1934 and had worked for both the Japan Times and UP. Stranded in Japan after Pearl Harbor, he had gone to work for Domei, where Frank Tremaine had contacted him in September 1945 even before the Allied landing. Frank learned that Les had visited Hiroshima on August 22, two weeks after the bombing, and had an eyewitness account of the destruction ready to go.
The No. 1 Shimbun, in reproducing his dispatch in the Club's twentieth-anniversary issue, reported, "It was the first eyewitness description of Hiroshima to reach print in the West. Nakashima's dispatch was widely published in August 1945 and was quoted in Time Magazine." Les returned to the UP and became an FCCJ member. He was for many years UPI's top sportswriter in Asia, covering the Melbourne, Rome, and Tokyo Olympics from 1956 to 1964, and the Asian Games in Jakarta in 1962.
The drama in Les' story was that just a few days before the bomb was dropped, he had moved his wife and two daughters out of Hiroshima, planning to return to move his mother who lived two miles from the city center. Les arrived at Hiroshima Station and found, "What had been a city of three hundred thousand population had vanished. So far as I could see there were skeletons of only three concrete buildings still standing in the city's chief business center."
He finally reached his mother's home and found it crushed as if by a giant fist. Fortunately, his mother had been working in the fields about two miles to the southeast of the city, and survived unscathed. Les and his mother made their way out of Hiroshima. After that, UP sent Les to Hiroshima on every bombing anniversary to report on the changes in that city and its people.
In 1945, news transmissions were by Morsecasts, and the news agencies, in particular, had their hands full. AP, UP, INS, and Reuters worked twenty-four hours around the clock distributing their worldwide news to Japanese subscribers, and, in the case of all but Reuters, photo services as well. Operators were required to take down the dot-and-dash transmissions and convert them into English. Desk men expanded them into full-fledged news stories. At the same time, the agencies had to compete with the "specials" on the stories out of Japan, as well. They couldn't wait for SCAP's Public Relations Office (PRO) handouts to write about occupied Japan.
One of the first news breaks came when SCAP sent MPs on September 11 to the home of General Hideki Tojo, the wartime prime minister, to arrest him for war crimes. They had to push their way through a noisy crowd of reporters and cameramen trying to interview him. When the MPs appeared, Tojo withdrew into his house and shot himself with a .32 revolver. An excerpt from the book The Fall of Japan, written by William Craig and reprinted in the March 15, 1997, issue of No. 1 Shimbun, describes the chaotic scene with Tojo slumped still conscious on a chair in his study, and photographers moving his head and crossing and recrossing his legs for better camera angles. "His body was just a limp doll to position, an object to photograph," Craig wrote.
Tojo survived his suicide attempt, and stood trial before an Allied military court which found him guilty of war crimes. He was hanged in 1948. Prince Fumimaro Konoye, former prime minister, was more successful when the war crimes staff came to take him into custody on December 17. He died, taking poison with his own hand.
Two other stories which the press pursued avidly were an interview with Emperor Hirohito and running down the mystery of Tokyo Rose. The latter, an Asian counterpart of Europe's Axis Sally, was alleged to have alternately taunted and tantalized men of the Allied Forces with sexy broadcasts over NHK.
The first interviews with the Emperor were nailed down by Frank Kluckhohn of the New York Times, and Hugh Baillie, president of the UP, according to a report by UP's Frank Tremaine carried in the Press Club's No. 1 Shimbun (October 15, 1995). The Japanese ruler replied to their written questions on September 25. "The catch," Tremaine wrote, "was that Kluckhohn would receive his answers shortly before Baillie's appointment so he would be able to get his story out first . . . ." Then the Emperor met the UP chief and after handing him the written answers to his questions, talked to him for twenty-five minutes about golf, baseball, and biology.
Two days later, on September 27, the Emperor called upon General MacArthur at the U.S. Embassy, something unheard of in the annals of Japan. Hearing of the meeting, the correspondents descended on the embassy to cover the story, only to be held back by bayonet-wielding U.S. Marine guards. A U.S. Army cameraman was on the scene to photograph the two together after the conference.
The Domei News Agency received the photograph through the SCAP PRO and distributed prints to the major Japanese newspapers, which splashed it on their front pages only to have the censors step in again, only this time it was the Japanese. The Cabinet Information Board termed the photos "disrespectful" and ordered that the distribution of these newspapers be stopped.
Domei
