American Shogun: General MacArthur, Emperor Hirohito, and the Drama of Modern Japan, and: America's Japan: The First Year, 1945-46 (review)

The two books under review are both written with "verve" and cover at least a small portion of the same geography and chronology. Robert Harvey is a former British parliamentarian, journalist, and amateur historian. Grant Goodman retired recently after a long and distinguished career as professor of Japanese history at the University of Kansas. Goodman's interest in Asia blossomed as an adolescent and turned into a lifelong affair when he enlisted in the U.S. Army shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack and volunteered to become a Japanese language specialist, a choice which defined not only his military service but the next fifty years of his professional life. Harvey, who has previously written popular histories of the American Revolution and wars of liberation in colonial Latin America, found the lives of MacArthur and Hirohito an attractive lens through which to view and interpret what he calls the "drama of modern Japan." By its nature, Goodman's memoir is more original and enlightening, while Harvey's account is more familiar and predictable.

Goodman's charming, if slender, account of his wartime service in the Allied Translator and Intelligence Service (ATIS) recreates the idealism and excitement of a Midwestern boy whose main knowledge of Asia came from collecting stamps and reading the frightening newspaper headlines about Japan's aggression. The author explains how hundreds of volunteers studied Japanese, mainly from Japanese-Americans, at the University of Michigan before shipping out to the just-liberated parts of the Philippines in 1944 where he interrogated Japanese POWs.

Arriving in Japan a month behind General MacArthur in September 1945, he was astounded to see the damage done to most cities by the American air assault. How, he wondered, "could a country so totally destroyed have continued to fight a war with America" (p. 36), and how would it ever recover? In spite of wartime propaganda which demonized both occupier and occupied, and the grinding poverty in which most Japanese lived, Goodman notes the enthusiasm of both GIs and ordinary Japanese to share thoughts, ideas, and hopes. Nearly everyone Goodman met engaged him in conversation, extended offers of friendship, and sought additional contact with "gaijin" (foreigners). Occupation personnel traveled everywhere and had virtually no hostile experiences. On this point, Goodman's one-year snapshot is echoed by other military personnel who served later in the Occupation.

As a language officer, Goodman translated press stories and other documents for Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. One of his most interesting jobs was translating the literally thousands of letters of advice sent by ordinary Japanese to the Occupation chief. MacArthur ordered that all letters be translated within one day of receipt and responded to when appropriate. Some correspondents reported on the location of war criminals in hiding, others sought guidance in organizing democratic institutions, and some could only be described as "love letters" to the General.

Goodman stresses, correctly I believe, that MacArthur saw himself less as an emperor or conqueror than as a sort of colonial viceroy on the British model. He would bring order, progress, and civilization to a backward land. The American experience in the Philippines, where he had served for a decade, was his model. MacArthur's greatest personal disappointment, according to the author, was the failure of Christianity to take firmer root in Japanese soil, despite what would now be called politically incorrect efforts to promote the faith. Although Goodman does not mention it, later in the Occupation MacArthur's staff routinely inflated the number of purported Christian converts to humor their boss.

Goodman heaps praise on nearly every aspect of the Occupation and those engaged in it...