Free Supreme Commander by Jr. Seymour Morris Page B

He recognized that the atom bomb had made the “traditional concept of war” obsolete. He reminded the Japanese that he came only as Matthew Perry had, to open up Japan and help it become a major power. He assured them that their talents, properly utilized, could lead to a new era of “dignity,” “liberty,” and “relief from fear.”
    Nobody listened more intently than the eleven Japanese in the radio room of the destroyer taking them back to shore, Toshikazu Kase doing his best to provide a simultaneous translation. “Is it not rare good fortune,” asked Kase when the speech was finished, “that a man of such caliber and character should have been designated as the supreme commander who will shape the destiny of Japan?”
    In the meantime, crowded into Admiral Halsey’s cabin after the speech were all the Allied commanders. They wanted a drink. “If ever a day demanded champagne, this was it, but I could serve them only coffee and doughnuts,” recalled Halsey. The Missouri , per MacArthur’s orders, would be a dry zone.
    Upon arriving back in Tokyo, Kase prepared his written report for Shigemitsu to deliver to the emperor. At the end of the report he raised a question: Whether it would have been possible for Japan, had it been the victor, to embrace the vanquished with a similar magnanimity? His answer was no. Returning from his audience with the emperor, Shigemitsu told Kase that Hirohito agreed.
    Thinking about what MacArthur had tried to communicate on board the Missouri , Kase concluded: “We were not beaten on the battlefields by dint of superior arms. We were defeated by a nobler ideal. The real issue was moral.”

5
    â€œDown but Not Out”
    If we allow the pain and humility to breed within us the dark thoughts of future revenge, our spirit will be warped and perverted into a morbidly base design. . . . But if we use this pain and humiliation as a spur to self-reflection and reform, and if we make this self-reflection and reform the motive force for a great constructive effort, there is nothing to stop us from building, out of the ashes of our defeat, a magnificent new Japan.
    â€” NIPPON TIMES
    (on the surrender ceremony)
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    F OR YEARS THE Japanese people had been spoon-fed a panoply of lies breathtaking in audacity. According to the relentless propaganda of the militarists, Japan had conquered the Philippines, the Netherlands East Indies, New Guinea, Australia, Hawaii, even the West Coast of the United States.
    The specifics would have astounded even those masters of lies, the Nazis and the Soviets. The Japanese navy was on a roll. Midway was just a blip on the horizon. As the American navy attempted to cross the Pacific, the Japanese propaganda drums continued their relentless beat of fabrications. Believing what they were being told, hundreds of Japanese villages erected Charen Kensho-tu —monuments to the victorious dead—as though Japan’s enemies had already surrendered. Little did they know that most Japanese warships were resting on the bottom of the deep Pacific. The more specific the claim, the more outrageous the lie. Okinawa, the government announced, would be the war’s sekigahara (decisive battle). (Certainly it had better be, given that Okinawa was only one day’s sail from the southern Japanese islands.)
    Lies, once started, inevitably grow into bigger lies—impossible lies. The Japanese Imperial General Headquarters, after the news of the American invasion of Okinawa, insisted there was nothing to worry about, the 180,000 American soldiers and marines had been allowed to land so Japanese kamikazes could sink their supporting ships and isolate the invaders on the island, where they would be destroyed.
    When U.S. broadcasts announced on June 21 that Okinawa had surrendered, people in Japan realized that the war had not been going like they were being told and invasion of the homeland was