The Magazine of The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan

August 2020 · Volume 52 · No. 8

RENOVATE AND RESETThe 75th Anniversary of Peace in the PacificSingapore’s
Japanese Interlude

Kohima: turning
the tides of war

Occupational
Hazards

Walter Sim

Monzurul Huq

Robert Whiting

02 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

In This Issue

August 2020 · Volume 52 · No. 8

Contact the Editors
no.1shimbun@fccj.or.jp

Our August issue commemorates Japan’s acceptance of the Potsdam
Agreement in the “Jewel Voice Broadcast” (Gyokuon-hōsō) at noon on
August 15 1945. The Imperial line and Japan itself were renovated, thenreset for the Cold War in Asia.

Publisher FCCJ
Editor Peter O’Connor
Designer Julio Kohji Shiiki, tokyographics.com
Editorial Assistant Naomichi Iwamura
Photo Coordinator Michiyo Kobayashi
Publications CommitteePeter O’Connor (Chair), Suvendrini Kakuchi,
Monzurul Huq, Robert Whiting, David McNeill
FC C J B OA R D O F D I R EC TO R S
President Khaldon Azhari, PanOrient News
1st Vice President Monzurul Huq, Daily Prothom Alo
2nd Vice President Robert Whiting, Freelance
Treasurer Mehdi Bassiri, Associate Member
Secretary Takashi Kawachi, Freelance
Directors-at-Large
Mehdi Bassiri, Associate MemberPeter O’Connor, Freelance
Akihiko Tanabe, Associate Member
Abigail Leonard, Freelance
Kanji Gregory Clark, Freelance
Associate Kanji Vicki Beyer, Associate Member
Ex-officio Thomas Høy Davidsen, Jyllands-Posten
FC C J C O M M I T T E E C H A I R S
Associate Members Liaison
Keiko Packard, Yuusuke Wada
Compliance Kunio Hamada, Yoshio Murakami
DeRoy Memorial Scholarship Abigail Leonard
Entertainment Sandra Mori
Exhibitions Bruce Osborn
Film Karen Severns
Finance Mehdi Bassiri
Food & Beverage
Robert Kirschenbaum, Peter R. Tyksinski
Freedom of Press Abigail Leonard
House & Property Khaldon Azhari
Human Resources Khaldon Azhari
Information Technology Yuusuke Wada
Library, Archives & Workroom
Koichi Ishiyama, Suvendrini Kakuchi
Membership Andrew Horvat, Peter O’Connor
Membership Marketing Abigail Leonard
Professional Activities
Tetsuo Jimbo, David McNeill
Public Relations Dan Sloan
Publications Peter O’Connor
Special Projects Haruko Watanabe
Foreign Press in Japan Robin Harding

THE FRONT PAGE
03

From the President
By Khaldon Azhari

FROM THE ARCHIVES
04

James Abegglen,
Guru of Japanese Management
Charles Pomeroy

F E AT URES

War Ends: The 75th
Anniversary Issue
05

Singapore’s Japanese interlude
Walter Sim

08

Kohima: turning the tides of war

11

The Yurakucho Tapes

16

Occupational hazards: the Canon Agency
in post-war Japan

Monzurul Huq

Roger Schreffler

Robert Whiting  

20

Aftermath
Veteran members look back on post-war days
Suvendrini Kakuchi

CLUB NEWSThe Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan
Marunouchi Nijubashi Building 5F
Marunouchi 3-2-3 Chiyoda-ku Tokyo 100-0005
Tel: (03) 3211-3161 Fax: (03) 3211-3168 fccj.or.jp
Published by the FCCJ All opinions contained within
Number 1 Shimbun are those of the authors. As
such, these opinions do not constitute an official
position of Number 1 Shimbun, the editor or theForeign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.
Please pitch and send articles and photographs, oraddress comments to no.1shimbun@fccj.or.jp
Read the Number 1 Shimbun online:
fccj.or.jp/number-1-shimbun

23

New members
New in the library
Exhibitions

24

The war photography of Stanley Troutman

Cover photo: Tokyo Bay, Japan, September 2, 1945. Presided over by General Douglas MacArthur,
troops, top brass and reporters prepare for surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri, ending the
Pacific War and WWII. Photo David Douglas Duncan, US Marine Corps/Torin Boyd Archive.

INDEX03 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

THE FRONT PAGE

From the President
Dear members,T

he life of my 2019-2020 Board has been inadvertently
extended by nearly two months, thanks to the complicated election system imposed on us by the Shadan
Hojin Law. A certain voting percentage is now essential
for any candidate to be elected. When members fail to vote in sufficient numbers, the Club and our staff consume much-needed
resources on establishing the new Board of Directors.
I have been serving on the Board for more than four years. In
every one of those years, we had to meet the challenge of an
insufficient quorum when we held GMMs and elections.
My own and past Boards have racked our brains for ways
out of this situation. How can we encourage members to votefor officials of their own Club? One suggestion was that thosemembers who fail to vote in any one year should lose their rightto vote in the following year. On one occasion we were unable
to reach the required quorum to approve the annual budget. We
eventually succeeded, but our electoral negligence brought usvery close to shutting down all Club operations.
This year, as we await the result of the third round of elections
to the Board, we have been obliged to set up a Caretaker Board
comprising both new and outgoing Board members until we
can elect our full 2020 Board. Once all new Members of theBoard of Directors are elected (we're still one Director short), my
Board's term will formally end.
The electoral issue must, I believe, become a priority forthe new 2020-2021 Board. We must find an effective way to
encourage members to participate in Club elections. Therefore
my final request as FCCJ President is: please help your club use
its resources wisely by exercising the privilege of your vote.

A historic moment
All of this comes at a historic point for our host country. August
15th marks the 75th anniversary of the “Jewel Voice Broadcast”,
in which the Showa Emperor broadcast Japan’s acceptance of
the Potsdam Agreement, effectively ending World War Two and
the Pacific War. Many of our correspondents have been hard atwork covering events related both to the August 15th statement
and to the formal signing of the Terms of Surrender on September 2, as illustrated so graphically on the cover of this issue of
No.1 Shimbun.
Today, the news in Japan refers to the anniversary of the endof the war in a tone of relative calm. When I first arrived here
about thirty years ago, I was astonished by the intensity andextent of the coverage of events related to WWII in this region.
No missiles were brought out of their silos in East and Southeast
Asia, but the media war was waged with extraordinary ferocity,and some of these media battles have yet to die down.
Intense debate continues over issues such as the so-called“Comfort women”, territorial disputes, the interpretation ofhistory, and the meaning and value of official apologies. The

names given to wars and to “incidents”, even whether the usage
should be the “End of WW2”, as often used in Japan, or “Japan's
surrender”, just as often used elsewhere, remain hot-button
issues. And of course, Yasukuni, where a visit by a sitting Japanese Prime Minister on the 15th of August is still a hugely controversial issue. Sometimes it seems that these issues have been in
the headlines forever.
After a few years as a correspondent here, my sense of surprise turned into no surprise at all. I became one of the herd ofreporters obliged to cancel all personal commitments in thefirst three weeks in August in order to focus on the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and on the War Memorial Service held in the Budokan ceremony rendered so majestic by theattendance of the Japanese Emperor.

Our own story
Going back to the dawn of the FCCJ, this Club was established bycorrespondents who had been embedded with the Allied forces
and then became a force of their own during the Occupation. Rightfrom the start in October 1945, these men and women made ourClub an essential forum for freedom of speech and expression in
Japan. As will be seen in our October issue, the 75th Anniversaryof the founding of our Club marks a historic milestone.
I have been granted the pleasure and been privileged by thehonour of serving either as a Member of the Board of Directors
or, more recently, as FCCJ President for twenty-one of the twenty-two years of my membership of our Club.
Along with all fellow members, the current Caretaker Board
and, I am sure, every member of the imminent 2020 Board, I thankthe membership, the staff and the news makers who have joined,
attended, and worked so hard to maintain the FCCJ as one of theworld’s great press clubs. Like all of us, I look forward cheerfully
to celebrating our Centenary twenty-five years from now.
● Khaldon Azhari, President September 2016 - June 2018;
December 2019 - presentINDEX04 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

FROM THE ARCHIVES

James Abegglen,
Guru of Japanese Management

FCCJ

James Abegglen, Japanese management guru, author, and educator, pausing for thought during his presentation at the FCCJ on April 9, 1998. Abegglen was afounding member of the Boston Consulting Group’s Tokyo Branch, with which he was affiliated from 1967 to 1983, who then established his own Asia Advisory
Service (AAS) on top of publishing insightful books on Japanese business and teaching at universities. Looking on expectantly is Anthony Rowley (Business
Times), the Club’s 1st Vice President.

CHARLES POMEROYB

orn in Michigan in 1926, James C. Abegglen’s firstencounter with the Japanese came while serving
as a U.S. marine in WWII, during which he suffered
wounds on Guam and Iwo Jima. At the war’s end, he
was assigned to Japan as a researcher for the Strategic Bombing Survey before moving on to a higher education at the
University of Chicago. After receiving a Ph.D. in anthropology
and psychology, he returned to Japan in 1955 on a Ford Foundation fellowship to study organizational differences between
U.S. and Japanese businesses. Building on this knowledge, hewent on to write key books acquainting the U.S. and the restof the world with Japanese business management, structure,and strategies.
Abegglen’s pivotal books include The Japanese Factory:
Aspects of Its Social Organization (1958); Kaisha, The Japanese Corporation (1985, co-authored with George Stalk, Jr.);and Sea Change: Pacific Asia as the New World Industrial
Center (1994). Familiar with U.S. business and industry fromco-authorship of several earlier books, his 1958 revelations

on factory employment practices highlighted Japan’s huge
differences. He then edited, wrote, or contributed to anumber of scholarly books on Japanese business management and economic relations prior to his 1985 Kaisha that
explained Japanese business methods and strategies. His
1994 Sea Change presented opportunities and risks for corporate America in doing business in East Asia.
As an educator, Abegglen taught at the University of Chicago and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S.
and Sophia University in Japan. He also served as a trustee at
the International House of Japan. Married to a Japanese, hebecame a permanent resident from 1982 and in 1997 became
a Japanese citizen. Many of these details can be found in
an interesting interview Abegglen gave to Bradley Martin:
https://www.japaninc.com/article.php?articleID=152.
Abegglen’s career ended on May 2, 2007, when he died ofcancer. His legacy lives on, however, especially at the International House of Japan to which he willed his book collection.
● Charles Pomeroy is editor of Foreign Correspondents in Japan, ahistory of the club that is available at the front desk.

INDEX05 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

F E A T U R E ›› War Ends: The 75th Anniversary Issue

SINGAPORE’S
JAPANESE
INTERLUDEWALTER SIM

M

y late grandfather was a chattyman, happy to talk about anything and everything, except for
his experiences during WorldWar II. His uncharacteristic reticence meant
he would eventually take these anecdotes to
his grave when he died more than 20 years
ago when I was a young boy, try as I did to
pry wartime stories from him. My grandfather
might not have been a national war hero, but
it would have been tough for him – or anyone
old enough to remember the war – to relive
the three torrid years when Singapore lost its
name and became Syonan-to (Light Of The
South) during the Japanese Occupation.

Power in the PacificSingapore had, by the time of Japan’s successful invasion, been long-established as
an important Pacific port, and the key to
British naval power in the Pacific, making ita crucial capture for the Imperial JapaneseArmy. The Empire of Japan ruled the islandfrom February 15, 1942 to August 15, 1945.
Among other projects, the Occupation
authorities had set up on the territory abranch of the infamous biological warfare
Unit 731 to study how to weaponise theplague, as well as malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and diseases like cholera, typhus
and smallpox.

February 15, 1942: LieutenantGeneral Arthur Percival (1887-1966)
commander of ‘Fortress Singapore’
faces his captor, Lieutenant-General
Tomoyuki Yamashita (1885-1946),
Commander of Occupation forces.

INDEX06 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

F E A T U R E ›› War Ends: The 75th Anniversary Issue
SINGAPORE’S JAPANESE INTERLUDE

Language and power
The Straits Times, the newspaper which I workfor, this year marking its 175th anniversary, spent
three years renamed as the Shonan Times andthe Syonan Shimbun. One notable headline fromthe archives had read “Nippon-Go Popularising
Week: Your Future Depends Upon A Knowledge
Of Nippon-Go”, with a story that chastised Singaporeans for “having made no effort to commence
upon the study” of the language.
“It is difficult to understand the failure on
their part,” the report said. “It is quite possiblethat they are unable to understand that without a knowledge of Nippon-go, their futures tothis country will be beset with difficulties, hardships and even unemployment and destitution,
unless they are content to work as unskilledlaborers or coolies.”

As seen on television
I was just 11 years old when my grandfather
passed, but even by then I had become acutely
aware of how an older generation of Singaporeans must have suffered at the hands ofcaptors that had seen themselves as superior
to other races.
Part of this was due to popular culture: Singapore television ran an inspired-by-real-events
blockbuster serial, The Price Of Peace (1997)
that was produced by the state-run broadcaster. The prime-time drama featured scenesof suffering, air raids and brutal torture and,most memorably, the rape and humiliation of awoman who was paraded naked in public.

Total Defense

7-15 February 1942: Japan takes
Singapore in 8 days: The Straits
Times becomes the Syonan Times
and The Shonan Shimbun.

National movements, as well as education, ofcourse also played a major role in my learning
about the war. Singapore practices the concept of “Total Defense”, an annual event held
on February 15 to mark the surrender of theisland's then-British occupiers to the Japanese.
“Total Defense” comprises six prongs – military,
civil, economic, social, digital and psychological – and is annually commemorated with aceremony and emergency preparedness drillsin schools as well as the sounding of the islandwide Public Warning System.
Singapore's Defense Ministry says on its website: "We mark Total Defence Day on 15 February
every year as a reminder of what could happen
to us if we cannot defend Singapore ourselves,
and to strengthen our resolve to keep Singapore
safe, secure, and sovereign."

The S word
Social studies and history textbooks in schools
now dwell at length on the fall of Singapore andthe role that war heroes played in standing up
to their captors. While the city-state has assiduously forged a forward-looking bilateral relationship with Japan, and does not take as muchumbrage as China or South Korea over thorny
issues like comfort women and political visitors

The Shonan Shimbun ca. May 1943.
Japanese lessons had to be taught
and publicised in the language ofthe enemy.

INDEX07 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

F E A T U R E ›› War Ends: The 75th Anniversary Issue
SINGAPORE’S JAPANESE INTERLUDE

Shonan Shimbun, Saturday Supplement ca. October 1942.

to the Yasukuni Shrine, the wounds of wartime still run deep.
Such sensitivities came to the fore when Singapore marked
Total Defense Day in February 2017 by officially proposing to
adopt Syonan Gallery: War and its Legacies as the name of arevamped war museum. The proposed change of title sparked
such an uproar that the Singapore government, in a rare move,
backpedaled days after its opening.
The National Library Board, which runs the gallery, had reasoned that the new name would serve as a reminder of “howbrittle our sovereignty can be, as Singapore lost not only its
freedom but also its name during the Japanese Occupation”.
The very idea that the Gallery, a national institution, could
use the word Syonan provoked a huge backlash, including fromwar survivors and descendants of war heroes who declaredthat under this new name the Gallery would be glorifying adark period of history. Two days later, on February 17th, Cabinet
Minister Yaacob Ibrahim apologised, and said that the feelingsof those who suffered terribly and lost family members during
the Japanese Occupation must be honoured and respected.
In turn, a much less offensive name was chosen for the Exhibition, one I’m sure my late grandfather would also have approved:
Surviving the Japanese Occupation: War and its Legacies.

become desensitized to the name, never having experienced
the war at first hand and given that my only interaction with theword Syonan had come from emotionless school textbooks.
But my initial apathy was most certainly not unusual, especially among the younger generation. Given the rapidly dwindlingranks of those World War II survivors who actually witnessed
the atrocities committed during the Occupation, I cannot help
but wonder whether the lessons and the legacy of the war willsurvive the test of time among future generations.
Meanwhile, the international order that was built on the ruinsof the Second World War looks increasingly fractured and fragile
as flare-ups around the world only serve to raise the question:
what has the world really learnt since August 1945?
First-hand survivor testimony, as well as photographs andartifacts in museums, have helped recreate the experience,but are such evocations doomed to turn into dusty memories
competing for attention with the information clutter most of us
face each day?
And as memories fade, are governments right to risk awakening old ghosts, as ours did in Singapore? How long should
sleeping dogs be let lie? Such questions will not go away. Rather,
they will gain urgency with the passage of time.

The power of memory
Truth be told, I was surprised that the use of a single word could
have evoked such a reaction three years ago. Perhaps I had● Walter Sim is the Japan Correspondent for The Straits Times,
Singapore.

INDEX08 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

F E A T U R E ›› War Ends: The 75th Anniversary Issue

KOHIMA: TURNING
THE TIDES OF WAR
ANOTHER VIEW OF WW2 IN ASIA
MONZURUL HUQW

ith the fall of Singapore on
February 15 1942, the British
Indian Army surrendered
and was quickly divided andtransported to two locations by the Japanese
Occupation forces. All officers, mostly British,
alongside a handful of commissioned officersof Indian origin were marched to Changi.
All NCOs (non-commissioned officers), rank
and file troops and a few Indian officers wereordered to gather at Farrer Park, a nearby
sports ground.
Here at Farrer Park unfolded a drama thatwould lead to the creation of an Indian nationalarmy set up with a mission to free India from
British colonial subjugation under the guidance of the victorious Imperial Japanese Army.
Around 40,000 men gathered on the sports
grounds at Farrer Park, not knowing exactly
what awaited them. Most expected to become
prisoners of war, but none had any idea of what
their new masters would expect of them.

The mission
A microphone was fitted on the second floorof the stadium building. Shortly afterward aJapanese officer, Major Iwaichi Fujiwara, made aspeech in Japanese, later translated into English
and then Hindustani, of welcome. Fujiwara
asked the assembled troops not to think ofthemselves as prisoners of war but as friends ofJapan. He finished by announcing that he wasturning the command of all officers and men
over to Major Mohan Singh, the most senior of
the captive Indians.
Mohan Singh then came to the microphone
and announced that together they were forming an Indian national army that would fightto free India and asked his audience if they
were ready to liberate their motherland fromMilitary positions
during the Battleof Kohima

British colonial rule. It took a few minutes for the audience toreact. However, quickly seeing a new door of opportunity toserve mother India in a meaningful way, they lifted their arms
in jubilation.
This is how the Indian National Army (INA) was born fromthe defeated remnants of the British defense of Singapore, aforce that would march alongside Japanese troops all the wayINDEX09 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

F E A T U R E ›› War Ends: The 75th Anniversary Issue
KOHIMA: TURNING THE TIDES OF WAR

Subhas Chandra
Bose (extreme right)
and other leadersof Greater East Asiawith Tojo Hideki,
Tokyo, autumn 1943

to Imphal and Kohima, the eastern gateway
to India, where their adopted dreams would
either come to nothing or, looking back, cometo a premature end.

Uncertainty anddisillusionment
Indians today see the formation of the INA asa symbolic act that paved the road to the independence that was achieved roughly five years
after it got into marching order. However, thejourney of the INA was from its inception roughand uncertain as it became clear that the roleof the INA was not that of an independent military force designed to free India from Britishcolonial rule, but rather a supporting arm of theImperial Japanese Army.
This uncertainty and frustration led to thefall from grace of Mohan Singh, who, not longafter taking nominal command of the INA wasarrested by the Japanese and imprisoned until
Singapore was retaken by British Indian troops

Subash Chandra Bose inspecting his troops before thefinal engagement at Kohima

in September 1945. Singh’s political successor,
Ras Behari Bose, was then entrusted by theJapanese to lead the INA. The INA became
disillusioned with Bose, but the INA’s sense of
mission was restored by the arrival in 1943 ofSubash Chandra Bose, a charismatic Indian politician who left Hitler’s protection in Germany
to take over the command of the INA.
The INA was welcomed in India once Subash Bose took the helm. But this enthusiasm
was not uniform, as by then the independent
movement within India was already gaining
momentum under the leadership of the Indian
National Congress and the All India Muslim
League. Given this uncertainty and theseschisms, when the INA finally reached Imphal
along with the advancing Japanese troops, few
in India expected it to achieve its declared aim
to overrun India’s cities starting with Calcutta.

The British retrench
The British Indian Army had by now regrouped
under the command of Field Marshall William
Slim. Slim had suffered defeat in 1942 when his
battalions retreated before Japanese forces in
Burma. However, by the time Japan launched
the invasion of India through Imphal and Kohima in March 1944, Slim, under the overall guidance of Lord Mountbatten, since August 1943
Supreme Allied Commander in South-East Asia,
had already cleared the way for a greater battle
by bringing in American and Chinese support.
Until the spring of 1944, the Japanese hadplanned a breakthrough into Assam, affording
Subash Bose an opportunity to encourage aINDEX10 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

F E A T U R E ›› War Ends: The 75th Anniversary Issue
KOHIMA: TURNING THE TIDES OF WAR

Subhas Chandra
Bose meeting
Hitler in Germany,late 1930s

popular rising against the British, thus clearing
the way to securing Japan’s western flank.
And there in Kohima, the remote hill town
base of the British deputy commissioner, thetwo sides clashed for a second time, the firsthaving resulted in the routing of British defenses in Singapore and Burma.
This time the overstretched Japanese could
not match the advancing British Indian troops
supported from the air by the Americans, andthe Japanese were soon on the retreat. Barely
a month after their arrival in Kohima, Japanese
troops were cleared from Kohima Ridge on
May 13 and the battle of Kohima ended onJune 6, 1944. There is a direct line from Japan’s
retreat from Kohima to the formal surrender of
the Japanese in Singapore in September 1945.

Midway on land
For the Imperial Japanese Army, Kohima stands
with the Battle of Guadalcanal as a turning pointin the Second World War. It is the terrestrial
equivalent of Japan’s June 1942 defeat at Midway in the Battle of the Coral Sea. Despite thesupport of the INA, fighting on their native soil,
Kohima put an end to Japan’s dreams of gaining the mastery of Asia.
As for the Indian National Army, Kohima
was an absolute end-point. Never again would
its Indian fighters support Japanese troops
against British imperialism. Many INA fighters

Subhas Chandra Bose meeting Tojo Hideki in Tokyo,
ca. 1943

were taken prisoner, later to face trial for treason, by virtue of an Act that British India had toabandon in the face of mass national protest.
By then, the INA had gained a mythical statusas patriots of a supreme order.
By the law of unintended consequences,
history reshapes the popular mind in unimaginable ways. To many Japanese, Kohima
has re-emerged, not as a nightmarish routfor Indo-Japanese forces but as a symbol offriendship. In 2019, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
declared his intention to set foot in Kohima to
pay respect to the fallen Japanese. The visit
was cancelled, but the intention and its meaning were unmistakable.
● Monzurul Huq is Tokyo Bureau Chief of the
Bangladesh daily Prothom Alo and a former
President of the FCCJ.

INDEX11 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

F E A T U R E ›› War Ends: The 75th Anniversary Issue

THE

YURAKUCHOTAPESJames Abegglen with (left to right) Kaoru Ogimi, Jack Russell, and moderator Roger Schreffler

HOW THE FCCJ INVITED AND
RECORDED OVER 50 WITNESSESTO A WORLD AT WAR
ROGER SCHREFFLER

F

alling in 1995, the 50th was the last big-anniversary chance
to assemble a good sampling of high-profile witnesses
to the war in the Pacific, and the FCCJ’s Professional
Activities Committee went all out to make it happen.
We kicked off the series with Saburo Sakai, a much-decorated
Japanese fighter pilot who told us that on June 9, 1942, he hadalmost shot down a plane carrying one Lyndon Baines Johnson,then on a fact­finding mission to Southeast Asia for President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Speaking at the Club on November 25, 1994, Sakai raised eyebrows in the audience when he criticized Emperor Hirohito for
his role in Japan’s decision to go to war. “He was commander
in chief," said Sakai, standing straight and resolute. “We fought
because he gave the decree to go to war. It doesn’t make sense(for him) not to bear any responsibility...”The programme
Our speaking programme ran for nearly nine months until earlyAugust 1995 and was widely followed in foreign and domestic
media. Besides Sakai and other retired military and naval personnel, the series included a former Japanese Prime Minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone, and a future South Korean president, Kim Dae Jung.
Among the other speakers were several POWs from Allied nations
who were visiting Japan seeking redress. The programme served
as a prelude for two follow-up series involving Club members. InINDEX12 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

F E A T U R E ›› War Ends: The 75th Anniversary Issue
THE YURAKUCHO TAPES
total, including members, commentary by more than 50 individuals, foreign and Japanese, can be found in the FCCJ’s archives.
Gebhard Hielscher, Japan correspondent for the Suddeutsche Zeitung and FCCJ President (1994, 1995) enthusiasticallyendorsed the project. The late Naoki Usui, a former Club president, took an active interest and personally approached many of
the retired Japanese officers who agreed to share their stories.

Nuclear ambitions
Imperial Japanese Navy pilot Zenji Abe, a squad leader in theattack on Pearl Harbor, followed Sakai’s talk. Other notable witnesses included Yasuo Yamamiya, a naval officer who spent thelast six months of the war fighting in the jungles of the Solomon
Islands, followed Abe. Next up was Tatsusaburo Suzuki, an Armylieutenant colonel who was involved in Japan’s own nuclear
weapons programme.
A physicist by training, Suzuki was one of a team of 50 scientists who worked on the bomb project, which never came close
to completion. Would Japan have used the bomb? Suzuki, whobroke many years of silence by coming to the Club, told us themost likely targets would have been U.S. air bases in the Pacific.

Fighter pilot Saburo Sakai (standing) with former FCCJ President Naoki Usui

“Suicidal”
Also speaking was Masamichi Inoki, founder and chairman of
the Research Institute for Peace & Security. In 1939, Inoki, as ayoung researcher at Mitsubishi Economic Institute, was tasked
to conduct a special study on America's war-making capabilities
for the Mitsubishi Economic institute.
Inoki’s study concluded that a war with the West would beunsustainable, noting that in steel production alone, the U.S.
produced 60 times more pig iron than Japan.
“To start a war with such a major power would be suicidal,”Inoki reported in 1939, adding that the U.S. had accounted for
30% of Japanese trade, imports and exports, since the Meiji
Restoration. After the war, Inoki went on to become President of
the National Defense Academy.

Naval “arrogance”
Masataka Chihaya, a former naval officer who survived thenaval battle of Guadalcanal and the sinking of his ship, the battleship Hiei, admonished the Japanese navy for its “arrogance”
and openly criticized Fleet Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, whoengineered the attack on Pearl Harbor, for not having a propercommand structure in place.
Chihaya, who went on to become a renowned naval historian,traced Japan’s catastrophic defeat at the battle of Midway inearly June 1942 to a series of crucial tactical errors committed
two months earlier during the Battle of Ceylon (today’s Sri
Lanka) on April 5, 1942. Although Japan won a victory, its naval
commanders failed to implement corrective measures.
Chihaya made a strong case for the significance of British,
not American, success in breaking the Japanese code andBeate Sirota Gordon

setting the stage for the U.S. victory at Midway where four Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk, effectively sealing Japan’s
eventual defeat.
“But even if Japan had won at Midway, it would have suffered asimilar defeat by the end of the year,” said Chihaya. He knew what
he was taking about. After all, Chihaya had collaborated with historian Gordon Prange on two standard works: At Dawn We Slept:
the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor and Miracle at Midway.

The firebombing
For the American side, we hosted U.S. Air Force major general(Retd.) Earl Johnson, who spoke on March 9, one day before the50th anniversary of the devastating Tokyo firebombing raid of
March 10, 1945. As a young officer and navigator, Johnson flew
on one of the lead B-29 bomber aircraft on the raid.

INDEX13 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

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THE YURAKUCHO TAPES
During March 1945, the U.S. conducted five major raids in four
cities, with the raid on Tokyo the deadliest, killing an estimated
88,000 to upwards of 100,000 people, a toll greater than theinitial fatalities reported in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There, as more victims succumbed to burns and exposure
to radiation, the cumulative total in Hiroshima eventually
exceeded total fatalities in the March 10 Tokyo bombing.
Yoshimasa Yamamoto, eldest son of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, shared memories of his father and corrected parts of therecord about the man whose biography was titled The Reluctant Admiral. Yamamoto provided intimate details of his final
meeting with his father at a family dinner just one week before
the Pearl Harbor attack.

Two women on women’s rights
We were fortunate to recruit two significant contributors towomen’s rights in post-war Japan: Shizue Kato and Beate Sirota Gordon, both playing important roles in changing modern
Japan with respect to the rights of women.
Kato, a legend in the woman’s rights movement in Japan,
expressed her disappointment with the Occupation’s failure tofollow through on efforts to “democratize” Japan, not just for
women but for all Japanese citizens.
“When the war ended,” she said, speaking shortly after her 98th
birthday, “the Occupation was prepared to teach us democracy.
They brought in many specialists, including specialists in thelabor movement. They started off well. Unfortunately, war brokeout on the Korean peninsula (with) their work only half complete.”
Fifty years after the end of the war, Kato, an early advocate offamily planning in Japan (in the war’s immediate aftermath familyplanning consisted mainly of terminating pregnancies by abortion), lamented that Occupation goals still had not been achieved.
The Austrian-born Gordon, who as a 22-year-old collaborated
on the women’s rights provisions of the Japan’s postwar Constitution, told us how she was recruited to be part of the team towrite the “people’s rights” section and was then tasked to write
what eventually became Article 24, stipulating that “marriage
shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes andmaintained through mutual cooperation with the equal rights
of husband and wife.”
Gordon had grown up in Japan, her family having moved
from Austria in the late 1920s. She matriculated at Mills College
in Oakland, CA, in 1939 and was estimated to be one of the fewer
than 50 non-Asian Americans (she naturalized in 1945) who
were fluent in Japanese.
Gordon provided rich and colorful detail about her role ingetting the women’s rights provision into Japanese constitution. From March 4-5, 1946, when the Americans and Japanese
finalized the constitution in a marathon 30-hour session,
including the future role of the Emperor (Article 1) and therenunciation of war as a sovereign right (Article 9), Gordon
took a seat in the room.

Former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone (standing) with Naoki Usui

Masatake Chihaya, Commander, Imperial Japanese Navy

Colonel Charles Kades, deputy chief of staff to General Courtney Whitney, one of Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers
General Douglas MacArthur’s most trusted advisors throughout the Occupation, brought Gordon in to provide interpreting
assistance to the American interpreting pool.
As expected, there was heated discussion about the futurerole of the Emperor. “It just went on and on,” Gordon recalled.

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THE YURAKUCHO TAPES“We didn’t get to the Rights and Duties of the People chapter(Article 3) until 1:00 a.m. At 2:00 a.m. (this would have been 16
hours after the meeting began), we finally got to Article 24. And
all hell broke loose. The men on the Japanese side were just as
vehemently opposed to the Women's Rights provisions as they
had been about the Emperor.
“At this point, Colonel Kades, who had seen that the Japanese
were favourably inclined towards me - they didn’t have thefaintest idea I was involved with the writing - turned to them andmentioned me by name. I was still “Sirota” at the time.”“‘Miss Sirota,’ Kades said, ‘has her heart set on the Women's
Rights provision. Why don't we pass it?’ The Japanese side
was stunned. I mean, imagine in a discussion about a constitution to bring in such a personal matter? And they passed it.”
In 1997, Gordon published her autobiography, The Only Woman
in the Room: A Memoir of Japan, Human Rights and the Arts.

Speaking for Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Takashi Hiraoka and Hitoshi Motoshima, the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki speaking at a joint session, openly criticizedJapan’s “war of aggression” in Asia while declaring that theatomic bombings on their cities, which targeted mostly civilians, to be illegal.
Estimates vary, but it is generally believed that between 70,000
and 80,000 died on the first night of the Hiroshima bombing andas many as 40,000 in Nagasaki. By December 1945, the totals
had grown to around 140,000 and some 70,000 respectively.
Motoshima, who five years earlier had survived an assassination attempt for publicly criticizing the Emperor, declined tocomment on the Emperor’s war responsibility, although he wasto do so at the Club ten years later at the 60th anniversary of
the war’s end.
“Because General MacArthur created a situation whereby
the Emperor didn’t have to assume responsibility, the question
remains unresolved. But legal issues notwithstanding, he bears
moral responsibility for what Japan did in his name, in violationof the Constitution, on the Korean peninsula.”

Members remember
In a second series of talks, over 30 Club members discussed
the firebombings in Tokyo, Yokohama and Nagoya, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the Tokyo tribunals in which one
witness, Takashi “Tak” Oka, former Christian Science Monitor
correspondent, served as a court interpreter, and the “comfort
women” issues. Others included the son of an Indian merchantfamily, Chuck Lingham, who emigrated to Japan in the 1935
only to be recruited into the Indian liberation movement during
the war; Kaoru Ogimi, son of a Japanese diplomat father andIrish-Welsh-British mother, who was one of a small number offoreign wives of Japanese diplomats to remain in Japan during
the war, and a Russian doctor, Eugene Aksenoff, who tended tocondemned Japanese Class-A war criminals at Sugamo Prison.

In addition: three of Japan’s most prominent interpretersin the postwar period, namely Sen Nishiyama, Masumi Muramatsu and Ichiro “Ken” Urushibara. Nishiyama went on to
become interpreters for U.S. Ambassador Edwin Reischauer.
The Club members’ programme also included Frank Gibney,
author, editor, FCCJ life member and interrogator of Japanese
POWs, and Koichiro Ueda, deputy chairman of the JapaneseCommunist Party.
James Abegglen, (see Charles Pomeroy’s portrait in thisissue), who was wounded in the battles of Guam and Okinawa,
and in September 1945 posted to Hiroshima with the U.S. military survey, discussed a range of issues ranging from spending
Christmas Day, 1945, in Hagi, Yamaguchi Prefecture, to watchingthe “victor’s justice” war crimes trials.
“I have no sympathy with those trials. If we were to discuss
the causes of the war, they are more complex than American
mythology would normally have it. I should've thought we'dhave done better to have simply ended things and gotten on
with our lives,” he said. “But the immediate cause of the war
was the U.S.’s blocking of Japanese supplies, oil supplies inparticular, which was designed to turn Japan off. I don't thinkat that point Japan had much choice, not to say that the Americans turning off the supplies of metals and oil was withoutsome justification.”
Abegglen, who eventually became a naturalized Japanesecitizen, was credited with coining the well known expression“lifelong employment” to characterize the Japanese employment system.

“Tokyo Rose” debunked
Former Club President Ken Ishii, a veteran newsman who spent
more than 20 years with the International Herald Tribune,
worked at Radio Tokyo toward the end of the war alongside Iva
D’Aquino, née Toguri, shed light on the myth of “Tokyo Rose.”“To try and stay out of the army,” recalled Ishii, “I got a job at
Radio Tokyo (where) Iva Toguri and I sat across from each otherat the same table for the year I was there. My job (like hers) wasan English-language propaganda announcer, translating Japanese Imperial Army Headquarters communications to English
and broadcasting them and other bits of news on what mostpeople know as the “Tokyo Rose” program. Afterwards I was
sent to the United States to testify at her trial.”
D’Aquino, born in Los Angeles to Japanese immigrants, wasvisiting an ailing relative when war broke out and stranded
her in Japan, leading her to seek employment at Radio Japan.
She was convicted of treason in 1949 and sentenced to 10
years in prison, earning release after serving six years. Ron
Yates, a former Tokyo-based correspondent for the Chicago
Tribune who conducted extensive interviews with D’Aquino
before her death at age 90 in 2006, told me that Ishii was
one of 12 witnesses for the prosecution at her trial, but said
nothing incriminating.

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F E A T U R E ›› War Ends: The 75th Anniversary Issue
THE YURAKUCHO TAPES“Having known her, I am sure she was never conscious of thesubject of treason. We never discussed it. We were all trying
to make a living, stay out of the war, stay alive. Everything was
rationed. It was tough. And that’s all she was doing. That’s what
we were all doing,” he reflected. “I am very convinced she neverbelieved she had done anything against the United States. She
was a victim of publicity by the Hearst publications and Harry
Brundige and people like that who wanted a story. She was all
too willing to talk about it. And, as she reportedly admitted toBrundige at the time with a smile: “the one and only.”

No more monsters“Looking back, I thought that this is what the war was about.
And this was a good lesson at the end of the war because
I recognized them (the Japanese soldiers) not as Japanese
but as people.
“And I remember the feeling of relief that I didn't have tobelieve in monsters anymore, that I didn't have to believe insomething uncomplicated like a Manichaean of ‘all bad, allgood’, that the end of the war returned my humanity to me. And
for that I will always be grateful.”Richie shared the stage with Edward Seidensticker, who alsocame to Japan with the U.S. military in the early postwar period
and went on to become a noted scholar and translator. Seidensticker, a marine, shared in highly personal terms his thoughts
about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as it
related to bringing the war to an end.

Donald Richie, widely known as an authority on Japanese cinema, arrived in Japan on New Year's Day,
1946. Richie spoke about his experiences“Looking back,during the early years of the Occupation asa young military officer who would sneak off
National leaders on
I thought that thisto movie theaters, prohibited for U.S. militarynational issues
is what the war
personnel, where he developed many of his
The issue of the “comfort women” was disearliest insights into Japanese society andcussed briefly from a policy standpoint by
was about. And
culture.
future South Korean president Kim Dae Jung
this was a goodHis first encounter with Japanese, inand former Japanese prime minister Yasuhilesson atfact, took place several months earlier, inro Nakasone. Our focus was on the issue of
Shanghai in September 1945, when he faced
legally sanctioned prostitution in Japan by athe end of thea contingent of the Japanese army. His recolman on the streets of Tokyo during the Occuwar because
lections of that encounter are worth noting.
pation as well as a Japanese journalist, Akira
In uniform and armed with a sketchpad,
Murase ,who wrote a book on the subject.
I recognized themRichie was drawing pictures of the countryJack Russell, whose job when he arrived(the Japaneseside outside Shanghai when behind him hein 1946 as a 19-year-old military policeman
heard soldiers marching.
was to patrol the brothels for the U.S. milisoldiers) not as“It was larger than a platoon,” he recalled,tary. Working in concert with U.S. militaryJapanesebutas“maybe even a company. I supposed it was
authorities, the Japanese government had
the beginning of some kind of repatriation.
set in motion the National Prostitution Order
people”
I expected (them) to be bright yellow, havedesigned specifically to cater to Occupation
buck teeth and wear glasses, smiling continforces. Russell, who would go into journalism
uously. Treacherous really, having been told what we were told following his two-year stint, explained that part of the rationale
during the war.
was to protect the health of U.S. forces.
“‘Clank, clank, clank, clank.’ I could hear them behind me.
Russell also shared his recollections about American racism
They didn’t have guns. But I saw an officer at the rear [who] toward Asians at the start of the war, a legacy of the Chinese
I thought probably had a sword. And of course I already knew Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Act of 1924.
what Japanese ‘did’ to prisoners or people they’d discovered“We went into that war a pretty racist country,” said Russell.
were the enemy. And nominally I was still the enemy.
“We came out of the war, albeit slowly, with an improved sense“I didn’t turn my head. I kept right on sketching, brave as of tolerance. We met people. It wasn’t a nice way to meet them.
I was. Then everything came to a stop. And right behind me was Nevertheless...”the man I took to be the officer. And he said something. I was
The Club has over 40 hours of digitized recordings in theso surprised to hear him say something and it obviously was archives. They’re all there today, a legacy for us all on the 75thin Japanese. I knew no Japanese, but I was so impressed that anniversary of the one of the greatest rifts between nations ofI remembered for years what the syllables had sounded like.
the 20th century.
“And when I finally learned Japanese, I finally knew what hehad said. He was looking over my shoulder at my sketch and ● Roger Schreffler is a business journalist who previously served
said “Nakanaka yoi” or “Not bad.” He was complimenting me. as Club President and five-time Chair of the Professional Activities
And then he marched off.
Committee at the FCCJ.

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OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS:
THE CANON AGENCY IN
POST-WAR JAPANThe author in 1962, aged 19 and working at the Elint Center

ROBERT WHITING

I

first came to Japan in 1962, in the U.S. military, assigned
to Fuchu Air Station in the Tokyo suburbs. I was 19 years
old. I was a trained electronic intelligence analyst working
in the Elint Center, a windowless bunker protected byarmed guards, under the joint supervision of the CIA, which was
making top secret U-2 spy flights over the Soviet Union and Red
China three times a week, and the National Security Agency,
which operated low-altitude flights and coastal surveillance
missions in those areas.
The Elint Center was an important cog in the overall US
defense scheme of things at the time. It was a primary target of
the Russians during the Cuban Missile Crisis. At one point duringthat 13-day stand-off our superior told us to write our farewell
letters home.
It was while working at the Center that I began to learn about
the extensive history of American intelligence operations inTokyo during the postwar era and came to learn about the Canon
Agency, thanks to a veteran warrant officer who knew Canon.
Later, after I had written Tokyo Underworld, I interviewed thelast two surviving Canon agents, Victor Matsui, a nisei from Los
Angeles and one-time amateur sumo champion of the UnitedStates, and Alonzo Shattuck, an ex-Army Sergeant from St. Louis.

GenesisThe Canon Agency was a Black Operations group that dated
back to the early days of the Occupation. Originally known as
the “Z Unit,” it was created in 1946, along with other groups, by
the G-2 Intelligence wing of the GHQ under General Charles Willoughby, who was alarmed by the advances of Mao Tse-tung’s
armies in China, the existence of a pro-Soviet North Korea, andan increase in demonstrations by leftist groups in Japan thatthreatened the country’s political stability.
Jack Canon had served in Borneo and Manila during WWII as
an explosives expert and became one of the first Americans toenter Tokyo after the war, arriving in September 1945 as a member of the 411 Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC).
Canon's mother was from Germany and he spoke fluent German. One of his first acts upon landing in the bombed-out capital
was to blow open the safe at the German Embassy, where hediscovered documents that showed the notorious Sorge spyINDEX17 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

F E A T U R E ›› War Ends: The 75th Anniversary Issue
OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS: THE CANON AGENCY IN POST-WAR JAPANring was still in operation. Canon took the papers to Willoughby
at G-2. Willoughby, also of German descent, then gave Canon his
own group to smoke out Communist spies in Tokyo.
Canon recruited 26 Euro-American, Japanese Nisei and Korean-American agents and trained them to conduct secret operations against the Soviet Union and communist sympathizers inJapan. The Canon group carried arms, made arrests and carriedout interrogations. It was one of a number of such groups in the
G-2 whose targets expanded with the creation of the Democratic
People’s Republic of North Korea and the Communist takeoverin China, events which helped transform the Occupation’s initial
goal from turning Japan into a peace-loving Switzerland of Asia
towards building it up as an Asian bulwark against communism.
Among many Canon Agency exploits was the 1948 infiltration of the newly established government of the DPRK, which,
Canon learned through underworld informants, was manufacturing heroin refined from opium fields in Manchuria, with theintention of flooding the Tokyo-Yokohama area with it.
“The DPRK regime had two goals,” Victor Matsui, who had
spent most of the war in an internment camp in Arkansas, told
me. “One was to sell as much of their drugs as possible in Japanand channel the profits to the Japan Communist Party. The otherwas to turn as many American soldiers as possible into heroin
addicts so they’d be unfit to fight in the war that was coming on
the Korean Peninsula, which broke out two years later in 1950.”
Until then, there hadn’t been a lot of heroin in Japan, exceptthat brought in from China by the ultranationalist Yoshio Kodama,
whose Kodama Kikan comprised of yakuza had plundered China
to fund the war effort back home. (It was Kodama’s wartime
treasure chest that had founded the Liberal Democratic party in
1955.) However, the DPRK project was much more ambitious.
The Canon people came up with a daring counterplan. Posing
as a yakuza gang based in Yokohama, under the leadership of a
Korean-American from San Diego named Young Hou, Canon’s
agents traveled to Pyongyang and struck a deal with the generals to distribute as much heroin as they could supply. They
returned to Tokyo and shortly thereafter, a North Korean fishingboat dropped off a dozen aluminum cans in a flotation device
at the mouth of Tokyo Bay. Each aluminum can weighed one
kilogram and bore the printed label, in English, Red Lion. Insidewere packages of 99.9% pure heroin. The agents picked up
the cans and took them to an office in Yokohama where they
unpackaged the heroin and weighed and measured it.
Alonzo Shattuck piloted the boat that picked up the heroin
canisters. As he told me, “The stuff was so powerful that just the
few puffs of powder that escaped into the air during this measuring process were enough to get everybody stoned.”
The agents, of course, did not want to deal the heroin, nor did
they want to reveal their operations, so they stored it and sent
word to the North Koreans that they had lost the shipment at
sea and requested another to be sent. That was a lot of heroin
to go missing.

Jack Canon, ca. 1946

The North Koreans sent another shipment, and another one
after that, but grew suspicious when no GI junkies immediately manifested themselves. So they cut ties with Young Hou’s
impostors and struck deals with a succession of real yakuza
gangs based in the Yokohama area. Soon heroin was being peddled on the streets of that city but cut as much as 20 times, withsome of the profits siphoned off to the JCP.
“By the end of 1948,” said Shattuck, “there were drugs all overthe place. There was a certain bridge in Yokohama where you
could buy heroin in any quantity you wanted. The dope wassubmerged underwater in waterproof packets attached to astring the dealer pulled up to fill your order.”After the real yakuza gangs took over distribution, the Canon
Agency mission became one of intercepting the clandestine
drug shipments. Violent shoot-outs between Canon’s men andthe gangs took place on beaches outside Yokohama, in publicparks, and sometimes even in deserted shrines and temples inthe small hours. In one battle at Yokohama’s Nogeyama Park,
Canon was wounded in the leg with a .38 caliber slug.
From 1948 on, narcotics manufactured in North Korea became
a fixture on the drug scene in the Tokyo-Yokohama area. Drugtrafficking was said to be worth more than a million dollars a
year, an enormous amount of money at the time.
Despite all the heroin flowing into the country, the drug neverreally caught on among the Japanese. As Matsui explainedit, heroin was a lethargy drug and Tokyo was a city on the go
where people worked dawn to dusk as much as seven days aweek. Speed was the perfect drug for a taxi driver, a night laborer, a student cramming for exams or a nightclub hostess.
Once the generals in Pyongyang figured this out, North Korea
was perfectly willing to manufacture and supply it to them in theform of crystal meth, which became Tokyo’s designer drug. ThereINDEX18 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

F E A T U R E ›› War Ends: The 75th Anniversary Issue
OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS: THE CANON AGENCY IN POST-WAR JAPAN
had been something called hiropon (Philopon), that was supplied
to soldiers, factory workers, pilots and others during the war by
the Japanese government, leaving many of them addicted andsuffering adverse side effects such as migraine and blackouts
because the drug was of such low quality. But the meth coming
out of North Korea, distributed by the Yamaguchi-gumi and othergangs, proved to be a better product and dominated the underworld market for the next several decades. It is still available
today, although China and Mexico are now the primary suppliersof crystal meth, synthetic cocaine and fentanyl.

The former Iwasaki House. Jack Canon’s office was on the second floor to therear of the building (Source: Wikipedia)

The Hongo House
The headquarters of the Canon Agency for most of the Occupation was the Hongo House in the former Iwasaki Estate(Kyuu-Iwasaki-tei) built on a palatial scale, like something out of
the Great Gatsby. On the sprawling 17,000 acre premises were
three buildings: a two-storey western style mansion, a large
44-room Japanese-style house and a billiard house. There wasalso a garden with a lawn, stone monuments, stone lanterns,
a hand washing basin and a tennis court. Originally the homeof Baron Hisaya Iwasaki, eldest son of the founder of the Mitsubishi Group and its third president, the Iwasaki Estate wasdesigned by the British architect Josiah Conder (1852-1920) andcompleted in 1896.
Canon’s Headquarters in the Hongo House had the feel of an
old European hotel. On the first floor was a big dining room witha fireplace, a big kitchen with a pantry, a library, nine bedrooms
and four assorted smaller rooms.
Canon’s office was upstairs overlooking the garden. According to his interpreter Vic Matsui, Canon had decorated the garden with empty coke bottles, tin cans, beer cans and light bulbs,
and used them for daily target practice, often firing at themfrom his desk with the gold plated pistol he always carried withhim. Once he took aim at an intruding crow and broke a store
window in Ueno’s Ameyoko-cho, a busy market area, causing aminor scandal.

Guns, midnight assignations and thethird-degree
Canon knew more about firearms than anyone else in Japan.
According to Matsui, “He was a real gun nut. He had the Shooter’s Bible memorized. You could wake him up at 3 o’clock in themorning and ask him what the weight, length and velocity of a
German Walther PK was and he could tell you, even half asleep.”Canon, in fact, would later invent the Glaser Safety Slug andwould die when a gun he was building went off and sent twobullets into his chest, thereby demonstrating that the slug was
not all that safe after all.
“Canon was a night person,” Shattuck told me. “All theagents were. His routine started after dark when he went out
to meet undercover operatives, collaborators and rival agents,
and also perform recon on suspected Communist activities.
He’d assume a false name and go to bars and nightclubs, andreceptions where he thought he could get the information he
was looking for.”“The ladies liked Canon. A big guy,
burly, good looking, with a highforehead. He was the kind of guy who
could easily strike up a conversation
with a beautiful woman whenever hewanted. It was a talent he used a lot
with the Russian ladies. He would getthem to invite him to Soviet receptions,and once there, he’d secretly take photosof people he thought were spies.”
One of Canon’s assets was a Japanese clerk at the Russian
Embassy who provided him with secret reports including photos and details of communications equipment the Russians
were using in Tokyo. Canon also turned a Japanese field operative working for the Russians to his side and supplied him withmisinformation in the form of documents and tape recordings
to dispense to his contacts.
When he wanted to send real information, Canon encrypted
his messages, recording and compressing them, so that they
could be sent over the radio in bursts lasting a matter of seconds. The receiving operator would record the message, thenplay it back at slower speed. Meetings with contacts usually
took place in the middle of the night in public parks like the
Hibiya in Tokyo and Nogeyama in Yokohama.
The Agency also used ethnic Korean yakuza, like Hisayuki
Machii, boss of the Tosei-Kai, one of the top Tokyo gangs, tosuppress leftist demonstrations in and around the city.

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F E A T U R E ›› War Ends: The 75th Anniversary Issue
OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS: THE CANON AGENCY IN POST-WAR JAPANIn the basement of the Hongo House was a utilitarian officewith a desk and a cot in the corner that looked like it had once
been a bedroom or servant’s quarters. There Canon and his
people would interrogate known or suspected Communist
sympathizers they had arrested.
“They held one guy down there,” said Shattuck, “a leftist journalist named Kaji Wataru, who was also a spy for Red China, forfive months. Canon kidnapped him off the street. He was lucky
in a sense because he had tuberculosis and our doctors cured
him of it, but only after he had given it to a couple of our agents.”
The Canon Agency held onto Kaji until December 1951 as the
Occupation neared its end and they had to leave. According
to Shattuck, “They didn’t know what to do with him. So theyturned him over to their Japanese counterparts in intelligence,
who didn’t know what to do with him either. They held on tohim for a while and then released him. He went straight to thepolice and the newspapers picked it up and it became a national scandal. That’s how the Japanese public first learned of theexistence of the Canon Agency and that it was a Black-Ops
group. The leftists went nuts. They blamed all sorts of unexplained events on us, like the train wreck at Matsukawa in 1949.
But they didn’t know what they were talking about.”

Closing down
The beginning of the end for the Canon Agency came shortly
before the Occupation closed down. A CIA representative simply walked in one day —appropriately clad in a trenchcoat andfedora — and announced that all military intelligence operations in Japan would thenceforth come under the CIA’s control.
Said Shattuck later, “It was a complete fiasco. The people
they sent over from Washington couldn’t find their ass withboth hands.”
There were many resignations as a result, starting with Jack
Canon, who immediately asked for a transfer and was sent to
Fort Hood, where he wound up working for the CIA anyway. H.L.
Hunt, one of the Kennedy assassination’s suspected financiers,
was another. (Canon was spotted in Dallas, with Willoughby, on
the day Kennedy was shot.)
Shattuck also resigned and stayed on in Tokyo to go into thenight club business, opening up the Latin Quarter in Tokyo’s
Akasaka district in 1952 with the Manila-based gambler Ted
Lewin and another Canon Agency veteran, Saburo Odachi, a
10th dan judo black belt from Southern California. Later Shattuck and Odachi opened Club 88, a popular Roppongi wateringhole. Victor Matsui went on to work for the CIA in Southeast Asia.
The CIA, however, did prove to be effective in its own way,
despite the deprecations of Canon, Shattuck and others. The
Agency had paid the LDP one million dollars a month throughmost of the 1950’s and 1960’s, using trusted American businessmen as go-betweens. Among them were executives from Lockheed, the aircraft company then building the U-2 and negotiating
to sell warplanes to the newly set-up Japanese self-defense forces.

The CIA also helped get Nobusuke Kishi, a former ClassA War Crimes suspect, and descendant of a samurai family,
elected to the presidency of the Liberal Democratic Partyand subsequently the post of Prime Minister. Kishi (maternal
grandfather of Japan’s current prime minister, Shinzo Abe)was notorious for his brutal rule of the Japanese puppet
state of Manchukuo in Northeast China in wartime, using
yakuza thugs to keep Chinese workers in line, and his lavish
spending amid much drinking, gambling and womanizing.
Kishi was released from Sugamo Prison in 1949 on the very
day General Hideki Tojo and others were hanged, under anagreement with GHQ whereby Kishi would work with theAmericans to pursue conservative interests in exchange forpolitical and financial support.
As Prime Minister of Japan in 1960, the flop-eared Kishi
oversaw the Diet ratification of the extension of the Mutual
Security Treaty, originally signed in 1951 despite massive public
opposition in Japan, allowing for the stationing of U.S. troops on
Japanese soil. Kishi also allowed the Americans to secretly store
nuclear weapons on military bases in Okinawa.
Following the end of the Occupation, new U.S. intelligence agencies came into operation. One was the National Security Agency,
established by U.S. President Harry S. Truman in 1952 and funded
and overseen by the Secretary of Defense, which co-managed
my duty station, the Elint Center. Two others were the DefenseIntelligence Agency, which Defense Secretary Robert McNamara
created in 1962 after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and the National Reconnaissance Office, set up in 1962 to build spy satellites.
But the CIA, with its monetary pipeline to the highest levels ofgovernment, was the most active U.S. agency in Japan. At thetime, no-one was privy to everything that was going on. Somepeople knew about the connection between the CIA and theyakuza but hardly anyone knew about the pipeline between the
CIA and the ruling LDP.
And no one knew about the operations of the Canon Agency. All records were destroyed and the activities of the groupremained secret for a long, long time until Canon granted aninterview to NHK decades later in 1977 and the aforementioned
Young Hou wrote the memoir “Kyanon Kikan Kara No Shougen”,(Bancho Shobo, 1973), a work noted for its exaggerations. Jack
Canon shot himself on March 8, 1981, the first victim of his own
invention, the Glaser Safety Slug, at his home in Maclean, Texas.
Matsui passed away in 2016 but Alonzo Shattuck is still alive andresiding in Fountain Hills, Arizona.

● Robert Whiting’s Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Lifeof an American Gangster in Japan was first published in 1999 and isavailable in paperback from Penguin Random House (Audio version
also available). It is currently under option to Legendary Global. The
Canon Agency will be explored in greater depth in a forthcoming
English edition of his Tokyo Outsiders (Kadokawa Bunko, 2004).

INDEX20 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

F E A T U R E ›› War Ends: The 75th Anniversary Issue

AFTERMATH
VETERAN MEMBERS LOOK BACK ON POST-WAR DAYSSUVENDRINI KAKUCHI

The Ginza, Shimizu, ca. 1946, looking towards Shimizu Bridge and Hongo-cho (photo by Yamanashi Toshihiko).

Jun Takahashi

V

eteran FCCJ Associate Member Jun Takahashi was
11 years old when Japan surrendered in August
1945. As impoverished and uncertain as all Japanese at that traumatic time, Jun’s experience of growing
up illustrates the complexities of life during the American
occupation. Against the backdrop of impoverishment andwar-weariness that gripped the country, Jun’s experience ofgrowing up reflects the complex relationship the Japanese
had with their new masters.
Living in Shimizu, a port town close enough to the shores of
the Pacific Ocean to be spared the worst of the Allied bombing,Jun kept up his schooling but developed an obsession withsweets, even dreaming of candy.
“Life was basic then and the very thought of having an ice
cream represented an impossible luxury. So I only salivated on
the possibility of eating one,” he mused when we spoke recently.

The extended Takashi family managed a small pharmaceuticalcompany in which Jun’s father was employed.

Getting by
Like most of his friends, Jun, the eldest of 6 children, also worked
part-time in Shimizu port delivering packages to trucks to supplement the family income. Food was scarce and malnutrition
was rampant. Several uncles had died fighting in Manchuria. Yet
Jun remembers, despite the enormity of the losses, the publicmood was stubbornly grounded to look ahead. Even on thoserare occasions when questions about the war were raised, thestandard explanation was that Japan had lost because the military pursued the wrong strategy.
The public mood reflected a resistance when it came tofinding a deeper meaning in the personal suffering and theslaughter of 3 million Japanese who had sacrificed their lives
for beliefs now discredited under the new schooling systemestablished by the Americans, Jun explained.

INDEX21 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

F E A T U R E ›› War Ends: The 75th Anniversary Issue
AFTERMATH

Jun Takahashi (tallest, back row, right) aged 16, and family, Shimizu City, 1950

Jun Takahashi on good form at the FCCJ

English lessons

Victors and subjects

Jun credits his love of English for playing a central role in his
survival. For example, being able to visit the United States asa Fulbright fellow where he studied film and the arts, and hisformer two marriages to American women. That precious talent
was nurtured by his mother who had imposed a love for the
English language that she taught by using Japanese senbei
rice crackers. “I took to the lessons like a duck to water. English
opened the door to ex citing paths in my life,” he said.
Buoyed by his English ability, Jun absorbed the new cultureof freedom that was emerging. The family had moved to
Kanda, Tokyo, and Jun attended school where remnants of
the old discipline were rigidly imposed, even though his own
particular resentment, bowing to the Emperor each morning
had been discontinued.
At home, children still hesitated to question the authorityof the father, who was still revered and treated with the same
respect as before the war. Much of this eased for the teenage
Jun when he attended bible studies at the local chapel. His
American teacher taught differently, encouraging students to“ask Jesus any question”, while also encouraging friendship.
“I entered a world of living English, a culture that was notpossible in Japanese society. I made friends quickly and invited
my GI friends to meet the family,” he said. Jun recalls the warm
welcomes given to the Occupying forces. His grandmother evenspoke to them in English.

Still, there was no denying the differences between the Japanese and the foreign victors, who were regarded as superiors
for their affluence and higher quality of life. The difficulties
implicit in relation with Occupation personnel permeated Jun’s
feelings as he watched children following GIs, pretty Japanesewomen draped over their arms. As a student at then left-leaning Waseda University, Jun opposed the US-Japan Security
Treaty and dabbled with communism, a personal quest for
many Japanese youth grappling with the numerous politicalcontradictions and scandals shaking Japan in transformative
post-war years.
Jun joined the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Japan in1973 when he was employed as marketing head for Reader’sDigest. Founded as a gathering place for foreign journalists toreport on Japan it was first located in the Mainichi Newspaperbuilding in Takebashi and then moved to the Dai-ichi Semi
building in Hibiya. The Club was a hive of activity where Japanese members gained access to foreign opinions and ideas
over drinks at the bar.
Seventy-five years later, Jun believes this critical role continues to attract Japanese members to the Club.
“Japan may now be an important global player in international affairs. Even more reason why the FCCJ remains aplace for us to deepen our understanding of the world,” hepoints out.

Setsuya Kobayashi

S

etsuya Kobayashi’s member card number is KA48, making him one of the earliest members of the FCCJ. Now 87,
Setsuya’s long membership is witness to the rich historyof the club, a legacy founded by the journalists and buttressedby the many Associate members at the core of our Club.
Kobayashi joined the FCCJ in 1965, a year after he returnedto Tokyo from the United States to join a subsidiary of the thenChicago-based Zenith Electronics, a world leader in electronic

radio and television receiver production, notably the ‘all-wave’
radio. He returned to Tokyo at the height of US influence: theworld’s most powerful nation reshaping Japan to the granddesign of Pax Americana.

On American terms
Taking up a new post as an expat, Kobayashi was hired on
American terms as head of marketing at Zenith Japan, as a consequence of his university education in the United States. The
Japanese subsidiary was more than ready ready to move ahead.

INDEX22 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

F E A T U R E ›› War Ends: The 75th Anniversary Issue
AFTERMATH

Setsuya Kobayashi
with friends at the
Yurakucho Clubpremises. Left to right,
Donald Houk, Babaof IRS's FB manager,
Thomas Brown,
Nagomi Koike, David
Young and Setsuya
Kobayashi.

“We had strict quality control, with every product part manufactured in US factories. Japan faced the uphill challenge ofcatching up,” he recalls.
The quest for quality control was taken with the utmost seriousness and determination. Having just emerged with a national image considerably burnished by the 1964 Olympics, Japanwas more than ready to forge ahead and shed its tragic past.
According to Kobayashi, while American businesses viewed
Japan as a cheap manufacturing base, the ambition sweeping
the nation was to learn, master and catch-up with the victors.

No turning back
There was no turning back. Kobayashi remembers umpteen
visits to factories in the United States by Japanese engineers
and by renowned business leaders such as Matsushita Konosuke and Sony’s Morita Akio. Morita, Matsushita and manyothers visited thousands of American factories to look, learn
and adapt US manufacturing skills and management systems
to the home economy.
“Japanese products were strictly checked by the American
supervisors and returned for revision and reproduction. That
process was taken seriously by managers determined tochange the image of Japan-made products as cheap and unreliable. They succeeded, displaying the commitment that is theessence of Japanese post-war recovery.”

Wartime in Kobe
During the last years of the war, Kobayashi was based in Nishinomiya, Kobe, a Treaty Port open to foreigners since 1858 andsubject to considerable Western influence. In 1901, Arthur Hesketh Groom and friends completed Japan’s first golf course on
Rokko-san in Kobe. Meeting foreigners, though not on familiar
terms, was not unusual for the young Kobayashi.

“The atmosphere in the city was different, which opened myeyes. As a boy I used to sit on the pier watching the vast ocean
before me and dream of exploring the vast continents that lay
hidden in the distance,” he told me.
While Kobayashi did witness deaths from bombings and lived
with the dread of the defeat shared by most Japanese, a dread
made all the sharper by his own foresight, his family was spared
the ordeal of losing close relatives. Kobayashi senior had special
engineering skills and was not sent to the front line but enlisted
in the Navy to navigate Japanese warships. When the war wasover, the family embraced western culture playing tennis withforeigners and speaking English.

Occupation“I feel the American post-war strategy for Japan was strict but
was not as harsh as practiced in other countries. In return, theJapanese people also avoided animosity towards their victors.
We were more accepting of them,” he mused.
The FCCJ played its own role in cementing personal relations between the two countries. As one of the few Japanese
members who was also a fluent English speaker representing an American company, Kobayashi enjoyed the special
atmosphere of the Club. Small things stand out. For example,
being invited to events accompanied by his wife, expressing
individual opinions, and other cultural traits less observed inJapanese society. Yet, as he sees it today, Kobayashi views
the separatism between foreign correspondents and associate members at the Club as a lingering issue that could be
improved to the benefit of both categories.

● Suvendrini Kakuchi is Tokyo Correspondent for University WorldNews in the UK.

INDEX23 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

CLUB NEWSNew members
ASSOCIATE MEMBERS
AKIKO KINOSHITA is President and CEO of
Owls Co. Ltd., One World Language Services.

KEISUKE OGATA is Communication
Director for the Sasakawa Peace Foundation

SHIGEO OGURI is President and CEO of
Netz Toyota Nagoya Corporation.

SEIICHI YAMAMOTO is President andDirector of Urban Co. Ltd.

YUSUKE MURAYAMAREGULAR MEMBER (freelance)
Yusuke Murayama has been a freelance journalist
since April 2020, after 19 years on the Asahi
Shimbun. He covers global issues such as
migrants, refugees, conflict and development.
Murayama-san was awarded the Vaughn-Ueda Memorial
International Journalistic Prize in 2019 by the Japan Press ResearchInstitute, and the Encouragement award in the documentary categoryby the All Japan TV Program Production Alliance (ATP) in 2018.
He was the Asahi’s diplomatic correspondent in Washington
DC from 2009-2012, then Dubai bureau chief from 2012-2014. At
the Asahi, he also covered the Prime Minister’s Office, Ministry of
Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), Ministry of Foreign Affairs(MOFA), and the Tokyo stock exchange. Murayama-san is a keen
backpacker, and a lover of hot springs.

Exhibitions
09/05 - 10/02 Osamu Nagahama: Cotton Fields

10/03 - 11/06

Photo Correspondent Stanley
Troutman: From Hollywood
to the Pacific War

New in the library
1
Faking Liberties:
Religious Freedom in
American-Occupied Japan
Jolyon Baraka Thomas
The University of Chicago Press

2
Ise: Japan's Ise Shrines
Ancient Yet New
Suvend M. Hvass
Aristo Publishing
Gift from Kent Dahl

3
Masu komi sekuhara
hakusho (The State of Sexual
Harassment in Media)
Women in Media Network
Japan (WiMN)
マスコミ・セクハラ白書
Bungeishunju
Gift from Suvendrini Kakuchi

4
Boku no kareshi wa
dokoni iru?
ボクの彼氏はどこにいる？
Taiga Ishikawa
Kodansha
Gift from Taiga Ishikawa

5
Gei no boku kara tsutaetai: "suki"no? (hatena) ga wakaru hon
ゲイのボクから伝えたい 「好き」の ? (ハテナ) がわかる本
Taiga Ishikawa
TaroJiro-Sha Editus
Gift from Taiga Ishikawa

24 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

PHOTOGRAPHY

S T A N L E Y
TROUTMAN

S

tanley Troutman became a professionTroutman returned to Japan on August 30,
al photographer aged 20 in 1937, when 1945 to cover the arrival of General Douglas
he joined the Los Angeles bureau of MacArthur at Atsugi. He toured Yokohama
Acme Newspictures.
and Tokyo, Hiroshima andStarting out as a darkroom
Nagasaki, bombed-out airassistant, he soon worked hiscraft factories in Nagoya.
way up to staff photographer
By late September 1945,
and covered the golden era
Troutman was back homeof Hollywood..
in Los Angeles settling into
In 1944, Acme sent Troutpostwar life. In 1946, he left
man to the Pacific Theater
Acme to work for the Univerwhere he was embedded
sity of California, Los Angeles
with the Wartime Still Picture(UCLA), where he headed up
Pool. His first assignment was
the school’s photo publicity
Saipan in June 1944, followed
and film department until
by Tinian, Peleliu, Guam,
1980. He passed away on
Borneo, Leyte, Luzon, Manila,
January 2, 2020, aged 102 inand Corregidor, where heOrange County, California.
Stanley Troutman, 101, with hisbarely survived hostile fire
The photographs on these
beloved 4x5 Speed Graphic camera,
during a beach landing.
pages
are derived from acatching the Pacific sunset at Corona
In July 1945, Acme assigned
documentary film on the life
Del Mar, Ca. Photo Torin Boyd.
Troutman to the Army Air
and work of Stanley TroutForce (AAF) on a worldwide press tour aboard man that photo historian and film maker Torina plane called the ‘Headliner’. By mid-August, Boyd is completing for release in late 2020.
Troutman was in Shanghai, covering the release The Club will be holding an Exhibition of Stanof internees from the Chapei internment camp.
ley Troutman’s photography in October.

INDEX

25 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

PHOTOGRAPHY

Atsugi airfield, Japan, August. 30, 1945:
Defeated Japanese forces march past US
Army Air Force planes. Later that day, General
Douglas MacArthur arrived to take control ofthe base, then oversight of Japan as Supreme
Leader of Allied Forces Pacific (SCAP) from1945-1951. Photo Stanley Troutman Estate.

INDEX

26 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

PHOTOGRAPHYTokyo, early September 1945. The
charred remains of the Ginza district.
The Wako Department Store at
centre was soon converted into
the Base Exchange or “PX” for US
military personnel. Photo Stanley
Troutman Estate.

INDEX

27 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2020

PHOTOGRAPHY

Nagasaki, September 13, 1945. A family makes
do in the ruins of Nagasaki, struck on August
9, 1945. Over the next two to four months,
the acute effects of the atomic bombing
killed between 39,000 and 80,000 people in
Nagasaki. Photo Stanley Troutman Estate.

INDEX

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¥5,000 ~ ¥25,000
credit for introducing a new member¥25,000
if you introduce:
Associate, Diplomatic Associate or
Five-Year Associate member¥10,000
if you introduce:
Regular, P/J Associate, Young Associate or
Outside Kanto Associate member¥5,000
if you introduce:
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