MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito's Gold

When General Douglas arrived in Japan to become "shogun" after ww2, the Emperor told him how much booty he had from conquered countries.MacArthur's grasp of project Golden Lily enabled him to develop a favorable attitude toward Hirohito and to work well with the new premier, a Yamato named Prince Higashi-Kuni. Although Japan dodged reparation payments by claiming to be devastated and bankrupt after the war, Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, in The Yamato Dynasty, call that assertion a sham. In a few years, Japan's "miraculous recovery" ensued, financed in secret by the Golden Lily bounty. In their assessment of the postwar situation, the Seagraves write, "Documents show that one of the big gold-bullion accounts set up . . . was in the name of General Douglas MacArthur . . . a man deeply involved in rescuing Emperor Hirohito, and suborning witnesses at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. What does this suggest?" In 1945, the U. S. Congress and the Allied nations unanimously favored a war criminal trial for Emperor Hirohito; however, MacArthur quickly convinced the politicians that communism was now the threat, especially in China. Japan needed to be an ally. If the U. S. dethroned the emperor, the Japanese would restore him as soon as possible. He merely "followed the military's orders" during World War II" MacArthur said, creating a false impression that persists today. Like Hitler, Hirohito lacked the capacity to respect the space of other nations, and though people were led to believe he was weak and ineffectual, he ordered his commanders to continue fighting for two years after they began suggesting surrender. The emperor did not participate in a war crimes trial, nor did he receive any punishment whatsoever, although many see his escape from justice as a terrible wrong. Those who might have been able to inform on the emperor died by various means. One, however, survived - Prince Konoe, Hirohito's brother, who called him "the major war criminal." MacArthur, however, aided in silencing the prince. The military officers agreed that to protect the emperor, they would claim that all decisions came from them, not the government. As a result, dozens of men admitted to crimes when they were only carrying out orders, or in some cases, were innocent of any knowledge or participation. In May 1946, the Tokyo War Crimes Trials convened. The trials initially included three hundred war criminals, but MacArthur shortened the list to twenty-eight. Not one Yamato and no one involved in Golden Lily was tried or even accused. On MacArthur's orders, not a single piece of evidence about the biological warfare section, unit 731, was revealed to the tribunal. Liberated American POWs were forced to sign confidentiality documents drawn up by the army stating that they would not discuss what happened in the Japanese biological warfare and slave labor prisons. If they did, they faced a court martial. MacArthur finished his stint in Japan and returned to the U. S., where he lived in a style few Americans could match. William Manchester described his seventy-foot living room in his Connecticut house and his Manhattan hotel-suite as having "the vast splendor of palaces," filled with "gifts from Japan." Though a self-described "simple soldier," he left behind an Asian art collection worth millions when he died. The source of this wealth can be easily misunderstood, as can his gifts of gold bullion and jewels running into millions; after all, they might simply have been Hirohito's method of handling a connection necessary to the furtherance of his career, or, one could say, his continued existence.