28 March 2008
  
Club Mikasa

 Yokosuka had come to terms with its new Americans in 1950,
  
 Base Commander CAPT Benny Decker and his Public Works Center had performed hundreds of good works for the people outside the gates of the former Imperial Navy facility. In fact, PWC under Benny’s firm hand had become a provider of common concern to the Japanese as much as it was an operating arm of the United States Navy.
  
 If those outside the gate benefited from the American largesse, what was the harm? The lights were brighter, the children less hungry, and the sailors on liberty were safer.
  
 That symbiosis made GHQ nervous, since things had progressed from beneficent good works by the conqueror into something much cozier. In fact, it was downright intimate.
  
 The modern girls had been organized by rank and status, very Japanese, and the rigid hierarchy of the military culture aligned nicely. It was not uncommon for CAPT Decker and his Department Heads to frequent the Grand Shima, and if the man himself was incorruptible, such was not the case with all of his officers.
  
 Relationships at all levels had been established, each having their own protocols and obligations. Certain ways of doing business had become established that benefited both sides, and the boundary of the commercial relationship was murky at best. The American officers and senior enlisted doing their overseas hard tours alone had found their comfort, and the visiting sailors, not that there were that many in the late 1940s, had their shorter term needs well cared for.
  
 In fact, if the carcass of the old Imperial base provided comfort for all hands, what was the matter with that?
  
 The basic infrastructure of the town had been lightly touched by the bombing, and within two years the town had reinvented itself through the Black Market in a warren of small bustling businesses that provided all the services that one would expect in a harbor town.
  
 If pride had to be one of the things that went first, the Japanese were pragmatic enough about it. General MacArthur’s GHQ had established lofty goals of democratization. In practical effect, this released a torrent of leftist activity that had been ruthlessly repressed in the days of Empire.

 Released from the terror of the bombing, hanging on through the famine that followed the collapse of the old regime, the women were in the vanguard of the recovery, even as their men began to drift back from the islands of the Pacific, and the huge army left to its own devices in the Field in Manchuria.
  
 Many of the demobilized soldiers and sailors returned to their former occupations or applied their military skills in support of the new Masters. The police force was all Japanese, except for American officers, and were in the highly nuanced position of enforcing American laws on the black market economy that enabled them to survive the transition of the early Occupation.
  
 That was the problem that GHQ had with Yokosuka-town, and the remaining enemy of the American Army of Occupation: the United States Navy.
  
 The monuments to the glory of the old regime, and particularly the Imperial Navy had been roughed up badly. Across the harbor from the Navy Exchange warehouse, and the old torpedo factory lay the most prominent of them.
  
 You could not blame the American pilots for lobbing bombs at it. From above you could not tell that IJN Mikasa’s proud hull had been encased in concrete, and was rooted to the soil. It appeared to be an armed ship of considerable bulk, and no amount of pre-strike briefing could alter the natural adrenaline-charged desire of the young pilots to put ordnance into it.
  
 In that, Mikasa had much in common with the ancient American battleship Utah. To be sure, Utah was still a living ship when the pilots of the Rising Sun had torpedoed her at Pearl Harbor, but she was disarmed, and no longer capable of offensive action.
  
Utah had rolled and sunk at her berth at Pearl, and there she still rested with the fifty sailors trapped forever within her steel sides.
  
 Utah had been disarmed in the great Naval Treaty struck at Washington that had been intended to avoid all this unpleasantness. So was Mikasa, though she represented something quite extraordinary to the Japanese: her dead steel was the living symbol of the rise of Asia against the western powers, and the embodiment of the greatest naval victory since Trafalgar.
  
 The Imperial Japanese Navy had been established in 1869 by the modernists of the Meiji Restoration. The  IJN had sampled from the buffet of European technology and adopted parts of the British and French navies.
  
 The major engagement against the dying Qing empire in 1894 had convinced Tokyo that that British model was superior, since at the fight near the Yalu River, two poorly managed Chinese battleships had proven almost unsinkable.
  
 In response, the Imperial Navy the IJN ordered half a dozen battleships from Vickers and other builders in England. By 1903, the IJN featured an impressive battle fleet manned by sailors trained in the traditions of the Royal Navy. The last ship delivered before 1904 was Mikasa, a 15,000-ton battleship based on the British Majestic class.
  
 With the Imperial chrysanthemum welded to her proud sloping bow,  Mikasa was queen of the Emperor’s fleet. She was equipped with four massive 12-inch guns in two dual armored turrets, and could churn through the dark waters of the Sagami Wan toward the open ocean with the bone in her teeth at eighteen knots.
  
 The rise of the Imperial Navy caused jitters in Europe. The husk of the Chinese empire had been savaged in the Sino-Japanese War; there was pressure to force Japan to ceded many territorial gains, and ensure the independence of Korea as a buffer to the Imperial Russian presence in the Far East. The Czar deployed a significant naval presence to Port Arthur.
 The Japanese had enough with the interferance, and made a bold gamble to resolve the crisis on the Emperor’s terms. With Admiral Heihachiro Togo in command, the Japanese fleet deployed from Pusan on the north side of the Tushima straits and conducted a preemptive attack on the Russians in February of 1904.
  
 While successful, much of the Czar’s force remained intact, and the next few months were  concentrated on the one hand to preventing the Russians force from escaping. In August, the Czar’s fleet made a break for it.
  
 Admiral Togo flew his flag from Mikasa’s mast. His well-trained fleet “crossed the T” on the hapless Russians and brought all guns to bear.

 Togo’s force was outnumbered but triumphant, and the Russians were driven back into Port Arthur. Alarmed, the Czar dispatched his Baltic Fleet to the Far East with orders to combine with surviving Russian ships at Vladivostok and destroy the impudent Japanese. The desperate race from Europe south around Africa left the Russians exhausted and demoralized, and Togo’s force was operating in its own back yard.
  
 He decided to engage the weary Russians in the narrow waters between Kyushu and Korea. At the Tushima Strait, Togo achieved the most significant naval victory since Trafalgar. His sailors sank 21 Russian ships and captured seven, including four battleships.
  
 The humiliation of the Russians was complete. The Japanese occupied Korea, and made it theirs; they took Vladivostok, for a time, and only returned it in the peace brokered by Theodore Roosevelt.
  
Mikasa was part and parcel of the manifest destiny of Japan’s leadership of East Asia. Though she sank in a catastrophic explosion in port shortly after the great victory, she was re-floated. Technically surpassed by the Dreadnaught age, she remained a proud member of the fleet through the Washington Treaty that limited naval firepower.
  
 As a symbol, she was encased in concrete, and designated a memorial to the glory of the nation.
  
 The statue of Admiral Togo did not survive the defeat in 1945, and Mikasa very nearly did not as well. The Russian had long memories, and as members of the victorious Allies, demanded that she be destroyed. As a compromise, her masts were cut and guns were stripped. Rust streaked her hull and weeds grew up on the plaza around her.
  
 Yokosuka was more concerned with food.
  
 In 1950, war in Korea made Yoko come alive in a way it had not been since the surrender. The American Fleet was back in a big way, and the port was the logical support base for operations, and there was a crush of sailors enjoying the pleasures of the harbor.
  
Mikasa was only a brisk walk, or a short rickshaw ride from the base for those flush with cash, hauled along by wiry ex-Imperial soldiers down on their luck. To capitalize on the situation, the enterprising Japanese business community came up with a use for the gutted hull.
  
 A large barn-like structure was built on the main deck, and the pride of the Tsushima Strait became the Club Mikasa, a dance hall and nightclub for American sailors.
  
 Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
 www.vicsocotra.com