13 April 2008
 
The M-Fund

 
As Police Inspector under Marshall Law, Tom had the keys to the warehouses on Yokosuka Base. That meant that he had access to just about anything he wanted in the way of the old materials of war.
 
That didn’t just include the K-Rations. It included thousands of confiscated weapons, and piles of swords.
 
“If some visiting fireman came to the base the Admiral would tell me to go get a sword as a present-o in commemoration of the visit.”
 
I pricked up my ears at that. “You know some of the young men took their family’s heritage blades to war with them,” I said. They put Army and Navy handles on them to make them appear regulation. Some of them are worth a bundle.”
 
“Yeah, we knew that. The guys on my police squad could knock the wooden pin out of the hilt and pull the grip off and read the Kanji characters etched on the steel tang. I wish I had taken a good look at what was really there. I don’t think many people knew the value of what was carried off. There is still stuff showing up at yard sales here that are worth a year’s pay, if they knew what they had.”
 
“The young men of the Samurai class did the same thing with their personal weapons. I’m not talking about the piles of Nambus that were in the warehouse. There were thousands of those thing, all designs of Kijiro Nambu. He was the “John Browning” of gun design in Japan.”
 
“They were under-powered but reliable, which was true about a lot of Japanese technology. The interesting ones were the officer weapons. I took about three hundred of them up to Col. Calvin Goddard at the Army Crime Lab in Tokyo to augment his collection of samples. Some of them were unique, but they were all illegal, like the swords. Japan had to be dis-armed, or at least that had been the theory when the Occupation started, and that included everything from the old memorial ship Mikasa to rifles and swords.”
 
“That actually turned out to be a bit of a problem. The new reality of the Cold War was sinking in back in Washington. Priorities were changing, and the old adversaries were starting to look a lot better than some old friends. The last American occupation troops came out of Korea the year before I got to Japan, which turned out to be a big mistake.”
 
“See, the deal was that we ran the Occupation through indirect rule. It was not like Germany, where the Allies assumed direct rule in the sectors established in the Potsdam treaty. That was the reason I was assigned to the Yokosuka Police Force as the Inspector. We let the Japanese government stay in place, and ran that by direction from General MacArthur’s GHQ as the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers.”
 
“It was not SCAP that ran Japan as much as it was the “Bataan Gang.” Those were a small group of officers who had been with MacArthur through the war, and had his special trust and confidence.”
 
“I was in the Counter-Intelligence chain, though way down, of course. That was run by Major General Charles Willoughby. He was a big guy with a German accent and people called him a Prussian, though no to his face. His old man had been a Baron, or something, and he adopted his mother’s maiden name when he came to the US as a young man. He had been in the Far East since before the war. He had been a linguist and one of the first aviators in WW I, and came to MacArthur’s staff as the logistics officer before getting the intelligence portfolio for the Southwest Pacific.”
 
“Willoughby had been on PT-35, one of the four boats that made break-out from Bataan. That was a close thing, from what I heard. Two of the boats broke down and they all wound up together. The General had his wife, his son and the Amah with him on one of the four boats. John Duncan Bulkeley was the Lieutenant in command, and he later made four stars.”
 
“One of the other big jobs at SCAP in Tokyo was the Economics and Science. The guy who headed that was another member of the Bataan Gang. Major General Bill Marquat was ESS when I was there, and he had been since the almost the beginning of the Occupation. He had been on PT-32.”
 
“He was a bit of an odd choice to be in charge of the entire economy of Japan, but he was better than they guy he relieved in 1946- a department store manager who didn’t have the first clue about how Japan worked. “
 
“Marquat had been a reporter in Seattle before the war, and an anti-aircraft artillery specialist before joining MacArthur’s staff in the Philippines.”
 
“He got ESS partly because of a stint he had as an assembly line analyst in the States before joining the Army, and his journalistic involvement with an auto trade magazine. He was a boxer, too, and he played second base on one of the ESS softball teams, even though he was in his mid-fifties at the time.”
 
“Of course the original thrust of the Occupation was the disarmament of Japan; it was strange that Japanese army units, abandoned in the field in Manchuria, would up switching their colors to fight for Chang Kai Chek’s KMT nationalists until they pulled out to Formosa.”
 
“The Red Scare back home turned everything on its head.”
 
“Willoughby was a big supporter of Joe McCarthy, by the way. His view was that the Commies were really out to get us and you could see it up close in Japan. That is how things changed. When I reported to Yokosuka in 1949 some of the purged politicians, businessmen and class “B” war criminals were permitted to be active in public life.”
 
“I was a simple cop at the time, with a squad of American chief petty officers on the Base, and a squad of Japanese at Police Headquarters.
 
“The Chiefs were an accident. They were not Master At Arms by rating. They had been POWS during the war, and treated as badly as anyone else. When they got home though, the wives had moved on, or they just didn’t fit in. They drifted back to Japan in the Navy, but they had been out of their rating for so long that they were just about useless. They mostly hung out at the Top Four Club, but the Admiral let me put them to work as my agents on the base.”
 
“My Japanese outside the gate were a lot hungrier, but both sets were useful to me.”
 
“That is the way the whole society was. Hungry for change. Organized labor was acting up, and my Japanese were always on the look-out for Communist infiltration. SCAP was worried about that, and had to shut down national strikes called by the leftists.”
 
“ESS got involved in that, of course, and stepped in to provide some diversion. I didn’t care much for baseball, and did not see much of it in Yoko except for the Navy stuff. But when SCAP decided to suppress Sumo wrestling and promote baseball as the new national pastime, Bill Marquat came up with cash to rehabilitate the baseball fields that had gone to seed when the military government outlawed the sport as un-Japanese.”
 
“They were still talking about the big tour of the San Francisco Seals in 1949, which is what launched professional baseball in Japan. They played 16 games in various places in Japan, including one in Tokyo, which was a sell-out. The Seals were a minor league team, but some big-leaguers made the trip with them. Manager Lefty O' Doul even played in a couple games. The Japanese loved him, and called him "O'Dou-San."
 
“MacArthur himself met with the players and called the tour “one of the most important acts of diplomacy the US could do for Japan.”
 
“ESS always had the money for good things, and Bill Marquat’s deep pockets always had some resources.”
 
“There was a lot of talk about Nazi gold after the war, and I’m sure some of the stories were true. There was a version of that in Asia, too. There was a story about the Golden Lily- “Kin no yuri,” which was supposed to have been the program to collect gold, gems, and art from the conquered territories. According to the scuttlebutt, some of it was recovered after the war and brought to Japan.”
 
“Maybe that is true and maybe it isn’t. I do know that General Yamashita, the Japanese commander in the Philippines wore black riding boots with golden spurs, and maybe that is where the talk about Yamashita’s gold came from.”
 
“The General gave the spurs to his US Army attorney the day he was sentenced to death. He felt his defense had been honorable, and if he wound up enshrined at Yasukini, so what? I told you before it was the Japanese Marines who defended Manila, not Yamashita.”
 
“I imagine that General MacArthur found it useful to have a funding mechanism outside of the one provided by Congress. Some called it the “M-fund,” after General Marquat, and that is where the resources came from to set up the National Police Reserve after the shooting started in Korea and US forces were pulled out of Japan to go fight.”
 
“Somebody had to keep order. The 95,000 police officers in the NPR formed the nucleus of the new Self Defense Forces. There was a lot of ambivalence about that, just as there was about the recreation of Japanese industry.”
 
“In 1947, Bill Marquat established two vehicle assembly plants near Yokosuka Base as a sort of prototype for what might come later. Not many people remember that.”
 
“Raw materials were scarce, and one of the best sources was the titanic amount of war material left behind on the island-hopping campaign. Disused trucks and jeeps from the battlefields were harvested by tramp steamers and brought back to the Sagami Wan, offloaded at the assembly lines and refurbished.”
 
“The motor-pool at Yokosuka had a novel arrangement. There weren’t many cars, except for the green Ford staff sedans and jeeps. General Macarthur had his big black Chrysler, of course, but the rest of us had to make due with what we could get. I had an issue jeep that used to get stolen periodically. It was a little like the Smart Cars of today, in that if a sailor saw an unattended vehicle and needed to go somewhere, he just took it.”
 
“I would put the word out and usually the jeep would magically come back.”
 
“Most of the rolling stock was surplus, of course, and just about worn out. We just ran them until they did not work properly any more. Then you took whatever you had and delivered it to the Japanese at one of the two assembly lines and took one that was rolling off like-new from the line.”
 
“The plants were ready to roll when US forces needed trucks in Korea. And with the encouragement of General Marquat and his deep pockets, Japanese industrial capabilities were re-born.”
 
“I don’t know if that stuff about the M-fund is true, but there were a lot of strange things in Japan at the time. One time after the Korean war kicked off, the Base Commander at Atsugi decided to lock the place down to test security.”
 
“All the Japanese employees on base showed up anyway. They just came in through the tunnels the Americans didn’t know about instead of the main gate.”
 
“General MacArthur was relieved on April 11, 1951. The anniversary was yesterday, by the way, fifty-seven years ago. I was lucky enough to be there for his departure. I took a few pictures of the General as he got ready to get on his airplane after shaking hands with Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgway.”
 
“I was long gone by the time the San Francisco Peace Treaty was finally signed in September of 1951, and the Occupation formally ended early the next year. I was off chasing counterfeiters in France by then. I’ll have to tell you about that some time.”
 
“But as to Bill Marquat and his deep pockets, he stayed on the job in Tokyo for another four years.”
 
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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