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organization he would create would be a lean one managed by decision makers all the way down the line. In his view, “Too many executives indolently dispense with a problem by sending out a form letter or looking up a precedent in a book, an action any child could do.” His organization, SCAP, would be entirely different. It would be big, of course, but it would act like a lean one: He would make all the key decisions.
    5.  Military occupations never last long because nobody likes living under another country’s thumb. For the occupation of Japan to work, extraordinary efforts must be made to understand Japanese psychology and work with it to mutual advantage.
    MacArthur was extremely proud of the job his cadre of officers was doing. Just ten days earlier they caught a horrendous mistake by Washington that could have upset the entire surrender and enabled the Japanese in several years to renounce it as improper and invalid. All because the provincial bureaucrats in Washington didn’t know what everyone who knows a bit of French knows, the difference between vous and tu . One is a formal, impersonal form of “you,” the other is a more personal, intimate one. Many languages make this distinction, which English does not. In Japanese the distinction is as wide as a chasm.
    The surrender documents prepared by Washington had used the wrong pronoun, watakushi , meaning “I”—a word never used by someone so important and dignified as the emperor. The proper word is chin , which translates, for lack of a better term, into “we.” Using the wrong word was more than just incorrect, more than just degrading and humiliating to the emperor: It was a mistake with profound legal implications.
    Fortunately the head of the four-thousand-man Allied Translator and Interpreter Section, Col. Sidney Mashbir, had caught it and gone to his boss, General Willoughby. Willoughby, German-born and a master of several languages, immediately set up a meeting for Mashbir to see MacArthur. They spent an hour together, discussing the distinctions between “temporal power” and “spiritual power” and how the emperor fitted in. At the end of the meeting MacArthur had given Mashbir complete authority to rewrite the surrender document to conform to Japanese usage, and closed the meeting with the words: “If at any time you feel that there is anything I should know, I want you to come straight to me with it. Don’t hesitate.” That’s how MacArthur ran his organization: If someone had a serious problem, come straight to him.
    MacArthur was no lawyer, but he had the brains of a good one. In fact, if he hadn’t admired his father enough to follow in his footsteps and become a general, his choice of career would have been law. The legal implications of this translation error may have escaped the non-lawyer or the incompetent one, but they didn’t escape MacArthur. Someone in Washington had screwed up, big-time. Had the surrender documents contained language improperly prepared under Japanese law, then at any time in the future the Japanese government could have said the surrender was invalid. . . .
    It was all a page out of Santayana, about people not remembering the past being condemned to repeat it. Wasn’t this exactly how the Nazis had justified themselves: by repudiating the legality of the Treaty of Versailles? Their argument, which had merit, was that Germany—technically speaking—had never surrendered, which in turn meant that the reparations demands had no legal standing and therefore were improper.
    Looking out the window and far off into the distance, where Japan must be, he had his fingers crossed, hoping that the Eighth Army under General Eichelberger had everything under control. How ironic that his top general in Japan was the holder of two medals from the Japanese government: the Imperial Order of Meiji, aka the Order of the Rising Sun, and