This week was the 69th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in WWII, at a simple, dignified ceremony on the U.S.S. Missouri, with General Douglas MacArthur presiding. Over 30 million had died in the Pacific theater, most of them Chinese at the hands of the invading Japanese. Japan’s occupation of many Asian lands was barbaric. About twice as many indochinese died under four years of Japanese rule than would later die in 20 years of the Vietnam War.
Understandably, the main Japanese representatives at the ceremony, one a diplomat, the other a general, were apprehensive about their reception by the Allied leaders arrayed on the U.S. battleship. The forced surrenders the Japanese had extracted of their many conquered victims had been degrading, as the Japanese militarist spirit had no respect for such shameful weakness. They anticipated humiliation for themselves.
Instead, they were received with dignity. In his brief remarks, MacArthur had no condemnation for the defeated, rejecting “hatred,” urging a “higher dignity” for victors and vanquished, and hoping for a world of “freedom, tolerance and justice.”
Reputedly Emperor Hirohito wept upon hearing of the ceremony’s respectful solemnity. It signaled there would not be a harsh occupation for Japan. Instead MacArthur would rebuild Japan.
In a radio broadcast after the Japanese officials left the battleship, MacArthur thanked a “merciful God that he has given us the faith, the courage and the power from which to mold victory.” An Episcopalian, he was not always a regular church goer, preferring to work on Sundays. But he was masterful in his deployment of Christian imagery as he practiced the priestcraft of American civil religion.
MacArthur concluded his brief broadcast almost as a sermon, declaring the “problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural development of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.”
So the viciousness and horror of WWII were concluded by a general’s call for peace through spiritual renewal. It was a very American, very Mainline Protestant message, both noble and a little naive, but also strangely appropriate and effective in its context. May such an ethos, however tattered, continue to guide the spirit of our nation as we confront the crises ahead.
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