CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A BRITISH ARMY PERSPECTIVE

Ian Nish

In February 1946, the troops of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) landed in Kure, which was to be its temporary headquarters. The headquarters was eventually set up at , where the Japanese naval academy had earlier been located. The troops which came from sev- Australia, 11,500 troops; Britain, 10,000; India, 9,500; and New Zealand, 4,500. eral of the larger Commonwealth countries which had been engaged in hostilities with Japan consisted of: These figures varied from time to time and only rough approximations can be given. The Australian 34th infantry brigade was responsible for prefecture, the most populous part of the region. The British and Indian division (BRINDIV) established its headquarters at Okayama and had responsibility for the four prefectures in and Okayama, Shimane and Tottori which was the largest area and the weakest in com- munications. New Zealand’s 9th brigade set up headquarters at Yamaguchi. This was not accomplished without incident; and the international diffi- culties both within the Commonwealth and outside it have been dealt with in detail by Dr Roger Buckley.1 From the American point of view, Britain’s force was welcomed because it enabled the United States to with- draw its occupation forces from the Shikoku and Chugoku regions, which were in the main agricultural areas and offered little prospect of long-term benefit. From the British Commonwealth point of view, the publicly pro- fessed object was that British participation in the various wars against Japan (the Pacific, China, south-east Asian campaigns) had been repaid by a place in the occupation of Japan at the war’s end. The historian may wonder whether an additional factor was to ensure that Churchill’s place

1 Roger Buckley, Occupation diplomacy: Britain, the United States and Japan, 1945–52, Cambridge University Press, 1982. 146 ian nish at Roosevelt’s side during the war should not be lost in the post-war period and that Britain should be guaranteed a seat at the peace conference with Japan. The Chugoku region of western had great scenic attractions and historical interest. So far as the Sanyo area was concerned, these were days long before the Inland Sea Industrial Belt when the area con- tained few, if any, industrial cities. Had tourism been developed at the time, it would have been a prime attraction. The same is true of the Sanin (Japan Sea) coastline. For their part, Shikoku’s four prefectures, Kagawa, Tokushima, Kochi and Ehime, enjoyed a milder climate and possessed places of great unspoilt natural beauty. The quality of the soil was poor and the island so mountainous that agricultural production was low. There was very little industry, though one of the towns, Niihama, had cop- per mines in close proximity belonging to Besshi Kōgyō (Sumitomo). Throughout the BCOF area, roads were indifferent at the best of times and in a bad state of repair. It is a reminder of the extent to which pre-war Japan was dependent on her rail network, though even that had limita- tions after the war, and on coastal shipping as a means of communication. The countryside was intact; but the prefectural towns had been badly damaged in systematic bombing. None of Japan’s major cities was sited in the British Commonwealth occupation area. Hiroshima with an estimated population of 750,000, Kure 250,000 and Shimonoseki 260,000, were the largest cities to be found in the area. Nor were there international trading ports, if we except Kure, the old naval base which had been badly destroyed, and Shimonoseki, whose place as a trading port depended on the nature of Japan’s foreign trade. The area included the ‘hot spot’ of Hiroshima and there was an infinity of speculation as to why this should have been allocated to Britain. But this has been overstressed because the ‘occupation’ surveillance in Hiroshima city was left to American troops stationed at Kaitaichi, to the east. I was a member of that force. My main aim in this paper is to record some simple thoughts which were understood as ‘unspoken assumptions’ at the time but may not be clear from the written record. I shall discuss the differences between Britain and the United States in their approach to post-war Japan and make some comments about the nature of the British occupation. I shall be concentrating on BCOF rather than on occupation policies themselves. The background of British occupationnaires was not the same as those from the United States. Every British soldier who went to the occupation of Japan had a strong awareness of the Thai-Burma railway. There had