DOWER: In a way, the occupation ended on this imperial note, where the two
emperors of the occupation period, the two sovereign figures, the two
authoritarian figures, said farewell. MacArthur left for the airport and was
given a good sendoff by the Japanese government. In his memoirs, I believe
MacArthur says that two million people lined the streets and the police
calculated that two hundred-thousand people actually lined the streets. That
sounds about right to me, because MacArthur always tended to exaggerate things
by a factor of ten.
School children were given time off and if you look at the pictures from
the period, you'll see school children standing there, waving Japanese flags
and American flags. And so he was seen off and some of the outpourings were
really emotional, the people saying, imagining--this is an editorial in one of
the newspapers, the Mainichi Newspaper--imagining him going, saying, what was
almost like a liturgical prayer: "General, General, General, you have left us,
did you see the fields of ripening grain, this is the bountiful harvest, which
is like the harvest that you have left for us." It was very, very emotional.
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