G2 was headed by the irascible and vehemently anti‐communist Major General Charles A. Willoughby (1892–1972). Willoughby, who was the son of a German father and American mother and whose birth name was Adolf Tscheppe‐Weidenbach, had moved to America at the age of eighteen and become a naturalized U.S. citizen.
As Takemae Eiji notes, “fellow Occupationaires mocked the General’s stiff Prussian bearing, referring to him alternately as ‘Sir Charles’ and ‘Baron von Willoughby’… Regarded as a martinet by his subordinates — he took a perverse pride in the epithet ‘Little Hitler’, and even MacArthur dubbed him ‘my loveable fascist’ — the volatile Willoughby nonetheless enjoyed the Supreme Commander’s full confidence”.
[…]
Eventually, it was the CIA that gained the upper hand in the struggle for intelligence control. Immediately after MacArthur’s dismissal in April 1951, Willoughby too returned to the United States in a state of “nervous slump”, handing over to the CIA his files, many of his contacts in Japan, and his messages of concern about the need to continue protecting and nurturing the former senior Imperial Army officers whom he considered “essential for rearmament”.
[…]
Arisue’s new position of trust with the American forces enabled him to provide financial support to Kawabe Torashirō, who also soon became a key informant to the occupation forces; and Arisue then proceeded to recruit a number of other leading former military figures, including Hattori Takushirō, who had held key positions in the Imperial army general staff, and later Tsuji Masanobu, a wartime colonel and military strategist who was regarded as one of the architects of the invasion of Malaya and Singapore, and had gone into hiding during the early occupation era after being listed as a Class A war criminal.
As Willoughby later wrote, these people had been “the brains” of the former Imperial Japanese general staff: “monographs were just a cover, to keep them from starving”. Equally importantly, the research activities of Arisue, Kawabe, Hattori, Tsuji and others enabled them to become crucial conduits of information for the U.S. occupiers — a rôle to which they took with enthusiasm.
They rapidly reestablished their authority over now unemployed former military subordinates, creating a web of private intelligence organizations which provided information to the Americans in return for a variety of monetary and other rewards. This web, as we shall see, extended across borders into many parts of the former Japanese empire.
(Emphasis added.)
[Notes]
Particularly cautious readers will wonder if others were overreacting when they called Willoughby a fascist. On the contrary, these reactions were justified:
Charles Willoughby, an outspoken admirer of Benito Mussolini, may also have been attracted to Arisue by the fact that the former intelligence chief had once served as Japanese Military Attaché in Rome, where he had developed a similar enthusiasm for Italian Fascism and reportedly attempted to develop a joint Japanese–Italian strategy towards the Muslim world.
Rather than being investigated for war crimes, therefore, Arisue was “interrogated, then called in for consultation very early in the occupation”, and “a working relationship apparently developed”.
Reconstructing Axis history is at least twice as difficult as reconstructing Allied history. Axis officials, possibly anticipating that I love a good challenge, destroyed substantial amounts of potentially incriminating documents in 1945. Nevertheless, they shouldn’t get all the credit for making my figurative job more difficult:
Arisue was soon installed by Willoughby in a section of G2’s headquarters in the NYK Building in central Tōkyō, where his ostensible task was to collect and analyze archives and write monographs about Japan’s wartime activities.
One advantage of this appointment was the opportunities it provided, not only to unearth and preserve the archive of Japan’s military actions in Asia, but also to make parts of it disappear from the record (so continuing a process which had begun with the destruction of many documents during the last days of the war). A U.S. official note from May 1946 advises that some Japanese War Ministry documents “of a special nature” are absent from the catalogue of files that had been drawn up, “having been left in the charge of Arisue.”
(All emphasis added.)