Friendship Across the Seas

Front matter

NaoyukiAgawa

The US Navy and the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force

OPEN ACCESS

Foreword

On August 28, 1945, 13 days after the surrender of Japan, the US Third Fleet entered Tokyo Bay. A long column of warships threaded a narrow entrance channel, making two sharp turns as it rounded the southern and eastern capes of the Miura Peninsula. American carrier planes patrolled overhead. The flagship Missouri, a 48,000-ton Iowa-class battleship, anchored about four miles offshore, in ten fathoms of water, not far from where Commodore Matthew Perry’s “Black Ships” had anchored in 1853.

The officers and men of the fleet had rejoiced to learn that Japan had agreed to lay down arms. But now, with their hard-won victory behind them, they faced another daunting challenge. The sudden end of the Pacific War (and with it, the Second World War) had caught them by surprise. Relatively little advance planning had been done for the largely unexpected contingency of a peaceful surrender. Japan was a nation of 70 million people living on four main islands and hundreds of smaller islands. Sending a military occupation force into the defeated country was an operation of vast scale and complexity, especially because it had to be done quickly.

The US Navy had been asked by Supreme Allied Commander Douglas MacArthur to secure Tokyo Bay, including the sprawling Yokosuka Naval Base. The schedule of operations was very tight. The fleet had not even managed to return to its rear bases in Okinawa, Guam, or the Philippines before going into Japan. An expeditionary landing force would have to be mustered using the crews of ships already at sea. For the officers and sailors of the US Navy (USN), the weeks after V-J Day were an immensely stressful and difficult time.

From his post on the bridge, high in the Missouri’s towering superstructure, Captain Stuart Murray observed the devastated landscape along the shore of Tokyo Bay. Inland, in the direction of Yokohama and Tokyo, he saw fields of ash, hillocks of rubble, and the frames of gutted buildings—the results of huge incendiary bombing raids by B-29s. Moored near the piers of Yokosuka Naval Base was a row of smashed, blackened, listing warships. They had been pulverized by the Third Fleet’s carrier bombers a month earlier. One was the battleship Nagato, which had served as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s flagship at the outset of the Pacific War.

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This pitiful array of half-sunken wrecks was nearly all that remained of the once-mighty Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN), which had blindsided the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and conquered half of the Pacific less than 4 years earlier.

A Japanese harbor pilot stood by Captain Murray on the bridge. He had come aboard the Missouri earlier that morning, to assist in navigating the great battleship through the narrow, zigzagging, mineswept channel into Tokyo Bay. The two men had established an efficient working rapport, and were conversing freely through a translator. Captain Murray would later recall the pilot had told him that Japan had been “thoroughly defeated” in the war, and “if there is ever another big war we’re going to be on your side.” He added that he believed this view was widely shared by his fellow Japanese.

The initial occupation of postwar Japan was fraught with danger and difficulties. The emperor and the Japanese government had consented to surrender, but millions of Japanese troops remained under arms. No one knew whether the Japanese Army would comply with the emperor’s edict. Allied forces might have to fight their way into Japan after all. But even if there was no organized armed opposition, it seemed likely that they would encounter, at a minimum, scattered resistance by disaffected or rebellious troops and civilians. They could imagine a range of lethal threats: lone snipers, bombs, booby traps, poisoned water supplies. They expected the inhabitants to display a sullen, noncooperative attitude, passive resistance, and perhaps to commit acts of sabotage against critical transportation and military assets.

More than a million Allied troops would pour into the defeated nation, representing every branch of the US armed forces and several Allied nations. The logistics required to support such a Herculean operation were comparable to those of an actual invasion. It was imperative that it be done quickly, so that a critical mass of military power could be established in every region of Japan, deterring any would-be insurrectionists. But speed, in turn, created its own logistical and engineering challenges.

A spearhead landing force of marines and sailors would occupy Yokosuka Naval Base. Simultaneously, the 11th Airborne Division would be airlifted from Okinawa into nearby Atsugi Airfield. Other units would occupy bases and airfields across the four main islands of Japan. But most such military installations had been hammered for months by B-29 and carrier bombing raids, and needed to be completely rebuilt. From the moment they set foot on Japanese soil, the occupation forces would have to begin rebuilding the bases they seized. General Robert Eichelberger, commander of the Eighth Army, wrote his wife from Okinawa: “We will have to rub a magic lamp suddenly and have the ruins of a destroyed city removed, bridges repaired, dead removed, electric lights and water turned on, food service installed, etc.”

Anticipating the arrival of foreign troops, the Japanese people were naturally apprehensive. Rumors had warned that civilians were likely to suffer pillage, brutality, and rape. Such fears may have been especially acute among those who had some inkling of how Japanese armies had behaved in China and other overseas territories. The Japanese people’s discovery that the Americans were generally decent and disciplined came as a great and welcome surprise. Often it was the children who were first to lose their fear. American servicemen were generous in

Foreword Vii offering small gifts of candy or chewing gum. Japanese adults, witnessing these exchanges, were flooded with a sense of relief. Likewise, the first Americans to go ashore in Japan were stupefied by the open and friendly attitude of the civilians they encountered. Gestures of courtesy were offered and reciprocated on both sides.

Remarkably, not a single shot was fired at Allied occupation troops anywhere in the country. The transition from war to peace was sudden and total. Rear Admiral Robert Carney, the Third Fleet chief of staff, went ashore at Yokosuka on August 30. “We found no resistance whatsoever,” he later recalled. “The whole thing was just fantastic. The Japanese were more than willing to cooperate in anything we wanted to do, and in a very short time they realized that they were not going to be brutalized.”

An American photographer captured the moment when Vice Admiral Michitard Tozuka, the commanding officer at Yokosuka, surrendered the base to Carney. In the photo, the two admirals face one another, neither smiling nor scowling. Both appear relaxed, open, and perhaps a bit curious. According to Carney, Admiral Tozuka was unfailingly professional and eager to cooperate. He told Carney that “the place was ours, and he made it known that it was ours, and they were at our service, and anything we wanted all we had to do was ask.” Rear Admiral Roland Smoot, another senior commander with the landing force, was delighted by how efficiently the Yokosuka handover occurred. Like many Americans, during the long and bitter years of war, Smoot had carried a “deep and abiding hatred” for the Japanese. Now he was astounded at how quickly those feelings faded. Professional collegiality became the basis for individual friendships. Smoot eventually became “quite friendly” with Admiral Tozuka, and was a guest at the Japanese admiral’s home on several occasions. “It’s amazing how quickly your enemies can become your friends when you stop shooting at each other,” he said. “The human side of people comes to the surface ... and it comes to the surface very rapidly.”

That, in a nutshell, is the major theme of Friendship Across the Seas, Naoyuki Agawa’s absorbing history of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) and its relationship with the US Navy. This is a revised English edition of a book (first published in Japanese in 2001), updated with new material translated by Keith Krulak. It carries the narrative up to the present, with two new chapters by Professor Agawa covering the eventful history of the last two decades. Friendship Across the Seas is a fascinating and well-told tale, but also an essential new contribution to the existing scholarship on the subject. It should be read by all military and foreign policy professionals with an interest in the US-Japan alliance and the increasingly tense security environment in the Pacific and East Asia. I have recommended it to Admiral Michael M. Gilday, the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), for inclusion in the US Navy’s CNO Professional Reading Program.

During his long and distinguished career, Naoyuki Agawa has been a lawyer, scholar, diplomat, and author. From 2002 to 2005, he was minister for public affairs at the Japanese Embassy in Washington. He has served for many years as professor of law at Keio University, and as that university’s vice president for International Collaboration and Education. I first met Agawa-san in 2011, when I was in Japan for research related to my three-volume history of the Pacific War. We found that we viii Foreword shared many interests and had much in common. I had read two books by his father, Hiroyuki Agawa, a prominent novelist, essayist, and biographer, who had served as a naval officer in the Pacific War. I had cited the elder Agawa’s classic biography of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (The Reluctant Admiral, 1969) extensively in the first volume of my trilogy (Pacific Crucible, 2011). Naoyuki Agawa and I are both Hoyas—meaning that we are alumni of a certain Jesuit university in Washington, D.C.—and my father studied at Keio University for a year in the early 1960s. We stayed in touch over the years, and he was always generous with his time. As I was finishing my trilogy, he helped me to understand the finer points of Japanese wartime history and culture. I sometimes joked that while Professor Agawa’s Japanese was much better than mine, my English was only a little worse than his.

Books about the JMSDF, at least those available in English, have been few and far between. One finds essays and lectures about the strategic roles and capabilities of the modern JMSDF, and the naval alliances and other security frameworks between and among the United States, Japan, Australia, and other Pacific nations. There is also an extensive literature concerning the political debates in Tokyo about the budget, mission, and deployments of the Self-Defense Forces. While covering those subjects extensively, Friendship Across the Seas takes a very different approach: it gives us the human dimension of its subject. It is a history of individual friendships and interactions between military and foreign policy professionals in Japan and the United States, and the way those relationships have shaped the two nations’ bilateral relations since 1945.

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The anthropologist Ruth Benedict, in her influential 1946 study The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, identified a strain of adaptability and pragmatism in Japan’s national character. The Japanese, Benedict observed, do not have an “absolutist” ethic but rather “an ethic of alternatives.”

Japan’s real strength which she can use in remaking herself into a peaceful nation lies in her ability to say of a course of action, ‘That failed,’ and then to throw her energies into other channels. They tried to achieve their ‘proper place’ in war, and they lost... That course, now, they can discard, because their whole training has conditioned them to possible changes of direction. The Japanese sees that he has made an ‘error’ in embarking on a course of action which does not achieve its goal. When it fails, he discards it as a lost cause, for he is not conditioned to pursue lost causes.

During the 15-year conflict known as the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945), Japan had sought to earn the respect of the world through military conquest. Total defeat in the Pacific War had discredited that approach. On August 15, 1945, when the Showa emperor’s “jeweled voice” went over the radio airwaves and told the Japanese people that the war was lost, they accepted this new fact and made the necessary adjustments. Devoted above all to their sovereign, they set out to “ease the emperor’s heart” in trying circumstances. It does not go too far to say that this duty (chit) was sacred. Showa tenno, the Emperor Hirohito, had invited their recent enemy to enter Japan. Therefore, the occupation forces were to be welcomed as honored guests, rather than resented and resisted. And so they were.

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Three weeks earlier, Japanese men, women, and even children had been training to fight the invading armies with bamboo spears. Now they were bowing, smiling, laughing, striking up conversations if they knew a little English, and volunteering to assist their recent enemies in whatever way they could. The transformation occurred so abruptly that the Americans and Allies found it strange and disconcerting, even unnerving. There was no precedent for such a sudden, stark, collective about-face in the history of any Western nation. But it certainly made their jobs easier. They were in charge, with undisputed authority, and even the humblest Japanese was keen to do his part to make the occupation function efficiently. A Japanese doctor in Hiroshima explained to a US Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) analyst, “It is the proper thing for the man of might to be on top, so the people are thinking of the future and about how to live comfortably and are quite at ease. That is why everything has gone smoothly up to now and it will continue to do so.” Of course there were those who had anti-American attitudes of various forms, but they were clearly a minority and did not take any action against the occupation forces. They realized Japan had lost the war and it was no use to do so. Instead, most of them kept silent and hid their feelings from the Americans.

General Douglas MacArthur was a fortunate choice to serve as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). More than any other Allied commander, he instinctively understood that the Pacific War had been a contest of ideas as well as arms. The ideology underpinning Japanese militarism and imperialism had been defeated and discredited by force of arms. In the aftermath of defeat, the Japanese people were willing to surrender in good faith, and embrace new models of politics, economics, education, and even (to some extent) culture. MacArthur was wise to define liberalism and democracy as universal principles, not specifically American or even Western, and suitable for all nations. In the radio address he delivered aboard the Missouri, immediately after the surrender ceremony on September 2, 1945, he spoke not only for the victors but for all nations and peoples. Peace was a universal blessing: “Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended.” Technological advances had made war too terrible. If nations did not find peaceful means to resolve their disputes, civilization would be annihilated. Humanity’s survival in the atomic era would depend on a kind of collective global awakening, 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 developments of the past 2000 years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.”

Many Japanese were not only willing but ardently determined to act upon those principles. They would devote their remarkable energy, ingenuity, and capacity for collective action into rebuilding their country on democratic foundations. During the following 6 years, ruling Japan as a kind of benevolent dictator, MacArthur would oversee the drafting of a democratic, pacifist constitution guaranteeing basic rights to all citizens, including women. Resisting pressure to put Hirohito on trial as a war criminal, he invited the emperor to a meeting in his office. Subsequently, a photograph of the two men, standing cordially side by side, was released to the media and published in Japanese newspapers. That single photograph, a political masterstroke, communicated to the Japanese people that MacArthur had their best interests at x Foreword heart, and was in common cause with their emperor. An imperial seal of legitimacy was thus placed on democracy itself, and on the other sweeping social, legal, and economic reforms that followed until the restoration of Japanese sovereignty in 1952.

Since his death in the 1960s, American historians and biographers have been hard on Douglas MacArthur, imposing harsh judgments on his command failures and certain unbecoming character traits—deviousness, corruption, hypocrisy, and egotism verging upon narcissism. But even his worst critics have tended to applaud MacArthur’s leadership in postwar Japan. Perhaps his greatest legacy is a stable, flourishing Japanese democracy, a system of government that has lasted three-quarters of a century—about five times longer than the fanatical militarist regime that led Japan down the path of imperialist aggression in the 1930s and 1940s.

But in the fall of 1945, as the occupation began, those luminous historical achievements were part of a future yet unseen. Japan was flat on its back. Conditions in Tokyo and the nation’s other major cities were especially desperate. Entire neighborhoods had been wiped out by bombing raids, and immense piles of rubble and debris would have to be carted away before the rebuilding could even begin. Many Japanese, having been burned out of their homes, had constructed rude temporary dwellings made of corrugated sheet metal, pipes, and pieces of lumber. Millions of urban residents had evacuated to rural areas, and now wished to return to their cities—but there was not enough housing to shelter them or food to feed them. Millions more Japanese servicemen and civilians were repatriating from overseas, which greatly exacerbated these problems. The food shortage threatened to turn critical in the winter of 1945-1946, because it was already too late to save the harvests of 1945. The Japanese had assumed that they would have to feed the occupying army, and since the Japanese people were already going hungry, mass famine seemed inevitable. Japanese officials were relieved to learn that US troops would ship their own provisions into the country. Indeed, beginning later that fall, the United States would ship large amounts of grain into Japan for relief distributions to the civilian population. But the basic problem of rebuilding the Japanese economy remained. Allied garrison forces, working closely with the Japanese government, were obliged to take urgent action to get the nation’s basic transportation, energy, communications, and industrial infrastructure back into working order.

One grave problem among many was the presence of some 66,000 mines in Japan’s coastal waters and harbors. These included approximately 55,000 defensive mines laid by the Japanese, and another 11,000 offensive mines laid by American submarines and B-29s. After the war, many ships transporting Japanese civilians and servicemen from overseas were lost to mines, causing the loss of hundreds of lives. Professor Agawa details some of these tragic sinkings, all occurring after the restoration of peace in 1945; altogether, he estimates that 1294 lives were lost to mines between V-J Day and 1953. The proliferation of mines impeded free navigation of Japanese coastal waters at a time when the nation desperately needed its fishing boats back at work, and its commercial trading vessels at sea. Even domestic industrial transportation depended, to a significant degree, on coastal maritime links between Japanese seaports, and throughout the Inland Sea. Moreover, US naval and

Foreword xi military forces needed free access to Japanese seaways in order to support their garrisons.

The threat presented by the American mines was especially serious. Most had been dropped from the air, by 20th Air Force B-29s based in the Marianas, in an operation appropriately codenamed “Starvation.” No one knew their precise locations or depths, and many were armed with fiendishly intricate trigger mechanisms that made them difficult to detect and disarm. For obvious reasons, mine hunting and minesweeping were perilous work, and inevitably, many sailors would give their lives in the effort.

Allied occupation authorities ordered that former Japanese naval personnel be remobilized to man a minesweeping force. The crews wore plain uniforms without rank insignias, although they operated under discipline and procedures that were, by necessity, quasi-military. They were sometimes deployed in other missions as well—to repatriate troops from overseas, or to act as a coast guard in Japanese home waters, interdicting illegal immigration and smuggling into the country. The small force operated under the direction of civilian departments, first the “Second Bureau of the Demobilization Ministry,” later the “Maritime Safety Agency,” both being ultimately subject to the authority of the SCAP. The rump flotilla, a shadow of the once-mighty IJN, did the vital work of clearing mines from Japanese waters, and by 1952, the work was largely (though not entirely) completed. In the process, 19 ships and 77 lives were lost. With this hard-won experience, the fleet had developed into one of the most adept, seasoned, and technically proficient minesweeping operations in the world. This was the kernel of the maritime organization that would become the JMSDF.

With the onset of the Cold War, the security and stability of the Asia-Pacific region became more precarious. On August 9, 1945—the same day Nagasaki was hit by an atomic bomb, and just 6 days before the end of the war—the Soviet Union had suddenly declared war on Japan and launched one of the largest ground operations in history. The Red Army invaded Manchuria and South Sakhalin Island, and Russian amphibious forces advanced down the Kurile Island chain, overpowering the small Japanese garrisons on one island after another. The Japanese grew increasingly concerned about the security of Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan, which lies just 26 miles across the Soya Strait (La Perouse Strait) from Sakhalin. We now know that Josef Stalin had hoped to seize Hokkaido in 1945, and the Red Army had prepared contingency plans to launch an invasion across the strait. (If the war had lasted even a few weeks longer than it did, Hokkaido might have passed through the entire Cold War as a Soviet client state, a Japanese version of East Germany or North Korea). In China, Mao Zedong’s communist forces won the Chinese Civil War and drove the remnants of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist forces across the Taiwan Strait. As Japanese military forces and civilians left the Korean peninsula, a power vacuum threatened to turn chaotic; in June 1950, communist forces invaded South Korea, commencing the Korean War. At sea, Japanese fishing and commercial vessels were frequently harassed by both Chinese and Soviet patrol craft.

American naval operations around Korea were impeded by heavy mining of the peninsula’s coastal seaways and harbors. An estimated 3000 mines lay off the coast.

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In 1950, the US chief of naval operations reported that the problem had grown critical: “The US Navy has lost command of the sea in Korean waters.” The Americans requested the participation of Japanese minesweeping units to help clear coastal waters at Wonsan. Since Japan had adopted a constitution that renounced war, partly at the behest of the Americans, the request touched off a vigorous debate in Tokyo. But the Japanese leadership judged that it had no choice but to comply—this was before the nation’s sovereignty had been restored—and the request was granted. Forty-six Japanese minesweepers operated off the Korean coast between October and December 1950, sweeping 300 kilometers of channels. Two ships were lost to mine strikes during these operations—in one case, with casualties of one dead and eight wounded. Strictly speaking, those casualties qualified as combat losses, making Japan a combatant in the Korean War.

From the adoption of the Japanese Constitution to the present day, the status of the Self-Defense Forces has been a subject of perennial controversy. In 1945, the Allies had set out to rid Japan of militarist influences. The Potsdam Proclamation had called for a permanent elimination of the authority and influence of the “self-willed militaristic advisers” who had led Japan to war, and a complete dissolution of the nation’s “war-making power.” By accepting those terms, the Japanese government had committed to a pacifist foreign policy, permanently and forevermore. Article 9 of the Constitution states that the Japanese people “forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.” It also specifies that Japan will never establish or maintain a military. Such was the necessity—so it seemed to the Americans, the Allies, and Japan’s postwar leaders—to ensure that Japan could never again resume a career of international aggression.

And yet, from the beginning, it was never realistic to simply eliminate Japanese military capabilities root-and-branch. The mine-clearing mission, and the protection and regulation of Japan’s home waters, were minimum capabilities even in a nation governed by Article 9. Since the 1950s, prevailing Japanese political and legal opinion has held that Article 9 allows for limited armed forces so long as they are strictly and solely for the purpose of self-defense.

To leaders and policymakers whose perceptions had been shaped by World War I, in Washington as well as Tokyo, it was natural to prioritize the demilitarization of Japan over all competing objectives. The proposal to deploy Japan minesweepers off Korea was controversial even in the United States, where opposition coalesced within the State Department. The debate reprised the essential dilemma that had existed since 1945. Was it more important for Japan to sever links to its imperial past, by accepting a strictly passive role in its own national defense? Or should Japan serve as a “brick in the wall” against communism in East Asia? The debate had begun in Washington even before V-J Day, when Truman’s civilian and military advisors had considered whether the Japanese monarchy should be retained. After the surrender, the issue was put to rest by General MacArthur, who held primary responsibility for the security of Allied occupation forces. He insisted that Hirohito must be left on his throne, so that he might lend his prestige and stabilizing influence to the reconstruction of a democratic Japan. When it was suggested that Hirohito

Foreword xiii should be arrested and tried as a war criminal, MacArthur warned that he would require an additional one million troops to garrison Japan. That settled the matter, and Hirohito remained on the throne until his death in 1989.

During the first 9 years of its life, the proto-JMSDF was known by many names and administered by various civilian bureaucracies. The formal creation of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (JSDF), of which the JMSDF is the maritime branch, dated to 1954. The existing fleet of veteran ex-IJN minesweepers was augmented by World War Il-vintage American patrol frigates and destroyers, transferred to Japanese control by Washington. Two years later, the destroyer Harukaze—the first post- 1945 warship built in Japan—was added to the JMSDF list. At about the same time, a new generation of Japanese aviators began to train in earlier-generation American aircraft such as the Avenger, the Harpoon, and the Catalina. These US-to-Japan transfers of military hardware, ships, and aircraft commenced a tradition, which continues to this day, of close interoperability of equipment and weapons systems between the two allies.

For the Japanese, the Cold War meant, above all, keeping a close eye on Soviet military operations and forces in Sakhalin, the Kurile archipelago, and the four islands to the south of which Japan continues to claim as the “Northern Territories.” This long-running territorial dispute, still not resolved, has shaped the history and missions of the JMSDF. In the 1950s, as the Cold War heated up, the Soviet Navy kept an aggressive, well-equipped fleet of submarines at Vladivostok, directly on Japan’s northern doorstep. Increasingly, the defense of Japan’s home waters required sophisticated submarine detection capabilities and countermeasures, known collectively as anti-submarine warfare (ASW). The pre-1945 IJN had largely neglected ASW, with ruinous consequences for the Japanese wartime economy. After a slow start, the US Pacific submarine force had launched an all-out campaign to destroy Japan’s maritime commerce. By early 1945, this campaign had severed Japan’s access to oil and other critical overseas resources, crippled its war industries, and left its population on the verge of starvation. With that searing experience fresh in memory, the first generation of JMSDF officers were determined to master ASW. The JMSDF’s Fleet Escort Force, inaugurated in 1954, was soon performing at a level comparable to that of the US Navy. Today, the Japanese Fleet Escort Force remains one of the best in the world, and its ASW mission would play a vital role in any future naval conflict in the Western Pacific.

International alliances are founded upon mutual national interests, but individual friendships are the bonds that hold international alliances together. That is the central premise of Friendship Across the Seas, and Professor Agawa illustrates his theme with intimate portrayals of key military and civilian officials on both sides of the Pacific. Students of the Pacific War will find many familiar names in these pages, including some of the most famous naval officers of that conflict, who went on to serve as high-ranking admirals in the 1950s and 1960s: for example, Forrest Sherman, James L. Holloway HI, and Arleigh Burke. They had experienced some of the worst naval combat in one of history’s most brutal wars, and inevitably, they were left with feelings of deep-seated bitterness against their former enemies. Subsequently, however, they either served in Japan or came into contact with xiv Foreword

Japanese officers and diplomats, and revised their views. Many became quite fond of the nation and its people. Arleigh Burke, who served as chief of naval operations for six consecutive years beginning in 1955, plays an important part in Agawa’s story. During the war, Burke had been chief of staff to Admiral Marc Mitscher of Task Force 58, the US Navy’s main carrier striking force. While in that role, he had survived the nightmarish kamikaze strikes on Task Force 58 off the Philippines and Okinawa. He and Mitscher were forced to evacuate their flagship Bunker Hill after she was hit by two kamikazes in May 1945, an ordeal which killed almost 400 of her crew. After the war, Burke later said, “I did not like the Japanese even a little bit.” His impressions changed when he was sent to Tokyo during the Korean War. As CNO, he advocated for an enlarged role for the JMSDF, arguing that it was in American as well as Japanese interests: “I feel that the problem must be faced directly someday and that the sooner it is faced the greater the probable benefit to the United States.” Regarding the constitutional limitations in Japan, “the Japanese Navy need not be called a Navy. It can be called a Coast Guard or a sea police force or anything else.” He also championed a program to allow Japanese JMSDF officers to study at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Agawa names Arleigh Burke as “one of the key advocates and supporters for founding the JMSDF.”