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January 03, 2005

Disappearnce of Weapons during the U.S. Occupation of Japan

People have commented that although the U.S. occupations of Germany and Japan after World War II are generally thought to be a grand success, they, like our occupation of Iraq, had their rough spots. I just came across an example of this in Robert Whiting, Tokyo Underworld (1999), page 19:
"But those responsible for the disappearance of large stores of diamonds--transferred to the custody of the U.S. Army from--the Bank of Japan and other venues--were never found; nor Ware those who had made off with the entire armory of the disarmed Tokyo police force sometime between 1945, when the GHQ disarmed the Metropolitan Police Department and placed the weapons in securely locked storage crates in a military warehouse in Yokohama, and 1946, when the crates were opened and the contents were discovered to be missing."
Whiting's book tells about the pervasive influence of black marketeering gangsters during the Occupation-- gangsters whose influence rivalled that of the legitimate Japanese government and were more important to daily life than was the small U.S. presence.

Posted by erasmuse at January 3, 2005 08:23 AM

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