August 30th, 1945. 1419 hours. At Sugi Naval Air Base, 28 miles southwest of Tokyo, the C-54 transport batan rolls to a stop on a runway that two weeks earlier was a kamicazi training field. Brigadier General Boner Fellers is the third man down the air stair behind MacArthur and behind MacArthur’s chief of staff.
He carries a leather satchel that contains 47 pages of psychological warfare assessments, a typed list of names from the Imperial Household Ministry, and one personal item, a paperback novel given to him in 1937 by a Japanese woman he met in Yokohama and would never see again.
He has been preparing for this afternoon for 8 years. No one in Washington knows that. Fellers was 49 years old, a West Point graduate of 1918, an Idahoorn infantry officer who had served as MacArthur’s military attache in the Philippines before the war and his head of psychological warfare in the Southwest Pacific area through every campaign from New Guinea to Luzon.
His official title at the moment he stepped off the baton was military secretary to the supreme commander for the allied powers. His actual job, the one MacArthur had given him verbally 3 days earlier on Okinawa was to manage the Japanese emperor, not to depose him, not to try him, to keep him on the throne. The order was not in writing.
It would never be in writing for the next 14 months. But to understand why MacArthur trusted Bonerfellers with the single most politically dangerous assignment of the entire Pacific occupation to keep alive the man. Much of America and most of Asia wanted to see hanged. We have to look back to 1922 when Fellers wrote a 70page student paper at the command and general staff school at Fort Levvenworth, Kansas.
The paper was titled the psychology of the Japanese soldier. The se it argued that the emperor was not a political figure to the Japanese mind. He was a religious one. To prosecute him as a war criminal would be in Fellow’s exact phrasing to ignite a war among the defeated that the victors will spend a generation fighting.
MacArthur read that paper in 1937. He remembered it in 1945. By the second week of September 1945, the government section of the State Department was drafting a paper for State Department Sha President Truman that listed Emperor Hirohito as defendant number one in the projected Tokyo trial. The list had been circulated through the Australian, Soviet, Chinese, and British governments.
Australia’s foreign minister HVAT wanted Hirohito hanged. China wanted Hirohito imprisoned for life. The Soviets wanted both the emperor and the entire imperial family deposed. Inside the Dedqi insurance building in central Tokyo, MacArthur’s new headquarters, eight floors of marble and brass requisitioned overnight from a Japanese insurance company.
Fellers was reading those cables daily. He was not authorized to act on them. He was acting on them anyway. The first meeting took place on September 22nd, 1945 in a small reception room on the second floor of the Daichi building. Fellers received a Japanese visitor named Kawi Tatsuo, a former diplomat who had served as Japan’s ambassador to Australia until 1942.
Kauaii had been quietly identified by Felaz’s small intelligence team as a viable intermediary, fluent in English, trusted at court, not implicated in any war crime, and politically expendable if the back channel ever leaked. They spoke for 90 minutes. No notes were taken. No record was filed.
The end of the meeting, Fellers handed Kauaii a single sheet of paper. Five questions, five answers. Kauaii was to deliver them to the Imperial Household Ministry by midnight. What fellers wanted from the Imperial Household over the next 14 months was the same thing every time. Alignment. He needed Hirohito’s public statements, Hirohito’s recorded interviews, and Hirohito’s eventual sworn testimony before any Allied tribunal to converge on a single narrative.
The emperor had been a constitutional monarch who reigned but did not rule. The war had been the doing of the militarists, especially Tojo. The emperor had personally intervened to end it in August 1945. None of those three claims was unambiguously true. Two of them were partially false. Fellers’s job was not to make them true.
His job was to make them consistent across every Japanese voice that mattered before any Allied prosecutor could find a contradiction. On September 27th, 1945 at 1000 hours, Emperor Hirohiotei arrived at the American Embassy in Tokyo for his first meeting with General MacArthur. The meeting had been arranged through fellows and Kauaii over the preceding 11 days.
Hirohito wore a black formal morning coat, striped trousers, and a silk top hat. He stepped down from his Rolls-Royce and was met by an American aid in the embassy foyer. Behind that aid in the reception room, MacArthur was waiting. MacArthur was wearing open collar khaki summer service dress, no tie, no medals, no cap.
The wardrobe had been Fellers’s specific recommendation transmitted to MacArthur by memorandum on September 24th. The contrast between the two men in the photograph that would result was the entire point. What happened in the embassy reception room over the next 38 minutes is not in the official record.
If this is the kind of history you want more of, subscribe. We are just getting to it. Only one official Japanese interpreter was present, a man named Okumura Katsuzo, who later destroyed his notes at imperial direction. MacArthur and Hirohito spoke for 38 minutes. At minute 11, a US Army photographer named Lieutenant Gaitano Fias, working under Fellow’s standing orders, was permitted into the room.
He took three exposures with a speed graphic camera. He left. The photograph that the world saw the next morning showed Hirohito, formal, rigid in his morning coat, standing beside a MacArthur, half a head taller, hands on hips, jacket open. One photograph distributed worldwide within 18 hours. The policy was now public. Reversing it would now be diplomatically catastrophic.
That had been Fellers’s calculation from the September 24th memo forward. The Japanese press initially refused to print the photograph. The Home Ministry, still operating under wartime censorship laws, banned it on September 28th. MacArthur’s headquarters lifted the ban that afternoon by direct order from Scap, drafted by Fellers, and signed by MacArthur.
A photograph appeared on the front pages of every Japanese newspaper on September 29th. It did exactly what Fellers had predicted in his September 24th memorandum. It humanized the emperor by making him visibly smaller than the American victor. It humiliated the militarist faction inside Japan by showing the emperor as a man and not a god.
and it made it impossible in international diplomatic terms for any Allied government to subsequently demand the emperor’s trial without appearing to repudiate MacArthur personally, a confrontation neither Truman nor any Allied capital was willing to have. In October 1945, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East opened formally on May 3rd, 1946 in the converted auditorium of the former Japanese War Ministry building in Ichigaya, Tokyo.
28 defendants were arraigned. Hideki Tojo, former prime minister, was defendant number one on the indictment. Hirohito was not on the indictment. He had not been on any draft of the indictment circulated within Scap after February 1946. The chief prosecutor, an American named Joseph Keenan, had been told privately by MacArthur in March that the emperor would not be charged, would not be called as a witness, and would not be mentioned by any prosecution witness without prior clearance from Scap.
Keenan accepted the instruction. He never put it in writing. The hardest moment came in December 1947. Hideki Tojo on the witness stand in his own defense was asked by the British prosecutor whether the emperor had ever overruled a decision of the cabinet on a matter of war. Tojo paused then answered, “No Japanese subject would ever act against the imperial will.
The answer placed the responsibility for the war directly on the throne. Within 48 hours, Tojo’s defense council, a Japanese lawyer named Kiosi Ichiro, was summoned to a meeting in the Daichi building with Fellers and Kenan. By the time Tojo took the stand again on December 31st, his testimony had been adjusted.
He clarified on cross-examination that the cabinet’s decisions had been the cabinets and that the emperor had merely ratified them. The crisis passed. Hirohito was not summoned. Tojo was sentenced to death on November 12th, 19 48 and hanged at Sugumo prison in Tokyo on December 23rd, 1948, 1 minute after midnight.
Six other defendants were hanged with him. 16 received life imprisonment. Two received lesser sentences. Two had died during the trial. One was found mentally unfit. Hirohito kept his throne. He would keep it for the next 41 years, dying as the longest reigning monarch in Japanese history.
On January 7th, 1989, age 87, surrounded by family in the Fukiage Palace inside the imperial compound, the same compound he had been the emperor of when the war began. By the time he died, the men who had decided his fate at the Dichi building were nearly all dead themselves. MacArthur had died in 1964, Truman in 1972, Keenan in 1954, Boner Fellers was 12 years gone.
The end of Fellers’s career came faster than the end of the tribunal. In November 1946, 18 months before Tojo was sentenced, four months after the tribunal opened, British General Bonner Feller received orders from the War Department in Washington, recalling him to the United States. The orders cited completion of theater assignment.
There was no theater assignment to complete. MacArthur was still scap. The occupation was still in its second year. Ellis’s office at the Dichi building was reassigned within 72 hours. His files, including the September 24th memorandum on the embassy photograph, including the questions and answers sheets to Kawaii, were boxed up and shipped to Washington in nine wooden crates.
Most of them would not be opened again for 30 years. The recall had come from Truman personally. The White House had learned through a leak from a former government section officer named Charles Cadids that fellers had been conducting unauthorized contact with members of the Japanese imperial household, including on at least four documented occasions with Hirohito’s younger brother, Prince Takamatsu.
The contacts had been substantive. They had touched on the indictment list on the language of the renunciation of divinity declaration the emperor had issued on January 1st 1946 and on the political future of the imperial institution under the new constitution then being drafted. None of those contacts had been cleared with the state department.
Truman, who had personally distrusted MacArthur since 1944, used Fellers as the lever. Fellers reached Washington on December 4th, 1946. He was assigned to the Pentagon as a deputy in a personnel office. The assignment was a deliberate humiliation. A brigadier general with 8 years of theater command experience reduced to processing transfer requests for captains and majors.
He held the post for 6 months. On July 31st, 1947, at the age of 51, he submitted his retirement papers. The Army accepted them the same day. There was no farewell ceremony. A brief retirement announcement in the Army Navy Journal listed his last assignment as personnel staff. Headquartered Department of the Army.
It did not mention MacArthur. It did not mention Scap. did not mention Japan. Fellers did not write a memoir. He gave four published interviews in the 26 years between his retirement and his death. Three to academic historians and one to a journalist from the Wall Street Journal in 1969. In all four, he refused to discuss the Hirohito intervention by name.
He would say only that the emperor’s survival had been a policy of the United States governments, that the policy had succeeded, and that the architects of the policy had agreed at the time not to claim credit for it individually. He kept that agreement. He took a position as a public Rickens adviser to the John Burch Society in the 1950s, a decision that further obscured his earlier work.
precaution since the political associations of his later career made academic engagement with his earlier role uncomfortable for two generations of American historians. The Hoover Institution at Stanford University accepted Fellers’s papers in 19 to the collection. 14 linear feet of correspondence, memoranda, photographs, draft orders, and personal diaries was sealed at Fellowers’s request until 1985.
John Daer, writing embracing defeat in the late 1990s, was among the first historians to work through the unsealed collection in full. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 2000. It contains a chapter on fellers titled the useful emperor. The chapter runs 26 pages.
It is the longest sustained treatment of Boner Fellowers’s role in the Hirohito policy ever published. There are 14 books on MacArthur in the same library. Two of them mention Fellers by name. None of those two devotes more than a paragraph to him. There is an argument that has run quietly inside Japanese and American historical circles for 40 years.
Was keeping Hirohito on the throne the right call? The case for it prevented an insurgency in Japan that even conservative US Army intelligence estimates put at 250,000 American occupation troops needed for 5 years. It made possible a peaceful constitutional reform that produced one of the longestrunn democracies in modern Asia.
It gave Japan the institutional continuity that allowed the postwar economic recovery. The case against it denied the victims of Japanese imperial expansion, the Chinese, the Koreans, the Filipinos, the Allied pals, the comfort women, the moral closure of seeing the throne held accountable. The argument is still alive.
It will be alive long after every man who made the decision is dead. Brigadier General Bonner Frank Fellers died on October 7th, 1973 at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. He was 77 years old. Cause of death, complications of a stroke. He is buried in section 30 of Arlington National Cemetery with a simple government issue marker that reads Bonerfellers, Brigadier General, US Army, World War I, World War II.
No mention of MacArthur, no mention of Japan, no mention of an emperor. The American Embassy reception room in Tokyo, where the photograph was taken on September 27th, the 1945, is still in use today as the residence of the US ambassador to Japan. The room is shown on occasional public tours. The photograph hangs on the wall.
Both men in it are named. The man who staged it is not. The general who answered the call, MacArthur, could not put in writing. the architect of the policy, his own country buried. The man whose decision kept a Japanese throne in place for 44 more years. If your father, your grandfather, your anyone in your family served in the Pacific theater of World War II, in the Southwest Pacific area, in the Philippines, in the occupation of Jan, in the Tokyo Tribunal staff, on any ship or any base from Atsugi to Yokosuka, leave their name and what they did in the comments below. Don’t just leave the name. Tell us one thing about them. One thing they did or one thing they said or one thing you remember. The men who were there deserve more than a name in a database. They deserve to be remembered as people. Subscribe if you
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