生長の家とは何だったのか？

大東亜戦争日本降伏文書調印式タイム誌報道を読む

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

International: ... Peace Be Now Restored (International) 

 

On the decks of the giant U.S. battleship Missouri the brief, fevered course of Japan as a great power came to a quiet end. 

After Perry's two steamships and two sloops of war opened Japan to the world, the feudal Japanese learned fast from the West. But their lesson was one-sided, their rise deceptively easy. First, they beat the Chinese, and then they drubbed the Russians. They got in on the right side in World War I. They grabbed Manchuria, and in 1937 they again attacked China, hoping to dominate all Asia. Just after Pearl Harbor, Japan careened to its highest point. 

On the Missouri nearsighted little men in anachronistic top hats and clawhammer coats dully accepted defeat. Japan would have to start all over again. 

A correspondent, staring at the scene from the Missouri's No. 2 turret, whispered: "I don't know what they're going to call this; I hope it won't be the 'Missouri Compromise.' " But there was no element of compromise in the surrender document, or in the ceremony. 

TIME Correspondent Theodore H. White cabled: 

"The veranda deck of the slate-grey battleship shone with the color of red-striped Russians, red-ribboned Britons, olive-drab Chinese, and row upon row of khaki-clad American admirals and generals. 

"The Japanese had been piped aboard four minutes before MacArthur made his appearance. The first aboard was the silk-hatted Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, limping on his wooden leg, leaning on his cane and clutching at the ship's ropes as he pulled himself up the stairway. The second was the dour, solemn-faced Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Yoshijiro Umezu—his chest covered with ribbons and hung with gold braid, his eyes blank and unseeing. 

"Complete silence greeted them as they ascended the deck. The American generals watched them come to attention in their designated places with varying degrees of emotion. Stilwell bristled like a dog at the sight of an enemy. Spaatz' chiseled face lines were sharp in contempt. Kenney curled his lips in a visible sneer. 

"MacArthur stepped out from a cabin stood stiffly erect and began reading with all the mellifluous, sonorous qualities of his magnificent voice. The only sign of his emotion was the trembling of the hands in which he held his paper. 

"As he closed the introductory remarks he half turned and faced the Japs with a piercing stare and said: 'I announce it my firm purpose ... to insure that the terms of surrender are fully, promptly and faithfully complied with.' 

"Shigemitsu, doffing his silk hat and peeling a yellow glove from his right hand, limped forward to sign the document and was assisted to a chair. With a blank, expressionless face he composed himself and signed. Umezu followed. He slowly drew off his white gloves and, without sitting, bent his stocky body forward and affixed the authority of the Japanese Army to the acknowledgment of total defeat. 

"It was Douglas MacArthur's show from beginning to end. At precisely 9:08 MacArthur stepped forward, removed a handful of fountain pens from his pocket. He started his signature, then handed the first pen to the gaunt soldier standing by his left shoulder. General Jonathan Wainwright saluted stiffly, accepted the pen, and stepped back. The next one went to Lieut. General Arthur E. Percival of Singapore. 

"In almost unbroken silence the ship's crew assembled as witnesses and watched one delegate after another affix their signatures. Grey, overcast skies had hung over the ship all during the ceremony. As the New Zealand delegate stepped forward to sign his name as the last on the list, the skies parted and the sun shone bright through the clouds. 

"MacArthur hesitated a moment after the final signature. Then he stepped forward and said slowly: 'Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.' 

"He lifted his eyes from the script, faced the Japanese, and declared: 'These proceedings are closed.' 

"The Japs clustered about and listened to the interpreter giving them their last instructions. [There was a moment of confusion while Lieut. General Richard K. Sutherland straightened out signatures on the Japanese copy of the surrender document. Colonel L. Moore Cosgrave, who signed for Canada, had written on the wrong line. So had the French, Dutch and New Zealand signers who followed him.] The orders were placed in their hands and the Americans curtly gave them the signal to leave. They turned and departed as they had come. The shrill bosun's pipe followed their steps over the side—Shigemitsu, tired and expressionless, limping on his cane as he went; Umezu, stony-faced and silent, lifting a white-gloved hand to acknowledge the salute of the guard at the gangway. 

"As the Japs departed, grey skies closed In again on the grey ships, and there was a steady drone in the sky. The drone became a deafening roar, and a mass of U.S. planes swept over the ships—400 B-29s and 1,500 fleet carrier planes—in a final salute. Then it was quiet again. The ceremony—and the war—were over."

TIME'S Person of The Year - EBOLA FIGHTERS

TIME'S Person of The Year - EBOLA FIGHTERS

 

 

The Choice

They risked and persisted, sacrificed and saved. Editor Nancy Gibbs explains why the Ebola Fighters are TIME's choice for Person of the Year 2014

Dec. 10, 2014


By Nancy Gibbs

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, says the proverb, but rather the hero’s heart.

Maybe this is true in any battle; it is surely true of a war that is waged with bleach and a prayer.

For decades, Ebola haunted rural African villages like some mythic monster that every few years rose to demand a human sacrifice and then returned to its cave. It reached the West only in nightmare form, a Hollywood horror that makes eyes bleed and organs dissolve and doctors despair because they have no cure.

But 2014 is the year an outbreak turned into an epidemic, powered by the very progress that has paved roads and raised cities and lifted millions out of poverty. This time it reached crowded slums in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone; it traveled to Nigeria and Mali, to Spain, Germany and the U.S. It struck doctors and nurses in unprecedented numbers, wiping out a public-health infrastructure that was weak in the first place. One August day in Liberia, six pregnant women lost their babies when hospitals couldn’t admit them for complications. Anyone willing to treat Ebola victims ran the risk of becoming one.

Which brings us to the hero’s heart. There was little to stop the disease from spreading further. Governments weren’t equipped to respond; the World Health Organization was in denial and snarled in red tape. First responders were accused of crying wolf, even as the danger grew. But the people in the field, the special forces of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the Christian medical-relief workers of Samaritan’s Purse and many others from all over the world fought side by side with local doctors and nurses, ambulance drivers and burial teams.

Ask what drove them and some talk about God; some about country; some about the instinct to run into the fire, not away. “If someone from America comes to help my people, and someone from Uganda,” says Iris Martor, a Liberian nurse, “then why can’t I?” Foday Gallah, an ambulance driver who survived infection, calls his immunity a holy gift. “I want to give my blood so a lot of people can be saved,” he says. “I am going to fight Ebola with all of my might.”

MSF nurse’s assistant Salome Karwah stayed at the bedsides of patients, bathing and feeding them, even after losing both her parents—who ran a medical clinic—in a single week and surviving Ebola herself. “It looked like God gave me a second chance to help others,” she says. Tiny children watched their families die, and no one could so much as hug them, because hugs could kill. “You see people facing death without their loved ones, only with people in space suits,” says MSF president Dr. Joanne Liu. “You should not die alone with space-suit men.”

Those who contracted the disease encountered pain like they had never known. “It hurts like they are busting your head with an ax,” Karwah says. One doctor overheard his funeral being planned. Asked if surviving Ebola changed him, Dr. Kent Brantly turns the question around. “I still have the same flaws that I did before,” he says. “But whenever we go through a devastating experience like what I’ve been through, it is an incredible opportunity for redemption of something. We can say, How can I be better now because of what I’ve been through? To not do that is kind of a shame.”

So that is the next challenge: What will we do with what we’ve learned? This was a test of the world’s ability to respond to potential pandemics, and it did not go well. It exposed corruption in African governments along with complacency in Western capitals and jealousy among competing bureaucrats. It triggered mistrust from Monrovia to Manhattan. Each week brought new puzzles. How do you secure a country, beyond taking passengers’ temperatures at the airport? Who has the power to order citizens to stay home, to post a guard outside their door? What will it take to develop treatments for diseases largely confined to poor nations, even as this Ebola outbreak had taken far more lives by mid-October than all the earlier ones combined?

The death in Dallas of Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola patient diagnosed on U.S. soil, and the infection of two nurses who treated him, shook our faith in the ability of U.S. hospitals to handle this kind of disease. From there the road to full freak-out was a short one. An Ohio middle school closed because an employee had flown on the same plane as one of Duncan’s nurses. Not the same flight, just the same plane. A Texas college rejected applicants from Nigeria, since that country had some “confirmed Ebola cases.” A Maine schoolteacher had to take a three-week leave because she went to a teachers’ conference in Dallas. Fear, too, was global. When a nurse in Spain contracted Ebola from a priest, Spanish authorities killed her dog as a precaution, while #VamosAMorirTodos (We’re all going to die) trended on Twitter. Guests at a hotel in Macedonia were trapped in their rooms for days after a British guest got sick and died. Turned out to have nothing to do with Ebola.

The problem with irrational responses is that they can cloud the need for rational ones. Just when the world needed more medical volunteers, the price of serving soared. When nurse Kaci Hickox, returning from a stint with MSF in Sierra Leone with no symptoms and a negative blood test, was quarantined in a tent in Newark, N.J., by a combustible governor, it forced a reckoning. “It is crazy we are spending so much time having this debate about how to safely monitor people coming back from Ebola-endemic countries,” says Hickox, “when the one thing we can do to protect the population is to stop the outbreak in West Africa.”

Ebola is a war, and a warning. The global health system is nowhere close to strong enough to keep us safe from infectious disease, and “us” means everyone, not just those in faraway places where this is one threat among many that claim lives every day. The rest of the world can sleep at night because a group of men and women are willing to stand and fight. For tireless acts of courage and mercy, for buying the world time to boost its defenses, for risking, for persisting, for sacrificing and saving, the Ebola fighters are TIME’s 2014 Person of the Year.