Compromise is made out of peace
But history is made out of violence
— Sturgil Simpson | Sing Along | 2019
At the edge of the heart of this bustling city lies a deceptively tiny and impeccably tidy park. A few steps in, and the hot concrete gives way to the humid shade of a thousand trees. This urban forest feels both perfectly natural and entirely sculpted. The only obvious evidence of how much human love goes into making this space are the small signs draped around each tree’s trunk with its species and genus painted on by hand.
In this quiet place’s quietest corner, look for the gently sloping stone steps. Ascend past smartly dressed young professional lunchers, and the trees will part, revealing America’s most powerful symbol in a most striking setting.
As the clocks on a million nearby digital devices simultaneously flip to the noon hour, this giant stone tower eeks to life. At first blush, you might think a strong breeze has pushed the Liberty Bell into a slight sway. But if you stop and watch — 60 seconds, 90 seconds — you’ll see the the 4-foot steel wheel crank and crank and gradually build enough momentum to shift from sway to swing. Finally, the clapper strikes the sound bow, and the Liberty Bell rings out. Twenty-seven beats per minute, twenty-one beats in this particular lunch hour. Each toll slightly louder than the last, then slightly quieter. The reverberations enter your solar plexus and ring up to the base of your skull and down to the soles of your feet — grounding you and lifting you all at once.
The lunchers keep lunching, and the city marches on.
As Liberty Bells go, this is far from the most popular replica, but you could make a case for it being the most impressive display and the best-kept secret in the U.S. Treasury-commissioned series. Though with 4.1 stars out of 61 Google reviews, the monument ranks in the same league as a slightly above-average restaurant.
“Nice little rest spot.”
“John Philip Sousa would be proud.”
“A shining beacon of freedom.”
Two-thousand-six-hundred-and-thirty-four days after the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan’s first and only Liberty Bell is unveiled in Tokyo’s Hibiya Park — a gift from American citizens at the behest of the former commander of occupation forces, General Douglas MacArthur — or so the story goes.
Flashback to 1905. Japanese citizens are gathered here at Hibiya Park to mark the end of another war. This time, they won. And they are PISSED. Brokered by Theodore Roosevelt, the Treaty of Portsmouth brings an end to the 18-month Russo-Japanese War. The two nations’ growing imperial pursuits forced a clash over competing trade routes and spheres of influence. While his efforts garner the American president the Nobel Peace Prize, the people of Japan aren’t having any part of peace just yet.
The treaty demands no financial reparations from Russia and even returns some territory won by Japan.* Soured by a victory with no apparent spoils and buoyed by a press critical of the Japanese government, 30,000 protesters convene at this tiny park and proceed to march through Tokyo, attacking government offices, police stations, and diplomatic buildings and churches they associate with Russia and the United States.
Alternately known as the Hibiya Riots and the Hibiya Incendiary Incident, the melee leads to 17 deaths, over 2,000 arrests and months of martial law. It’s now considered the opening salvo of the Era of Popular Violence, a 13-year series of protests that toppled two governments and raised the tide of Japanese nationalism.
The mood at Hibiya Park is decidedly more peaceful on this warm October day in 1952. The U.S. occupation officially ended that spring. At war’s end, with orders to act in the best interest of the United States and given the agency to do so as he sees fit, General MacArthur imports food to avert nationwide famine. He retains Emperor Hirohito as a figurehead — less like the living god he has been and more like the king of England. The man who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor avoids trial as a war criminal and reigns until his death in 1989, becoming the country’s longest-reigning monarch. His grandson Naruhito currently keeps his throne warm.
Compromise is made out of peace.
When Hirohito renounces his godness and pledges allegiance to MacArthur, the Japanese public largely toes the line, venerating the general and emperor with equal measure. Just three months after V.J. Day, MacArthur holds a 75% approval rating in Japan. While the two leaders don’t see eye-to-eye on the divine right of kings, they agree on the most significant threat facing their respective homelands: communism.
Eclipsed on three sides by Russia and China, the fear hits very close to home for Japan. The enemy of your enemy is your friend, and our two nations have plenty of reasons to work on their budding friendship.
The American people want to defeat communism, sure. But the threat is considerably more abstract. After two world wars and a depression, we’d rather spend the second half of the century enjoying the spoils of war than jumping into the next one. We care more about baseball and television and suburban home ownership than whether or not folks in Kaesŏng can vote.
Enter the Central Intelligence Agency. They care. They care a lot. Covert operations being covert and all, the CIA secretly forms the Free Asia Committee, framed as a grassroots collective of concerned citizens. Headed by prominent San Francisco businessmen Brayton Wilbur and George H. Greene Jr., the group’s goal is similar to that of Radio Free Europe,** — to share independent news in local languages to counteract state propaganda.
A syndicated newspaper article in 1952 aims to quell any notion of statecraft, describing the committee’s mission:
“Working as private citizens and financed by the people and not the government in America and Asia, they attack Communism on its battleground in the Far East, publishing and broadcasting truth where it may be hidden or distorted and exposing the myth of the Communist Utopian dogma.”
The citizen-led group somehow gets its hands on the last of the 57 Liberty Bell replicas commissioned two years earlier by the U.S. Treasury. They decide to sent it to Japan to be included in the peace memorial currently under construction in Hiroshima, near where we dropped Little Boy, the world’s first atomic bomb.
History is made out of violence.
This plan falls through, and instead, the Free Asia Committee gifts the bell to the Japanese Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association, which launches a 1.3-million-yen campaign to build a bell tower. When they meet their fundraising goal, the group then donates the Liberty Bell to the city of Tokyo.
U.S. Ambassador Robert D. Murphy and Tokyo Governor Seiichirō Yasui oversee an inaugural ceremony introducing a newly sovereign nation to the sound of liberty. A brass plaque mounted to the bell’s stone tower reads, in part,
The dimensions and tone are identical with those of the original Liberty Bell when it rang out the independence of America in 1776, becoming thereby a symbol of freedom to not only Americans but all mankind.
In standing before this symbol, you have the opportunity to dedicate yourself, as did the founding fathers of the United States, to the principles of freedom which you share with free citizens everywhere.
The free citizens of Japan enjoy the daily tolling of the Liberty Bell throughout the second half of the twentieth century. But time does what it does. By 2010 the ringing mechanism has failed, the clapper has gone missing and the tower is showing its age.
Ando Hiroshige Ukiyo-e Museum owner Akira Takada steps in and forms the Liberty Bell Restoration Fundraising Committee, raising money to restore the bell and tower. At a rededication ceremony on October 1, 2011, the sounds of liberty once again echo across Tokyo. Every year on August 15, Japanese citizens gather beneath the Liberty Bell in Hibiya Park to commemorate the end of the Second World War and pray for peace.
Since 1960, the United States has been treaty-bound to defend Japan in the event of foreign attack. Still, Japan has steadily rebuilt its military might, spending 1.19% of GDP on defense. But that’s no match for her American allies, whose role as world police remains unchallenged — with just 4.3% of the world’s population, the U.S. accounts for 40% of global military spending.
A 2024 assessment from the U.S. Heritage Foundation names Russia and China as the greatest threats to America’s peace. A Japanese Defense White Paper from the same year lists Russia, China and North Korea as that nation’s most significant military threats — more so than at any time since WWII.
It looks like the U.S. and Japan are in for a long friendship.
Tokyo Liberty Bell replica
Location: Hibiya Park
1 Hibiyakoen
Chiyoda City, Tokyo 100-0012, Japan
Serial Number: 56
Can I ring it? The bell rings daily at noon and on special occasions, but visitors can not ring it.
Hours: 24/7 (Outdoors)
* The island of Sakhalin was split along the 50th parallel north, with the top three-fifths returning to Russia and the remainder remaining Japanese. Control bounced back and forth, and the entire island has been part of Russia since the end of the Second World War.
** Radio Free Europe was also founded by and funded by the CIA until 1971. It proverd to be one of the Cold War’s most effective weapons.
Resources: Google review from local guide, 小林慶太 | Arlo Ayres Brown III, The Great Tokyo Riot: The History And Historiography of The Hibiya Incendiary Incident of 1905. | Only in Japan, Tokyo has Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell, a Unique Sight
Credits: Thanks to Brett DeVore for the photos and confirming the serial number.