Allied occupation of Japan

The Allied occupation of Japan occurred from 28 August 1945 to 28 April 1952 in the aftermath of the Allied victory over Japan in the Pacific Theater of World War II. Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) Douglas MacArthur presided over an American-led occupation of Japan which saw the wartime cabinet purged and replaced by a moderate cabinet which, under MacArthur's guidance, transformed Japan into a parliamentary democracy, enacted sweeping social and economic reforms inspired by the United States' own New Deal priorities, and adopted a new constitution in 1947. The Nationalist defeat in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 led to a "Reverse Course" policy in Japan as the Allied occupiers depurged several conservative and ultranationalist politicians with the goal of building an anti-communist bulwark in Japan, and, after Japan signed the Treaty of San Francisco in 1952, Japan's sovereignty was fully restored; however, the Ryukyu Islands would remain occupied until 1972.

Background[]

On 15 August 1945, after a long and brutal war and two atomic bombings, the Japanese government finally agreed to surrender to the Allied Powers, and, a day later, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's unconditional surrender the next day over the radio, the first time most citizens of Japan ever heard their sovereign's voice. On 28 August 1945, the USS Missouri and its accompanying vessels landed the 4th Marine Regiment on the southern coast of Kanagawa Prefecture, while the 11th Airborne Division was airlifted from Okinawa to Tokyo, commencing the occupation of Japan. On 2 September 1945, the Japanese government signed the Instrument of Surrender, formally surrendering and ending the Pacific War and World War II. On 6 September 1945, President Harry S. Truman set two objectives for the occupation: eliminating Japan's war potential, and turning Japan into a democratic nation with a pro-United Nations orientation.

Truman then appointed General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) with the objective of dismantling the system that had sent Japan to war and create another, based on an American vision of democracy. The occupation idea was meant to remake Japan into a democracy, and many young Japanese eagerly greeted the occupiers as liberators. The American propaganda film Our Job in Japan proclaimed that, "We're here to make it clear to the Japanese that the time has come to make sense: modern, civilized sense." MacArthur came to be very popular among the Japanese for his commanding presence and his old-fashioned personality. He believed that Emperor Hirohito held a special power over his people and that, if he was a god to his people, he could work miracles for the occupation; he believed that Hirohito should be rehabilitated, even as other Allied leaders sought to have him tried for war crimes.

MacArthur and Hirohito posing for the photo

In the third week of September 1945, Emperor Hirohito met with MacArthur, who cordially and respectfully greeted the Emperor and posed for a photograph with him, symbolizing the new relationship between the Americans and the Japanese, and the new roles of MacArthur and the Emperor. Hirohito later delivered a second radio broadcast (his first being the one which ended the war and renounced his divinity) which tried to soothe the fears of famine among his people. However, his people remained skeptical, arguing that the famine was already happening.

By 1946, the Imperial Japanese Army garrisons from overseas had been recalled to Japan due to the war's end, and the returning soldiers found that Japan's economy was in shambles, and that unemployment had skyrocketed, inflation was severe, and there were food shortages. 6 million civilians and soldiers returned to a country that could not support them, as their cities had been reduced to rubble, and, in the countryside, bad harvests cut the food supply in half. There were 13 million unemployed, food was rationed, and newspapers carried reports of death by starvation. Many Japanese still lived in the rubble of their destroyed homes, building huts among the ruins.

Japanese civilians heading to the Subaru Theatre

As Japan's previous system of governance had failed its people, many Japanese citizens were eager to learn more about democracy. Tokyo was gradually rebuilt, and, while the Japanese tried to learn American ways through education, books, music, and films, the Americans tried to democratize Japanese culture. On national radio, SCAP installed a new show, "Amateur Hour", which looked for new talent among the people. Baseball was also encouraged, releasing pent-up enthusiasm for the game. Japan's favorite pastime during the occupation was the movies, which were no longer censored by the government, or used for propaganda. The Americans replaced the old fascist censors with new censors who imported American movies to teach democracy to the Japanese, mandating that lovers on screen must kiss, breaking the old Japanese taboo of not depicting kisses on-screen.

The occupation promoted free speech, and SCAP encouraged workers, women, and intellectuals to speak out now that the authoritarian regime had been defeated. SCAP sought to root out all vestiges of wartime Japan, identifying and trying Japan's war criminals, with the most infamous and unrepentant being Hideki Tojo, who led Japan's war effort. Many Japanese business leaders considered partners of the military were removed from their positions of power, and over 200,000 military leaders, businessmen, and politicians were purged. The purge was popular among the next level of office-holders and managers, and Colonel Charles Louis Kades used to refer to it as "early retirement".

Conservative leader Shigeru Yoshida speaking before the Diet

The zaibatsu business conglomerates, which had worked with the army to exploit cheap labor from Southeast Asia, Manchuria, and Korea, were also targeted by the purge. Mitsubishi had built the Zero fighter and Nissan built its first cars in Manchuria, and occupation reformers sought to break up concentrations of power and transform Japan from a nation of big businesses to one of little businesses. The reformers planned to bust up the zaibatsu and release their natural enemies, the communists, who had consistently opposed Japanese militarism. When released from jail, the communists renewed their attacks on militarist government and big business. Japan's conservatives were appalled by the American reforms, asking MacArthur if he was trying to turn Japan "red", and wondering what kind of people would foment revolution from above. It was at the Daichi Building in Tokyo where a few hundred American men and women set about reinventing Japan, with few having any knowledge of the country they were trying to change.

Writing of the Japanese constitution — The writing of the Japanese constitution

The Americans attempted to implement New Deal programs in Japan, with even conservative Republicans like MacArthur and Courtney Whitney seeing no other alternative. Whitney headed the important Government Division of SCAP, but Colonel Charles Louis Kades, a staunch New Deal Democrat, oversaw its day-to-day affairs. Kades persuaded Whitney to go along with a number of liberal reforms, as MacArthur wanted to shake the foundations of the Japanese state. MacArthur had the Japanese government rewrite the Meiji Constitution, and, when they refused, he decided to have his team, including Beate Sirota Gordon, Milton Esman, and Richard Poole, rewrite it themselves. MacArthur gave the government section six days to write up a draft; its Article 9 called on Japan to lay down its arms forever. Sirota sought to improve women's rights, as women could not decide who they wanted to marry, divorce a man, and had no property rights, so she added many specific rights such as pre-natal care, maternity leave, and other enumerated women's rights not in the US Constitution. However, the steering committee said that the Japanese constitution went further than the Constitution and was too specific, so Kades and the committee struck them out. Ultimately, the steering committee agreed to incorporate the "main rights", as well as changing the role of the Emperor.

After Shigeru Yoshida and the other conservatives saw the American constitution, they were reportedly dumbfounded. Japan's conservative government hated the new constitution, but, as elections were coming up, most Japanese firmly backed the constitution's principles, and SCAP threatened to put the draft before the Japanese people, the government presented the constitution as a Japanese draft. During the summer of 1946, the national assembly debated and fought over the constitution, with some of its strongest supporters being 39 female representatives elected in the first election in which women could vote. It was adopted on 7 October 1946, approved by Emperor Hirohito on 3 November 1946, and went into effecton on 3 May 1947. Newspapers argued that the constitution "smelled of butter", meaning disticntly American.

The ensuing 1947 general election saw Tetsu Katayama and the Japan Socialist Party win the largest number of seats, becoming the first Christian and socialist prime minister. Freedom of expression led to an explosion of Japanese popular culture in song, dance, and movies, with Akira Kurosawa making his first films, capturing the joys of youth such as a boy and a girl having a picnic; such innocent themes were censored during the war.

By 1946, half of Japan's population lived off the land as tenant farmers, bitterly poor and tilling the soil for a handful of rich landlords. To stave off rising discontent, the occupation enacted land reform, forcing the government to buy 30 million parcels of land and sell it cheaply to the farmers. Land reform created a new class of conservatives in Japan (as it undercut the JCP's rural support), and labor reform set free more radical elements. Labor unions were established very quickly, and 4.5 million workers joined unions in the first year of the occupation.

For years, wages and union activity had been suppressed by the military and the zaibatsu. With unemployment and inflation rising, workers were ready for more radical action. One of the first bold moves caught everyone by surprise: in late 1945, railroad workers seized control of the Tokyo train and trolley system and let everyone ride for free. On May Day of 1946, in the biggest demonstation in the nation's history, 2 million men, women, and children took to the streets to demand wage increases, political power, and worker control of the factories. By fall, over 100 strikes hit Japanese industries from newspapers to car factories and movie studios. The movement peaked in the winter of 1947 when confident labor leaders called for a general strike to display their political power and shut down the entire country. The Japanese Communist Party sought to seize power and topple the Yoshida cabinet, as Yoshida called the labor unions "lawless", mocked the economic reforms as "revolution from above leading to revolution from below", and he said that Japan was "submerged in a sea of red flags."

Every union had agreed to take part in the general strike, and some members of the occupation worried that democracy was going too far. General Charles A. Willoughby feared that the communists were gaining control over the labor unions, and, as trains stopped running, communications were cut off, food ran low, and shelters ran short, Japan approached anarchy. MacArthur banned the general strike, crippling the communists, but many Japanese workers felt betrayed by the American reformers, who had given the Japanese workers the right to strike, a signal of reversals to come. By 1947, events outside Japan were starting to change the course of occupation policy. In China, communist forces led by Mao Zedong were routing the armies led by America's ally, Chiang Kai-shek. In Eastern Europe, new communist regimes emerged, and many Americans feared that the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was leading a campaign to spread communism throughout the world.

George F. Kennan, the man in charge of the American blueprint for containing communism, concluded that the occupation reforms in Japan were paving the way for a communist takeover, as it had brought democracy, but not prosperity. He saw the weakness of Japan's economy as fertile for the growth of communism, and conservatives in America argued that they could not afford to weaken Japan any further, as they sought to make Japan into a bulwark of the Western defense system, rebuild the Japanese economy, and halt the reforms. Kennan flew to Japan, followed by the Under-Secretary of the Army, William Henry Draper Jr., the "Wall Street General". Draper tried to persuade MacArthur to stop punishing big business in Japan and start building up the country.

An unsympathetic 1947 *Newsweek* cover asking, "Japan: Has the Job Been Bungled?"

SCAP's reformers had pushed economic democracy by busting up big business to make a nation of small capitalists, but that meant taking from the rich and giving to the poor, which upset conservatives in the United States. The Republicans won control of the Congress in 1946, and there was concern among conservatives that land reform, the breaking up of the zaibatsu, and the purges were having a negative effect on property rights, were far too radical, and were moving in the direction of socialism. Washington's distrust of MacArthur and the SCAP reformers soon began to circulate in the US press, indicating that the occupation was in the hands of "mindless leftists" who were making Japan very vulnerable to communism, chaos, and anarchy. Inside SCAP, division grew between those in favor of democratic reforms and anti-communists seeking to strengthen the country. The Japanese took advantage of the division of opinion to sabotage the reforms suggested to them by the Government Section.

Japanese and American conservatives joined forces to undermine some of the earlier reforms, seeking to rebuild Japanese big business under the guidance of elite bureaucrats and politicians. The "Reverse Course" saw Japan move away from what Yoshida called "the excesses of democracy". In 1948, the USA officially adopted a new plan to build up Japanese industry, seeking to make Japan into the workshop of Asia in the fight to contain communism. A month later, Japanese voters - looking for stability and economic growth - swept Yoshida and the Japanese conservatives into power. By the end of 1949, Japan began a "Red Purge" to root out the communists SCAP had set free four years before. The Japanese labor movement's leadership was leftist, but its body consisted mostly of moderate rank-and-file workers who lost their radical direction once their leaders were arrested. Japanese managers also used the Red Purge in their battle against the labor unions, and many people who were not communists lost their jobs because they took a hard line toward management.

When the Toho movie union tried to occupy the studio and run it themselves, police broke down the studio gates; they were backed up by American tanks and airplanes. With the unions in check, the US sent a new emissary to remake Japan's economic policy. On 1 February 1949, the Detroit banker Joseph Dodge arrived in Tokyo with total authority to fix Japan's authority. Inflation was the main problem, so Dodge decided to balance the budget, stopping inflation dead in its tracks. For workers, however, the cure seemed worse than the disease, as Dodge had cut government subsidies to balance the budget. Without government funds, thousands of firms went bankrupt. In 1949, public and private companies laid off over 2 million workers, and union leaders were the first to go. Economic conditions inflamed political passions, and newspaper headlines were filled with news of mysterious murders and political sabotage. The Yoshida government promised prosperity, but the Dodge line was mocking his promises of economic prosperity.

Yoshida called it a gift from the gods when the Korean War broke out in 1950 as the Soviet-backed North Koreans invaded US-backed South Korea. The Americans bought their trucks and supplies from Japan; for a country trying to build, the infusion of cash from the war effort helped stimulate the Japanese economy. However, it also allowed the Japanese people to forget about what they had done to Asia during the war, and they learned that, if something made money, it was good. From 1950 to 1954, the US spent nearly $3 billion in Japan for military supplies in the "Procurement boom", which jump-started Japan's economy and saved the regime of Shigeru Yoshida.

Yoshida signing the Treaty of San Francisco

In 1951, Yoshida flew to the USA to make a deal, demanding Japan's independence. America wanted Japan to rearm and side with America in the Cold War, and, in 1952, the Treaty of San Francisco was signed by delegates from 52 nations to conclude a treaty of peace with Japan. Japan allowed the US to keep its military bases on Japanese soil in exchange for peace, but many Japanese feared that the USA would lead Japan into another war. While Americans urged Japan to stick to manufacturing toys, bicycles, and cocktail napkins, Japan put all its resources into steel mills, cars, and electronics, protecting and nurturing the key industries through central economic control. The government worked with banks and big business for national goals, forming the "Japan Inc." system. By the time MacArthur had left Japan, Japan's military machine had been dismantled, and many democratic reforms had taken root. However, the economic system was still uniquely Japanese. Japan and the United States developed a new relationship, with Japan believing that the USA would always protect its right to be different.

Allied occupation of Japan

Background[]

Fan Feed