Program Five in the ten-part video documentary series on “The Pacific Century.” Written and produced by Alex Gibney and co-produced by Alan Poul. Sponsored by the Pacific Basin Institute in association with KCTS/Seattle, 1992. 60 minutes.
If any historical depth is given to a notion of “contemporary” Japan, it is usually thought to extend over the six decades from the end of World War II to the present, that is, 1945-2004. For some time, “contemporary Japan” was considered synonymous with “postwar Japan” (in Japanese terms, for example, genzai Nihon shakai was used interchangeably with sengô Nihon), but that precipitated many debates about just when the “postwar” period ended in Japan. Some took a narrow view: “postwar” was the brief period of the American Occupation and Japanese recovery. Others extended “postwar” through the high-growth boom period, ended by the Oil Crisis and other problems of the 1970s. Still others (myself included) think “postwar Japan” wasn’t symbolically concluded until the Emperor Shôwa died in 1989. Only then did Japan enter post-“postwar Japan.”
Whatever one’s position on the periodizing and nature of contemporary Japan, we all take its starting point to be the military occupation of Japan upon its surrender in August, 1945, until 1952. This is usually called the American Occupation, although more precisely it was the Allied Occupation because forces from all the Allied countries were represented. However, quite unlike the Allied Occupation of Germany, the American armed forces vastly outnumbered the other allied contributions. Even more significantly, the occupation of Japan was commanded by an exceptionally forceful and confident American “Supreme Military Commander,” General Douglas MacArthur.
The American Occupation was both unique and familiar in Japanese historical experience. On the one hand, Japan had never been defeated or occupied in its 1500 years of state history. The moral collapse, the political disgrace, and the societal dislocation were on an unprecedented scale. Consider, as a starting point, the way that the political scientist Robert Ward evoked the sense of defeat and devastation that the Japanese faced as MacArthur was deplaning:
“At the time of Japan’s surrender in August, 1945, the nation was confronted with the awesome costs of the war. Combined military and civilian casualties totaled about 1,800,000 dead; civilians alone accounted for 668,000 killed, wounded or missing; roughly twenty-five percent of the national wealth had been destroyed or lost; some forty percent of the built-up area of the sixty-six major cities subjected to air attacks had been leveled to the ground; about twenty percent of the nation’s residential housing and almost twenty-five percent of all her buildings were obliterated; thirty percent of her industrial capacity, eighty percent of her shipping, and forty-seven percent of her thermal power-generating capacity were destroyed; forty-six percent of her prewar territory had been lost… Other more intangible costs were harder to calculate: the long-term economic significance of the loss of Empire; the political consequences of being reduced to the status of a second-or-third-class power; the effects of being cut off from established trading partners; the consequences of facing world suspicion and opposition to any revival of Japan’s prewar eminence in Eastern Asia. Japan’s immediate prospects were ominous and alarming. What had become of the country? How was it to be reconstructed and rehabilitated?” (Japan’s Political System, pp. 17-18, 1967)
MacArthur seized the opportunity to reinvent Japan from the rubble. The American Occupation restored the central government, revived the national economy, and reorganized society–in very different terms than the prewar fascist emperor-state. Perhaps the most eloquent account of this time, as told from the perspective of ordinary Japanese society, is the recent book by John Dower, Embracing Defeat, which won both the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 2000.
And yet, one may also argue that Japan had experienced similarly intense and radical societal reform on four earlier occasions. One might even argue that “reinventing Japan” has been a periodic, not singular occurrence:
- with the seventh-century establishment of an imperial court at Nara and Heian, in which Yamato clan leaders fashioned out of indigenous “Shintô” beliefs and a creative appropriation of ideas and institutions from T’ang dynasty China;
- with the declaration in late 1100s of another novel form of government and social structure with the establishment of the military high command (shogunate) at Kamakura that brought to an end the Heian court’s central control under new principles of feudal loyalty and military prowess;
- with the even more radical reordering of politics and society under the “integral bureaucracy” of the seventeenth-century Tokugawa shoguns, adapting Western technology (guns) to wrest control from rival warlords and then appropriating Chinese ideas (Sung philosopher Chu Hsi’s “neo-Confucianism”) to underwrite a new model of political relations and social obligations; and finally,
- with the “restoration” of the Emperor Meiji by dissident samurai who proceeded to launch Japan on a rapid course of modernization and ultimately militarism through massive adaptation of technology and ideas from the West, leavened with a creative reworking of indigenous Japanese identity.
In that sense, the Occupation was one more point in a historical spiral, another moment when a new central authority emerged, reconstituted on novel principles and precipitating major societal transformation.
In 1945, the emperor was fundamentally recast, from divine being to human being. The documentary refers to General MacArthur as the “new emperor.” He was an imperial figure, to be sure, wrapping himself deliberately in clouds of mystery, but you might better think of him by another of his nicknames, the “American shogun.” Like Tokugawa Ieyasu, he preferred to let the emperor reign while he ruled. Still, it is perhaps early Meiji that is the closest parallel and clearest contrast–the forced “opening” of the country, the fascination with things Western (cf. Meiji had its “Dancing Cabinet” while “jazz was the sound of democracy” in the late 1940s), the struggles over a new Constitution, new austere fiscal policies, powerful tensions between the demands for democracy and the felt imperatives of national strength, and so forth.
Contemporary Japan begins with the American Occupation, but the legacy of what MacArthur wrought remains a hotly-debated topic. One of the most interesting features of this documentary is its contradictory position—some might say, waffling—on this issue. The documentary ends with an interview with Clyde Prestowitz, who was well-known in the late 1970s and 1980s as a hard-line negotiator with the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office and is now an influential Washington insider and think-tank president. His position—a common one—is that nothing much changed. Japan remained Japan, resolutely on its own course (and as a result, by the 1980s, we were fighting them once again, this time in an economic world war):
“In the Occupation [to paraphrase Prestowitz], America was the mentor and protégé; the Japanese seemed to be eager pupils, absorbing our lessons. We were grateful and flattered, but we were duped. The pupil turned out to have his own very different economic program. We thought Japan was recovering to be a modest producer of toys and cocktail napkins; instead, they quickly became our manufacturing rivals in steel and automobiles. And they did it not with Occupation reforms but by going back to prewar structures–central control and the industrial zaibatsu conglomerates.”
With mixed anger and pique, he complains, “We thought they were just like us; they thought we would protect their right to be different.”
This is a curious conclusion, because the message of the documentary itself seems rather different. It stresses two features of Japan in the late 1940s and early 1950s that undermine any simple distinction between an American Occupation of reform duped and undermined by a Japanese reactionary backlash.
First, Occupation policy and reforms were divided against themselves. The earliest initiatives pushed thoroughgoing democratization: purging and punishing all leadership, destroying the zaibatsu, and encouraging labor unions, land reform, and extensive civil rights. But changing American politics and fear of a growing worldwide Communist threat threw everything into “reverse course.” The massive general strike called for May 1, 1947 was banned by General MacArthur hours before it was to have begun, a “Red purge” was countenanced against the recently-freed Japanese Communist leaders, the Detroit banker Joseph Dodge was dispatched in 1949 to fix the Japanese economy at great hardship to the working population, and the Japanese government was urged to rearm as an outpost of stability and strength against Red China in the Far East. There were, thus, two American Occupations.
The other theme of the documentary is the divided nature of the Japanese themselves. The local political, economic, and social scene featured a raucous clash of Communist activists, Socialists, democrats, and unrepentant nationalists. Many Japanese enthusiastically embraced and embellished the more progressive American dictates and were devastated when the forces of political conservatism (led by Prime Minister Yoshida) and economic nationalism (the restored corporate leaders) took advantage of the American reverse course to capture control. The Japan that emerged restored and revived by the end of the 1950s was thus a product of interests and struggles that cross-cut both the Occupation and the Japanese.
This documentary introduces the decade that was the time of youth and young adulthood for Japan’s present older seniors and the childhood for those Japanese now in late middle age and entering their sixties. The new institutions of “contemporary Japan” that we will explore in the rest of this course began to take shape in this decade as an amalgam of preexisting patterns and controversies with those patterns and controversies introduced during this first, turbulent, and formative postwar decade.
Finally, the documentary is misleading on one important point and illuminating on another. It opens with beginning of Occupation, implying that Japan was being “re-invented” from the ground up. With footage of the urban rubble, the arriving US forces, MacArthur and the Emperor, it suggests a total break with the past. However, most other scholarship now suggests otherwise–that there were significant residues of the wartime and before.
At the same time, the documentary illustrates well the constant conflicts that marked the course of the Occupation and the shifting lines of contention. It was not simply that “Americans” imposed a new order on “Japanese.” The Americans were divided against themselves, as were the Japanese, and sometimes the same people changed agendas and ambitions as the period developed. The results were mixed and many consequences contradictory and unintended.
Miscellaneous notes:
On the famous first meeting and photograph of MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito, as related by Faubion Bowers in the documentary, see also Bowers’ account in the New York Times in 1988
Among the US interviewees are Milton Esman, Richard Poole, and Colonel Charles Kades. Kades was a liberal New Dealer in what was perhaps the most powerful SCAP section, the Government Section, which was run by General Whitney, a conservative Republican and close friend of MacArthur.
Japanese interviewees include the film director Imamura Shohei, the labor leader Takaragi Fumihiko, Nakasone Yasuhiro (then a young bureaucrat but later the nationalist Prime Minister in 1982-1987), and Miyazawa Kiiji, who was Prime Minister at time of interview)
Note the clip from the 1946 propaganda film on “Our Job in Japan” portraying ‘the Japanese brain,’ announcing that brains are all the same, only ideas are good or evil, and now Americans must refill the Japanese brains with good ideas. This attitude, arrogant and idealistic in equal measure, was reflected in General MacArthur’s insistence on retaining the Emperor. Faubion Bowers. MacArthur’s personal assistant, details the meeting with the Emperor and we are shown the three photos (the first was suppressed because MacArthur blinked, the second was suppressed because the Emperor was caught with his mouth open and starting to walk away, and the final shot, which has become the official photograph).
The documentary makes much of MacArthur’s god-like stature and his deliberate insularity (“He only met some 60 Japanese, none below the rank of a Supreme Court justice”)
Footage dramatizes how the immediate postwar trauma was exacerbated by the huge numbers of returning soldiers, the severe famine from crop shortfalls, and the 13 million of a 76-million-population who were unemployed
Also clear is the early idealism and naiveté of the American mission: we fought, we won, and now we were going to impose democracy (the word was on everyone’s lips; GIs asked what is democracy?). Their task was a matter of “rooting out” fascism and “putting in” democracy. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal sought to punish the leaders, and some 200,000 bureaucrats and corporate employees were purged (this move was popular with middle-rank employees, who quickly shot up into the vacated positions above them!).
Note importance of New Deal thinking among SCAP staff and of the role and prestige of Japan Communist Party, whose leaders were released from wartime imprisonment and which played an active role in building the trade unions that SCAP promoted.
The Americans pushed jazz, baseball, and Hollywood movies (deliberately featuring kissing), but these were already popular with the Japanese. The filmmaker Kurosawa Akira is interviewed several times and there are scenes of filming and footage from his 1946 film “No Regrets for Our Youth” on one woman’s self-awareness.
A long section of documentary tracks the 1946 drafting of a new Constitution by SCAP. Incredibly,the task was entrusted to a group of 24 youngsters with no such experience, and MacArthur required them to produce it in only six days. Much attention is given to Beate Sirota, the only woman on the team and the only one with prior experience living in Japan; She tried to include a very detailed list of women’s rights; meeting resistance, she nonetheless did manage to have a number of them retained in the final document. Yoshida and his fellow conservatives were “dumbfounded” by the document, but it was pushed through the Diet over their resistance, and he Yoshida was forced to accept it. [The emperor’s promulgation struck a parallel chord with the Meiji emperor’s promulgation of the first constitution fifty years earlier.]
Kades asks why an obviously foreign document has never been amended. Because, he believes, there was a lot of domestic sentiment for democracy and history of struggle for rights. As Nakasone’s comments imply, though, many have challenged and sought to revise some of its key provisions, especially concerning re-armament.
The section on the Land Reform notes that Japan Communist Party leader Nozaki complained to MacArthur that the Reform undermined socialism in creating bourgeois small holders. Indeed, its class thrust was opposite from the Occupation’s other early policy of fostering labor unions and raising worker consciousness. The May Day, 1946 labor demonstrations led to a plan for a total General Strike in late January 1947 as threat to Yoshida. When MacArthur ordered a halt to the strike, there was massive feeling of betrayal, and it set in motion a backlash. At the same time, events in China (Mao’s routing of Chang Kai-shek) and Stalin’s moves in Eastern Europe (creating an Iron Curtain) were causing fundamental rethinking by US about Japan.
In effect, the first two years of the Occupation brought political democracy but not economic prosperity. This perversely, they feared, was making fertile soil for Communism.
The “reverse course” U-turn began with George Kennan, who is portrayed at Princeton. Then Draper (the “Wall Street General”) was sent to Japan to plan a rebuilding of Japanese economy, to make Japan “the workshop of Asia.” He help persuade MacArthur to fatefully shift Occupation policy from political democracy to economic growth. In 1949 came a new purge, the “Red Purge.” An interviewee likened the labor movement to a Japanese crane (tanchô), with a white body and red head; the purge cut off the red head, the communist leadership.
Joseph Dodge arrived on February 1, 1949, with total authority to fix the economy. His enforced recessionary measures were harsh (two million workers were let go as the government halted its subsidies of business and thousands of companies went bankrupt), but Japan’s economy was saved by the outbreak of the Korean War in June of 1950. To Yoshida (who had been elected prime minister in 1948), it was “a gift from the gods,” and for four years pumped billions of dollars of U.S. procurement sales into the economy. It also had a profound psychological effect in allowing the Japanese to forget their own aggressive incursions into Korea and the rest of Asia.
The documentary concludes with San Francisco Peace Treaty and Yoshida’s successful efforts to parry John Foster Dulles’s demands for rearmament. Note Frank Gibney, Sr.’s interview with Yoshida near the end of the program.