CHAPTER I

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Japan’s Defeat
and Re-emergence

BY STARTING the Pacific War and then conquering its vast empire, Japan ensured the eventual elimination of Western domination from Asia and its replacement by independent nations. But Japan also earned the hatred of many Asians and, lacking adequate defensive capabilities and the means of deterring the United States by the threat of a direct attack, it found its sea communications with its empire virtually cut off and its home islands subjected to rapidly escalating American bombing by early 1945.

The Collapse of the Japanese Empire

From this untenable situation there was only one way out; after the arguments of the peace party in Tokyo had been strengthened by the two atomic bombs and the Soviet attack on Manchuria, the Emperor announced his country’s surrender on August 15.

Japan’s situation could hardly have been less promising. The home islands were devastated and demoralized and faced the prospect of six million more mouths to feed as millions of personnel and civilians were repatriated from the fallen empire.

In various other parts of Asia, the Japanese military attempted, through their behavior at the time of the surrender, to complicate the problems of whoever might replace them. Broadly speaking, this meant the United States as the major power in the northwestern Pacific, the Soviet Union in Manchuria, and the Chinese (Nationalists and Communists) south of the Great Wall; the situation in Southeast Asia was more complex as the returning representatives of the prewar colonial powers confronted emergent nationalist movements.

Even though Japan was defeated, Asia has never been the same since its defeat. By building an anti-Soviet “military-industrial complex” in Manchuria without actually attacking the Soviet Union, Japan had inevitably involved Moscow in the affairs of postwar Asia. By trying unsuccessfully to reduce the Chinese Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek to satellite status, the Imperial Japanese Army had so weakened it that the Chinese Communists, for whom Japanese military and other conservatives had always felt a strong ideological antipathy, were able to challenge and then overthrow it. By using the Western colonial empires in Southeast Asia and encouraging anti-Western nationalism among the former subject peoples, Japan had helped to release a force that from then on would almost inevitably resist domination by any alien power, beginning with Japan itself. Through the defeat brought on by its own aggressiveness, Japan had been eliminated not only as a great power but as a potential force—one whose potential had never been realized—for international stability in an Asia badly in need of such an influence.

The Occupation: The Punitive Phase

For practical purposes, the “Allied” occupation of Japan was an American show. There were no occupation zones as there were in Germany; Stalin’s demand for such a zone in Hokkaido, the northern island, was flatly rejected by President Truman in 1945. If it had not been, Japan might be divided today into a Communist “North Japan” and a non-Communist “South Japan,” with uncertain but obviously important consequences. Behind the merest semblance of “Allied” control, occupation policy was set jointly by the United States government and by General MacArthur (the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) in Tokyo.

Confused by and ashamed of their defeat, and accustomed to obeying their leaders, the Japanese people were in a cooperative mood. The same was true of the Japanese government. It was possible, therefore, for the United States to avoid setting up a full-fledged military government and establish instead a “civil affairs” situation in which occupation policies were transmitted to and implemented by the Japanese government, suitably purged and “democratized.”

This spirit of cooperation was all the more remarkable because the initial purpose of the occupation was strongly punitive. Japan was to be made to stew in its own juice as a reward for having started, and lost, the Pacific War. The Japanese armed forces were demobilized and their equipment destroyed. Thousands of people were purged, or debarred from public life, for having supposedly instigated or supported the waging of aggressive war. Some who were regarded as war criminals were executed or imprisoned. In theory, Japan was to pay reparations to the countries it had occupied, but because of the battered state of the Japanese economy almost none were actually paid in the lifetime of the occupation.

Reform and “democratization” of the Japanese political system, with the aim of immunizing it against the temptation to resort to aggression again, got under way at the beginning of 1946, when the Emperor announced that, contrary to previous official theory, he was in no way divine. MacArthur believed that all major reforms should be introduced within the first year, while the favorable atmosphere lasted; the pace accordingly was rapid, probably too rapid. Under strong American prodding, the Japanese government reluctantly adopted a new constitution from which the numerous authoritarian features of the old one (the Meiji Constitution of 1889) were missing and which instituted a full-fledged parliamentary system based on universal suffrage. Perhaps the most striking feature was Article 9, which owed its inspiration directly to General MacArthur; Japan renounced war and the maintenance of armed forces. In addition, the huge prewar industrial holding companies (the Zaibatsu) were deconcentrated somewhat, although not broken up entirely; a rather thoroughgoing land reform was instituted; the educational system was reformed along American lines; and a considerable degree of local autonomy was substituted for the previous overcentralized arrangement under which the Home Ministry (now abolished) in Tokyo controlled the political life of the prefectures and localities.

Under this new regime, Japanese political life promptly reasserted the prewar tendency toward conservative political dominance. Except for a brief interval of Socialist rule in 1947-48. the leading right-wing party (known since 1955 as the Liberal Democratic Party) has been in power since the first postwar general election of April 1946. It has stood essentially for stability, not necessarily reaction, in domestic affairs, and for a close relationship with the United States as the cornerstone of its foreign policy.

The Occupation: The Recuperative Phase

In 1948-49 a sharp change occurred in the spirit and purpose of American occupation policy. The cost of letting Japan stew in its own juice had been high and there was a strong desire in Washington to “get Japan off the American taxpayer’s back” by actively promoting economic recovery (still without a military resurgence) rather than continuing to preach perpetual austerity alleviated by American relief aid. American experts began to advise the Japanese government on how to improve the economy’s performance. A still greater stimulus to recovery was the beginning, in 1950, of massive “offshore procurement” of supplies from Japanese firms by the United States government in connection with the American military effort in the Korean War.

Another important phenomenon was the intensification of the Cold War in Europe after early 1947, and especially after the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, as well as the Communist takeover in China in 1949. In this difficult international environment the United States government promptly came to desire Japan as a stable friend, although not an active military ally, rather than as a defeated and repressed enemy.

After 1949, accordingly, the occupation authorities began to tolerate the natural tendency of the Japanese government to embark on a “reverse course” that undid some of the occupation’s innovations while leaving their essence intact. There was some “depurging” of purged individuals and some recentralization at the expense of local autonomy. A “police reserve” was created in 1950 mainly to cope with possible Communist violence, some of which actually occurred in the spring of 1950 in connection with the impending Korean War and led MacArthur to purge the leadership of the Japan Communist Party without actually being able to catch it.

The Peace Settlement

One of the most important manifestations of the new American policy toward Japan was an intensification of efforts dating from about 1947 to negotiate a peace teaty. The moving spirit in this difficult diplomatic process was John Foster Dulles, later to become Secretary of State. The essence of the American proposal was to leave the status quo in Japan undisturbed, apart from the termination of the occupation, to deprive Japan formally of all territory outside the home islands, and to avoid further controversy on this point by refraining from specifying in the treaty the new ownership of the territories that Japan had lost. The main reason for this evasiveness was the dispute between the Chinese Communists and the Chinese Nationalists over Taiwan, which had been a Japanese colony for half a century before 1945 but had become the Nationalists’ main base since their defeat on the mainland. For similar reasons neither of the contending Chinese parties was invited to the conference that met at San Francisco in September 1951 to consider the American proposal for a peace treaty. The Western and pro-Western governments that participated in the conference signed the treaty, which went into effect in 1952. The Soviet and Indian governments withheld their approval and expressed strong, but opposing, objections to the American-sponsored treaty, the Russians asserting in effect that it was too easy on Japan and the Indians that it was too hard.

The United States government regarded the peace treaty as part of a package deal the whole of which the Japanese government would have to accept, and the American view necessarily prevailed. Another part was a separate bilateral treaty between Japan and Nationalist China (or Taiwan), which was accordingly negotiated along lines very similar to the San Francisco treaty; a corollary was that Tokyo, partly willingly, and partly at American insistence, maintained diplomatic relations with the Chinese Nationalists rather than the Communists. The third part was a mutual security agreement (in effect a treaty of alliance) between the United States and Japan; this pledged the United States to defend Japan against external attack, a reasonable idea inasmuch as Japan lacked the power to defend itself, but it embodied some other provisions not necessarily acceptable to Japanese national pride; it gave the United States the right to maintain bases and forces in Japan (including Okinawa) for the security not only of Japan but of the Far East as a whole and to intervene in Japan itself (with the consent of the Japanese government) if civil order were seriously threatened by a Communist rising.

The fact that a peace treaty was negotiated for Japan as early as 1952 stands in strong contrast to the case of Germany, for which no peace treaty has been concluded even today. The main reason for this difference is the fact that the occupation of Japan was essentially an American affair, whereas the occupation of Germany was shared by the Soviet Union as well as the Western Allies. But just as Stalin successfully opposed a peace treaty for a united Germany on terms that the Western powers would accept, so he opposed, although unsuccessfully, the idea of a Japanese peace treaty without his own participation, and, therefore, on terms unacceptable to him. As early as 1948, George Kennan, then the State Department’s chief policy planner, saw that American insistence on reviving Japan and negotiating a peace treaty with it would probably produce serious complications with the Soviet Union. This prediction was borne out even before the San Francisco Conference.

Independent Japan

The termination of the “Allied” occupation of Japan in the spring of 1952 left Japan formally and fully independent, and led to some further movement along the “reverse course,” notably further “depurging.”

Given the immense dynamism and practical competence of the Japanese people, the legacy of the remarkable period of development down to 1945, a favorable international environment, and some further factors already mentioned, the Japanese economy moved rapidly ahead in the late 1950s. Its problems soon became those of a mature developed economy—inflation and pollution in particular—aggravated by occasional adverse payments balances with the outside world and the necessity to import nearly all industrial raw material.

The associated processes of a limited “reverse course” in domestic politics, rapid economic growth, and continued close association with the United States produced some dramatic results during the premiership of Nobusuke Kishi (1957-60). He aroused the violent opposition of the Japanese left, including many students, by his “high posture,” which took such forms as a bill increasing the powers of the police and pushing through the signature of a revised mutual security agreement with the United States (which in reality eliminated the American right to intervention in Japan and was more favorable to Japanese interests in other ways as well). His pro-American stand antagonized Peking, which, in 1958, launched a program of intense although largely ineffective economic pressures against his government and the Japanese business community.

These difficulties led to Kishi’s resignation in 1960 and his replacement by Hayato Ikeda, who consciously adopted a “low posture” de-emphasizing political initiatives and stressing economic growth, a program that could hardly fail since the economy was already growing at an extremely rapid rate.

Premier Eisaku Sato (1964-72) reverted in part to Kishi’s pro-American “high posture,” but he took care to cultivate popularity by declaring himself in 1965 in favor of the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese civil jurisdiction in the near future. Another important, although considerably less popular, step was the “normalization” of relations (i. e., the establishment of normal diplomatic and commercial relations) with South Korea, also in 1965. In the same year a seriously divisive issue arose in the form of the escalation of the war in Vietnam. The Sato government stuck loyally by its political and security commitments to the United States, which made considerable, although declining, use of Okinawa as a base in connection with operations in Vietnam, and the business community profited enormously from another round of offshore procurement. The left (the Communists, the Socialists, and the intellectual and academic activists), on the other hand, objected strenuously to American policy toward Vietnam, partly because one of its effects was to strengthen the Japanese Establishment, and increased its opposition to the Sato government, the Liberal Democratic Party, and the American connection.

By the late 1960s, Japan was a significantly different country from the Japan of a decade or more earlier. Its economic performance was astonishing, although subject to the strains of maturity. Its political system, while parliamentary and essentially democratic, was dependably dominated by a conservative leadership with the result, however, of a growing frustration and proneness to illegal tactics on the part of the left. Japanese foreign policy was growing somewhat more assertive, although within the framework of the American alliance, and the memory of 1945 continued to inhibit rearmament at anything above the level of a modest defensive capability.