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The US occupation of Japan
Embracing Defeat – Japan in the Aftermath of World War II
By John Dower, Penguin Books, 2000, £14-99
Reviewed by Laurence Coates
JOHN DOWER’S Pulitzer Prize-winning study of the military
occupation of Japan after World War II raises issues of great relevance today in
the light of US plans for a lengthy occupation of Iraq.
The book is a dossier on US hypocrisy and great-power
arrogance. It shows how US General Douglas MacArthur ruled Japan like a
‘colonial overlord’, rescued the disgraced Emperor Hirohito, and ruled through
the mandarin bureaucracy which had run Japan throughout the war. Following
Japan’s capitulation on 15 August 1945, after atom bombs were dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the country became a de facto US colony under the
Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP) headed by MacArthur. For Japan’s
ruined masses this meant an extension of military rule, albeit ‘under new
management’, for a further seven years until the US withdrawal in 1952.
During its fourteen-year war (1931-45), Japan had expanded
ferociously into China and South-East Asia, committing atrocities such as the
1937 ‘Rape of Nanking’ and the ‘Rape of Manila’ eight years later. In China
alone, up to 15 million may have died under the Japanese occupation. Japan’s
imperial ambitions, its attempt to create a ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity
Sphere’ counterpoised to white colonial rule in Asia, drew inspiration from
older imperialist powers such as Britain. As Britain’s Royal Institute of
International Affairs reported at the time, Japan followed the precedents of
European imperialism, sometimes ‘with almost pedantic exactitude’. MacArthur is
credited with Japan’s post-war ‘democratisation and demilitarisation’ and on the
strength of this alleged merit has been dragged into the current debate over
Iraq. Dower’s account helps to puncture the MacArthur myth.
The Tokyo war crimes tribunal – Japan’s Nuremberg – opened
in 1946. The entire proceedings were stage-managed to serve, above all, the
geo-political interests of US imperialism. The trial focused on Japan’s war
against the US and Britain rather than its crimes in Asia. Neither the plight of
tens of thousands of Formosan and Korean women forced into sex-slavery as
‘comfort women’ for the imperial army, nor the use of slave-labour in mines and
heavy industries under Japanese control, were ever pursued as ‘war crimes’. In
return for access to their ‘research’ findings, the US also granted blanket
immunity to the officers and scientists of the notorious Unit 731, a chemical
warfare base in Manchuria where lethal experiments were conducted on thousands
of prisoners. In fact, at no time in the Tokyo trial did the prosecution pursue
the issue of chemical weapons despite evidence of their use by Japanese forces
in China. In order to keep the war-time state fundamentally intact, the trial
scapegoated just a handful of officials – like General Tojo, who had ordered the
attack on the US naval base of Pearl Harbour. No heads of the Kempetai (Japanese
Gestapo), no leading ultra-nationalist politicians, and no industrialists, were
ever indicted.
In the first phase of the US occupation, significant
democratic reforms (votes for women, legalisation of trade unions, an
anti-feudal land reform) were introduced. These measures were accompanied by
mostly symbolic blows against the war-time nationalist ‘old guard’. At the same
time, however, the US administration was careful to protect Emperor Hirohito and
his dynasty, in whose name Japan had invaded and plundered East Asia. MacArthur
wanted, in his own words, "to keep the emperor safe at all costs" and intervened
twice to stop him abdicating. In the words of MacArthur’s military secretary,
abdication "would be a victory for all Communists and especially the Russians".
The war crimes trials of 1946-49 were rigged to render Hirohito ‘invisible’ – he
was not even called as a witness. When the hapless General Tojo, who was later
executed, inadvertently implicated Hirohito by stating in court that no
government official could have acted against the emperor’s wishes, he was
prevailed upon by the Americans to change his testimony and clear his boss,
which he did.
MacArthur administered "a censorship bureaucracy that
extended into every aspect of public expression". Between 1945-49, US censors
checked 330 million pieces of mail and monitored 800,000 private phone
conversations! Newspapers, books, public broadcasting and cinema were heavily
censored. A Tokyo stage show in which one of the cast sang ‘how can we have
democracy with two emperors?’ (ie Hirohito and MacArthur) was banned. Taboo
subjects included criticism of the US, criticism of the emperor, food shortages,
the black market, warnings about World War III, fraternisation and ‘mixed blood
children’, and references to censorship. While the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki were not officially proscribed subjects, eye-witness accounts and
other reports were suppressed. Dower notes, "for over six years, Japanese
scientists and doctors... were denied access to data that might have assisted
them in communicating to and helping atomic-bomb victims".
In January 1947 MacArthur banned a general strike called to
resist government attacks on rail and other public sector workers. Union leaders
were called to MacArthur’s headquarters and ordered in the presence of
pistol-waving military police to sign a statement cancelling "the use of so
deadly a social weapon" (MacArthur). This marked a turning point in popular
perceptions of the US occupation.
Japan’s post-war radicalisation had seen union ranks swell
from 380,000 at the end of 1945 to 5.6 million a year later. With the ban on the
general strike in 1947 the US occupation entered upon its so-called ‘reverse
course’ – allying itself with the nationalist right, which had faced persecution
in the first phase of occupation. MacArthur personally spearheaded a ‘red purge’
in the public sector, sacking 11,000 union activists including the entire
national leadership of the Communist Party (JCP), which had made huge gains
despite its muddled opportunist policies (welcoming the US occupation at first
as ‘progressive’, leading demonstrations to appeal to the emperor etc). Of 28
periodicals subject to censorship in 1947, only two were ‘ultra-rightist’. All
the others (with a combined circulation of 600,000) were left-wing. At the same
time a ‘de-purge’ of ultra-nationalists and militarists took place.
Under the banner of ‘demilitarisation’, US occupation
personnel wrote the ‘enlightened’ Japanese constitution of 1946, which contains
the famous peace paragraph (paragraph nine) renouncing "war as a sovereign right
of the nation" and stating that "land, sea, and air forces... will never be
maintained". This unique document, replete with ‘funny language’ – its first
draft was in English – remains in force to this day (notwithstanding which,
Japan’s ‘self-defence force’ is one of the most technically advanced armies in
the world).
At the time it met with strong support among war-weary
Japanese of all classes who saw it as a means to hasten the end of the
occupation, but also to curb the power of nationalist generals and the obscene
waste of armaments spending. Almost before the ink was dry on this document,
however, the US was pressurising Japan to rearm. In 1950, at the outset of the
Korean War, MacArthur "secretly urged Japanese leaders to create an army of
between three hundred thousand and three hundred fifty thousand men", Dower
explains. Japan did rearm but resisted the wilder notions of US spokesmen and
attempts to drag it into the Korean war.
MacArthur was appointed to lead the UN forces in Korea but,
in 1951, was sacked by US President Truman for insubordination. In his address
to the American people, Truman explained this was "in order to avoid World War
III" – the issue being MacArthur’s proposed attack on China. The US occupation
of Japan continued for a further year.
Overall, the aim of MacArthur’s reform programme was to
secure capitalism’s future in Japan and inoculate the Japanese masses against
Stalinism, which had been strengthened in Russia and was advancing in China.
With the rise of working class militancy in Japan from 1946 onwards, US support
for reform all but collapsed and gave way to anti-communist purges and
counter-reforms. The Korean war, however, created an economic boom in Japan, as
the major supplier to the US war effort. This hastened the end of the occupation
and marked the start of a remarkable economic ascent. Some US strategists
imagine this scenario can be repeated in Iraq today. They overlook the obvious,
that the Korean war and strategic rivalry with Japan’s ‘communist’ neighbours
forced US imperialism to bankroll the country’s post-war expansion with a
largesse that has been noticeably absent in today’s world, for example in
Afghanistan and the Balkans.
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