Economic miracles and the making of a postmodern society

A new start: the US occupation


In his first ever radio broadcast to the people of Japan, on 15 August 1945, Emperor Hirohito called on them to ‘endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable’. The invincible and sacred Empire of Japan had been defeated; despite all the sacrifices, toil, and suffering, Japan had finally lost. In a surprisingly high-pitched voice, using archaic Japanese that many could not understand, the emperor apologized for the fact that the ‘war had developed in a manner not necessarily to Japan’s advantage’. He expressed his regrets to the Japanese themselves, but also (still clinging to the rhetoric of the coprosperity sphere) to Japan’s allies in East Asia. In an intriguing twist that would occupy historians and commentators for decades thereafter, Hirohito called on Japan to endure the changes that would inevitably follow, so that Japan could ‘keep pace with the progress of the world’, as though the impending reforms were instrumental measures to guarantee the survival of the ‘innate glory of the imperial state’. In much the same way that Meiji revolutionaries had called for wakon yosai (Japanese spirit and Western technology) as a strategy to both modernize Japan and to preserve its essence, so Hirohito seemed to suggest that a version of this strategy should be employed in the postwar period as well.

The reality of the occupation managed to meet the expectations of everyone. There was a level of humiliation for the Japanese.
In fact, one of the first moves by the Japanese government was to organize ‘comfort stations’ (that is, brothels) to service American GIs. The American occupiers were quick to take advantage of
this generous provision, although they finally banned state-sponsored stations in January 1946 as a violation of women’s human rights (prostitution remained legal). There was a level of starvation and suffering, as the Japanese simply ran out of food and supplies, and the domestic economy slumped into collapse as though the tension had just been let out of it. The contrast with the well-fed Americans was stark, and a gloomy atmosphere of depression set into some of the major urban centres. But at the same time, the occupation brought opportunities for entrepreneurs – not just for pimps and prostitutes, but for
translators and for businessmen of all kinds. And finally, it became immediately apparent that the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP), US General Douglas MacArthur, had grand plans for the reconstruction of Japan; there would be new opportunities for everyone.

Although the occupation of Japan was technically a multilateral enterprise under the supervision of the Far Eastern Advisory Commission (which included representation from Australia, Britain, Canada, China, France, India, the Philippines, and the Netherlands), in practice it was an American show from the start. The USSR pushed for some involvement in the Allied Council on Japan, but MacArthur had already made substantial reforms in Japan before that body had its first meeting in February 1946.

Washington was adamant that the new Japan would remain within its sphere of influence in the postwar international order. 

Despite MacArthur’s significant freedom to manoeuvre, he chose a tactic of indirect rule in order to maximize his effectiveness.

In particular, realizing the symbolic value of the office, he decided immediately that the emperor should be protected and preserved. 

Indeed, sharing an insight that had been a commonplace throughout Japanese history, he feared that the abolition of the emperor might make the Japanese people ungovernable. Furthermore, for purely

practical and linguistic reasons, MacArthur had to rely on a staff of Japanese interpreters and translators in order to get work done.

Hence, SCAP employed a corps of bilingual political technicians to intervene between its government headquarters (GHQ) and the Japanese government itself, which was also retained. The result was

that the Japanese authorities maintained the feeling (and to some degree the reality) of continuity and of being involved in the decisionmaking process, which helped MacArthur to push through his

reforms, but which also left segments of the wartime and pre-war Japanese bureaucracy in place.

MacArthur’s plans for reform were ambitious. Based on the assumption that wartime Japan had suffered from over-centralization, militarism, and fascism, he set out his plans according to two interlinked ‘solutions to the Japan problem’: demilitarization and democratization.

The simplest of these was the first: MacArthur immediately dissolved all of Japan’s military forces, both within Japan and beyond, which meant repatriating nearly 7 million people. He disbanded the Special Higher Police (the so-called ‘thought police’) that had monitored political criminals and intellectual

dissidents during the war, and then he started his own purge of the politically offensive (removing 200,000 people from their posts in government, the bureaucracy, and business). Seeking to

address the problem of the emperor cult, even if not the issue of the person of the emperor himself, SCAP then disestablished the state Shinto religion and forced the emperor to publicly renounce his divinity.

The showcase of the demilitarization campaign came in the form of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (aka the Tokyo Trials), which were held between May 1946 and November 1948. These trials, which were designed to be the equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials in Germany, have been the subject of great controversy, and accusations of ‘victor’s justice’ have been common; it is certainly the case that many more prisoners were executed in Tokyo than in Nuremberg, and some senior officers were executed for the unprecedented crime of ‘conspiracy to wage war’ rather than for war crimes themselves. The headline case was that of Tojo Hideki himself, who was found guilty of

war crimes and conspiracy to wage war, and was hanged. 

However, perhaps the most conspicuous aspect of these trials was the fact that MacArthur kept the emperor off the stand. For a number of postwar Japanese intellectuals, such as the political theorist Maruyama Masao, the failure to make the emperor face up to his responsibility was detrimental to MacArthur’s second great ambition, the democratization of Japan, since it set a dangerous precedent that undermined the notion of political subjectivity that is essential for democratic consciousness.

Perceiving an apparent connection between militarism and monopoly economics, MacArthur’s push for democracy began with measures to decentralize the economy. He affected a series of land reforms that forced landowners to sell all but a single plot of their holdings, thus enabling workers to own the land

that they farmed. But the showpiece of economic democratization was the plan to dissolve the zaibatsu conglomerates, which MacArthur associated with Japanese imperialism. SCAP was convinced that these conglomerates had orchestrated the war economies of Japan’s colonies. In the end, however, the dissolution of the zaibatsu was incompletely implemented. In many cases, the family holding companies were dissolved, but the networks quickly reformed around the banks that replaced them. The resulting units, which shared some characteristics with the zaibatsu, came to be known as keiretsu. The most famous names in Japanese business – Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Fuji, Sumitomo, Nissan – all continued into the postwar period.