American Occupation of Japan & Post-War Reconstruction

Jobial alex

❖ American Occupation of Japan. (2018, 2015 & 2014)

Japan’s history was significantly changed by America’s post-war occupation of the country. The American
occupation began in September, 1945 after the end of the Second World War on 15th August, 1945 and lasted till the
signing of San Francisco Peace Treaty in April, 1952. The American occupiers brought a vision of far-reaching
reform and the Japanese people faced the unprecedented experience of occupation by a foreign power wielding the
authority to rewrite laws, restructure the economic and political system, and even seek to redefine culture and values.
Although it lasted only for seven years, it was decisive for Japan’s subsequent development.

The occupation in theory was a collective endeavor of the Allied powers. A four-nation Allied Council for Japan
was created in January 1946 to advise the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). An
eleven-member Far Eastern Commission was charged to formulate occupation policy and review SCAP actions. In
fact, the supreme commander, in the imposing person of General Douglas MacArthur and a mostly American staff,
took orders from the U.S. government and paid scant attention to these bodies. As a matter of convenience, the
acronym SCAP quickly came to refer both to MacArthur himself and to his extensive administrative bureaucracy
infers Andrew Gordon.

The initial American strategy in Japan was encapsulated in two words: demilitarize and democratize. To achieve the
first goal, SCAP dissolved the army and navy immediately: Japan’s armed forces were officially disbanded on
November 30. Other demilitarizing steps focused on those outside the military who had supported the war machine.
In October 1945 the Americans disbanded the oppressive Special Higher Police. Between 1945 and 1948, the
occupiers purged over two hundred thousand men from positions in the government and business world who were
judged responsible for leading the war effort. They disestablished the official state Shinto religion. During and
immediately after the war, the allies tried some six thousand military men for conventional war crimes, such as
abuse of prisoners. They convicted and executed over nine hundred. They also set in motion an ambitious plan for
war reparations. Significant portions of Japan’s industrial plant were to be loaded onto ships and given to the
wartime victims of Japanese expansion in Asia.

The most significant arena of retribution was the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, also called simply
the Tokyo Trial. It dragged on from May 1946 to November 1948 and put Japan’s wartime rulers on trial. Beginning
with General Tojo Hideki, twenty-eight men were charged with both conventional war crimes and the newly minted
crime of engaging in conspiracy to wage war.

The United States in 1945 sought to do far more than demilitarize Japan and punish the nation’s leaders. It was
striving to reconstruct the entire world in its image, Japan included, opines Gordon. In this spirit, SCAP imposed a
rush of reforms in the fall of 1945 and 1946. They were based on a simple logic: Militarism stemmed from
monopoly, tyranny, and poverty. To construct a peaceful, non-militaristic Japan required more than just disbanding
the military. It required vast reforms to smash authoritarian political rule, equalize political rights and even wealth,
and transform values.

SCAP announced the first major reforms in October 1945, with declarations that guaranteed freedoms of speech,
press, and assembly and the right to organize labor or farmer unions. SCAP also ordered the Japanese government to
extend civil and political rights to women. A bit later, in December, the occupiers told the Japanese government to
undertake land reform that would allow tenant farmers to purchase their fields. With these steps, the Americans sent
a clear message that democracy should be the cornerstone of a new Japan. Although, the Emperor Hirohito was
treated with respect and not tried, he was forced to relinquish his divinity. The capstone of this effort was the
rewriting of the constitution which was promulgated in November 1946.

The postwar constitution downgraded the emperor from absolute monarch to a “symbol of the State and of the
unity of the people.” It transferred sovereignty from the Emperor to the people, the House of Peers was transformed
into an elected House of Councilors, the Cabinet was made collectively responsible to the Diet and Judiciary became
constitutionally independent. It granted to the people of Japan an array of “fundamental human rights,” including the
civil liberties of the American Bill of Rights such as freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion. It also boldly
extended the concept of rights into the social realm. The new constitution guaranteed rights to education
“correspondent to ability” and to “minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living.” It assured the right (and
obligation) to work, to organize, and to bargain collectively. It outlawed discrimination based on sex, race, creed,
social status, or family origin. It gave women explicit guarantees of equality in marriage, divorce, property,
inheritance, and “other matters pertaining to marriage and the family.” Finally, its Article 9 committed the Japanese
people to “forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling
international disputes.”

From 1945 through 1947 occupation officials imposed important additional changes. The Home Ministry and police
were broken into smaller units and their authority substantially reduced. SCAP freed Communist Party members
from jail as early as October 4, 1945. It outlawed Japanese institutions of censorship and arguably allowed a greater
range of political expression than was possible in the United States at the time. At the same time, with little sense of
irony, SCAP put in place its own program to censor the newly “liberated” Japanese cultural world to prevent
continued support of the military or war regime.

The occupation reformers attacked the sprawling business empires of the zaibatsu. They took away ownership and
control from holding companies dominated by the zaibatsu families (Mitsui, Sumitomo, Yasuda, Iwasaki [who
owned Mitsubishi], Asano, and others). They broke up some of the larger firms within each zaibatsu network. They
encouraged and advised labor unions, and at first SCAP officials welcomed the extraordinary drive of organizing
and strikes. The program of land reform enacted under SCAP order revolutionized the distribution of social and
economic power in rural Japan. It essentially expropriated the holdings of landlords, gave them to former tenants,
and created a countryside of small family farms. The schools were also subject to reform. SCAP ordered the
Ministry of Education to replace lessons for war and loyalty to the state with teachings of peace and democracy.
These sweeping measures changed the climate of ideas and the distribution of economic and social power. A fever
of “democratization” swept Japan. The projects of democracy and equality were understood in extremely expansive
terms by their advocates; they meant far more than voting and land reform.

Since 1947, the policy orientation of US shifted towards rebuilding Japan as a strong and self-reliant nation in order
to use the latter as a deterrent against the rising tide of Communism in China and East Asia. These new departures
have come to be known as the occupation’s “reverse course.” In 1948 the Americans sharply scaled back plans to
dissolve the former subsidiaries of the zaibatsu combines, and in 1949 they relinquished all claims to war
reparations. In 1948 SCAP encouraged the Japanese government to revise the new postwar labor laws to outlaw
strikes by public employees and weaken protective labor standards. They encouraged the Japanese to create a
national police force beginning as early as 1947 and promoted Japanese rearmament (within limits) thereafter.

Economic recovery was also a basic ingredient of postwar stabilization. When Japan surrendered, it lost 20% of its
resources. At the outset of the occupation, SCAP rejected any responsibility for helping Japan’s economy to revive.
Left to their own devices in an uncertain context, business leaders combined fear with greed in disastrous ways. The
early postwar government offered reconstruction subsidies to major firms in hopes the funds would be used to revive
production. The first glimmer of hope in the effort to revive confidence and restart production came in 1947 with the
introduction of Priority Production program according to which bureaucrats in the Ministry of Commerce, drawing
on wartime experience, allocated both coal and imported fuel on a preferential basis to steelmakers.
But throughout 1948 the economy remained relatively stagnant, and inflation continued to surge. The Americans
were now committed to Japan as Asia’s “bulwark against communism,” in the words of Secretary of the Army
Kenneth Royall and were now anxious to promote economic recovery. As a step in this direction, SCAP, on the
advice of Joseph Dodge, imposed a “harsh medicine in three doses:” a balanced budget, the suspending of all state
loans to industry, and the abolition of all state subsidies. SCAP also followed the advice to set a favorable exchange
rate of 360 yen to the dollar to encourage Japanese exports. This “Dodge line” program indeed halted inflation, but
industry found itself starved for capital. In the spring of 1950, a year after this deflationary program had been
implemented; observes Gordon, Japan appeared on the brink not of recovery but of a deepening depression.

In June 1950, just as it appeared SCAP’s “medication might kill the patient”, the Korean War began. This tragedy
across the straits conferred great fortune on Japan. With the war came a surge of American military procurement
orders placed with Japanese industries, which were located conveniently close to the front. From 1949 to 1951
exports nearly tripled, and production rose nearly 70 percent. Corporations began to show profits for the first time
since the surrender, and they responded with a surge of investment in new plants and equipment. The gross national
product began to increase at double-digit rates. Japan’s recovery was underway.

With reforms in place and the economy on the mend, and with the Korean War placing great demands on American
military resources, pressures in Washington mounted to end the occupation suggests Gordon. The end came sooner
than many had anticipated; in 1945, some top officials in the United States had spoken of the need to occupy Japan
for two decades, or even a century. As it turned out, the era of formal occupation lasted just under seven years.

Some of America’s wartime allies were reluctant to sign a treaty so quickly that would bring the occupation to a
close. The British, the Chinese and Southeast Asian governments wanted a harsh peace with reparations paid and
with strong guarantees against a revival of the Japanese military. Led by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the
United States negotiated vigorously on multiple fronts to hasten a settlement. It concluded defense agreements with
the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand that assuaged the fears of these nations. Asian nations were also given
the right to follow the treaty by negotiating bilateral reparations agreements with Japan. In September 1951,
representatives of forty-eight nations met in San Francisco and signed a treaty to end the state of war that still
formally existed with Japan. The occupation officially ended in April 1952.

To sum up, the occupation forces arrived in 1945 determined to engineer a root-and-branch transformation of Japan.
J.K. Fairbank opines that the occupation succeeded as it was built on some earlier trends, yet in some crucial
respects it broke with the pre-war system in ways that were revolutionary. It made changes that would not have
occurred had not Japan been briefly subject to a foreign power. Nonetheless, Andrew Gordon points out that
although they did change a great deal a considerable portion of the old order of imperial Japan, and the revised order
of wartime mobilization, remained in place when the Americans packed their bags in 1952.