Inventing Japan: 1853-1964 (Modern Library Chronicles)

by Ian Buruma

  —

  The Japanese Left had its own reasons for resentment. In the beginning, when the New Dealers were in charge and “feudalism” was the main bugbear of SCAP’s government section, socialists and communists were not only freed from prison but actively encouraged to help in the reforms. They did so with enthusiasm. Keen Japanese bureaucrats revised the labor laws, and for the first time in Japanese history, trade unions, often led by communists, were given real clout. Millions of workers joined up. Strikes and demonstrations were common. In some cases, workers took over the factories. On one occasion, they even threatened to storm the imperial palace. Marxist academics drew up blueprints for a planned economy. State intervention in the economy was one area where New Dealers, Japanese bureaucrats, and the Marxists saw eye to eye. In 1947 and 1948, Japan had its first socialist prime minister. One of the most sweeping reforms, encouraged by the Americans but planned and carried out by Japanese bureaucrats, was the redistribution of land from big landowners to their tenants. It was at once a progressive measure, applauded by the Left, and a way to avert the kind of rural unrest that was helping the communists in China. Poor tenant farmers, brutalized by their wretched lives, had been the harshest foot soldiers of Japan’s holy war. Now a new class of rural smallholders was born, with the unintended consequence of helping the conservatives remain in office until this day.

  Another thing that cannot have been intended was that SCAP reforms boosted Japanese bureaucrats at the expense of elected politicians. The newly created Ministry on International Trade and Industry (MITI) was put in charge of central economic planning. New Dealers were also convinced that private big business was largely to blame for Japanese imperialism. The solution, as they saw it, was to take these businesses out of the hands of the families that owned them. This task, too, was left up to the bureaucrats, the same bureaucrats, in fact, who had integrated the zaibatsu into the war economy, often against the private owners’ wishes. Unwittingly, American left-wingers, because of their instinctive hostility to big business, were handing over more powers to the very institutions that helped to drive Japan toward war. As a result, politicians were reduced to being brokers between corporate and bureaucratic interests.

  It is hard to be precise about the moment when the anti-feudalist, reformist enterprise reversed its course and became a conservative crackdown on communism in all its alleged manifestations. U.S. bankers and business leaders had been dismayed by SCAP’s reforms from the start. In 1947, SCAP felt the need to ban a general strike in February because of worries that the communists were wrecking the Japanese economy. With hyperinflation raging, there was indeed cause for alarm. Other measures soon followed: Civil servants were no longer allowed to strike. And the planned dissolution of private business combines was much reduced in scope. Yoshida and other conservatives were pleased to see that the “realists” in SCAP were beginning to prevail over the “idealists.” But after all the initial encouragement, Japanese leftists felt betrayed by the Americans.

  Two reasons help to explain this turn of events. First, with the Republicans in control of Congress in the late 1940s, Washington was no longer inclined to prop up the Japanese with U.S. taxpayers’ money. And second, Mao’s communists were close to victory in China. Hard-nosed grandees such as George Kennan believed that it was time to put democratic ideals to one side and concentrate on economic recovery. A tough banker by the name of Joseph Dodge was dispatched to Tokyo in February 1949 to help bring down inflation and balance the budget. The “Dodge line” was that Japanese workers and consumers should make sacrifices for the national good. Export industry, guided by able bureaucrats and fed by the natural resources of Southeast Asia, would be the engine of Japan’s revival as a fortress against communism. Homegrown leftists were dealt with in a “Red purge” of potential troublemakers in government, unions, and private enterprises.

  SCAP, though never exactly a friend of the “Reds,” was distressed, because he saw his control of Japanese affairs slipping. However, all this was sweet music to the ears of Japanese conservatives, who were now coming together nicely as a new elite—with some trusted old faces—made up of bureaucrats, politicians, and big-business leaders. This new elite was in many ways like the old elite in the 1920s, but without the unwelcome competition of power-hungry generals. Dodge’s anti-inflationary measures put a lot of people out of work, which gave the Communist Party 10 percent of the vote in 1949, but Yoshida’s Liberal Party still won the elections by a landslide.

  The Korean War, which broke out the following year, provided just the kind of liftoff the Japanese economy needed. The zaibatsu, now reconstructed around big banks, supplied the unprepared American troops with everything they needed, for very stiff prices. Leftists, liberals, and pacifists, already embittered by the “reverse course,” were especially disgusted to see Japan being drawn into another Asian conflict. The final blow was the emergence of an ersatz Japanese army in the form of a police reserve, which was forced upon the Japanese government—against SCAP’s wishes—by Washington, even though it was in conflict with the pacifist constitution. But the economy was growing, and this mattered more in a hungry nation. The main casualty of the war, apart from millions of Koreans, was the career of the supreme commander himself. Despite his victory at Inchôn, MacArthur’s megalomania became too much for President Truman. When SCAP publicly stated his desire to take the war into China, if necessary with nuclear bombs, he was dismissed.

  The reaction in Japan was extraordinary. Even as rightists and leftists nursed their grievances, the liberal Asahi newspaper thanked MacArthur for teaching the Japanese people “the merits of democracy and pacifism” and guiding them “with kindness along this bright path.” It continued in a way designed to warm SCAP’s paternal heart: “As if pleased with his own children growing up, he took pleasure in the Japanese people, yesterday’s enemy, walking step by step towards democracy.…” The emperor came to thank him for everything he had done. The general’s route to Haneda airport was lined with hundreds of thousands of tearful Japanese citizens waving little paper flags. Children were let off from school. NHK radio played “Auld Lang Syne.” Prime Minister Yoshida waved good-bye as the Bataan, the same plane that brought SCAP to Atsugi airdrome in 1945, took off from Japan for the last time.

  Much of MacArthur’s mission, despite reverse courses, had been an astounding success. His idealism was now enshrined, for better or worse, in the constitution. The Japanese had full suffrage, freedom of speech, and, in theory, the right to pursue happiness freely and without discrimination. Militarism seemed to be dead and buried, and with a parliamentary democracy, the dreams of many generations, from Sakamoto Ryoma to Fukuzawa Yukichi, from the People’s Rights Movement activists to the postwar democrats, seemed finally to have come true. Yet SCAP’s legacy had some profound defects. The price of pacifism is a total dependency on others to defend you. This has kept right-wing revanchism alive and polarized political opinion on the one thing where there should have been consensus: the constitution itself. The war crimes trials and the constitution also left the Japanese with unresolved questions about their monarchy and a troubled attitude toward their past. In one respect, at least, Japan had become a distorted mirror image of the nation that tried so hard to shape it: High ideals made the flaws all the more obvious.

  7

  1955 AND ALL THAT

  On Christmas Eve 1948, a thin middle-aged man in a shabby khaki uniform and a peaked cap was released from Sugamo prison. His soft lips formed a toothy smile as he boarded an American jeep. Kishi Nobusuke had just spent three years in Sugamo jail as a class A war crimes suspect. He had been General Tojo’s minister of commerce and industry when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Before that he had been the industrial czar of Manchukuo. He was in fact the nearest Japanese equivalent to Albert Speer. His wartime responsibilities ranged from munitions to slave labor. If the war had been fought by soldiers, their conquests had been administered by people like him.

  Many a pos
twar friendship was kindled or strengthened in Sugamo. Kishi’s cellmate was Sasakawa Ryoichi, the leader of a small fascist party in the 1930s and a notorious racketeer in occupied China. He expanded his fortune after the war in various more or less opaque ways, which included a huge gambling enterprise. Wartime connections and a great deal of shady money made him a formidable backroom operator in postwar conservative politics. Sasakawa was released the same day as Kishi. Less than ten years later, Kishi would be prime minister of Japan.

  In 1948, however, Yoshida Shigeru was still in charge. Though both moved in the same high-flown circles, Kishi and Yoshida did not like each other. Yoshida, born in Tosa, the son of a People’s Rights Movement activist, was a genuine conservative compared to Kishi, a Choshu man, proud of his provincial samurai ancestry and a typical exponent of the more zealous Japanese Right. Kishi had more silky charm than the gruff Yoshida, who is still remembered in Japan for having called a socialist MP a

  “damned fool” in parliament. But from the time he entered Tokyo Imperial University to the end of his long career, Kishi’s instincts were always on the opposite side of liberalism. As a young man, he admired Kita Ikki, the national socialist agitator behind the 1936 military rebellion. In the constitutional debates between Minobe and his rightist enemies, Kishi took the ultranationalist view. In Manchukuo, he was close to General Tojo and the Kwantung army. In 1939, he was in favor of strengthening the ties with Nazi Germany. In the struggles between businessmen and the military, he took the latter side. And in Sugamo prison, he still believed Japan had fought “a just war.”

  Even though Kishi became a defender of democracy after the war, his politics were in some ways remarkably consistent. Before and during the war, he described himself as a national socialist: authoritarian, nationalistic, and socialist in the sense of seeing a planned economy as the right way to strengthen the nation and spread its wealth. He was never a believer in laissez-faire, or liberal Anglo-Saxon-style capitalism. In 1953, Kishi spoke out against policies of “the ‘let-alone’ type.” What was needed, instead, was centralized industrial planning that “should be carefully worked out—like the Russian five-year plans.” Just before making this statement, he had been on a trip to West Germany, where he had had a pleasant encounter with his old colleague, the former Nazi economics minister Hjalmar Schacht. Kishi’s economic ideas were and would remain very close to the mainstream of Japanese thinking.

  —

  In their battles for the conservative leadership, Kishi encouraged the common perception of Yoshida as a SCAP toady, an American boy, a good Jap who did as he was told. This was not entirely fair. In 1951, just as MacArthur was flying back to the United States, John Foster Dulles was on his way to Tokyo as a special envoy to conclude a peace treaty with the Japanese. They conferred on the radio in midflight. Dulles was under instructions to put pressure on Japan to build a serious army. Yoshida—and SCAP—had been fighting Washington on this issue for some years already. In 1948, MacArthur argued that such a move would be contrary to his principles and place the Americans “in a ridiculous light before the Japanese people.” When he was instructed to make the Japanese build a national police reserve, he still spoke of Japan as “the Switzerland of the Pacific” and stalled. In 1950, with the Korean War, further resistance was futile, and seventy-five thousand Japanese “police officers,” dressed in cast-off U.S. uniforms, were given machine guns, tanks, and bazookas. Yoshida pretended that these Imperial Army veterans weren’t real soldiers. They were deployed around industrial areas to crack down on communist agitation. But soon they were given more extensive hardware and renamed the Japanese Self-Defense Forces.

  Dulles demanded more. He wanted 350,000 Japanese under arms. Yoshida resisted such a clear breach of the peace constitution. It would cause huge upheavals, he warned, not just in Japan but all over Asia. To make his point, Yoshida secretly encouraged socialists to demonstrate in front of his office. He held the Japanese Self-Defense Forces to seventy-five thousand. In the end a compromise was reached, which Yoshida could claim as a victory of sorts. The United States would have unlimited access for an indefinite period to Japanese territory for military bases. Okinawa would become a huge military installation under U.S. government administration. Japan promised in time to assume responsibility for its own defense. When was not specified. Until that fine day, the United States would take care of Japanese security, and Japan was free to pour all its energy into government-directed industrial growth. In December 1951, in San Francisco, a peace treaty and a security treaty were signed simultaneously. Sovereignty was regained, up to a point. The constitutional problem was no longer mentioned. The Yoshida deal was done.

  The end of the occupation meant that Japanese were free at last to vent their frustrations. Stoked by leftist intellectuals, the Communist Party, and union leaders, students and workers staged massive demonstrations against the security treaty on May Day 1952. Crowds charged the police on the imperial palace plaza. The police responded with guns, tear gas, and baton charges. Two people were killed on this occasion, and many people got badly beaten up or trampled in the chaos. This did nothing to dampen the anger of Japanese liberals and leftists. Often starry-eyed about the Soviet Union and filled with a kind of guilt-ridden solidarity with the Chinese communists, the Left wanted out of any security arrangement with the United States. This time, to atone for its historic error of trying to be a Western-style imperialist power, Japan should be on the side of its Asian neighbors. It would never go to war with them again. That, after all, is what the renunciation of using military force meant. For the Japanese Left, Article 9 of General MacArthur’s constitution had become holy writ.

  Rightists such as Kishi were eager to take the American side in the cold war, but they argued for constitutional revision, both of Article 9 and Article 1, concerning the emperor’s new, secular status. Pragmatic conservatives such as Yoshida were happy to let the Americans fight the communists while Japan got on with its own business, and hoped the constitutional debate would simply go away. Well, it would and it wouldn’t. Two-thirds of the Diet was needed to revise the constitution, and since this was an unlikely prospect, resentments boiled over in riots, polemics about Japan’s wartime history, textbook controversies, anti-American diatribes, and sound trucks running around the streets with uniformed thugs spouting right-wing revanchism.

  The early 1950s were a golden age for Japanese cinema, with masterpieces by Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa. But film was also a perfect vehicle for right- and left-wing anti-Americanism. On the right were such movies as Battleship Yamato and Eagle of the Pacific, celebrating the spirit of the Imperial Navy and its brave and blameless admirals. On the left were such cinematic tracts as Hiroshima, sponsored by the radical Teachers Union, which portrayed the atom bombing as an act of racism. It ends with American tourists coming to Hiroshima to collect souvenir bones of the victims. Just as popular were semipornographic films about the rapacious behavior of GIs around the military bases. Base movies were a vibrant subgenre of the blossoming sex industry. Some of these fantasies were remarkable for their viciousness. The patriotic heroine of one popular comic book, later made into a film, was a diseased Japanese whore who slept with as many Americans as she could to infect the U.S. Army with syphilis. The same charming theme was later taken up in a burlesque show in Tokyo, entitled The Tachikawa Base: Ten Solid Years of Rape.

  Even though Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the prime symbols of anti-American pacifism, the Japanese Left did not play down Japanese war crimes. On the contrary, the war was discussed more critically in Japan during the 1950s than in Germany, sometimes with dire consequences. Army veterans who wrote a confessional account of their brutal deeds in China were denounced as communists, and their publisher, threatened by right-wing thugs, withdrew the book. But the correct line in left-wing intellectual circles and the influential Teachers Union was heavy with Marxist dogma: The Chinese communists had been brave freedom fighters in a war of liberation against Japanese
capitalist imperialism and “the emperor system.” Hiroshima should have turned Japan into a beacon of peace. The new enemy in Asia was American imperialism and its Japanese running dogs.

  The Right, led by Kishi, still maintained that Japan’s war had been just. This issue began to replace, as a kind of substitute, the necessary political debate on the constitution. Whenever the Left used the barbarity of Japan’s war record as an argument for constitutional pacifism, the Right would deny that Japan had done anything wrong, or at least anything more wrong than other nations in wartime. The rows over textbooks, which continue to this day, between the Teachers Union and the conservative Ministry of Education, are really about this. Article 9, described in 1953 by Vice President Richard Nixon as “an honest mistake,” had left the Japanese bitterly divided over their most recent history for essentially nonhistorical reasons. A salient aspect of the endless polemics about the war in Japan’s popular press is the conspicuous lack of participation by professional historians, who tended to confine their writing to strictly academic channels.

  —