Forty-eight nations signed the peace treaty with Japan, but its two giant neighbors, the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, did not. The latter, to everyone’s surprise, had come to San Francisco but only to refuse to join in the treaty. Since the United States recognized the Nationalist Chinese government, now on Taiwan, while several of the signatory nations recognized the People’s Republic in control of the Chinese mainland, it had proved impossible to decide which Chinese government should be invited to San Francisco. The next most populous country, India, had also abstained from the conference, largely as a protest against the exclusion of China. Subsequently, however, both India and Nationalist China signed treaties of peace with Japan.
The peace treaty stated that Japan acquiesced to the dismemberment of its empire, which had already taken place in conformity with the Potsdam Proclamation and the terms of surrender. Korea once again had become an independent though tragically divided nation. Taiwan and the Pescadores Islands had reverted to China and then had become the sole remaining refuge of the Chinese Nationalists. The North Pacific Islands, which the Japanese had held under a mandate from the League of Nations, had been formally transferred to the United States in 1947 as a trusteeship territory under the United Nations. The Soviet Union, in accordance with the Yalta Agreement of February 1945, had occupied Southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands north of Hokkaido. Similarly, the United States had occupied the Ryukyu and Bonin islands and administered them as areas separate from Japan. In the peace treaty Japan renounced its claims to all these territories. The treaty thus confirmed Japan’s limitation to the four main islands of Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku, and Hokkaido and the smaller islands that adjoined them. The treaty, however, did not specify to what countries some of the areas Japan had given up would ultimately be assigned. Nor did it resolve certain other basic problems. For example, reparations, although mentioned, were not discussed in detail and hence were left in an uncertain state.
Because imports still exceeded exports, the Japanese economy remained dependent on American aid even after the treaty went into effect, and no sharp line can be drawn between the occupation and postoccupation periods in the economic field. Japan also remained heavily dependent on the United States in the field of defense. The shift of most American ground forces to Korea following the outbreak of the war there had led to the establishment of a National Police Reserve, a sort of embryonic army of 75,000 men, to replace the American soldiers. Although, for a country of Japan’s size, this was only a tiny military force, the people as a whole remained violently opposed to any substantial rearmament. Because American bases in Japan were essential for the defense of South Korea, which was serving as a military buffer for Japan, the only solution to Japan’s defense problems seemed to be a bilateral security pact with the United States. This was signed on the same day as the peace treaty and provided for the continuation of American bases and forces in Japan.
Japan had regained formal independence, but it could by no means stand fully alone. Its economic future seemed precarious. It was surrounded by turmoil throughout East Asia and by the hostility of the peoples it had ravaged. American military bases and forces remained in the land. And yet to the Japanese people, the prospects looked far more hopeful than had seemed possible in the early postwar years. Americans, too, could look back with satisfaction on the occupation. More had been achieved in reforming Japan than had been expected; United States policy toward Japan had proved to be by far the most successful aspect of its postwar activities in Asia.
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NATIONAL SURVIVAL
Americans tend to give themselves credit for the postwar transformation of Japan, and certainly American occupation policy did help set the course, but other factors were even more important in determining what happened. Without the Japanese people’s capacity for hard work and cooperation, their universal literacy, their high levels of government efficiency, their great organizational skills and industrial know-how, and their considerable experience with the democratic institutions of elections and parliamentary government, the American reforms would probably have foundered in a sea of confusion. If the Japanese had not turned their backs emphatically on militarism and authoritarian rule themselves, American efforts at reform might well have ended in complete frustration.
Naturally, the occupation did rule out certain possibilities for Japan while favoring others. A division between American and Soviet rule, or occupation policies limited to revenge, or confused in objectives and weak in execution, would have produced far less happy results. The supreme self-confidence of MacArthur and his almost unlimited powers as an external force majeur speeded up reforms that would have taken much more time or would not have been made at all if the Japanese had had to carry them out on their own in the confused conditions of postwar Japan. So the American occupation did help determine the direction of the reforms and the speed at which they progressed. At the same time, they succeeded, fundamentally, because American hopes for Japan’s future were in line with what the Japanese themselves wished, and because the Japanese people possessed the qualities that enabled them to reach these goals.
Much of what the occupation brought to Japan would probably have been achieved in the long run in any case, though perhaps more slowly and uncertainly. American misconceptions about the unmitigated evils of Japanese society made occupation efforts desirably vigorous and even radical, but their success ultimately depended on the nature of Japanese society and the substantial foundation for democracy and liberalism the Japanese themselves had already established. Unfortunately, the Americans assumed that their achievements in Japan were entirely of their own making. So they subsequently sought to do the same elsewhere in the world, where they lacked the powers they had enjoyed in Japan and where the local people did not have the desires, experience, or skills of the Japanese. The results usually were disastrous.
At first, after the sudden end of the war in August 1945, the Japanese were an exhausted, dispirited, and bewildered people; but they fell back on their fatalistic acceptance of adversity and, determined to rebuild their nation, put their faith in dogged hard work. Long accustomed to restoring their country after the natural devastations of typhoons and earthquakes, they embraced this task with undaunted resolve. A scum of shacks began to cover the burned-out wastes of the cities, and in time these were replaced with progressively sturdier buildings. Efforts were made to restore destroyed industries with makeshift new ones, utilizing the wreckage of the war as raw materials.
Japan’s farms, despite lack of fertilizer and new investment, had maintained themselves better than the factories, but it had been a long time since domestic agriculture, even under the best of circumstances, had been able to feed Japan’s rapidly expanding population. Naturally it was the city dwellers who suffered most. Their caloric intake fell to the semistarvation level of 1,500 calories. Those whose homes had not been burned out made exhausting trips to the countryside to seek food from the farmers in exchange for their remaining family possessions. This peeling off of successive layers of their goods they wryly called an “onion existence.” Others attempted to supplement their diet with pathetic crops grown on whatever scrap of land they could find—an unused roadway or the burned-out site of their former home. Runaway inflation further plagued the wage- or salary-earner. Most Japanese were completely absorbed in just trying to stay alive.
These conditions drastically reversed relative economic status between rural and city people. In the countryside, the peasants still had their old homes and produced ample food for themselves. But urban residents had in large part been burned out of their homes, and had seen their means of livelihood destroyed. Many were kept alive only by American food shipments, often of unfamiliar and, to Japanese, unappetizing substitutes for their normal rice diet. Only the black market prospered in the cities—but it was dominated by gangsters and Koreans. The latter had been brought to Japan during the war to work in the mines and factories
vacated by Japanese draftees, and after Japan’s defeat some 600,000 of them elected to stay on in Japan. Until November 1945 the occupation accorded them a special status as semivictors, and they, with their deep resentment of Japan, regarded themselves as above its laws. No city dweller could live without recourse to the black market. This was not only costly but psychologically damaging to the Japanese, with their punctiliousness about observing both law and custom. The squalor and dirtiness of postwar Japan was also damaging to a people who tended to be meticulously neat and clean.
After a decade and a half of military domination, war, and crushing defeat, Japan was an intellectually confused and politically divided nation. It had been through a series of great shocks that had left deep wounds in the Japanese psyche. All the old values had been cast into doubt, and new ones were bitterly disputed in a rapidly changing situation. The objectives of the American occupation forces were sometimes obscure to the Japanese and in any case were beyond their control. There were some things, however, on which most Japanese were agreed. One was the largely unspoken realization that economic recovery must take precedence over all other concerns. The nation was completely bankrupt and unable to support itself. It was viewed with hatred and contempt by most of the outside world. Great deprivation and heroic effort were needed to get Japan back on its feet.
Another point on which most Japanese were agreed was that Japan must never again become involved in war. There was a deep longing for peace and a passionate outburst of pacifistic sentiment, which still remains strong. It seemed self-evident that the militarists had been tragically wrong and that Japan could never solve its economic problems by war. It seemed imperative that it maintain a neutral position outside the conflicts that embroiled other countries. As the only people who had ever suffered nuclear attack, the Japanese showed particular sensitivity to nuclear weapons. They were adamantly opposed to introducing such weapons into Japan, even for defense purposes, and passionately protested their development and testing by other nations, particularly the United States. The renunciation of war in the new constitution had overwhelming support. Even after Japan had regained its independence and eventually its economic strength, the Japanese preferred to maintain a “low posture” in international affairs, speaking softly and carrying no stick at all. Realizing the deep animosities their wartime conquests had stirred in neighboring lands, they held back from assuming leadership even in those countries that needed their help and could have profited from their guidance.
The Japanese also shared a general loss of confidence in their country, an attitude that faded only slowly. This lack of national self-esteem was manifested in the avoidance of all nationalistic expressions, verbal or visual. Even the Japanese flag was used sparingly, and the national anthem was played so seldom that children who years later heard it over television at the opening of the professional sumo wrestling bouts thought of it as the “sumo song.” Anything international was automatically viewed with favor, anything strictly national with a certain degree of suspicion. For a long time the Japanese tended to seriously underrate themselves. In part this was because, with unconscious snobbery, they compared themselves not with other non-Western countries but only with the most advanced countries of Western Europe and North America.
Still another attitude on which Japanese generally agreed was that authoritarian rule of any sort must be avoided if catastrophes such as those caused by the militarists were to be prevented. Democracy was an ideal on which all could unite, and it was the announced objective of the Americans. But when it came to defining democracy, deep differences of opinion and bitter distrust became evident. Was Japan’s new system to follow the American pattern of political democracy combined with a relatively free economy, or the more socialistic democratic patterns of some Western European countries, or the so-called democracy of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in communist lands?
The division of opinion on these points was varied and confused. Differences by age group are common in most fast-changing societies, but they were especially pronounced in Japan, where the time of “Taisho democracy,” the period of military domination and war, and the postwar era contrasted sharply with one another. The gulf between people of different professions was also broad—certainly broader than in the more fluid society of the United States. The government official or big businessman lived in a different world from the so-called intellectual, or interi, a term of pride in Japan that was used for a wide variety of people, particularly university professors, writers, and the like, but also included almost anyone who had received a higher education but was not a businessman or government official. Businessmen and government officials were largely the products of the same universities as the intellectuals and had received the same Germanic sort of theoretical, idealistic education, but their professions forced them to become more pragmatic than the intellectuals, who tended to cling to their bookish theories, unsullied by any compromise with sordid reality. Such differences are not unknown in the West, but on the whole the gap was much greater in Japan than in the United States.
A similar intellectual gap existed between residents of rural and small-town Japan and city intellectuals and their younger cohorts in the universities. Rural and small-town Japan, the traditional stronghold of the old political parties, had its own well-established patterns of pragmatic democratic politics based on personal association, patronage, and other local considerations—a pattern not unlike that of much of the United States. City intellectuals tended to reject all this as “feudalistic,” insisting on their own more theoretical concepts of democracy, socialism, or communism.
Industrial labor, proud of its new organizational strength and determined to share in political power, deeply distrusted management and the whole prewar establishment. In the early postwar years, when business remained moribund and there was little in the way of profits to fight over, organized labor made a determined bid to take direct control of industry. It constantly went out on strikes, sometimes seized plants and ran them itself, and frequently held public parades and demonstrations. Even when the economy began to come back to life and bargaining over wages and working conditions became the focus of attention, labor expressed its continuing militancy by applying the term “spring struggle” to its annual bargaining sessions with management preceding the start of the new fiscal year in April.
UPI
Confrontation between labor unionists and the police during the annual “spring struggle” over wages in 1958.
The first few months after the war were a time of great political uncertainty and confusion. Official American policy, as enunciated in the Initial Post Surrender Policy for Japan, would have permitted a popular revolution to unseat the emperor and the old government but did not encourage one. Despite MacArthur’s unauthorized drafting of a constitution and other high-handed acts, the Americans had promised that Japan was to have a government “supported by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.” There was no sign of a revolution, however. Instead, the citizenry gradually sorted itself out into two mutually hostile groups, which came to be known as the “conservative camp” and the “reformist” or “progressive camp.”
The “conservatives” were essentially the remnants of the prewar establishment. Deprived of the army and navy and with the high court officials bereft of power and the bureaucracy clearly subordinate to Diet control, this side consisted primarily of the two traditional major parties, their business supporters, and the bulk of rural and small-town voters. Though the two traditional major parties had been the “liberals” of earlier days, winning power for the Diet from the older establishment and then reluctantly yielding it to the military, in the new political spectrum they were the “conservatives.” There was only a tiny and politically insignificant fringe of old-fashioned nationalists and militarists further to their right.
The “progressives” were those who deeply distrusted all surviving elements of the prewar e
stablishment and leaned instead toward socialist or communist ideas. Intellectuals had suffered most from “thought control.” Labor felt it had been cruelly exploited. City people in general, both white collar workers and manual laborers, living under worse conditions than rural Japanese and suffering more from the disruption of the economy, were eager for a complete break with the past. Such people viewed any remnants of the old controlling groups as dangerous links to the past, threatening a return to the bad old days. The conservatives for their part considered many of the progressives to be impractical idealists and easy dupes for dangerous revolutionaries who, they felt, would like to discard the good of old Japan along with the bad and destroy the nation’s identity. The depth of the hostility and bitterness between the two sides can only be understood in terms of the very real fears the one side had that the other would set back the clock to prewar days and the equally real fears of the other side that their opponents would obliterate what they considered to be the true Japan. Although neither fear proved valid, they were wholly genuine and were expressed with undisguised animosity.
One reason for this unfortunate cleavage of opinion was that the Americans, despite their many admirable reforms, had not explained their whole program in clear philosophic terms. Because they themselves took democracy so much for granted, they did not put much effort into expressing it in words. The Japanese, particularly the intellectuals, with their background in the all-embracing Confucian philosophy of Tokugawa times and, more recently, in German idealism, wished something more philosophically coherent than what the Americans seemed to offer. It may have been just as well that a basically military occupation did not try to formulate a great guiding philosophy, but nonetheless the Japanese were left to interpret the American reforms for themselves. For most small-town and rural people, this meant their interpretation was based on how the reforms affected their private lives, and the reaction was overwhelmingly favorable. For intellectuals and many other urban groups, it was largely based on the theories they already knew, and these were largely Marxist.
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