Such a situation might have led to a highly undisciplined party vote in the Diet, as in the American Congress. That it did not illustrates, perhaps, the greater Japanese tendency toward cooperation and the survival of premodern patterns of interpersonal relations. The average conservative Dietman attached himself to some leading politician in his party, who could help channel him funds for elections and win him a high position in the central government, in return for his support of the leader’s bid for the party presidency. The result was that the conservative parties were not cohesive ideological groupings but rather congeries of factions divided not by policy issues but by personal loyalties. These factions could easily switch sides between the two conservative parties, accounting in part for their rise and fall in votes and Diet seats. This was precisely the way the traditional parties had operated before the war, and the revival of this system was another clear sign of political continuity.
Yoshida’s Liberal party had faced a particularly severe factional division because he, a former bureaucrat, had achieved the leadership of the party only because Hatoyama and the other older party leaders had been purged. Released from the purge by the end of the occupation, these men tried to reclaim their old positions. When Yoshida refused to yield, Hatoyama and his following split off from the party in March 1953. Yoshida, now lacking a parliamentary majority, dissolved the Diet and held an election on April 19. His wing of the Liberal party won 39 percent of the vote and obtained 199 seats, well short of a majority but far ahead of the Progressive party and the divided Socialists, and he continued precariously on in power for another year and a half.
Hatoyama returned to the attack in the autumn of 1954. In November he joined the Progressives and reorganized them under their alternate name of Democrats. Meanwhile, another veteran politician threatened to desert Yoshida, who finally relinquished his weakening grasp on the prime ministership in December 1954, passing it on to Hatoyama. To consolidate his position, Hatoyama held elections on February 27, 1955. The Liberals declined sharply (26.6 percent of the vote), and the Democrats emerged as the plurality party with 36.6 percent of the vote and 185 seats, confirming Hatoyama’s hold on political leadership.
In this election the combined vote of the conservative parties showed an overall decline and that of the opposition rose. This seems to have been mostly the result of changing demographic conditions, particularly the rapid shift of the population from the countryside to the cities and rising educational standards. Over the next two decades the conservatives lost an average of about 1 percent of the vote per year and the so-called progressive camp gained correspondingly. The conservatives saw the need to unite their two parties if they were to maintain control of the government. The Socialists could see even more clearly that, unless they were reunited, they could never achieve their goal of becoming the majority party. On October 13, 1955, the two wings of the party joined together again, and on November 15 the two conservative parties combined under the joint name of the Liberal Democratic party, usually abbreviated to Jiminto in Japanese and to LDP in English.
The unification of the two major political groupings created virtually the two-party system that Japan had been leaning toward in the 1920s, but it also made the conflict between the conservative and progressive “camps” all the sharper. One of the major reasons the conservatives came together was to muster sufficient strength to revise some of the occupation reforms. All the purges had been dropped with the end of the occupation, and now the chief objective was to revise the constitution because of its clearly foreign origin and its strange-sounding verbiage. In particular, the conservatives wished to get rid of the unrealistic Article 9, which renounced war and all armaments, and to restore theoretical “sovereignty” to the emperor. The opposition forces, however, fought desperately against any changes in the constitution, even though they might be merely stylistic or theoretical, because they feared that the slightest alteration might open the door to more substantive changes. Thus, curiously, the progressives, though strongly anti-American, had become the chief defenders of the constitution MacArthur had forced on Japan. As it happened, the conservatives were unable to revise the text of the constitution, because by 1955 they lacked the two-thirds majority needed in the two houses of the Diet to make amendments. As their majority continued to decline in later years, their hope for constitutional reform became progressively less feasible and gradually faded away as a practical political issue.
The conservatives, while unable to amend the constitution, did carry out some lesser reforms of the system, though only against determined and sometimes violent opposition by the progressives. One such reform, made in 1954, was a partial recentralization of the police into prefectural police systems under the coordination and guidance of a National Police Agency. Though bitterly opposed by the progressives, who feared this would lead to the reconstruction of centralized police controls of the prewar type, the new system worked much more efficiently than the municipal system introduced by the occupation. The progressives prevented the formal restoration of certain police powers by law, but the public granted these powers to the police in effect through their increasing cooperation and trust, and the postwar Japanese police system evolved into one of the most efficient and respected police systems in the world.
Another reform effected by the conservatives was a reconsolidation of certain educational controls. Elected prefectural and municipal school boards, which had generally been very unpopular, were changed in 1956 to appointed local boards, and more authority for the supervision of textbooks and curriculums was returned to the education ministry. The radical teachers union fought all these changes bitterly, as well as the reintroduction of the course on ethics in 1958 and of national student evaluation systems over the next several years, which it was feared would make possible political control of the teachers. The battle between the teachers union and the ministry of education has continued ever since, with only slowly declining hostility between the two, but there has been virtually no use of education for reactionary indoctrination, nor has the running fight between the union and the ministry impaired the high quality of elementary and secondary school education.
The problem of Japanese rearmament was also solved at least temporarily by a slowly shifting reinterpretation of the meaning of Article 9. The National Police Reserve of 75,000 men, created in 1950 to replace the American soldiers sent to Korea, was expanded in August 1952 to a National Safety Force, including a small naval component, and then in 1954 was further expanded into Land, Sea, and Air Self-Defense Forces, under a Self-Defense Agency. Though limited to 250,000 men, the Self-Defense Forces, known for short as the Jieitai in Japanese and the SDF in English, were an embryonic military. They were kept under strict civilian control and carefully eschewed anything remotely bordering on politics, stressing instead internal public disaster services and other noncontroversial tasks. Still, they embodied a reinterpretation of Article 9, permitting Japan the right of self-defense.
The parties of the Left quite naturally opposed this reinterpretation of the constitution as well as the 1952 security treaty with the United States and the continuation of American military bases in Japan. They argued that all three steps contravened the spirit of the constitution and threatened to embroil Japan in what they considered to be America’s adventuristic and imperialistic foreign policy. The three issues together formed the white-hot center of postoccupation political controversy. Popular feeling was so strong that the conservatives were forced to act and speak with great caution on such matters. They found that they could not raise the status of the Defense Agency to a ministry, as they had planned, and they were forced to accept a tacit limit of 1 percent of gross national product (GNP) for the military budget.
The conservative governments of the early postoccupation years did not merely concentrate on negative efforts to undo aspects of the original American reforms, but made serious efforts to restore Japan to world society. They were aided in
this by the quickening pace of economic recovery. At first the conditions of dire want and demoralization following the surrender improved only very slowly. As late as 1950 per capita income had climbed back to only $132, even then an extremely low level for an industrialized nation. But then economic recovery began to pick up speed. The reforms recommended by the Dodge Mission in the spring of 1949 helped balance the budget, check the inflationary spiral, and eliminate the black market, thus creating a stable foundation for further growth. The outbreak of the Korean war in 1950 produced a big American demand for Japanese goods and services, and a sudden spurt in the whole economy resulted. Once started in motion, Japanese industry rolled ahead with increasing speed, until by the mid-fifties both national production and per capita income had returned to the prewar heights of the mid-thirties. Able to export industrial goods again, Japan could now start to settle its reparation debts, left undetermined by the peace treaty. It did this by reparation agreements in the form of Japanese goods, which incidentally created markets for future exports that further stimulated the economy.
At the time of the peace treaty the United States had insisted that Japan sign a treaty with the Nationalist Republic of China on Taiwan in conformity with the American position on the two Chinas. Both Chinas, however, decided to forego reparations from Japan in view of the huge Japanese investments in their territories that had already been taken over. Japan made its first reparations settlement in 1954 with Burma, and during the next five years settlements with the Philippines, Indonesia, and South Vietnam followed. The last and most important settlement, however, did not come until 1965, when a “normalization” agreement was finally signed with South Korea.
Hatoyama was determined to settle matters with the Soviet Union as well, in order to lessen the danger of being associated only with the American side in the Cold War and to remove the Soviet veto of Japanese membership in the United Nations. But this was not easy because there were real bones of contention between the two countries, and Japanese resentment against the Russians ran high. For one thing, large numbers of war prisoners had never returned from Siberia and had to be considered the victims of conditions in Soviet prison camps. Another problem was that, while in the peace treaty Japan had renounced its claims to the Kuril Islands, the Japanese insisted that Shikotan and the Habomais, which were small islands the Soviets had seized, were actually part of Hokkaido and that the two southernmost Kurils, Kunashiri and Etorofu, were indisputably Japanese by all rights of discovery and development and should therefore be returned. These claims were met by an uncompromising Soviet stand on territorial matters that made a full peace treaty impossible. But Hatoyama was able to achieve a “normalization” of relations with the Soviet Union in October 1956, and as a consequence, Japan finally won acceptance into the United Nations two months later. In the meantime, Japan had become a member of the GATT, or the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, in 1955. Thus bit by bit it was resuming its normal position in the world as an independent nation.
The decade following Japan’s surrender in 1945 had been a confused and difficult one, but Japan had survived the trauma. There had been no revolutionary upheavals or breakdown of society. Japanese desires for change and American zeal for reform had blended successfully to create political and social trends that, if one overlooked the intervening two decades of turmoil and suffering, were virtual extensions of the more democratic and liberal tendencies of the twenties. Despite the distasteful foreign authorship of the constitution, parliamentary democracy had been firmly established, life was settling down again, and Japan was becoming an extraordinarily egalitarian and classless society. The economy was coming back to life, and Japan was showing signs of becoming an economically viable nation once again. It was also being allowed back into international society, though as a timid and meek member, longing to be able to put its faith in the goodwill of other nations and in the ideal of universal peace embodied in the United Nations.
The general patterns had also been set for Japan’s domestic and international development over the following few decades. The Japanese, whether they wished it or not, were closely linked with the United States in defense, trade, and culture, leaving relations with China and the Soviet Union less than satisfactory. The conservative inheritors of the liberal parties of prewar days had firm control of the Diet, though the Socialists hoped that they could in time replace them as the majority party. Deep cleavages existed between the conservative and progressive forces, which continued to view each other with profound suspicion and animosity. The constant political warfare between the two sides tended to focus on the controversial relationship with the United States. Japan remained a relatively poor land and its people politically divided. But at least the nation had come through what had probably been the greatest crisis in its history in surprisingly good shape.
15
THE FIRST POSTWAR FLOWERING
Japan in the mid-1950s was still economically fragile and in a state bordering on political turmoil. Long years of foreign military rule and a constitution dictated by the conquerors seemed almost to guarantee a dangerous reaction someday. And yet beneath the surface, profound and constructive changes had taken place. A functioning democratic political system was becoming well established, society was settling down into new molds, and the country was actually beginning to show signs of prosperity. The work ethic of the Japanese, their well-established tradition of fine workmanship, their high levels of education and technical skills, their old habits of domestic peace and social order, their special genius for cooperation between business and government and between management and labor, their advanced skills in business enterprises, and, above all, their implacable determination to overcome past disasters and present handicaps had given them unmatched capabilities for economic growth and institutional development.
Once the change in occupation economic policy and the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950 had set the economy in motion, it steadily picked up speed, soaring in the mid-fifties past the prewar peak established almost twenty years earlier and then maintaining a rate of growth for the next two decades of almost 10 percent a year in real terms—that is, after discounting inflation. This was a speed of economic expansion no major country had ever approached before. By the mid-fifties the Japanese were facetiously referring to the “Jimmu boom,” meaning the greatest economic boom since the mythical founding of the nation by the emperor Jimmu in 660 B.C. Before long the rest of the world was also taking note and speaking of the “Japanese miracle.” But it was, of course, no miracle. It was the springing back, under favorable conditions, of a war-ravaged but industrially advanced country, a far different matter from the first steps of industrialization in an underdeveloped land. Much the same phenomenon was occurring in Germany. The Japanese were merely continuing the industrial growth that had tentatively started in the 1860s, had shown its first signs of success in the 1880s, had been gradually picking up its pace since then, and was now surging ahead all the faster because of the setbacks of the war years.
The special relationship with the United States and certain other unusual factors contributed to the speed of Japan’s recovery. For example, Japan’s military burdens were largely borne by the Americans. Even after the Self-Defense Forces had been established, they absorbed only about 1 percent of Japan’s GNP, as compared to the more usual 3 to 5 percent for most other large countries or 10 to 20 percent for some. More important, the United States opened its own vast markets to Japan and encouraged its allies and friends to do the same. Thus Japan became the full beneficiary of the postwar American effort to build a peaceful world of open trade for all.
Another factor was America’s willingness to share its technology and financial resources with Japan in order to help get the nation back on its feet. Wrecked or worn-out Japanese machinery was replaced by the latest equipment, and new technology developed in the West since 1937, when the war started to cut Japan off from industrial advances abroad, was intro
duced through hundreds of patents and affiliations between American and Japanese firms. All this know-how was provided by the United States and other Western countries at what now seem ridiculously low prices, because no one at that time could imagine that the Japanese would ever become serious industrial competitors again. The Japanese thus saved on expensive research and development costs, though they frequently improved on the technology they acquired at these bargain prices by making relatively inexpensive though ingenious modifications that made the Japanese product more attractive than its original Western model. A large flow of American credit to capital-hungry Japan also helped immensely. The Japanese wisely saw to it that this was mostly in the form of bank loans, so that foreigners would not buy up their still very feeble reborn industries.
A fortuitous revolution in energy sources also greatly helped Japan to restore its industries. Cheap oil, largely from the Persian Gulf and transported at declining costs by mammoth Japanese tankers, began to overshadow limited hydroelectric power and relatively costly Japanese coal, giving promise of what then seemed unlimited cheap energy. New Japanese factories were located by the sea to exploit this cheap foreign oil and to reduce the transport costs of bulk imports and exports. These new water-level factories, fitted out with the latest machinery and technology, soon began to be formidable competitors to older Western factories, often less advantageously placed or as well equipped.
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