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Occupation: the American Way of Life as an Imposed Model

On 30 August 1945, the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Military Forces, General MacArthur, arrived in Japan full of the confidence which characterized his whole life. From air photos taken in the last phase of the war, he was assured that there was little possibility of meeting significant resistance from the Japanese. This made him magnanimous.

General MacArthur had been known as a man of conservative political views. In the summer of 1932, on the order of President Hoover, General MacArthur commanded cavalry and infantry to disperse the 5,000 squatters who remained in barracks in Washington after the spring march of the bonus army, the unemployed World War I veterans who had been badly hit by the 1929 panic. Some 11,000 had marched to Washington to demand the earlier payment of their pension. President Hoover had obtained $100,000 from Congress and reduced the bonus army to 5,000, who then built barracks and continued to watch the central government. The crushing of the remaining bonus army made MacArthur famous. This was just before Hoover was replaced by Roosevelt, who introduced the New Deal. Ironically, at the time of his arrival in Japan General MacArthur’s staff officers were men who had grown up in the era of the New Deal. Nevertheless, MacArthur had soldierly affection for these staff officers, who had fought with him in the Philippines and beyond, and was ready to enjoy the task of drawing up a blueprint for the remodelling of Japan in a spirit of magnanimity. In this respect, the background of his subordinate officers—the New Deal era, when the United States government planned the economy and life style of the society—was most helpful.

Subordinate again to these officers were non-commissioned officers just a few years out of university. These did most of the chores of investigating conditions in postwar Japan, an extremely difficult task because cities were burnt down and records removed to faraway country towns, and the personal network which could have supplied needed information was hard to find. The task of gathering information and of applying the directives to concrete cases was often left to these young and energetic non-commissioned officers. The Supreme Commander and his higher-ranking aides did not have time to examine the decisions of subordinates in detail, and in many cases supported subordinates’ decisions in the face of complaints brought to them by high-ranking officials of the Japanese government, politicians and company presidents, who had enjoyed a high prestige before the surrender. This state of affairs continued roughly until the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, which brought about a change in the atmosphere which had influenced MacArthur’s decisions.

So we might say that there was a time-lag between the U.S.A, and U.S. occupied Japan. The earlier phase of the U.S. occupation of Japan perpetuated the original spirit of the New Deal as it had existed in the United States during the early period of the Roosevelt administration in 1933.

Right from the beginning, however, MacArthur had two opposing factions among his staff officers. The chief of the GII, the General Staff Section II, was General Charles A.Willoughby (1892–1972), who had been a staff officer to General MacArthur since 1940 in the Philippines. The section was in charge of information and counter-espionage activities. Under this cover, General Willoughby kept contact with former officials of the special secret police of Japan and gathered information imbued with the anti-communist bias of the wartime Japanese police, which accorded with the general’s own political views. He also gathered information on what he considered undesirable activities of officials of the Occupation. The information thus collected was sent to the U.S. House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee and was used for the McCarthyist removal of active New Dealers in the earlier phase of the Occupation.

The Government Section of MacArthur’s staff was headed by General Courtney Whitney (1897–1969), who had been a practising lawyer in the Philippines before the war and was in charge of General MacArthur’s financial affairs. In 1940, he returned to military service as a major in the army and directed guerrilla warfare against Japan in the Philippines. In 1943, he was appointed chief of the Government Section of the U.S. Army in the Pacific theatre, and he arrived in Japan with MacArthur on 30 August. Although he was in conflict with General Willoughby, he kept the trust and affection of General MacArthur and was loyal to the general to the end of his life.

Next to General Whitney in the Government Section was Colonel Charles L.Kades (1906–). Born in Newburg, New York, he graduated from Cornell University and went to Harvard Law School. In 1931 he became a lawyer in New York. In 1933, he served under the Secretary of the Interior, Harold L.Ickes, in Roosevelt’s cabinet. In 1942, he entered military service and served in the European theatre, in charge of civil administration in the former German Occupied Area. He arrived in Japan on 30 August, with the papers on Occupation policies from Washington. With General Whitney, Commander Alfred R.Hussey (1899–) and Milo E.Rowell (1903–), Kades worked on the original draft of the constitution of Japan, which explicitly stated that Japan would henceforward waive the right to wage war. Kades was active in land reform, the dismantling of financial monopoly groups, and the purge of wartime leaders from responsible official posts. These activities incurred the enmity of General Willoughby, who publicized Kades’ relationship with Viscountess Torio Tsuruyo and so forced him to leave Japan. Nevertheless, General MacArthur preserved his paternalistic regard for Kades and left his private financial affairs in his charge.

As a soldier, General MacArthur firmly opposed communism of all kinds and was therefore hawkish in his recommendation on the military move against Soviet Russia and Communist China. He was a conservative with regard to politics within the United States.

With regard to Japan, however, as civil administrator superior to the Emperor of Japan, MacArthur took a paternalistic attitude which entailed the encouragement of reform. His opinion is well expressed in a statement he made after he had left Japan to the U.S. Congress in 1951, that the Japanese were mentally 12 years old. The publication of this statement in Japanese newspapers angered the Japanese, who had by that time come to place full trust in General MacArthur’s goodwill toward the Japanese people. There can be no doubt of his goodwill, but it was the goodwill of a full-grown man towards a 12-year-old.

In the beginning, the term of the Occupation was not specified. To the Japanese, it appeared as though the Occupation would last for ever, just as a few years before it had appeared that the war would last for ever. Accordingly, they prepared to adjust themselves to permanent occupation. Most remarkable was the retraining of the bureaucracy. The Occupation functioned as a training centre for the new class of high officials who were to take the helm of state in the years of swift economic growth after the 1960s. The list of Japanese government liaison officials who negotiated with or, more truthfully, took orders directly from the Occupation headquarters is a list of the conservative party leaders and cabinet ministers of the period after 1960. Most of these officials were already in their forties at the beginning of the Occupation but nevertheless strove to learn the English language, so that by the 1960s they could negotiate with U.S. cabinet members without the help of interpreters.

Before the Occupation, the Japanese higher education system was such that few Japanese could speak and write English, or any foreign language, with fluency. It had long been believed that there was a jinx on Japanese officialdom to the effect that an adept in a foreign language would never rise to the highest rank. The jinx was broken with the Occupation and the character of high officialdom has been transformed. The imprint of the U.S. Occupation remains on the officialdom of Japan.

The close link between Japanese officialdom and the Occupation system was a material consequence of the indirect occupation which the U.S. adopted in Japan, in contrast to the Allies’ occupation of Germany. The U.S. policy was to make use of the Japanese Emperor and his government as far as they could serve the aims of the U.S. Occupation, although the U.S. Army could demand the replacement of government organs and personnel or take action independently of the Japanese government.

At the beginning there had loomed another possibility which, if realized, would have meant direct occupation. On 3 September 1945, MacArthur was to have made an announcement that the U.S. Army would occupy all of Japan and begin military rule. The announcement was to include three items:

1. U.S. military administration:

2. the replacement of the Japanese judicial system by U.S. military courts;

3. the use of the U.S. Army Note or military currency in Japan.

The Japanese cabinet was notified in advance of the content of the scheduled announcement. Prince Higashikuni’s cabinet was thrown into confusion. It was through a juggling of obscure Chinese ideographs that the Japanese government had managed to ease the shock of surrender. In Japanese official documents, and in newspaper and radio announcements, the word ‘defeat’ had been carefully avoided and the words ‘the termination of the war’ put in its place. The ‘occupation’ had been called the ‘stationing’ of U.S. forces in Japan. If the War Note were to be used in Japan—that is, the dollar to replace the yen as the currency, and military courts to take over—the people would become acutely conscious of the fact of defeat and occupation, placing the government in a very difficult position. For the government had constructed an elaborate pretence to the Japanese people that they had acted wisely in serving the national structure and had brought the long war to an honourable close.

In alarm, Premier Prince Higashikuni sent Okazaki Katsuo (1897–1965), the head of the Liaison Office, to General MacArthur, then quartered in the New Grand Hotel in Yokohama, at midnight. When Okazaki reached the hotel, it was already 1 a.m. He sneaked into the hotel and went into a bedroom, where he found an American whom he mistook for General Sutherland, the Chief of Staff, and appealed to him. After ten minutes of talk he discovered his mistake, and he was finally taken to the Chief of Staff, who said that the telegrams had already been sent to all the depots in Japan and that the announcement was to be made public the next day. But finally General Sutherland saw the importance of Okazaki’s objections in the light of the policy dispatched from Washington, and agreed to stop the announcement. Even Okazaki’s report could not allay the alarm of the Japanese cabinet, and Foreign Minister Shigemitsu was sent to visit General MacArthur before 9 a.m. that day. All this occurred in the small hours, during which time the whole cabinet stayed awake.

The discrepancy between the Japanese and the English wording of the same facts of surrender and occupation may be attributed not only to the contrivance of Japanese officials but also to the very nature of the U.S. policy of occupation in Japan, which aimed at a ‘conditional’ unconditional surrender. The ambiguity is rooted in the U.S. policy itself, in the unilateral information of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration as terms of surrender for Japan. Although terms were stated, the demand for unconditional surrender was never openly retracted by the U.S. official sources. For this reason the U.S. Occupation allowed the Japanese use of the terms ‘termination of war’ and ‘stationing of forces’ in lieu of ‘defeat’ and ‘occupation’, which gave rise to the controversy over the reality of ‘unconditional surrender’ in Japanese journalism 33 years later.¹

The link between the Japanese bureaucracy and its U.S. counterpart did not affect the Japanese system for training high officials, which remained as it had been before the war, in spite of the education reform brought about by the directives of the Occupation. The Ministry of Education remained intact, although the Ministry of the Interior, responsible for police control, was abolished during the Occupation. The pyramidal school system, with Tokyo University at the top, remained unscathed, and still operates. The Law Department of Tokyo University is the training ground for those who are to occupy the highest posts of the bureaucracy. The fact that the faculty members of Tokyo University are trained by a system of in-breeding has also not changed. Those who have climbed up the ladder of competitive examination to the Law Department of Tokyo University feel themselves to be a chosen group fit to lead the nation. After they attain the status of government officials, they are not fired until they reach the age of retirement, after which they may accept either high positions in semi-governmental enterprises or seats in parliament as members of the ruling party, assisting former colleagues in the ministries to draw up government policies. The members of parliament who belong to opposition parties cannot hope for such confidential roles. This is the key to the continuity of Japanese government policy throughout the 34 years since the surrender. In the whole history of postwar Japan, there was only a brief period of seven months during which cabinet was not held by this conservative party-high official amalgam. This was during the U.S. Occupation, so even the policy of this government was kept within the general framework set up by the military administration and its continuity was not affected in any serious way.

When these officials, trained in negotiation with the Occupation, came to occupy responsible political positions themselves, they began to speak a new kind of political language. Before and during the war, the political vocabulary was formulated around the concept of national structure, combined according to a pattern set by the Emperor’s edicts. The premier’s speeches invariably followed this nomenclature. After the Occupation, successive premiers tried to follow the usage of U.S. democracy in their speeches. The premier who succeeded Kishi after the anti-mutual security uprising in May and June 1960 used a new style of political language entirely free of the pre-armistice terminology of national structure. The official policy speeches of Premier Ikeda Hayato began to centre on economic growth, Gross National Product and the standard of living. This could be interpreted as a new political language with which to disguise Japanese economic imperialism in the post-Occupation era. Up to the present, however, as the military budget has been kept at less than 1 per cent of the G.N.P., it is unlikely that such ideas will result in military activity, such as the sending of a gunboat to defend the freedom of Japanese oil tankers to pass the Malacca Straits. The defence of the Japanese standard of living may arouse public opinion as a basis for state action. It will not suffice, however, to transform it into militarism, when it is cut off from the prewar ideology of national structure and strong military armament. The Japanese are not yet accustomed to the idea of the U.S.A. as the fatherland of free citizens which they must defend militarily.

Major reforms, intended to break down the remnants of feudalism in Japan, were undertaken in the earliest phase of the Occupation: the trial of the war criminals, the purge of war leaders, the abolition of the thought police and its public maintenance law, the release of political prisoners, the dissolution of financial groups, land reform, the Emperor’s declaration that he was human, the draft of the constitution in which Japan gave up the right to wage war, women’s suffrage, and the remodelling of the school system. Among these reforms the dissolution of financial groups had little effect, and all the financial groups later came to be re-established. Land reform, on the other hand, although it left the holdings of forest and mountains untouched and was to this extent incomplete, had an enormous effect in reshaping the Japanese mentality. Farmers developed the mentality of property owners, and began to show a staunch support for the Conservative Party, which is unchanged to this day. The purge of the war leaders was intended to remove militarist and ultra-nationalist leaders from responsible posts in government, industry and mass communications. The same criteria were loosely interpreted in order to purge all of the central committee members of the Japanese Communist Party on 6 June 1950. Here the logic of the purge was distorted.² It was coupled with the red purge by the Occupation directive, as a result of which 20,997 Communists and Communist sympathizers lost their jobs in government, mass communications and private enterprises between 1949 and 1951. In most of these cases the victims, even when erroneously labelled Communists, did not get back their jobs. Only in universities, because of the opposition of student movements, the red purge was carried out in just a few cases.

The Korean War, which started on 25 June 1950, caused the Occupation authorities to reverse their course, opening the way for the total rearmament of Japan and putting an end to the displacement of wartime leaders. One month after the outbreak of the Korean War, MacArthur’s directive caused the rebirth of a Japanese army, then under the name of the Police Reserve Force. The use of euphemism in regard to military matters continues to this day, when what are in fact an army and a navy are still called ‘self-defence corps’. This helps, against the wishes of the U.S. government and of the late General MacArthur, to keep the size and cost of the armed forces small, or at least smaller than the United States would like it to be.

As late as June 1948, General Whitney, of the Government Section, stated that the purge of war leaders should be deemed permanent, and that in the future the Occupation authorities would hold the Japanese government responsible for complying with the final decision taken on the purge. This statement is in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration which stated: ‘There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan on world conquest.’ Whitney’s statement was, however, revoked by the U.S. Government within one year, retracting not only the U.S. occupation policy but the Potsdam Declaration itself. After a few years, the old forces in Japan gathered together and, this time with the support of the United States, reinstated wartime leaders in positions of power. In February 1957, Kishi, who had been a member of the Tj cabinet, was appointed the Premier of Japan.

A similar kind of ambiguity was displayed by the opposition groups. After the defeat, as early as 8 December, the Japan Communist Party organized a people’s rally to prosecute the war criminals. At the meeting 1,600 names of a wide variety of people were disclosed, including Shidehara, Wakatsuki and Sakomizu, who had done something to criticize the war. Conversely, among the members of the Committee of Prosecutors were people like the poet Tsuboi Shigeharu, who was to be criticized by a younger poet Yoshimoto for his poems in praise of the war. The Communist Party and its followers tended to label as war criminals those who did not follow the party line after the defeat.³ We may say, borrowing a classification from logic, that the label ‘war criminal’ was quasi-heterological. (Any word that does not apply to itself is heterological, such as a ‘brick’, whereas any word which applies to itself is homological, such as ‘English’.) The ‘war criminal’ was likely to be a member of any group which did not include the speaker. From the point of view of the Occupation, the war criminal was a member of the group which did not include the Occupation and the U.S. government.

From 9 December 1945, the national radio broadcasting station began a series called ‘This is true’, which was supposed to reveal the facts of the Japanese war. It was a programme ordered by the Occupation authorities from NHK. It gave the impression that the Occupation had a monopoly on the truth which had been hidden from the Japanese people. The Japan Comimunist Party also believed that they had a monopoly on truth, but then, they were still at the stage of welcoming the U.S. Army as the army of liberation and made it an official policy to co-operate with the U.S. Occupation, so they did not openly criticize the details of the ‘truth’ disclosed by the Occupation. The U.S. Occupation offered the only truth to the Japanese people. There was little left for the Japanese but to co-operate in the spreading of the truth so proclaimed.⁴

There was great confusion in all the major cities, which were not food-producing areas. The most advertised event of the period, the arrest of Kodaira Yoshio (1905–1949) will throw light upon life in this period. Kodaira would go to a railway station and begin to talk to a girl in the ticket queue. He would say to the girl that he had procured a very reliable way of securing food in the country and she would then follow Kodaira to a forest in the country, without going home and informing her parents of this sudden trip. In this way Kodaira raped and murdered seven persons in succession between June and December, 1945. He had acquired a taste for rape and murder as a marine fighting in China in 1927 and 1928. He had been decorated by the government for bravery shown in these battles and returned to Japan as a hero. He murdered his wife’s father and was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but the confusion during the last part of the war enabled him to hide his previous criminal record and to serve as a boilerman in the women’s dormitory in the naval garment storage section.⁵

Food was the main problem, which made all other problems seem trifles. To the Japanese, the Occupation made a durable impression primarily as a provider of food. Tons of food were ‘released’ by the Occupation to the people in Japan. Flour, corn and powdered milk were the main items. But on children chocolate and chewing gum made a deeper impression. The memory of these foods, and their association with General MacArthur, forms the basis of a friendliness, generated in the seven years of Occupation, which is still felt by many Japanese living today.

Along with the provision of food, there was health care. After the long war, especially after the defeat, epidemics of various kinds were expected. The Occupation handled the problem of public hygiene in a masterly way, which the Japanese could not have expected from their own government. The accomplishment of General Sams and his staff in the field of public health and welfare is probably the most indisputable achievement of the U.S. Occupation of Japan. From 1895 to 1945, the Japanese male enjoyed an average life span of 42 years. In the later phase of the war, this must have been shortened, although we have no adequate statistics. But from 1946 to 1951, the average male life span leaped from 42·8 years to 61 years. The average female life span rose from 51·1 to 64·8 years.

For people at large, the most durable influence of the Occupation was on the Japanese life style, especially with respect to relationships between women and men. Since the 1920s, American movies had influenced the Japanese to a great extent. After four years of war with the United States, during which American movies were not shown in public, there came a flood of them. In addition, the Japanese daily witnessed the gestures of Americans in the streets, at least in the big cities where U.S. soldiers were stationed. They set models for the exchange of gestures between boys and girls. Before and during the war, men usually walked a few steps in front of women. For a man and a woman to walk abreast would have been considered immoral during the war and liable to be questioned by the police box. Now a decisive change took place, at least among those in their twenties at the beginning of the Occupation. The photograph on page 12, taken from an album of Kimura Ihei, the master photographer, will not strike you as anything noteworthy, but to the photographer himself if must have given the impression that a new age had arrived.

First in the area of food, second in the region of life style, especially in male-female relationships, and lastly in the region of the sense of justice, the shift to the new values set by the United States was felt to be a necessity which had to be accepted. But the idea that the new values were the only universally acceptable ones, as the Occupation seemed to assert, was something the Japanese would not readily accept, although they did not openly criticize them.

The ordinary Japanese view of the conquerors was quite different from the conquerors’ view of themselves. All the major cities, except Kyoto, had been practically burned down. In Tokyo, the horizon, hidden for many years, could be seen in all directions. Many were living in air-raid shelters; others used drainage pipes to

1 Marunouchi, October 1949 (photo Kimura Ihei)

store their kitchen utensils and even to sleep in.

During the last stage of the war, a novelist recruited for compulsory labour service commented that his way of carrying earth in a crude straw basket seemed like a return to the age of the gods as told in the legend. Our manner of living at the outset of the Occupation had much in common with the ancients.

Lancelot Hogben entitled his history of human communication From Cave Painting to Comic Strip (1949), which exactly describes the change in the mode of communication of the Japanese people from 1945 to 1960.⁶