Chapter 48
With the U.S. occupation of Japan in its fifth year, the Japanese newspaper Asahi Press in 1950 sponsored the America Fair to infuse locals with a deeper grasp of the American way of life. Encompassing fifty acres in Osaka, Japan, the fair displayed large-scale models of New York’s skyline, Abraham Lincoln’s log-cabin birthplace, and the Liberty Bell, among a superabundance of other icons.
The fair was part and parcel of an effort to thoroughly demilitarize Japan and render the architects of Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking and the Bataan Death March as unthreatening as a middle-aged man in Bermuda shorts and socks with sandals. Its empire had been liquefied in the heat of two atomic blasts, and its economy and infrastructure ruptured under the weight of 160,800 tons of bombs Allied planes dropped on the home islands.
The new constitution, superimposed on it by the supreme commander for the Allied Powers Gen. Douglas MacArthur, demoted the emperor to a status somewhere between that of the Queen of England and an NBA mascot. The document elevated Japan’s parliament, the Diet, to the country’s highest political institution. The people received the right of free speech. Its military forces were completely eliminated under the constitution’s Article 9, with the country forbidden from ever going to war again.
Labor unions, once outlawed, were introduced. (By the end of 1946, there were an astonishing 17,000 of them.) Land reform was instituted to uplift tenant farmers from inescapable poverty. The voting age was lowered from 25 to 20, and women received suffrage. Enforcing this experiment in benevolent occupation were 200,000 allied troops whose constant presence was like a teacher that never leaves the room.
Touted as the largest fair in Japan since the famous four-month-long Tokyo Peace Commemorative Exposition in 1922 honoring “the best of world culture,” the America Fair would be one more vaccination against the murderous impulses many thought were fixed in the Japanese national character.
Then again, many thought the 1922 Peace expo reflected a Japan no fiercer than a napping puppy. Emphasizing industrial progress, it saw daily attendance hit 100,000, with visitors poring over 209,000 exhibits, including a popular showing of model homes. Yet, the expo was more of a carnival mask over a violent visage waiting to express itself, e.g., the fair’s Hall of the South Pacific depicted Japan’s colonial holdings, suggesting that building an empire was more appealing than cultivating a peace. Indeed, fifteen years later, the Japanese officially invaded China just two months after the 1937 Nagoya Pan-Pacific Peace Exposition, leaving a body count that should have been measured in Lectors.
After all that, hope, radiant as daybreak, still shone through: “But, when a nation, defeated in war, conceives and dedicates a fair to its late enemies,” wrote one commentator in 1950, “then the event takes on an importance not to be lightly considered. In fact, it inspires belief in the premise that the Japanese people do indeed sincerely seek to learn more about what makes the United States tick.”
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
An estimated two million Japanese strode through the America Fair grounds to discover that unique United States’ raison d’être. They wandered among a display of thirty American-built cars, a recreation of an American farm, and a full-sized replica of a Pan-American Stratocruiser, with its novel duo of passenger decks.
The real draws, though, were the extensive recreations of famed American landmarks and geographical vistas, from what Woody Guthrie immortalized as its “golden valleys” to its “diamond deserts.” Visitors gaped at skyline panoramas of New York, Niagara Falls, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Texas oil fields. They gawked at replicas of the White House, the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, Philadelphia’s Independence Hall (including the Liberty Bell), the Empire State Building, Mammoth Cave, and adobe houses from the scorched southwest. Tellingly, the faces on the imitation Mount Rushmore, seen here, were carved with distinctly Asian features, much as a century before Japanese artists captured Commodore Perry’s likeness with a decidedly Asian cast that would have fit in snugly next to portraits of shoguns and samurais.
According to a 1950 report from the United States Army’s Office of Occupied Areas, the America Fair’s “. . . objectives, presentation and the enthusiasm engendered among the Japanese people were encouraging signs of democratic ideas and aspirations representing the beneficial impact of the reorientation program.” In 1952, after seven years of enacting pervasive political and social reforms, the American occupation of Japan came to a close.