From the Japanese perspective, the prospect of experiencing a “revolution from above” was hardly unprecedented. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, ruling elites had exhorted the populace to industrialize, modernize, westernize, throw off the past, become new men, become new women, become new subjects of a new-born nation state. Starting in 1868, the government had carried out extensive reforms under the explicitly Europe-oriented slogan “civilization and enlightenment.” Beginning in the 1880s, the state promoted modern nation building under the more conservative top-down aegis of a reconstituted emperor system. Even the military and civilian autocrats of the 1930s and 1940s carried out their imperialistic and militaristic policies under renovationist and revolutionary slogans.
The fact that authoritarian, top-down exhortations to dramatically alter the status quo were not new does help explain—but only in part—why the American reformers succeeded as well as they did. General MacArthur, quintessential American that he was, easily became a stock figure in the political pageantry of Japan: the new sovereign, the blue-eyed shogun, the paternalistic military dictator, the grandiloquent but excruciatingly sincere Kabuki hero. MacArthur played this role with consummate care. Like the emperor and the feudal shoguns, he ensconced himself in his headquarters, never associated with hoi polloi, granted audiences only to high officials and reverential distinguished visitors, issued edicts with imperious panache, and brooked no criticism.
General MacArthur’s charisma was as great as his authority among the defeated Japanese.
The supreme commander never actually saw the Japan over which he presided. From the moment he arrived in Tokyo, his travels were restricted to morning and afternoon commutes between his residence in the old U.S. embassy facilities and his nearby office at SCAP headquarters in the former Daiichi Insurance building. He never socialized with Japanese; and, according to one intimate observer, “only sixteen Japanese ever spoke with him more than twice, and none of these was under the rank, say, of Premier, Chief Justice, president of the largest university.” The general’s evenings were largely devoted to watching Hollywood movies, particularly Westerns. Sometimes he also viewed newsreel-type footage of Japan shot by U.S. military cameramen, enabling him to at least keep in celluloid touch with the country he governed.
For five years, the general’s movements were as predictable as a metronome. Prior to the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, he left Tokyo only twice for brief visits to Manila and Seoul. Like Emperor Hirohito prior to 1946, MacArthur spoke in intimate, paternalistic terms about the sentiments and accomplishments of the tens of millions of Japanese under his aegis but never had the slightest meaningful contact with them, never observed first hand how they actually lived. The general thrived on veneration, believed that “the Oriental mind” was predisposed “to adulate a winner,” and assumed that democracy would take root only if people believed him when he said it should. And, indeed, the response of huge numbers of Japanese was that the supreme commander was great, and so was democracy.1
MacArthur was the indisputable overlord of occupied Japan, and his underlings functioned as petty viceroys. At the hub of GHQ activities in the unbombed section of downtown Tokyo, a cadre of American military and civilian bureaucrats (roughly fifteen hundred in early 1946, peaking at thirty-two hundred in January 1948) operated what Theodore Cohen, an energetic participant, aptly characterized as a “new super-government.” This super-government interpreted and promoted basic political, economic, social, and cultural policy, while cultivating the art of “noncommands with the force of commands.” Even mid-level staff offered advice or suggestions to Japanese functionaries that, though technically not orders, effectively operated as such. Faubion Bowers, who served as an assistant military secretary to MacArthur, described this heady authority as involving, in practice, a policy of “demand, insist, enforce, ban, burn” (and a basic pattern of behavior that often, in his rich phrase, “became buffonic”).2 In the postoccupation period, when the Japanese bureaucracy itself proved adept at such “administrative guidance,” Americans would denounce this practice as yet another peculiarity of the Japanese state. Such authoritarian legacies of the neocolonial revolution would rarely be acknowledged.
This extraordinary concentration of power at the center was complemented not only by the stationing of both civilian and military personnel throughout the country, but also by a hands-on manipulation of the educational system and everyday culture. The conquerors were keenly aware that meaningful democratization involved more than simply instigating legal and institutional reforms. It was also essential, as one of the initial planners of occupation policy put it, “to get at the individual Japanese and remold his ways of thinking and feeling” to enhance a deeper appreciation of freedom and democracy.3
To this end, occupation authorities created a web of programs designed to reach every man, woman, and child in the country. They dispatched teams of Americans, mainly men but some women as well, to local communities to provide grass-roots tutelage in American-style civics. Until around 1950, they required that all proposed school textbooks be translated into English for their scrutiny and approval.4 They exerted immense influence over the mass media—negatively through censorship and positively through active input into the articles the press published, the programs public radio broadcast, and the foreign and domestic films movie houses put on screen.
The conundrum of inducing democracy autocratically was apparent at every level and easily abused by functionaries who found themselves suddenly possessed of authority they could never have dreamed of wielding in their own country. Case after case demonstrated how seductive such power could be. To ensure a single voice of “democracy” in the crucial medium of radio broadcasting, to give but one small example, occupation authorities chose to perpetuate the total monopolization of the airwaves by the national broadcasting station (named “NHK” at this time, in emulation of CBS and NBC). The fixation on top-down social engineering was so great that GHQ deliberately thwarted the development of rival commercial stations until 1951. Only through such tight control, the reformers believed, could the archetypal “Joe Nip” (their counterpart to “John Doe”) be molded into a good facsimile of an American-style democrat.5
The ramifications of the viceroy role extended beyond policy making per se, for the huge army of occupation—including military officers and their dependents, civilian employees of SCAP and their dependents, and eventually close to a million ordinary GIs in toto—constituted a privileged caste, class, and race. They made up a “little America” in Japan, literally so in downtown Tokyo; and they practiced clear-cut segregation. Year after year—while the Cold War intensified, the nuclear arms race accelerated, the European powers struggled to reestablish themselves in Southeast Asia, the Communists emerged victorious in China, and war erupted in Korea—American domination remained a constant in defeated Japan. Under the new constitution that came into effect in 1947, the Japanese in theory became citizens and no longer just the “subjects” of their emperor. In practice, however, they remained the subjects of the occupation.
Beyond doubt, many of the conquerors conveyed an impressive idealism and generosity of spirit. GIs became famous for their offhand friendliness and spontaneous distribution of chocolates and chewing gum. Individual Americans demonstrated serious interest in aspects of Japanese culture and a sense of bearing responsibility toward strangers that was unfamiliar and attractive (or sometimes just bizarre) to their Japanese neighbors. They took people unknown to them to hospitals and did favors without expecting repayment. They practiced simple charity in uncalculating, matter-of-fact ways.6
The conquerors also bestowed significant practical gifts upon their new subjects: penicillin, streptomycin, blood banks, and genuinely public libraries, for example, as well as tutoring in such technological practices as statistical quality control, which would be of immense value in the country’s eventual economic reconstruction. Close personal relationships based on mutual respect were forged between individual Americans and their Japanese counterparts in a variety of settings; but when all was said and done, such relationships were impressive, in part, precisely because they defied the inevitable inequalities of binational relations under a military occupation. And even such intimate personal relationships usually rested on the assumed superiority of American culture. With very few exceptions, all relationships were defined and conducted in the conqueror’s tongue.
Daily reminders of American superiority were unavoidable. The most redundant phrase in the defeated land, posted in public places and reiterated in a myriad public and private settings, was Shinchūgun no meirei ni yoru—By order of the Occupation Forces. Petty as well as grand activities were governed by directives from GHQ and encumbered by all the tedious paperwork and micromanagement this entailed. Numerous stores, theaters, hotels, buildings, trains, land areas, and recreational facilities like golf courses were designated “off limits” to Japanese. Ordinary SCAP officers and civilian officials who would have lived plain middle-class lives at home resided in upper-class houses requisitioned from their owners, hardly the most persuasive demonstration of respect for the rights and property of others. There, they might employ three, four, five, or even six servants, all paid for by the Japanese government (cook, “boy,” maid, gardener, nursemaid, and laundress was considered an ideal roster). Bowers, an irrepressible aficionado of Kabuki, managed to obtain two personal cooks, one for Western-style and the other for Japanese-style cuisine. “I and nearly all the Occupation people I knew,” he later mused, “were extremely conceited and extremely arrogant and used our power every inch of the way.”7
This U.S. Navy photo from August 1947 was part of a series illustrating the lives enjoyed by occupation personnel. “There is no talk about the high cost of living among some 125 Navy families in Yokosuka, Japan,” the Navy’s caption read. “For $27.00 a month they occupy from five to seven rooms furnished complete with electric ranges, telephones, refrigerators and house boys.” Japanese would find this breakfast scene odd, in that the maid on the right is wearing far too elaborate a kimono for the occasion.
The few square miles of downtown Tokyo that had been spared by the air raids became known to all as “Little America.” Christmas decorations appeared on those streets annually starting in December 1945, almost simultaneously with SCAP’s directive ordering the disestablishment of state Shinto and the absolute separation of church and state. American flags hung from the numerous large buildings the foreigners had taken over, whereas any display of the Japanese rising-sun flag (“the meatball” in GI slang) was severely restricted and singing of the national anthem prohibited; a man who improperly displayed the national flag in Yokohama in June 1948 was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment at hard labor.8
Thousands upon thousands of Americans worked and played in Little America. They renamed streets and buildings (there was a MacArthur Boulevard and an Ernie Pyle Theater, for example), and clogged the area with jeeps, military buses, and new automobiles brought over from the United States. In a daily vignette that perfectly symbolized the U.S.–Japan relationship, an American MP and a Japanese policeman directed traffic together at the busy Hibiya intersection—with the Japanese always giving his signals a moment after the MP’s. “We could walk from one end to the other” of Little America, the wife of an American colonel recalled, “without being out of sight of an American face or an American vehicle.” This gave the occupiers a sense of familiarity and security—and provided a stark contrast to the surrounding “mile upon mile of wasteland, heaped with ashes, charred wood and rusty metal,” where their subjects were attempting to reconstruct their lives.9 For some, the separation between these two worlds was unbridgable, and properly so. “To me,” a woman attached to the occupation as a civilian employee recalled with unbridled contempt, “the world beyond our brightly lighted Allied billets, offices and railroad coaches was largely peopled by warped and ugly creatures from some Oriental Nibelungenlied; often I think I must have stared at them as hard as they ever gaped at any member of the conquering masters.”10
While Japanese turned to the black market to survive, Americans shopped at PXs and commissaries filled to the brim with luxury items as well as hardy staples. “There was always a crowd of Japanese outside the PX,” the colonel’s wife observed, “watching the customers come in and out, flattening their noses against the show windows, gazing in silent awe at the display of merchandise: the souvenirs, candy bars, cameras, milk shakes, shoes, wool sweaters, silk kimonos and guaranteed curios of the Orient.” Ragged onlookers watched in silence as the Americans staggered out with “meat in fifteen-pound hunks, rice in fifty-pound sacks, vegetables and fruit in mess-size tins.” Occasionally the officer’s wife deliberately knocked a few loaves of freshly baked bread to the ground while loading her jeep, so that a small, hollow-eyed boy, who always seemed to be present, could make off with them. Even the mustard came in one-gallon jars, obviously more than a healthy American family needed; and so, “rather than have it go bad, the servants ate it with a spoon.” Faubion Bowers was visited every morning by a master sergeant who asked, “What do you want?”—to which, in his exuberant retelling, he would reply, “Eighteen chickens and three hamhocks!” He entertained a lot, Bowers explained, but also gave many of these provisions “to the starving Kabuki actors.”11
As in any colonial enclave, individuals in the conquering force possessed inordinate authority. MacArthur’s devoted aide Courtney Whitney, a lawyer who had been his personal attorney before the war, became chief of GHQ’s Government Section while still a colonel and exercised decisive influence in supervising the purges, policies regarding the emperor and the imperial institution, revision of the constitution, and all matters pertaining to the cabinet, Diet, electoral system, courts, and civil service. Comparable if not greater power accrued to Major General William Marquat, who had been a professional boxer, journalist, and low-ranking army officer specializing in antiaircraft tactics before emerging as one of MacArthur’s trusted aides. Appointed chief of the Economic and Scientific Section, Marquat assumed responsibility for nothing less than supervising all developments in finance, economics, labor, and science, including the dissolution of zaibatsu holding companies and the promotion of economic deconcentration. Every major government financial and economic institution reported to his section, including the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, the Bank of Japan, the Economic Stabilization Board, the new Ministry of Labor, the Board of Trade, and eventually the new Ministry of International Trade and Industry as well.12
Farther down the chain of command, young Americans in their twenties or thirties, short on practical experience and unversed in the native language, were empowered to tell more elderly Japanese how to conduct their business and rearrange their minds. Individuals who did not speak a second language judged the intelligence of those they dealt with by their competence in English and joked about their pidgin-English mistakes. Americans accused of crimes against Japanese were tried by their own government, not in local courts, and their crimes went unreported in the press. Indeed, any criticism of the alien overlords whatsoever was forbidden. The mass media were not permitted to take issue with SCAP policy or speak negatively of any of the victorious Allied powers, nor were they allowed to mention that they were operating under such restraints.
The hierarchies of race and privilege were apparent in virtually every interaction between victor and vanquished. These GIs, in jinrikisha pulled by yesterday’s battlefield foe, posed for a U.S. Army photographer in front of the imperial palace.
Although as a rule the victors conducted themselves with far greater discipline than the Japanese military had exercised in occupied areas of Asia, assault and rape inevitably occurred. None of this was reported in the press, and more than a few incidents went unreported to the police as well. Victims had little faith in the possibility of fair redress. After the occupation, mass-circulation magazines ran articles about rapes by American servicemen, and Japanese men resentfully recalled incidents of being randomly, almost whimsically, assaulted in public.13 The sexual opportunities enjoyed by men affiliated with the occupation forces, including foreign journalists—with their gifts of tinned goods, chocolates, nylon stockings, cigarettes, and liquor—humiliated and infuriated Japanese males. GIs regarded themselves as experts on “Babysan’s world” and, in a racial idiom they found amusing, joked that this gave them a unique “slant” on Japan. Some spoke with contempt of the “gook girls.” Mixed-blood children became one of the sad, unspoken stories of the occupation—seldom acknowledged by their foreign fathers and invariably ostracized by the Japanese.14
In numerous such ways, the contradictions of the democratic revolution from above were clear for all to see: while the victors preached democracy, they ruled by fiat; while they espoused equality, they themselves constituted an inviolate privileged caste. Their reformist agenda rested on the assumption that, virtually without exception, Western culture and its values were superior to those of “the Orient.” At the same time, almost every interaction between victor and vanquished was infused with intimations of white supremacism. For all its uniqueness of time, place, and circumstance—all its peculiarly “American” iconoclasm—the occupation was in this sense but a new manifestation of the old racial paternalism that historically accompanied the global expansion of the Western powers. Like their colonialist predecessors, the victors were imbued with a sense of manifest destiny. They spoke of being engaged in the mission of civilizing their subjects. They bore the burden (in their own eyes) of their race, creed, and culture. They swaggered, and were enviously free of self-doubt.
It was inevitable that relations between the victors and the vanquished be unequal, but this inequality was compounded by authoritarian practices that were part and parcel of the American modus operandi independent of the situation in Japan. To begin with, the administrative structure that the Japanese encountered was itself organized in the most rigid hierarchical manner imaginable. MacArthur’s command, after all, was a military bureaucracy, the very organizational antithesis of democratic checks and balances. The caste distinction between officers and enlisted men was hard and fast, and each individual’s “proper place” in the chain of command minutely prescribed. Women were excluded from authority in this governing apparatus. Blacks were segregated and relegated to low-ranking positions.
This working model of authoritarian governance was compounded by the manner in which the occupation regime implemented its directives. Contrary to the practice of direct military government adopted in defeated Germany, this occupation was conducted “indirectly”—that is, through existing organs of government. This entailed buttressing the influence of two of the most undemocratic institutions of the presurrender regime: the bureaucracy and the throne. As with the basic reform agenda itself, the decision to rely on already existing machineries of government was formalized at the eleventh hour. Until the literal eve of arrival, MacArthur and his staff were operating under secret orders, code-named “Blacklist,” that called for the establishment of direct military government. These plans were altered in the “Initial Post-Surrender Policy” document, which stipulated that “the Supreme Commander will exercise his authority through Japanese governmental machinery and agencies, including the Emperor, to the extent that this satisfactorily furthers United States objectives.”15
The rationale behind this fundamental policy change was eminently practical: the occupation force lacked the linguistic and technocratic capacity to effectively govern the country directly. In principle, the supreme commander retained the authority to change the existing machinery of government, depose Emperor Hirohito, even eliminate the imperial institution altogether if given approval to do so by his superiors in Washington. In practice, these options never were given serious consideration. Although the military establishment was eliminated and the repressive Home Ministry dismantled, the civilian bureaucracy was left essentially untouched and the emperor was retained. The American proconsuls depended so heavily on an indigenous technocratic elite to implement their directives that, under SCAP’s aegis, the bureaucracy actually attained greater authority and influence than it had possessed even at the height of the mobilization for war.16
In the end, MacArthur’s imperious personal role as the supreme symbol of the new democratic nation would be transferred back to the emperor who had reigned through all the years of repression, war, and atrocity; and GHQ’s modus operandi as a “super-government” would be carried on, long after the conquerors departed, by the bureaucratic mandarins it had left in place. Still, Japan would be a different country after the victors who arrived as reformist viceroys finally left. It would take a Jonathan Swift to do full justice to such political and ideological convolutions. And this was only the half of it.
The very notion of democratizing Japan represented a stunning revision of the propaganda Americans had imbibed during the war, when the media had routinely depicted all Japanese as children, savages, sadists, madmen, or robots. In the most pervasive metaphor of dehumanization, they were portrayed in word and picture as apes, “jaundiced baboons,” or, most often, plain “monkey-men.” There had been scant place in popular consciousness for “good Japanese,” as there usually had been for “good Germans.” The wartime incarceration of over one hundred thousand American citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry, with scarcely a murmur of protest, was stark testimony to this animus. In On to Tokyo, an instructional film produced by the War Department after Germany had been defeated and the Nazi concentration camps exposed, General George C. Marshall, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army, took care to emphasize that the “barbarism” of the Japanese “has even exceeded that of the Germans.” In the War Department’s Know Your Enemy—Japan, which was released only weeks before surrender, the Japanese were relentlessly depicted as a people devoid of individuality, as alike as “photographic prints off the same negative.”17
This was hardly promising material for a democratic revolution. Once policy shifted from killing the monkey-men to turning them into democrats, it became necessary to reeducate not merely the Japanese but the American public as well. Demeaning and dehumanizing wartime stereotypes had to be corrected. When it still was assumed that direct military government would be imposed in defeated Japan, for example, Americans being trained at the Civil Affairs Staging Area in California were given instructional materials couched in the following terms:
Under the heat of wartime emotions the Japanese were commonly seen as treacherous, brutal, sadistic, and fanatical “monkey-men.”
It is true that individuals and even groups have at various times demonstrated these traits—as witness the rape of Nanking, Bataan, Pearl Harbor, etc. Without attempting to defend or excuse the Japanese for these horrors it should be emphasized that it is a mistake to think that all Japanese are predominantly the monkey-man type. It would be just as wrong to picture all Americans as constantly being engaged in mob-lynching, gangsterism and race rioting.
A “realistic, balanced knowledge of the Japanese character,” the civil affairs guide went on to explain, would equate Japanese treachery with an extreme manifestation of the Western notion that “all’s fair in love and war.” In this regard, they simply went too far and did not understand or appreciate the Western sense of fair play. Where wartime acts of brutality and sadism were concerned, these were to be understood as the outbursts of men who had been subjected to a lifetime of repression. In the words of the military handbook, “The docile, meek little Japanese when put in uniform, ruthlessly trained and turned loose, has an opportunity for the first time in his life to express himself, and he may go completely berserk, indulging in outrageous orgies of terror and brutality.” When all was said and done, however, the despised “monkey-men” were not in fact all that different from other people:
There are other traits of character—reliability, ingenuity, industriousness, thrift, bravery, aggressiveness, honesty. With some exceptions, depending on individual personality, sex, age, social standing, income, profession and so forth, the average Japanese displays these characteristics in about the same manner and measure as other people in other lands.18
Other materials directed to American audiences, especially troops assigned to occupation duty, similarly endeavored to convey the notion that the “little Japanese” were almost humans like themselves. In November 1945, when the War Department sent a short instructional film titled Our Job in Japan over to SCAP for viewing by occupation forces, officials demanded that the film be revised because it still hewed too closely to the wartime portrayal of the Japanese as dangerous and untrustworthy. In the altered version received early in 1946, grisly images of the “disgusting, revolting, obscene” war they had waged were offset, in the film’s final minutes, by footage depicting friendly Americans mingling with attractive, earnest Japanese women and children.19
Our Job in Japan began with the observation that the Japanese were a people “trained to play follow-the-leader.” The problem the victors faced could be stated in a word: it was the Japanese brain, which could “make trouble” or “make sense.” Viewers were presented with a close-up of a Japanese man’s head in profile—and then watched as a literal representation of a spongelike brain filled his cranium and expanded until the head itself was obliterated and the brain, now gigantic, held the center of the screen, floating against a background of countless other tiny brains crowded together like so many beans in a box. “Our problem’s in the brain inside of the Japanese head,” the narrator intoned. “There are seventy million of these in Japan, physically no different than any other brains in the world, actually all made of exactly the same stuff as ours. These brains, like our brains, can do good things [here appeared a still photo of a bearded elderly man, seemingly in a Christian church] or bad things [the screen now showed a famous wartime atrocity photo of a Japanese beheading a kneeling, blond soldier], all depending on the kind of ideas that are put inside.”
Throughout the film, that giant brain repeatedly materialized and receded, while the GI audience was informed of the terrible things it had been taught by the “warlords” and the “military gang.” Turning ancient Shinto beliefs into a weapon of modern indoctrination, the militarists had saturated that brain with “ancient nightmares” and “ancient hatreds,” with “bloody fairy tales and pagan superstitions,” with the “mumbo-jumbo” of a “murky past.” When the narrator made passing reference to “an old, backward, superstitious country,” the screen showed scenes of people burning incense outside a Buddhist temple.
In wartime propaganda films, it was standard practice to convey the utterly alien nature of the enemy by introducing jarring montages of the “most exotic” Japanese behavior—such as footage depicting seasonal festivals and traditional dances, in which distinctive garments were worn and the accompanying music was inevitably atonal and offensive to Western ears. Our Job in Japan exploited this familiar formula, while the tough-talking narrator proceeded to hammer home another basic theme: all Japanese were indoctrinated to believe—and here the point was deemed so central that it was printed across the screen as well—that “The Sun Goddess Created the Japanese to Rule all Other Peoples of the Earth.” Although Japan’s leaders in fact had never contemplated “world conquest,” this had been a staple of wartime American propaganda and was not about to be repudiated now. On the contrary, it was averred that this was the most basic idea “that was sold to the Japanese brain”; and this, in turn, clarified the victor’s task. “That same brain today remains the problem, our problem,” the narrator intoned. “It will cost us time, it will cost us patience. But we are determined that this fact will sink in: THIS IS JAPAN’S LAST WAR.” For emphasis, these last words were again emblazoned across the screen.
Turning to the demilitarization policies already under way in the defeated nation, the film suddenly became lyrical, surely reflecting the more positive outlook that SCAP had demanded. Smiling GIs were shown talking with kimono-clad women no longer gyrating in strange dances or singing in nasal voices, sharing a book with an earnest boy, receiving a bouquet of flowers from a doll-like girl. The Americans would be vigilant and tough with tricksters, the narrator declared, “but the honest ones, the sincere ones, the ones who really want to make sense are being given every opportunity they need. At the same time, these people, these honest ones, are looking to us to help them prove that our idea is better than the Japanese idea.” Their job, the GIs were told, was simply to be themselves:
By being ourselves we can prove that what we like to call the American way, or democracy, or just plain old Golden Rule common sense, is a pretty good way to live. We can prove that most Americans don’t believe in pushing people around, even when we happen to be on top. We can prove that most Americans do believe in a fair break for everybody, regardless of race or creed or color [two black GIs flitted across the screen at this point, hitherto and hereafter invisible].
Our Job in Japan was a near-perfect expression of an American sense of righteous mission and manifest destiny, not to speak of secular saintliness. It was America’s task, the film concluded, to enable the Japanese to read, speak, and hear the truth; and “when they’ve read enough truth, when they’ve heard enough truth, when they’ve had enough first-hand experience with the truth, they’ll be able to lead their own lives” in a constructive and peaceful manner. With the Liberty Bell tolling on screen, the narrator summed it all up:
We’re here to make it clear to the Japanese brain that we’ve had enough of this bloody barbaric business to last us from here on in. We’re here to make it clear to the Japanese that the time has now come to make sense—modern, civilized sense. That is our job in Japan.
Much of the film’s footage, apart from its concluding images of a ruined and occupied land, had been cannibalized from earlier wartime films. Conspicuously missing when compared with propaganda such as Know Your Enemy—Japan were any critical references to the emperor, reflecting SCAP’s belief that the imperial brain, too, was capable of being democratized. The most striking aspect of the film, apart from its eerie floating brains, however, was its fundamentally optimistic message. Neither blood, culture, nor history drove the Japanese to war, but rather socialization and indoctrination of recent vintage. When all was said and done, reeducation did not in fact seem to be such an insuperable task. The title of an article in the weekly Saturday Evening Post four months after surrender captured the new outlook succinctly: “The G.I. Is Civilizing the Jap.”20
In characterizing the Japanese as people “trained to play follow-the-leader,” the War Department film was tapping into a conservative view that carried great implications for the development of democracy. Among the American and British elites who claimed special knowledge of Japan, this observation was virtually gospel; and to many of these specialists, the logical inference was that any notion of inducing a democratic revolution from above was absurd. With few exceptions, the “old Japan hands” were second to none in belittling the capacity of ordinary Japanese to govern themselves.
In Washington, by far the best known expert on Japan during the war was Joseph Grew, the undersecretary of state who had served as ambassador to Tokyo from 1931 to 1941. In May 1945, Grew told President Truman that while the imperial institution was undeniably a relic of feudalism, “from the long range point of view the best we can hope for in Japan is the development of a constitutional monarchy, experience having shown that democracy in Japan would never work.” Eugene Dooman, a language specialist and Grew’s key advisor on things Japanese, similarly emphasized that the country was “a communalism, that is a graduated society, in which the top of the social structure formulated purposes and objectives and the people down below conformed.” The emperor capped this social hierarchy and performed the crucial role of providing social cohesion as “a living manifestation of the racial continuity of the Japanese people.” Joseph Ballantine, another influential Japanese-speaking specialist in the State Department, thought the notion of bringing forth new political leadership was ludicrous, for ordinary Japanese were simply “inert and tradition bound.”21
British Asia specialists tended to be similarly disdainful. Prior to the surrender, for instance, the prestigious Royal Institute of International Affairs issued an influential report that referred to the Japanese people as an “obedient herd”—a standard phrase of the time—and expressed grave “misgivings regarding Japanese ability to operate democratic institutions.” In the opening stages of the occupation, the British representative in Tokyo used the formation of a new cabinet under Shidehara Kijūrō—a former ambassador to London famous for his impeccable English—as an occasion for wiring the Foreign Office that the Japanese were “as little fitted for self-government in a modern world as any African tribe, though much more dangerous.”22
Such views, which gained wide currency in the writings of journalists and academics who also enjoyed reputations for being Asia experts, reflected something more complex than just ethnocentric contempt for the “obedient herd” or “monstrous beehive” (another pet phrase) of Orientals. Many Western experts, diplomats in particular, had spent a good part of their careers ingratiating themselves in upper-class circles in Japan. When they spoke disdainfully of the capacity of ordinary Japanese to govern themselves, they were reflecting not only their own elitism but also the reverential monarchism and fearful contempt for “the masses” they had heard their Japanese counterparts express time and again.23
Had these erstwhile Asia experts had their way, the very notion of inducing a democratic revolution would have died of ridicule at an early stage. As happened instead, the ridicule was deflected by the views of experts of a different ilk—behavioral scientists who chose to emphasize the “malleability” of the Japanese “national character,” along with planners and policy makers of liberal and left-wing persuasions who sincerely believed that democratic values were universal in their nature and appeal. Although these latter viewpoints pulled in opposite directions, toward the “particularistic” on the one hand and “universal” on the other, both offered reasons to be optimistic that democratic institutions could indeed be established in Japan.
The wartime mobilization of behavioral scientists attracted an impressive contingent of American and British anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists into the general areas of intelligence analysis and psychological warfare. By the final year of the war, their work had led them to the conclusion that the Japanese national character was pendulumlike, capable of swinging from one extreme to another—and consequently capable of shifting from fanatical militarism to some form of qualified democracy. Numerous variations on this theme were offered in confidential intelligence reports, all essentially in one way or another imposing the findings of individual clinical psychology on the Japanese as a collectivity.
A representative sample of where such thinking led can be seen in a routine paper prepared for the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) in December 1944, which observed that “the Japanese civilization pattern seems to be most closely akin to the clinical picture of an obsessional neurosis.” Such neurosis, it was argued, was manifest in their concern with “ritual and avoidness [sic],” as well as in their masochism, violent reaction to frustration, and “general rigidity of behavior.” Insofar as future policy was concerned, the most interesting “practical upshot” of this diagnosis lay in the question the OWI investigator posed: “Which are the individuals and social groups who set the pattern of thoughts and attitudes likely to be imitated by the rest of Japan?”24
Practical responses to this familiar query took several forms. As suggested most famously by the cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict, a member of the OWI intelligence team, the Japanese were said to behave in accordance with situational or particularistic ethics, as opposed to socalled universal values as in the Western tradition. The same person might be polite and generous under some circumstances, harsh and callous under others. What mattered was the social context and the individual’s prescribed role in each and every situation. In exceptional circumstances, where roles and constraints had not been defined, the individual had no core values, no clear subjectified self, to fall back on.
More particularly, the analysis went, the Japanese responded submissively to authority. This was the social scientists’ more circumspect way of referring to an “obedient herd,” and it would soon provide a good basis for rationalizing policies that promoted democracy under the emperor’s aegis. Such OWI analysts as Clyde Kluckhohn and Alexander Leighton, who went on to distinguished academic careers, argued that the emperor, the supreme authority in Japan, was fundamentally an empty vessel. Just as he had been followed as the embodiment of ultranationalism, so he would be followed if turned into a symbol of some sort of imperial democracy. All this seemed to have been borne out by the American experience with POWs. Many of these prisoners had been captured against their will, unconscious or severely injured and so unable either to fight to the bitter end or to take their own lives. As prisoners, however, they quickly proved docile and obedient to their captors, even to the point of assisting in drafting surrender appeals to their erstwhile comrades. This experience gave analysts further grounds for believing that, by an adroit combination of authority, example, and symbolic manipulation, the victors could provide a “democratic” model, however modest, that postwar Japanese might seek to imitate and emulate.
The cautious optimism of this revised vision was itself soon challenged. With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to look back on the last half year of the Pacific War not only as murderous folly on the part of the imperial government, but also as a futile prolongation of conflict that permitted the emergence of a more radical occupation policy in Washington. Had Japan surrendered in early 1945, as the emperor was strongly urged to do by some intimate advisors, the country would not merely have been spared the air raids, atomic bombs, and deaths of well over a million of its people; it also might have escaped the occupation’s revolution from above. As of early 1945, there was no plan to induce a democratic revolution in the defeated nation. The old Japan hands who still controlled postsurrender planning anticipated a mild reform agenda at best.
The more progressive, less racially and culturally condescending argument that ultimately shaped much of postsurrender policy emerged from several overlapping groups: New Deal liberals, leftists, and Asia specialists more associated with China than Japan. The New Dealers—whose influence over domestic policy was waning as the war entered its final stage—placed their faith in the universal applicability of democratic ideals, aspirations, and policies. Such “universalism” held that people everywhere were fundamentally the same and that the ideal government was one in which all individuals were equal before the law. At the same time, the bedrock principles of democratization espoused by the New Dealers contained a strong component of economic democracy, which in practical terms meant the active encouragement of organized labor, opposition to excessive concentrations of economic power, and policies aimed at ensuring a more equitable distribution of wealth. In addition, of course, the New Dealers had few compunctions about supporting interventionist governmental policies to achieve their goals.25
Where the liberal New Deal approach minimized the significance of cultural constraints in Japan, a more radical line of analysis—found in left-wing publications such as Amerasia as well as the Institute of Pacific Relations periodicals Far Eastern Survey and Pacific Affairs—called attention to the existence of a genuine potential for democratization from below. Leftists denounced support of the emperor and the old-guard civilian “moderates” as appeasement. At the same time, they applauded the revolutionary potential of the lower-class groups that the old Japan hands deemed incapable of democracy—or, worse yet, highly susceptible to Communist demagoguery.
To T. A. Bisson, the prolific editor of Pacific Affairs, authentic “liberals” were to be found among men and women “who led political parties, trade unions, or peasant organizations that were suppressed prior to 1941” and had “spoken publicly and unequivocally against the war, and have perhaps languished in jail for their temerity.” Only such Japanese, Bisson argued, could establish a new order that was truly “based on the will of the people and dedicated to democracy and peace.”26 In his book Dilemma in Japan, published in September 1945 and sometimes referred to as “the Bible” for radical reformers in the early stages of the occupation, the young left-wing researcher Andrew Roth similarly argued that a true potential for democracy was to be found among industrial workers, peasants, students recruited for onerous war work, small shopkeepers, political prisoners, brutalized and disillusioned ex-soldiers, and former prisoners of war in China who had been subjected to “anti-fascist” reeducation by such Japanese Communists as Okano Susumu (the pseudonym of Nosaka Sanzō) in Yenan and Kaji Wataru in Chungking.27
As the Pacific War entered its final stages, such views gained greater prominence in the government and in the media. At the same time, the Japan experts increasingly came to be regarded as special pleaders for the conservative causes of their Japanese contacts and acquaintances, as men befuddled and bamboozled by too many elegant, silken prewar encounters with the privileged. In the State Department, such criticism of the “Japan crowd” arose primarily among those who had been more involved with China. Such individuals, the “China crowd,” were harsher in their critique of the civilian Japanese elites and more sanguine about the possibilities of cracking open the structures and institutions of ruling-class control to release democratic forces from below. They rejected, among other orthodoxies, the Japan crowd’s depiction of the zaibatsu leaders as “moderate” businessmen and argued that the existing economic system itself was one of the “roots of war” that had to be dug out and eliminated.
The best-known public spokesman for the views of the China crowd was Owen Lattimore, a distinguished, if caustic, scholar of China and central Asia. Lattimore was a conspicuous figure on the American scene—teaching at Johns Hopkins University, editing Pacific Affairs before the war, working for OWI after Pearl Harbor, and serving as a regular consultant to the State Department. In 1945, he reached out for a popular audience with a short, polemical book, Solution in Asia, in which he skewered the Japan crowd. The only “solution” for postwar Asia, as he saw it, was the thoroughgoing democratization of Japan, combined with a maximal leveling of economic capabilities throughout Asia. Otherwise, Japan would sooner or later resume its exploitative, imperialist policies. Reparations would be one step toward such leveling, serious economic deconcentration of the economy another.28
The “Japan crowd” and “China crowd” were of course emblematic terms in a complex struggle over the evaluation of Japan’s prospects for democracy. Much of this debate took place behind the scenes in Washington, and the issue did not come to a head until the final weeks of the war, when critics of Grew and his backers emerged triumphant in the State Department and also found support in the War Department, where a sympathetic assistant secretary of war, John J. McCloy, was directing the revision and finalization of basic policies for Japan. This shift in influence reflected broader policy struggles within the bureaucracy and was, in part, related to the change of guard that occurred in the wake of President Roosevelt’s death.29
In symbolic terms, the eclipse of the conservative Japan specialists can be precisely dated. On August 11, 1945, Dean Acheson replaced Grew as undersecretary of state, and Acheson’s comments soon thereafter about eradicating the forces in Japan that made for a “will to war” reflected his identification with the more radical reformers. In a striking insult to the Japan crowd, the first State Department appointee as political adviser to MacArthur was George Atcheson, Jr., a China specialist, rather than one of the department’s senior Japan experts such as Dooman or Ballantine. In the years that followed, the advisory missions that regularly shuttled between Washington and Tokyo invariably comprised well-briefed technical experts. One would be hard pressed to find a single Japan specialist among them.
At GHQ headquarters in Tokyo, Japan specialists were likewise conspicuous by their absence. In his unique way, the supreme commander himself exemplified this. He was, in many ways, the most ethnocentric of men, given to extraordinary generalizations about the “Oriental” personality. “The general,” President Truman was informed by an envoy to Tokyo in mid-October of 1945, “stated that Oriental peoples suffer from an inferiority complex which leads them to ‘childish brutality’ when they conquer in war and to slavish dependence when they lose.” Yet at the same time, MacArthur was also capable of speaking expansively about the irrelevance of “racial characteristics”; and, even in the midst of the war, he had often taken time to expound on how “the lands touching the Pacific with their billions of inhabitants will determine the course of history . . . for the next ten thousand years.”
The supreme commander had no serious first-hand experience with Japan, apart from war. There is no evidence that he read widely about the country, apart from intelligence reports. He did talk on occasion with knowledgeable, non-elitist scholars such as the Canadian historian and diplomat E. H. Norman, but most of his “conversations” tended to end up as monologues. Bowers observed that MacArthur rarely if ever asked his staff questions about the country, and he certainly did not seek information from the Japanese themselves. His only guides, he often intimated, were Washington, Lincoln, and Jesus Christ (pictures of the first two adorned the walls of his office in Tokyo); and, essentially, he seemed to operate on the assumption that the four of them together could—with help from the emperor—“democratize” Japan. However one may categorize this mixture of prejudice, presumption, and grand bromides, it was not to be confused with expertise on Japan or Asia. It did, however, enable MacArthur to throw himself wholeheartedly behind the early agenda of “demilitarization and democratization” with an almost messianic zeal.30
From top to bottom, the general’s “super-government” in Tokyo reflected an aversion to area specialists as such. Colonel Charles Kades, an exemplary New Dealer who would play a pivotal role in such critical Government Section initiatives as the drafting of a new constitution, later spoke frankly of his own background in this regard. “I had no knowledge whatsoever about Japan’s history or culture or myths,” he recalled. “I was blank on Japan, except of course I knew about the atrocities that had occurred during the war and I was aware of their expansion into China and Southeast Asia. But I had no knowledge other than what one would glean from a daily newspaper about Japan.”31
There were exceptions, but by and large Kades’s case was typical. Indeed, at the level of daily operations GHQ appears deliberately to have excluded most individuals who possessed even slight credentials in Japanese matters. The several thousand Americans trained in Japanese language and culture during the war in anticipation of being assigned to military-government duties often found themselves sent elsewhere than Japan. MacArthur and his staff did not want them. Of those who actually made it there, some were shunted off to Okinawa—an American version of exile to the gulag, where U.S. policy eschewed reform and focused instead on turning the war-savaged archipelago into an impregnable military base. Alternatively, these bright, eager, new speakers of Japanese might be assigned to the Eighth Army in Yokohama and deposited at the lowest level of occupation activity: grass-roots prefectural work. Whatever their ultimate assignment, they were excluded from serious policy-making positions. As the consummate GHQ insider Theodore Cohen put it, “they were firmly kept out of Tokyo.” Rather than utilize these neophyte Japan specialists, SCAP conducted an intensive “in-house” recruitment campaign to tap the numerous “lawyers, bankers, economists, industrial technicians,” and other professionals who willy-nilly happened to find themselves in Japan at war’s end.32
Alfred Oppler, a jurist born and educated in Germany who was recruited to assume the heady responsibility of overseeing revision of all civil and penal codes, was a perfect product of this cult of exclusion. When interviewed by an Army colonel, Oppler “volunteered the confession that, although I had some familiarity with European affairs, I did not have any knowledge of things Japanese.”
He could not have advanced his case more felicitously. “Oh, that is quite all right,” the colonel responded. “If you knew too much about Japan, you might be prejudiced. We do not like old Japan hands.”33