In April 1946, GHQ was informed that an entertainer in Tokyo was singing subversive songs while accompanying himself on the violin. Investigators attended a performance and were shocked. They heard lyrics like: “Seducing Japanese women is easy, with chocolate and chewing gum.” More scandalous yet was this line: “Everybody is talking about democracy, but how can we have democracy with two emperors?” Democracy, Hirohito, and MacArthur lampooned, all in a single breath! The Americans banned the show.1
As numerous Japanese outside the music-hall circuit could attest, this was not a random act on the part of occupation authorities, who policed the country’s new freedoms with a censorship bureaucracy that extended into every aspect of public expression. In the process, the Japanese quickly learned to identify the new taboos and to practice self-censorship accordingly. One simply did not challenge ultimate authority and expect to win.
The inviolability of the nation’s second emperor, General MacArthur, was brought home to writers and editors in what became known as the “hero worship” incident of October 1946. Commenting on the adulation the supreme commander was receiving, the newspaper fiji Shimpō offered a tempered editorial warning about “the habit of hero worship that has imbued Japanese minds for the past twenty centuries.” The editorial was prompted by the publication of a best-selling biography of MacArthur that had been accompanied by a flood of adulatory letters in the press in which the general was described in terms only recently reserved for Hirohito himself—as “a living god” and “the sun coming out of dark clouds and shining on the world” or even as “the reincarnation of Japan’s first emperor, Jimmu.” The newspaper’s response, subsequently published in the English-language Nippon Times, read in part as follows:
If the conception that government is something imposed upon the people by an outstanding god, great man, or leader is not rectified, democratic government is likely to be wrecked. We fear, the day after MacArthur’s withdrawal, that some living god might be searched out to bring the sort of dictatorship that made the Pacific War. . . . The way to express the gratitude of the Japanese people toward General MacArthur for the wisdom with which he is managing postwar Japan and for his efforts to democratize the nation is not to worship him as a god but to cast away the servile spirit and gain the self-respect that would not bow its head to anybody.
Although this eminently reasonable commentary had been approved by GHQ authorities prior to its publication in Japanese, the English version was immediately seized by the American military police on orders from General Charles Willoughby, head of the Civil Intelligence Section, on the grounds that it was “not in good taste” and tended to diminish the reputation of the occupation forces and their commander.2 This was a rare public display of power by the ultraconservative Willoughby. At the same time, however, his heavy-handed intervention exposed the everyday regimen of censorship, signaled a tightening of occupation controls on critical commentary that could be deemed “leftist” or even remotely critical of American policies, and came to symbolize for many the carefully programmed and controlled nature of the democratization agenda.
Censorship was conducted through an elaborate apparatus within GHQ from September 1945 through September 1949, and continued to be imposed in altered forms until Japan regained its sovereignty. In the early stages of the occupation, it was anticipated that such controls would last only until the safety of the foreign forces could be assured and reformist policies successfully implemented. SCAP’s first formal directive on “freedom of speech and press,” issued September 10, 1945, explicitly declared that “there shall be an absolute minimum of restrictions on freedom of speech” so long as such expression adhered “to the truth” and did not disturb “public tranquility.”3
In practice, the censorship apparatus soon took on a life of its own. A sprawling bureaucracy was created under the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) within the Civil Intelligence Section, and CCD’s censors were closely abetted by the “positive” propagandists for democracy within the Civil Intelligence and Education (CI&E) Section.4 Censorship was extended to every form of media and theatrical expression—newspapers, magazines, trade books as well as textbooks, radio, film, and plays, including the classical repertoire.5 At its peak, CCD employed over six thousand individuals nationwide, the great majority of whom were English-speaking Japanese nationals who identified and then translated or summarized questionable material before passing it on to their superiors. Until late 1947, many publications, including close to seventy major daily newspapers and all books and magazines, were subject to prepublication censorship. At one point, the monthly volume of material flooding into CCD’s central “PPB” (Press, Pictorial and Broadcast) section alone was estimated to average “26,000 issues of newspapers, 3,800 news-agency publications, 23,000 radio scripts, 5,700 printed bulletins, 4,000 magazine issues, and 1,800 books and pamphlets.” Over the course of their four-year regime, CCD’s examiners also spot-checked an astonishing 330 million pieces of mail and monitored some 800,000 private phone conversations.6
Censored materials included foreign as well as Japanese writings, meaning that the vanquished were not allowed to read everything the victors read. Both Associated Press and United Press wire-service dispatches were sometimes vetted before being deemed safe for consumption in translation; syndicated columnists such as Walter Lippman encountered similar obstacles crossing the Pacific. The overall censorship operation eventually came to entail extensive checklists for taboo subjects, and in the best Orwellian manner these taboos included any public acknowledgment of the existence of censorship. Editors and publishers all received such confidential notifications as the following as soon as censorship was established:
1. The purpose of this memorandum is to make certain that all publishers in the jurisdiction of this censorship office understand fully that no publicity regarding censorship procedure is desired.
2. While it is assumed that all publishers understand that in the make-up of their publications no physical indication of censorship (such as blackened-out print, blank spaces, pasted-over areas, incomplete sentences, OO’s XX’s, etc.) may appear, there are some points which may not be understood clearly.
3. No write-ups concerning personnel or activities of any censorship group should be printed. This pertains not only to press censorship personnel and activities, but also to those of radio, motion-picture and theatrical censorship.
4. Notations such as “Passed by censorship,” “Publication permitted by Occupation Forces” or any other mention or implication of censorship on CCD must not be made. . . .
Since censorship was never openly acknowledged to exist, its nominal termination with the dissolution of CCD in late 1949 also took place without public notice. Fittingly, as if it had been but a phantom bureaucracy, CCD passed from the scene under the confidential farewell policy that “there will be no press release on the termination of civil censorship.”7
Contrary to early hopes that censorship would taper off fairly quickly, CCD’s surveillance became both more stringent and more picayune as the months passed. In this regard, the confiscation of the press edition carrying the “hero worship” editorial signaled a moment, roughly a year after surrender, when GHQ’s censorship policies hardened and simultaneously began to depart from their original focus on eliminating militaristic and ultranationalistic ideas. Robert Spaulding, who held several responsible positions in CCD, later observed that Willoughby’s action had a triple legacy. It led to an expansion of the CCD staff, fostered a psychology of extreme cautiousness among the censors, and led to the proliferation of cumbersome “checking” procedures whereby officials throughout GHQ’s numerous divisions and branches became more involved in controlling what the media said.8
Although censorship under the occupation was by no means as pervasive and stunting as that practiced in Japan in the decade and a half prior to surrender, scores of prominent literary figures ranging from Dazai Osama (the author of The Setting Sun, whose suicide in 1948 caused a sensation) to the future Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari experienced the blue pencil. The novelist Tanizaki Junichirō, to his astonishment, had an entire short story suppressed on the grounds that it was “militaristic.” He was, in this regard, in honorable company, since the translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace was also vetted by CCD’s censors. Still, even such an acerbic literary critic as Nakamura Mitsuo concluded in the immediate wake of the occupation that, although postwar Japanese literature was largely worthless (too much sex, in his view), the literary world as a whole had enjoyed incomparably greater freedom than in the past.9
Journalists who had firsthand experience with presurrender and post-surrender variants of censorship were less sanguine about postwar “freedom,” but usually still acknowledged that the conqueror’s hand was the lighter one. Ikejima Shinpei, a former editor of the moderate monthly Bungei Shunjū, expressed disgust at being censored by people who didn’t even speak his language, but allowed that GHQ’s surveillance was a far cry from the situation under the militarists, when a transgression might even imperil one’s life.10 Matsuura Sōzō, the author of a well-known book about occupation censorship and a former editor of the left-wing magazine Kaizō, a favorite target of CCD, felt that even in the later period of draconian “Red purges,” America’s censorious “democracy” was nowhere near as oppressive as imperial Japan’s “emperor-system absolutism” had been. At the same time, he looked back on the years from 1948 through 1951 as an era of darkness for progressive and left-wing writers made all the more bitter by the hopes that the occupation had encouraged.11 Radioshow producers sometimes spoke of their long interlude under American supervision as being “still an era of unfreedom of speech” that was in some ways “more troublesome” than the wartime restrictions under which they had operated—for at least under their own thought police they were spared the burden of having to translate scripts into English for the censors’ review!12
SCAP officials were acutely aware that their give-and-take approach to democratization involved a delicate balancing act. From the outset, the censorship policy was set against a positive emphasis on freedom of speech and the dissolution of official government controls over the media. In the wake of SCAP’s “civil rights” directive of October 4, editors and publishers were summoned to CI&E and encouraged to interpret this “Magna Carta” aggressively. Contrary to the past, they were told, it was now permissible to criticize the government, debate about the emperor system, and even espouse Marxism.13 This would be a schizophrenic world, however, for the victor’s censorship sometimes replicated the earlier campaigns of the imperial government against “dangerous thought” in uncanny ways, hamstringing postwar democracy from the start. This was conveyed to writers and publishers at virtually the same moment that they were being granted their “Magna Carta,” for beginning on the following day the media were gradually brought under CCD’s prepublication censorship and made concretely aware of the new taboos they were now required to observe.
The policy of censoring the existence of censorship itself cast a taint of hypocrisy on the Americans and compared poorly with the old system of the militarists and ultranationalists, who until the late 1930s had allowed excised portions of texts to be marked in publications with Xs and Os. At least prewar readers knew that something had been excised; they could even count the Xs and Os and try to guess what. It is not surprising, then, that some writers who experienced censorship under both systems were cynical in their appraisals of SCAP’s version of free expression. One evoked an old metaphor in describing its modus operandi as like being “strangled with silk floss.” Another observed, with not a little bitterness, that at least the Japanese censors had served tea.14
For publishers, broadcasters, journalists, filmmakers, and writers, SCAP’s censorship operation possessed an opaque quality that made it challenging to determine how far one could go without offending the new thought police. This came, in part, from the fact that CCD’s censors operated on the basis of secret “key logs” of prohibited discourse—checklists of forbidden subjects—that were never made available. In other words, the precise criteria for unacceptable expression were not conveyed to those being censored. As a consequence, those who engaged in any form of public communication had to rely on two imprecise guides in deciding what was impermissible: the very general press, radio, and film “codes” issued by SCAP in the opening months of the occupation (“News must adhere strictly to the truth. Nothing shall be printed which might, directly or by inference, disturb the public tranquility. There shall be no false or destructive criticism of the Allied Powers . . .” and so on); and imagination shaped by experience—that is, guessing what the censors would allow on the basis of what they had thus far permitted.15 This was not only disorienting, but could prove financially disastrous if one miscalculated the censors’ tolerance. Such circumstances helped foster a climate of disquieting rumors that easily spilled over into a pathology of self-censorship.
The classified key logs used as monthly checklists by CCD changed as political winds changed. Early on, they included some three score prohibited subjects. In June 1946, the “categories of deletions and suppressions” in CCD’s key log were, in full, as follows:
Criticism of Military Tribunal [that is, of the Tokyo war-crimes
trials]
Criticism of SCAP Writing the Constitution [including any reference whatsoever to SCAP’s role]
References to Censorship
Criticism of the United States
Criticism of Russia
Criticism of Great Britain
Criticism of Koreans
Criticism of China
Criticism of Other Allies
General Criticism of Allies
Criticism of Japanese Treatment in Manchuria [referring to treatment of Japanese POWs or civilians by Russians and Chinese after Japan’s capitulation]
Criticism of Allies’ Pre-War Policies
Third World War Comments
Russia vs. Western Powers Comments
Defense of War Propaganda [described as “any propaganda which directly or indirectly defends Japan’s conduct of and in the War”]
Divine Descent Nation Propaganda
Militaristic Propaganda
Nationalistic Propaganda
Glorification of Feudal Ideals
Greater East Asia Propaganda
General [Japanese] Propaganda
Justification or Defense of War Criminals
Fraternization [referring in particular to fraternization of Allied personnel with Japanese women]
Black Market Activities
Criticism of Occupation Forces
Overplaying Starvation
Incitement to Violence or Unrest [on actual censored material this often was phrased as “Disturbs public tranquility”]
Untrue Statements
Inappropriate Reference to SCAP (or Local Units)
Premature Disclosure16
When, say, galley proofs were censored, the offending material was returned to the publisher with blue-penciled passages to be altered or deleted along with a standard form that simply indicated the paragraph or paragraphs of the ten-item Press Code that these impermissible passages violated.17 In this manner, the concrete nature of what had been excised became the primary means by which Japanese understood what occupation authorities really meant by their vague code commandments. Cases that, in retrospect, may seem aberrant or even ludicrous censorial excesses sometimes became guideposts by which the censored party decided what the victors construed to be within the boundaries of acceptable expression.
As these internal checklists indicate, the realm of impermissible discourse was extensive. No criticism was permitted of the victorious Allied nations (including, initially, the Soviet Union), nor of SCAP or its policies, which meant that for over six years the supreme authority in the country remained beyond accountability. Sensitive social issues such as fraternization, prostitution involving the occupation forces, or mixed-blood children, to say nothing of GI crimes including rape, could not be discussed. Public commentary about emerging Cold War tensions was, initially, forbidden. Even serious critical analysis of the black market was by and large off limits. “Feudal” values could not be praised. Any expression of opinion remotely resembling the propaganda of the war years was, of course, taboo.
Controlling commentary about the recent war naturally was of utmost importance to the victors at the outset of the occupation. They considered it essential to suppress any rhetorical appeals that might rekindle violent wartime passions and thereby either imperil the security of occupation personnel or undermine their reformist agenda. In a more active rather than reactive direction, the Americans deemed it necessary to educate the general populace about the many aspects of Japanese aggression and atrocity that had been suppressed by their nation’s own censorship machinery.
This was a reasonable mission, a formidable challenge, and a delicate undertaking, for it posed—and ultimately failed to escape—the danger of simply replacing the propaganda of the vanquished with that of the victors. All prior ways of speaking about the war became incorrect and unacceptable. Any criticism of the prewar policies of the victorious Allies was categorically forbidden. All past propaganda became a portmanteau violation, as it were, of the media codes. Even controversial but entirely reasonable statements about the global milieu in which Japan’s leaders embarked on war (the shock of the Great Depression, the breakdown of global capitalism, worldwide trends toward protectionism and autarchy, the models as well as pressures of European and American imperialism, Western racism, and the countervailing racial and anticolonial ideals of Pan-Asianism) could be deemed not merely incitements to unrest, but also transgressions of “truth,” not to speak of criticism of the occupation’s policies and of the victorious powers.
What now was “true,” of course, was the Allied version of the war, which the media had to endorse by acts of commission as well as omission. Publishers and broadcasters were required to present accounts of the war prepared within GHQ, especially by CI&E. Criticism of the war-crimes trials was not permitted. This meant, as noted in the key logs, that there could be no public “justification or defense” of individuals who had been indicted as war criminals. Essentially, whereas the defendants at the Tokyo trials were provided with committed defense counsel, the media were required to uncritically support the prosecution’s arguments as well as the tribunal’s eventual judgment.
SCAP’s war-guilt campaign played an important role in the psychological demilitarization of the Japanese. The “Class A” Allied war-crimes tribunal, in particular, with its voluminous written evidence and oral testimony, revealed a secret history of intrigue and atrocity that could never have been so effectively exposed otherwise. These were critical educational undertakings, but as filtered through the censorship apparatus they taught the media and general public less positive lessons as well: that the makeup and conduct of the court were not to be questioned, for example, and that the accused were to be assumed guilty unless judged innocent. Inside the courtroom, defense attorneys were allowed to argue that Japan’s leaders had believed themselves to be defending legitimate national interests, and that “victor’s justice” had made these proceedings inherently biased. Outside the courtroom, the media were neither allowed to endorse such arguments nor, in a different direction, to criticize the trials for not casting a wider net by indicting many more top wartime leaders. In a familiar paradox, the Japanese learned a great deal about the war that the censorship and secrecy of their own government had withheld from them, but were not permitted to comment freely on this.
Impermissible discourse about the war extended much further, however. It went without saying that the wartime rhetoric of Pan-Asianism and fighting a holy war against “Chinese bandits” and “devilish Anglo-Americans” was intolerable, as were the paeans to “Yamato race” superiority that commonly accompanied this rhetoric. Coming to terms publicly with death, destruction, and defeat was more problematic. Here, censorship could impede reasonable and therapeutic expressions of grief. Nothing revealed this more graphically than the difficulty of coming to grips publicly with the meaning of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Writing about the atomic-bomb experience was not explicitly proscribed, and in the year or so following the surrender, especially in local publications in the Hiroshima area, a number of writers were able to publish prose and poetry on the subject. At the same time, however, survivors such as Nagai Takashi found their early writings suppressed, many bomb-related writings were severely cut, and the most moving English-language publication on the subject—John Hersey’s Hiroshima, a sparse portrait of six survivors that made a profound impression when published in The New Yorker in August 1946—though mentioned in the media, could not be published in translation until 1949. As word spread that this was a taboo subject, a combination of outright censorship and widespread self-censorship led to the virtual disappearance of writings about the atomic-bomb experience until the end of 1948, when Nagai’s books finally signaled the modest emergence of an atomic-bomb genre. In these circumstances, survivors of the bombs found it exceedingly difficult to reach out to one another for comfort, or to tell others what nuclear war meant at the human level. Beyond this, overt censorship extended to scientific writings. Many reports concerning the effects of the blasts and ensuing radiation could not be made public until the closing months of the occupation. For over six years, Japanese scientists and doctors—and even some American scientists in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were conducting research on radiation effects—were denied access to data that might have assisted them in communicating to and helping atomic-bomb victims.18
The visual record of nuclear destruction was even more thoroughly suppressed. Documentary footage filmed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki between August and December 1945 by a team of some thirty Japanese cameramen was confiscated by the Americans in February 1946 and sent to Washington, with orders that not a single copy was to remain in Japan.19 The first graphic representations of the human effects of the bombs did not appear until 1950, when the married artists Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi published a small book of drawings of scenes they had witnessed or heard about in Hiroshima (entitled Pika-don, a term specific to the atomic bombs that literally means “flash-bang”). That same year the Marukis were also permitted to exhibit a stark painting entitled Procession of Ghosts, which became the first of a series of powerful collaborative murals depicting atomic-bomb victims. As Maruki Iri later explained, the couple was motivated to do such paintings because they feared that there might otherwise never be an indigenous visual record of the horrors of nuclear destruction.20 It was not until after the occupation, on the seventh anniversary of the bombings in August 1952, that the public was afforded a serious presentation of photographs from the two stricken cities. The residents of the only country to experience atomic warfare thus spent the early years of the nuclear age more ignorant of the effects of the bombs, and less free to publicly discuss and debate their implications, than people in other nations.21
In Allied eyes, the Japanese simply had reaped what they had sown. The terror bombing of Japanese cities, culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was seen as an appropriate homecoming for the horrors Japan had visited on others throughout Asia and the Pacific. Early in 1949, when occupation authorities finally relaxed their restraints on the publication of intimate personal accounts of the effects of the atomic bombs, they conveyed this notion of righteous punishment literally. At General Willoughby’s insistence, the first printing of Nagai Takashi’s Nagasaki no Kane (The Bells of Nagasaki) had to include a lengthy American-prepared appendix about “The Sack of Manila” by Japanese forces in 1945. Such victor’s logic was obtuse. It easily could be taken as suggesting that Nagasaki and Manila were comparable atrocities—hardly what the Americans intended. To the great majority of ordinary people, it was in any case emotionally impossible to accept the death of family and acquaintances or their own suffering as being deserved retribution.22
The need to grieve publicly, to mourn and speak well of the dead, in some instances unsurprisingly transgressed what the censors deemed proper and permissible. The most famous such case involved an elegiac prose-poem written by a former ensign in the imperial navy, Yoshida Mitsuru, who had been drafted out of Tokyo Imperial University to serve on the doomed superbattleship Yamato. In mid-October 1945, in an intense burst of anguished inspiration, Yoshida wrote down in intimate detail his memory of the sinking of the Yamato en route to Okinawa in April 1945, with a loss of almost three thousand men. Many emotions drove him. Yoshida wished to expunge the impression of meaningless death from the memory of his comrades, liberate them from shame, memorialize their sincerity and bravery, and mourn those who perished and—as would most navy men anywhere—the death of a great ship.
The twenty-three-year-old Yoshida was also wrestling with why death had not chosen him when it gathered in so many of his comrades. As one of the few survivors of the Yamato—and as someone, moreover, who had witnessed most of the final battle from the bridge—Yoshida essentially took it on himself to write, in a single text, an after-action report, an obituary, and a eulogy. His closing lines (as translated in the censor’s report) were as follows:
Over three thousand were the number of the crew, of which the survivors were only two hundred something. Who could surpass their ardent fighting spirit? Who could doubt their excellent training? Glorious be their end in the eyes of all the world.23
Yoshida’s Senkan Yamato no Saigo (The End of the Battleship Yamato) now is recognized as one of the few important literary memoirs to emerge from Japan’s war. Censors at the time acknowledged its impressive qualities, but also feared that this intimate evocation of the “Japanese militaristic spirit” might promote feelings of both regret and revenge among readers. As a consequence, it was suppressed in 1946 and again in 1948, published only in abridged form in mid-1949, and not made available in full until after the occupation ended.
More modest efforts to grieve publicly or treat the war dead as tragic victims also encountered disapproval. In mid-1948, censors deleted the following line (the translation is the censor’s) from a piece by the fiction writer Nagaiyo Yoshirō: “Under the present circumstances, she could not openly weep or express her sorrow for the loss of her only and precious son, who died an honorable death in the battle of the Solomon Seas.” In this instance, the censor’s rationale was “criticism of Occupation.”24 Earlier that same year, the poet Yano Matakichi failed to gain the censors’ approval for a number of verses in a collection he had dedicated to his children. Yano had learned belatedly that his married daughter perished of malnutrition in Manchuria after the war and his son had died in Soviet hands as a prisoner in Siberia. A number of his poems were censored for their “anti-Soviet” sentiment. A haiku in which he spoke of having offered his son’s life “for victory’s sake, never never for defeat” was deemed “rightist propaganda.” Another haiku, exclaiming that “the whips of defeat are too severe” and asking what crimes these young people had committed was censored as “incitement to unrest.”25
A well-known poet, Tsuboi Shigeji, provoked a more complex response among the censors, who blue-penciled a published collection of his verses. In addition to deleting lines about alienated and starving individuals groaning in the “beehive” of Japanese capitalism and warriors who had fought and perished under “the flag whose color is that of pure blood,” the censors also were confronted with a poem titled “History,” unpunctuated in the original, which they translated as follows:
and from a radio box
comes the voice of a god—
hollow, trembling, sorrowful.
This moment must be recorded in history.
Falsely created pages of myth
are closed on this day.
People’s eyes are newly opened
and gaze at the reality around them.
Appallingly ruined streets,
corpses already removed without a trace,
only resentment remains.
Harboring the resentment of those who perished in the conflagration,
weeds spread over the ruins.
August 15 piles upon August 15.
Between those who destroyed the country
and those who would rebuild the country,
a year of vehement battle.
A history of 365 days
pours into tomorrow’s time.
Let us fill tomorrow’s 24 hours
as historic hours.
It is perhaps a token of the censors’ own uncertainty, as well as the poet’s, that they disapproved only of the third stanza of “History”—letting stand Tsuboi’s opening reference to the emperor as a god (kami), as well as the ambiguous implications of his concluding allusion to those who had destroyed the country.26
The censors had no doubts at all, on the other hand, about the complete unacceptability of “Let Us Shake Hands,” by the gifted woman poet Kurihara Sadako:
“Hello, American soldiers,”
call out little militarists,
throwing away their toy guns.
They were busy with their game of war
until only yesterday.
“Hello, American soldiers,” they call.
In their little hearts spring out longings
toward people of unfamiliar race.
“Hello, American soldiers!
Was it you who fought our fathers
until only yesterday?
But you smile at us brightly:
You are not the beast
that grown-ups had made us believe.”
We want to touch your big hands,
We want to shake hands with you.27
Sometimes the censors’ responses to allusions to the war went beyond hypersensitivity and seemed merely dim witted. A passing reference to the death of a suicide pilot was censored from a story by Kawabata Yasunari. Similarly, a short article by the popular writer Sakaguchi Ango that praised the patriotic passion of those who had volunteered to die for their country and expressed hope that disheartened veterans could now turn that same selfless spirit into a force for peace was suppressed as “militaristic.” The censors repressed as “nationalistic propaganda” this simple, natural statement from a text for learning English: “If the war has taught us what peace is worth, those whom today we remember will not have died in vain.” The following haiku, evoking a familiar scene in bombed-out urban areas where people cultivated garden plots, was suppressed as “criticism of the United States”:
Small green vegetables
are growing in the rain
along the burned street.
The same rationale lay behind the deletion from a boys’ magazine of a story that used seeds sprouting in Nagasaki as a metaphor for young people throwing their energies into constructing a new Japan out of the ruins.
This poem too was deemed beyond the pale:
It seems to be a dream far, far away
that we wielded bamboo spears
priced at only one yen and twenty sen
against the big guns and giant ships.
An American journalist writing in the Catholic magazine Commonweal in 1947 singled out this particular suppression as a typical example of SCAP’s censorious oversensitivity, arguing that in fact these modest lines nicely reflected “the current preference of the Japanese for sardonic comments on their political and military immaturity—an attitude that is commendable both for its common sense and its humanity.” His criticism provoked a florid response from Major Daniel Imboden, chief of the CI&E press division, who referred to the Japanese as “these strange and mysterious people” and exclaimed, “I thank God that General MacArthur established censorship.”28
One of the most consequential censorship policies pertaining to the war involved nothing more than a change of nomenclature: the Japanese were forbidden to refer to their war in Asia as the Great East Asia War (Dai Tōa Sensō), the name they had given it. Instead, they were required to use the term “Pacific War” (Taiheiyō Sensō). This change, introduced by SCAP in mid-December 1945 as part of a broad directive aimed at eliminating religious and nationalistic indoctrination, amounted to an act of semantic imperialism with unexpected ramifications. Whereas the Japanese phrase, for all its jingoism, had clearly centered the war in China and Southeast Asia, the new term recentered it in the Pacific and gave unmistakable primacy to the conflict between Japan and the United States. There was nothing conspiratorial in this renaming of events. It merely reflected the reflexive ethnocentrism of the conquerors, who essentially had excluded Japan’s Asian antagonists from any meaningful role in the occupation and now eliminated them from the very language by which the war was to be identified. Quite the opposite of reminding the Japanese of their war guilt, such a maladroit rectification of names facilitated the process of forgetting what they had done to their Asian neighbors.
Where criticism of the occupation and Allied powers was concerned, the censors’ files contain more than a little that borders on the ridiculous. A small dog was ordered deleted from a photograph of U.S. forces on parade because it detracted from the dignity of the troops. More commonly, it was the troops themselves and all their emblems (jeeps, English-language signs, and the like) that were expunged from the visual record—as if eliminating any sign of the occupation from films and photographs would somehow help the Japanese forget that they had no sovereignty.29 The public was denied the opportunity to see a cartoon about the remarkable efficiency with which the GIs took over Tokyo, and as a consequence of this little act of suppression never was introduced to the marvelously captioned observation that “the power of chewing gum is awesome.” Nor was the public allowed to read such witty senryū, or satirical haiku, as this:
Only the jeeps
seem to receive
the May sunshine.30
At a different level of suppression, for some years the media were not allowed to refer directly to the huge monetary costs that the government was required to pay for maintenance of the occupation forces—amounting at one point to around one-third of the regular annual national budget. In 1946, the press was instructed to refer to occupation costs, if at all, as “war-termination costs” (shūsen shorihi). The following year, at the censors’ command, this was further deflated to a benign “other items” in discussions of the budget.31 The stultifying taboo of “criticism of Occupation forces” also meant that the Japanese could not dwell on the contradiction between soaring flights of rhetoric about freedom and democracy on the one hand, and gnawing hunger on the other. The censors translated and then marked “Suppress” the following poem scheduled for the February 1948 issue of Kaizō:
Whenever the time comes,
“The meal is ready, grandfather,
The meal is ready, grandmother,” we say:
And a stale meal is carried to grandfather and grandmother,
Consisting only of “haikyu” [rations].
When anything is said against it,
They’re told to keep their mouths shut and eat it.
In this way,
Their existence is just like that of the nation.
The nation is feasting on freedom,
And is feasting as though it is trying to see
How long it can live no matter how it lives.
That is “haikyu.”
One morning,
It was still too early to eat.
The peaches were blooming in the garden
When grandfather and grandmother went down to the garden;
They were stretching their bent backs
And were yawning toward Heaven.32
This was not exactly immortal literature. But the fact that two and a half years after defeat writers could still be prohibited from expressing such views says a great deal about “the sealed linguistic space” of the occupation period, as the critic Etō Jun has called it. Those who raised cynical questions about the swiftness with which yesterday’s militaristic ultranationalists became today’s peace-loving internationalists sometimes (by no means always) felt the censor’s hook. Those who observed that politics was gelded under the occupation were often silenced. Three years after surrender, Baba Tsunego, one of the country’s best-known newspapermen, still was unable to publish an article saying that postwar cabinets were mediocre because prime ministers had no choice but to be yes-men.33
One small casualty of such soft dictatorship was incisive political cartooning. The turn of the century had seen the emergence of an urbane cadre of social and political cartoonists, led by a brilliant Western-influenced illustrator, Kitazawa Rakuten. Rakuten and his colleagues (who often published their graphics in humor magazines that used the English “Puck” in their titles) offered sharp lampoons of cultural foibles, social inequities, and political corruption and abuse. From the 1930s on, incisive satire of the domestic situation was suppressed and a new generation of cartoonists came to dominate the scene, led by Kondō Hidezō, a gifted chameleon who rode with the political tides but never ceased to skewer his targets of the moment in a distinctive manner. Under Kondō’s leadership, cartoonists initially claimed to be politically neutral and inspired only by a “healthy nihilism.” They took pride, they said, in simply producing “nonsense cartoons,” but before long they became, virtually without exception, avid propagandists for Japan’s war.34
As also happened in the film industry, cartoonists escaped the post-surrender purges virtually unscathed and declared themselves champions of democracy with scarcely a moment’s pause. Symbolic of this quick conversion, the monthly magazine Manga (Cartoon)—a major vehicle of wartime propaganda—resumed publication in January 1946 with a cover illustration by Kondō depicting a hapless General Tōjō behind jail-house bars. Kondō and others also lent their considerable talents to new left-wing publications such as the tabloid Mimpō (People’s Report). Yet these cartoonists quickly learned that democracy had its limits. The same maiden postwar issue of Manga was not permitted to print a Kondō graphic depicting a kimono-clad woman dancing with a big GI. Two months later, in the March issue, the censors suppressed the graphic of another well-known cartoonist, Sugiura Yoshio, in which a cigarette-smoking, GI-servicing panpan prostitute stood beside a homeless man. The source of the streetwalker’s relative prosperity was not exactly disguised: she was wearing a kimono and haori jacket with a Stars-and-Stripes design. “Get a job,” she told the homeless man; on the wall behind her was a left-wing poster reading “Overthrow the Emperor System.”
Sugiura’s witty sally was a triple abomination to CCD. It attacked the emperor, highlighted the economic crisis, and called attention to the fraternization of GIs with Japanese women. Nor could the victors tolerate a clever graphic in another magazine, ridiculing the exclusion of the emperor from the impending war-crimes trials. Depicting a large MP shepherding Japan’s wartime leaders into custody, the cartoon carried the cynical caption, “Leaving the lord behind, everyone has gone.”35
The emperor was not formally off limits to satire, and for a while a few publications—especially the left-wing monthly Shinsō (Truth)—did venture to make him a cartoon subject.36 After 1947, however, even mild satire about the throne largely disappeared. The more significant official restraint on satirizing authority involved the foreigner who actually reigned over the country. General MacArthur was as sacrosanct as the emperor had been before his descent from heaven. (A European who worked as a censor for CCD amused himself by privately redesignating the division SPCD as an acronym for Society for the Prevention of Criticism of Douglas.)37 Below him, the occupation forces, from highest officer down to lowest-ranking enlisted man or civilian employee, were similarly insulated from criticism—indeed, from anything but laudatory portrayal. As a matter of policy, top occupation officials also were unavailable to the media for interviews. SCAP communicated its policies largely by press conferences and handouts that the media were expected to report dutifully, an ex cathedra structure of “channeled news” that foreign journalists recognized as setting a dangerous precedent.38
To lampoon the prospects for—or the nature of—democracy in MacArthur’s Japan was a risky undertaking. The humor magazine Van learned this lesson when several cartoons were ordered deleted from its issue of October 1947. In one, a small MacArthur faced a large but friendly dragon labeled “Japan” with a rope around its neck and a saddle identified as “Democracy” on its back. MacArthur was murmuring, “Well, somehow I’ve tamed it.” For any American newspaper or magazine of the time, this would have been a commonplace depiction of the formidable challenges the occupation faced and MacArthur’s partial and still uncertain success in meeting them. CCD’s censors, however, interpreted the cartoon as criticizing MacArthur by representing him as being unable to get into the saddle, and so “having a difficult time in democratizing Japan.”39
This is not to say that the period of occupation failed to stimulate clever and amusing cartoons. The greatest of postwar comic strips, Hasegawa Machiko’s Sazae-san, made its debut in April 1946 and consistently provided an engaging, witty, and female-centered (the artist was a woman) running commentary on the ups and downs of daily family life, dominated by an exceedingly spunky wife-mother-daughter-sister named Sazae. In Anmitsu Hime (Princess Bean Jam), young girls were treated to an extroverted medieval cartoon princess whose silly name conveyed her passion for a popular sweet. Tezuka Osamu, the country’s most inventive and venerated cartoonist, made his postwar debut in 1946 by leaving the confines of Japan for an imagined world of androids and humanoids that posed provocative questions about science, human nature, and personal identity as well as good and evil.40
As these examples indicate, the best cartooning was to be found outside the realm of politics. Editorial cartoonists such as the Asahi’s Shimzu Kon did become well known for their bemused renderings of the antics of easy-to-caricaturize politicians such as Prime Minister Yoshida. As Shimizu observed, though, even he and cartoonists like him did not really produce political cartoons, but rather “cartoons about the political world” (seikai manga).41 With but occasional exceptions, they offered no sustained political vision, no biting critique of the misuses of power and authority, no cosmopolitan world view. The occupation’s modus operandi made the public development of such a critical vision next to impossible. If we were to rely on just the visual record left by cartoons, this would seem to have been an occupation virtually bereft of occupiers.
The same rationale that prohibited fundamental criticism of occupation policies extended to criticism of the Allied powers in general, for to speak badly of the victors would undermine their moral authority. This meant that the outside world, too, had to be sanitized for Japanese consumption. The left-wing monthly Kaizō offers a small case study in the types of statements about the victorious Allies and their world that could be deemed to be in violation of the Press Code. As Professor Furukawa Atsushi has documented, Kaizō was required to delete references to racial prejudices toward peoples of color among the Western Allies; mention of the surrender of Japanese troops to Kuomintang (Nationalist) rather than Communist forces in China; an allusion to the denial of voting rights to blacks in the United States; descriptions of the Soviet Union as “socialistic,” the United States and Great Britain as “capitalistic,” and China as “semicolonial”; mention of tension between the “democratic” U.S.S.R. and “reactionary imperialistic” United States; an expression of fear that Japan might become subordinated to international capital; a description of fascism as a manifestation of “capitalistic contradictions”; and criticism of capitalism in general (by, for example, well-known Marxist scholars such as Hani Gōrō).
Nor was this the end of the journal’s transgressions. In mid-1946, Kaizō also was required to delete the following line from the translation of an article about Korea by the American journalist Edgar Snow: “A certain high U.S. official privately told me that ‘Korea is now part of the new U.S. front line,’ and this reflects the thinking of a majority of the high command.” The censor marked this “untrue.” In the occupation’s new historiography, “general criticism of Allies” even extended back to medieval and early modern times. Thus in August 1947, Kaizō was required to remove a passage from an essay entitled “Dante and Columbus” which stated that in the historical development of European nations such as Spain, Portugal, Holland, and Britain, there was a predominant tendency to acquire new lands as colonies. In October 1948, the magazine, by now formally identified as “ultra-leftist” on CCD’s watch list, was not permitted to state that there were plans afoot to create a committee on “un-Japanese activities” modeled on the House Un-American Activities Committee in the U.S. Congress. Although such a committee did not materialize, it was being considered at the time.42
Other publications were subjected to comparably close vetting. A famous turn-of-the-century Christian convert, Uchimura Kanzō, was subjected to posthumous censorship in the reprint of an autobiographical work. The offensive text referred to an early period in his life when he was in the United States and mentioned that there were more murders and alcoholics in New York than in Tokyo—to which the CCD censor responded that, although this might well be true, it was too early to let the Japanese know it.43 Even trivia such as passing reference to the youthful poker-playing skill of former U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull were ordered deleted. An autobiographical account of a Japanese former POW interned at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin passed the censors’ scrutiny in mid-1946 with only these sentences deleted: “The Americans give the impression of being educated, but they’re surprisingly ignorant. They actually believe what they read in the papers. As gullible as the Japanese are, there’s hardly one of us left who still does that.” The Japanese editors of an English-language dictionary failed to smuggle in this example of the use of the verb denounce: “No imperialism is more denounced today than the imperialism of the United States.”44
These remarkably close and nervous readings extended to passing comments critical of America’s allies in the recent war. Censored “criticism of China” included references to the postsurrender use of Japanese troops in the Chinese civil war, abuse of Japanese repatriates, and characterization of the country as “emerging from a semi-colonial or colonial situation.” Discussion of the civil war itself was not taboo, but graphic descriptions of China’s chaotic upheaval could be regarded as exceeding the limits of propriety.45
For a while, such repression extended to negative comments about the Soviet Union. The philosopher Tanabe Hajime was censored in January 1946 for expressing apprehension about the Soviet role in the occupation, and the elderly parliamentarian Ozaki Yukio, writing in Kaizō in April 1946, was not permitted to speak in passing of repression in the Soviet Union. An article on Reinhold Niebuhr’s book Children of Light, Children of Darkness in the November 1946 issue of Shisō no Kagaku (Science of Ideas) was heavily censored for criticizing Stalin’s despotism. Even as late as September 1948, when Cold War tensions were unmistakable in occupied Japan, the following passage was deleted from the monthly Sekai for being “critical of Russia”: “The USSR is administering her own country by an absolute, autocratic policy, so she takes the same high-handed autocratic attitude toward the smaller nations.”46
This mystique of the immaculate Allies contributed to the fashioning of a public world that was not merely unreal, but sometimes almost surreal. Isolated from the rest of the world, the defeated Japanese were supposed to ignore the collapse of the victorious wartime alliance, the breakup of national unity in China, the renewed struggles against Western imperialism and colonialism in Asia, the decisive emergence of Cold War tensions, and the beginnings of a nuclear arms race. They were placed, as it were, in a small time warp, where the World War II propaganda of the winning side had to be reiterated even as the erstwhile victors engaged in new struggles and polemics.
In this world the Japanese could not express concern that competition among the victorious powers “in regard to atomic energy is not a welcome phenomenon from the standpoint of the establishment of world peace” (censored as “general criticism of the Allies” in May 1946); in which it was impermissible to warn that “above all, Korea today forms the contacting point of America and the Soviet Union, as well as having deep bearing with the international destinies of both countries” (censored in January 1947); in which, long after the West had adopted the rhetoric of the Iron Curtain, Japanese writers could be prohibited from reporting that “the clash of opinions between America and the Soviets is being widely circulated at present,” or from expressing hopes that this would not lead to open conflict in the future (censored as “disturbing the public tranquility” in December 1947).47
In the course of six and a half years of occupation, Japanese movie studios produced around one thousand feature films. Up to 1949, two copies of every screenplay had to be submitted in English in advance to SCAP’s “advisers,” and on numerous occasions a great deal of give-and-take took place before a script emerged that was satisfactory to the Americans. Some directors, such as Kurosawa Akira, flourished despite these constraints; others, such as Kamei Fumio, never found a firm postwar footing.48
To Kurosawa, GHQ’s controls were trivial compared with those imposed by wartime censors, whom he regarded as idiots perverted by, among other things, emperor worship and repressed sexual fantasies. Kurosawa had made his directorial debut during the war, and all four of his wartime films—Sugata Sanshirō (the name of the film’s hero) and its sequel; Ichiban Utsukushiku (The Most Beautiful); and the incomplete Tora no O o Fumu Otokotachi (Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail)—were included among a total of 236 “feudal and militaristic” films that SCAP ordered destroyed in November 1945.49 This did not prevent Kurosawa from quickly emerging as the most influential cinematic innovator of the new Japan. Between 1946 and 1952 he produced eight films, beginning with the naively idealistic “democracy film” Waga Seishun ni Kuinashi (No Regrets for Our Youth, 1946), which was followed by a meandering tale of romance and mishap amid the ruins entitled Subarashiki Nichiyōbi (One Wonderful Sunday, 1947).
As the occupation unfolded, Kurosawa continued to address contemporary themes, but the hope and idealism of his early films gave way to a darker vision. His prototypical protagonist became male rather than female (as had been the case in No Regrets for Our Youth as well as The Most Beautiful)—a generally humanistic individual who sometimes was cursed by the past and almost always found himself mired in a venal, duplicitous society. In film after film, this protagonist, invariably played by Mifune Toshirō, moved through an increasingly dismal milieu of gangsters (Yoidore Tenshi, Drunken Angel, 1948), ex-soldiers turned criminals (Nora Inu, Stray Dog, 1949), venal journalists (Shūbun, Scandal, 1950), and helpless, deranged innocents (Hakuchi, based on Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, 1951). Even his masterful Rashōmon, released in 1950 and set in medieval times, held a mirror to the contemporary scene in its portrayal of sexuality, crime, and ambiguity—and the relativity of all stories people tell.50
Kamei Fumio’s experience was the opposite of Kurosawa’s. Where Kurosawa shrugged off GHQ’s surveillance and moved imaginatively within the boundaries of the permissible, Kamei—more overtly idealistic and ideological—came to personify the forbidden terrain of the new censored democracy. This became clear when Kamei found it impossible to screen a short documentary titled Nihon no Higeki (The Tragedy of Japan) in 1946 and then was forced to make extensive cuts in Sensō to Heiwa (Between War and Peace), an ambitious feature film he codirected with Yamamoto Satsuo.
The Tragedy of Japan drew primarily on wartime footage to present a scathing analysis of the ruling-class forces that had led Japan into an aggressive and disastrous war. Kannei’s crisp montage style, based on skillful editing of the government’s own propaganda newsreels, was similar to that of Frank Capra, the premier director of propaganda films for the U.S. military during the war. There was more than a little irony in this. The pièce de résistance of Capra’s cut-and-splice art was the anti-Japanese film entitled Know Your Enemy—Japan, released less than a year before Kamei’s Tragedy appeared. Although Kamei’s 1946 film hewed fairly closely to a line of Marxist analysis endorsed by the Japan Communist Party (the so-called Kōza-ha line), emphasizing feudal legacies and ruling-group militarism and repression under the emperor system, it was not fundamentally at variance with Capra’s wartime propaganda.
By far the most memorable scene in Kamei’s documentary (one that Capra surely would have applauded) was a dissolve in which Emperor Hirohito was transformed before the viewer’s eyes from the nation’s rigid, uniformed commander into a benign, slightly stooping civilian figure, modestly garbed in necktie, overcoat, and soft felt hat. The major studios Tōhō, Shōchiku, and Nikkatsu all refused to show the documentary in their theaters, apparently more for financial than ideological considerations, and Kamei later recalled how at early screenings some viewers hooted and one threw a wooden clog at the screen. This was a marginal film, but one just beginning to attract curious audiences—about twenty-five hundred people a day—when it was abruptly banned by GHQ in mid-August 1946.
A leftist but non-Communist film maker, Kamei had studied documentary techniques in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. His was a unique experience of having films suppressed by both the imperial army and General MacArthur’s command. His brooding 1939 documentary of the war in China, Tatakau Heitai (Fighting Soldiers), had been made with the official sponsorship of the military but was immediately withdrawn for being “defeatist.” (The film’s nickname among insiders was Tsukareta Heitai, or “Exhausted Soldiers.”) In a roughly comparable manner, Kamei received strong support from American officials in the Civil Information and Education Section in preparing his documentary, only to have General Willoughby personally intervene and order all prints and negatives confiscated some three weeks after its release.51
Willoughby’s intervention came at the request of Prime Minister Yoshida, who regarded Kamei’s treatment of the emperor as lese majesty and succeeded in persuading two of the general’s aides to view this sacrilege with him. On its own part, the Willoughby camp was more troubled by the implicit criticism of the occupation’s policy of exonerating Hirohito from war responsibility. As Kamei and others later observed, the supression of the documentary essentially marked the moment when serious debate concerning imperial war responsibility disappeared. The overt rationale for withdrawing the film was that such “radical treatment of the emperor,” as one of the Americans who viewed the documentary with Yoshida put it, might “well provoke riots and disturbances.”52
Suppression of The Tragedy of Japan carried at least three lessons for those trying to gauge what SCAP’s “democracy” meant in practice. It revealed, first of all, not merely the persistence of absolute authority, but also its arbitrariness. What GHQ had censored, after all, was a purely Japanese criticism of militarism and the abuse of authority in presurrender Japan, precisely the type of free and critical discussion the occupation claimed it hoped to promote. Kamei and his staff had been encouraged to undertake this project by CI&E officials and had then dutifully moved it through the censorship apparatus and received official approval to release it. Iwasaki Akira, the producer, was thunderstruck when told the film had been ordered withdrawn, and Willoughby himself privately acknowledged that the documentary did not actually violate censorship policy. Kamei’s dry response was that he had not changed since his trouble with the Imperial Army seven years previously and apparently circumstances had not changed much either.53
A second lesson, carefully taken in by media people, was that serious criticism could carry an intolerably heavy price tag. Despite its reliance on already existing footage, The Tragedy of Japan proved expensive to produce for Nichiei, the studio that backed it. The film’s suppression pushed the company close to bankruptcy and provided a compelling warning to anyone else who might be contemplating playing with controversy. Individuals working in the print media, where delays as well as outright suppression could be financially devastating, were likewise keenly attuned to the accounting costs of expressing what they truly thought.54
The third lesson to be gleaned from the film’s abrupt suppression was ideological: the purpose of censorship was changing, moving slowly but inexorably from militaristic and ultranationalistic targets to left-wing ones. If this changing focus was still blurred in 1946, it had become much clearer by the time Kamei and Yamamoto were completing their ambitious feature film Between War and Peace.
CCD’s lower-level censors revealed their erudition with an early notation on the screenplay to the effect that the film’s title was “apparently taken from Dostoevski’s famous novel.” Although the title came from Tolstoy, the story line—of a soldier, long given up for dead, who returns home after the war to find that his wife has married his close friend—actually came from D. W. Griffith’s innovative 1911 movie Enoch Arden.55 Like Tragedy, the 1947 film was initially officially encouraged—in this instance by the government, at GHQ’s insistence, to commemorate the ideals of the new constitution. The major studios were being urged to produce films exemplifying certain principles in the new national charter, and Kamei and Yamamoto were selected by Tōhō to direct a feature conveying the antimilitarist spirit of Article 9. After being shepherded by CI&E, the film was submitted in mid-May to the Civil Censorship Division, where it immediately came under intense criticism as a vehicle for “several Communist propaganda lines.” A secret memorandum of mid-June characterized these as “glorification of demonstrations, identification of the Emperor with discreditable groups, overplaying post-surrender starvation in Japan and decadence in morals.” The film, this memorandum went on to note, fell into a “sensitive” category similar to that of The Tragedy of Japan.
Other memos spelled out these “Communist propaganda lines” more concretely. Scenes of labor strikes and demonstrations, for example, were excised as “incitement to unrest and criticism of SCAP.” As the censors put it, “Demonstrators carrying banners and posters such as ‘Freedom of Speech,’ ‘Let us who work eat,’ and watchers cheering and joining the marchers etc. are suggestive of criticizing SCAP censorship and encouraging labor strife.” An episode involving thuggish strikebreakers was drastically cut on the grounds that it suggested a link (not, in fact, implausible) between right-wing strikebreakers and emperor-system ultranationalists. These scenes, it was claimed, also entailed “subtly intended criticism of U.S.” by showing one of the principal characters being beaten up by the strikebreakers in a manner “suggestive of American ‘gangster’ methods.”
The censors also discerned both criticism of the victors and a “Communist” emphasis on moral decadence in a passing shot of a man with his back to the camera negotiating with a streetwalker and in a cabaret scene in which the walls were decorated with posters of Hollywood actresses and pictures of Caucasian nudes. Although CI&E officials had assured the Japanese that kissing on the silver screen was the open and democratic thing to do, scenes that mingled promiscuous kissing with jitterbugging and other nightlife activities were here deemed “criticism of U.S. suggestive that such display of public affection is due to American influence.”
Although many of the scenes that upset the censors involved unflattering portrayals of social and political conditions under the occupation, Between War and Peace was from start to finish a wrenching antiwar melodrama. Repatriated from China years after being declared dead, the protagonist returns to find that his wife has married his former best friend. The friend, traumatized to the point of insanity by his battlefield experience in China, has become de facto father to the protagonist’s son. In miserable living conditions, the wife supports her reconstructed family by piecework. The viewer is introduced to many scenes that linger in the mind’s eye: the terror of combat, the suffering and generosity of the Chinese, the air raids on Tokyo, the squalid living conditions of the postwar scene, tough street orphans and youthful prostitutes, the corruption of former military officers, the hedonistic escapism of life on the margins. Where did the responsibility for all this misery and degradation lie?
The film’s answer—which unnerved the censors—was that responsibility lay with “greedy people” who had taken advantage of the emperor-centered socialization for war. When the shell-shocked ex-soldier plunged into madness after discovering his predicament and exclaimed “Tennō Heika Banzai!” (Long Live the Emperor!), imagining himself back on the killing fields, the censors identified this as “criticism of SCAP,” on the grounds that “SCAP has recognized the Emperor system, and the scene is an attempt to belittle the system by inferring that only ex-soldiers who have gone insane ever think of their Emperor.” The flashback survived, but the offending phrase was excised.
In the end, CCD backed off on a number of its reviewers’ initial criticisms but required that at least seventeen sections totaling around thirty minutes be deleted from the rough cut that had been approved by CI&E in May. Even after these excisions, Between War and Peace still emerged as one of the grittiest postsurrender films about Japan, a rarity in the way it conveyed a visceral sense of the misery, sleaziness, tensions, hopes, and passions of those years. Despite the censors’ interventions, the film’s left-wing vision, driven by idealism more than ideology, remained unmistakable. Japan’s Chinese victims were portrayed with a sympathy rare anywhere in Japan at that time. The film’s three protagonists, their fates grotesquely twisted by the war, eventually came to exemplify an almost impossibly high order of forgiveness and love. Eloquently and with quintessential simplicity, the film’s closing words—spoken against a background of children playing in a schoolyard—evoked the dream of a new generation that could be educated to cherish peace and democracy. And for all this, there was a receptive audience. Critics praised Between War and Peace as one of the finest films of the year, and large crowds flocked to see it. Kamei was to have no chance to repeat this accomplishment, however, for thereafter he found it increasingly difficult to get work as a director.
In ways that went beyond what had to be left on the cutting-room floor, even Beyond War and Peace, for all its ambition, ultimately failed to convey the political and social milieu of the time. For there were, quite simply, no Americans. There was no occupation. Alien authority was invisible. This was as it had to be. Especially in the early years of the occupation, filmmakers and other photographers and graphic artists had been instructed to turn their eyes away from the American presence. Exceptions to this injunction were tolerated, but only where the image of the conqueror was bland and benign. Soon after the occupation ended, the director Yamamoto Kajirō reminisced about how difficult it had been to film in Tokyo. Directors were supposed to avoid GIs, jeeps, English-language signs, and buildings controlled by the occupation forces, not to speak of terribly burned-out areas. Even a verbal mention of “being burned-out” was excised from one of Yamamoto’s scripts, while the sound of an airplane was ordered silenced in one of his sound tracks. Since there were no Japanese planes at this time, such sound effects could only represent U.S. military aircraft—and, as such, were interpreted as signifying criticism of the occupation.56
The “occupied” screen did not merely offer a new imagined world. It also made things disappear.
Formally, SCAP censorship gradually tapered off beginning in 1947 and was terminated in October 1949, when CCD was dissolved. Traditional theater was removed from preperformance censorship in mid-1947, beginning with Bunraku puppet theater in May, followed by Kabuki in June, and Noh in September. Chūshingura, the classic drama of the “forty-seven loyal retainers,” returned to the Kabuki stage in November with an all-star cast. (It had been feared that such tales of feudal loyalty and revenge might incite violent reprisals against the newly arrived occupation forces.) After August 1947, most radio scripts no longer required pre-broadcast approval, and phonograph records were removed from prerelease strictures three months later. In October, all but fourteen book publishers were shifted from pre- to postpublication censorship, and by September 1948 the remaining companies were also freed of having to clear their manuscripts at the galley-proof stage. All but twenty-eight magazines were placed on postpublication surveillance status by December 1947, with the exceptions remaining subject to prepublication approval until October 1949. All major newspapers and news services were removed from prepublication scrutiny by the end of July 1948.
This easing of formal controls was misleading, however, for censorship assumed new forms after 1947 and did not end in 1949. CCD’s sprawling bureaucracy actually peaked numerically in 1948, well after the U.S. State Department had complained that the censorship operation had “the effect of continuing the authoritarian tradition in Japan.” As liberal officers increasingly left GHQ and were replaced by more conservative technocrats, censorship became more stringent, arbitrary, and unpredictable. More subtle and pernicious, in the print media in particular, the shift from prepublication to postpublication censorship had a chilling rather than a liberating effect on many publishers, editors, and writers, for it made them more vulnerable to financial disaster should occupation authorities find their published product unacceptable and demand that a newspaper, magazine, or book be recalled. Ambiguity and arbitrariness served SCAP’s purposes particularly well in the context of economic instability, for few publishers could take the risk of being censored after putting their product on the market. As a consequence, caution and self-censorship became ever more apparent as the occupation progressed.57
The tactics of intimidation took other forms as well. While prepublication censorship was in effect, higher GHQ officials sometimes simply “held” or deliberately misplaced articles that were not technically in violation of the Press Code but nonetheless were deemed undesirable, thereby creating havoc with deadlines. This happened to many controversial articles submitted to CCD by Akahata (Red Flag), the official newspaper of the Japan Communist Party, and was known to be a favorite practice of Don Brown, the influential head of CI&E’s Information Division, to whom CCD often referred controversial materials. GHQ officials were also able informally to reward or punish publishers by manipulating the rationing of paper, which remained in short supply for most of the occupation period. Another subtle form of leverage over what could be read was GHQ’s control over the licensing of foreign books for translation, which required approval from Brown’s office in CI&E.58
A blunter instrument lay in the ability of American officials to demand that writers or editors who displeased them be summarily fired. SCAP’s early purge directives (in December 1945) had included only a small number of high-level media executives, and the formal categorical purge of influential media officials associated with militaristic and ultranationalistic propaganda prior to Pearl Harbor did not even begin until late 1947. When this astonishingly belated media purge ended in May 1948, some 2,295 individuals had been screened and 1,066 purged (of whom 857 had already resigned or retired).59
These public “old-war” purges had hardly ended before GHQ officials began informally demanding that management fire writers and editors whom the Americans deemed unacceptable for Cold War reasons. In October 1948, for example, Suzuki Toshisada, the publisher of the magazine Nikon Hyōron (Japan Review), was told by Major Daniel Imboden of CI&E to fire his assistant editor, whose offenses included trying to publish articles by the progressive Canadian historian-diplomat E. H. Norman (on free speech) and the well-known Communist Itō Ritsu (on the “new fascism”). If he failed to do this, Suzuki was told, he might well find himself being tried before a military tribunal and sent to penal service in Okinawa. The assistant editor “resigned” that month. Shortly afterward, in the so-called December Incident, four editors at Kaizō were forced to step down in circumstances so similar that they even involved a Nisei official from GHQ visiting Kaizō’s offices to invoke the same threat of “hard labor” in Okinawa. Such crude threats had weight because of yet another dimension of the censorship operation: Okinawa, under the draconian control of the United States, was shrouded in secrecy as the Americans built the strategically situated island into a major Cold War military base. Throughout the occupation, and indeed until 1955, no news reports or commentaries about Okinawa were published in the press, making the image of that virtually invisible prefecture as a penal colony seem perfectly reasonable.60
The threat of bringing dissident editors before a military tribunal and sentencing them to hard labor was an extreme but not entirely idle one. One of the more egregious abuses of the censorship authority occurred in September 1948 in an altogether absurd incident involving a sports newspaper. The incident began with an article published in the May 27, 1948 issue of Nikkan Supōtsu (Daily Sports) under the headline “Mr. Thompson to Introduce American Nude Show to Big Theater.” After observing a striptease in the Asakusa theater district, an official in GHQ’s entertainment section was quoted as commenting to Japanese reporters that the strippers were not very impressive and he would like to introduce them to a real American burlesque show.
Although the report was accurate and had been passed by CCD’s censors, it was retroactively deemed to impugn SCAP’s dignity, and formal prosecution procedures were initiated. On September 1, a U.S. military tribunal sentenced the editor to one year at hard labor, suspended publication of Nikkan Supōtsu for six months, and levied a heavy fine of 75,000 yen on the paper—all on the formal grounds that Article 2 of the Press Code (disturbing public tranquility) had been violated. On appeal, the editor’s sentence and the newspaper’s suspension were overturned, but the steep fine was reaffirmed. In less frivolous proceedings a year later, three Communist editors were tried and sentenced to hard labor for publishing inflammatory propaganda.61
At first glance, the Thompson affair itself might appear a burlesque. To media people trying to gauge the parameters of permissible expression, however, it seemed reasonable to interpret such incidents as reflecting a deliberate, systematic arbitrariness. The outrageous striptease case, after all, went on for months, extended far beyond the foibles or momentary excesses of some GHQ underling, and dramatically revealed the heavy price that could be exacted for even petty and inadvertent transgressions of what the supreme military authorities deemed proper.
The Nihon Hyōron and Kaizō cases, on the other hand, were ideologically explicit: they made clear that the major target of censorship now was left-wing rather than right-wing thought. This was no secret in media circles. Indeed, the very process of moving away from the initial procedure of prepublication censorship had involved the explicit stigmatization of the left as the new enemy of democracy. This became a virtually open policy in December 1947, when, of the twenty-eight periodicals left subject to prepublication censorship, only two were “ultra-rightist” (with a combined readership of approximately four thousand readers). The remaining twenty-six magazines were progressive and left-wing publications with a combined circulation of over 600,000. Among them were some of the best known journals of opinion in Japan, including Chūō Kōron (circulation 80,000) and Kaizō (50,000), both of which had been suppressed by the imperial government during the war; Sekai no Ugoki (World Trends; 50,000), a weekly published by the Mainichi newspaper; Sekai Keizai Hyōron (World Economic Review; 50,000), which the censors characterized as being “directed toward picking out ‘defects’ in the capitalist system” and predicting the eventual triumph of Soviet socialism; and Sekai (30,000), which was regarded as moderate on domestic issues but having “adopted the usual Communist line” in its criticism of the United States, Britain, and capitalism.
The twenty-six periodicals represented only a small percentage of existing progressive and left-wing publications. The thrust of CCD policy, however, was to weaken socialist, communist, and Marxist influence by example, through the harassment and vetting of the most influential and prestigious purveyors of such views. Here, for example, is how the censors confidentially explained their decision to include the monthly Chōryū (The Tide; circulation 30,000) on the list. Chōryū, they wrote, “rates as the most important of the leftist publications. Contributors are chiefly leftist scholars who are analytical in their analyses of the world’s industrial, agricultural, financial, social and political problems but whose conclusions are invariably anti-capitalistic and destructive. Their arguments are for the most part free from the bombastic outbursts peculiar to rabid Communist commentators, but are presented in such learned and exhaustive fashion as to be very effective for propaganda purposes.”62 Much the same could have been said about the often prestigious contributors to some of the other targeted journals, whose arguments went far beyond the simplistic recitation of Marxist mantras. Editors at the Iwanami publishing house, which issued Sekai, found that in general the censors tended to hold them to more stringent anti-Marxist standards than were applied to other publishers, on the grounds that they should be restrained from lending prestige to the political left.63
Robert Spaulding, who rose to be chief of the Press, Pictorial, and Broadcast Division within CCD, later acknowledged that the censors became concerned with “antidemocratic” criticism of SCAP and the United States from the left as well as the right virtually simultaneously with the proclamation of civil liberties on October 4, 1945. One of the earliest radio programs promoted by CI&E, doubly titled The Patriot’s Hour and Prisoners Speak Out, was designed to give political prisoners recently released from jail an opportunity to express their views on the evils of the past and the prospects for a new Japan. In December, however, the program was dropped after it became apparent that most of these individuals were Marxists and Communists. CCD began to prepare detailed internal surveys of Soviet influence and left-wing and Communist trends in the Japanese media before the end of 1946, although it was not until around mid-1947 that “Leftist Propaganda” appeared as an explicit category on the key logs.64
A huge amount of leftist analysis did pass through the net—some incisive, some mind-numbingly formulaic. On the other hand, even lionized “soft” Marxist economists and industrial relations specialists such as Ari-sawa Hiromi, ōuchi Hyōe, and ōkōchi Kazuo, who were allowed to reach a large audience, all suffered minor censorship at one point or another.65 Prominent historians such as Hirano Yoshitarō and Shinobu Seizaburō faced more sweeping suppression in mid-1947, when their long essays (on “The History of the Bourgeois Democratic Movement in Japan” and “Revolution and Counter-revolution in the Meiji Restoration” respectively) were ordered to be deleted entirely from a volume on “Tasks of the Japanese People’s Revolution” in a series sponsored by Tokyo University.66
From the American point of view, the tapering off of formal censorship posed a dilemma, for it coincided with adoption of the conservative “reverse course” in occupation policy and a predictable heightening of left-wing criticism. On April 30, 1948, the central Press, Pictorial and Broadcast division within CCD was ordered to conduct “100 percent surveillance” of the Communist media, largely for purposes of intelligence rather than direct control. Early in 1949, the conservative government, with SCAP’s concurrence, cut the rationed allotment of newsprint to official Communist publications from 86,000 to 20,000 pounds per month.67 The “Red purge” that the Yoshida government conducted with GHQ’s active cooperation beginning in late 1949 initially did not seriously affect the media, for it was carried out against radicalized employees in the public sector in the name of “retrenchment” or “rationalization” or comparable euphemisms. In the wake of the outbreak of the Korean War on June 25, 1950, however, the Red purges spilled over into the private sector and, among many other fields of activity, swept through publishing and film making, as well as public radio.
Although the beginning of the Korean War was the trigger for a media purge of “ultra-leftists,” the gun had been cocked several weeks before the war began. On June 6, General MacArthur ordered that the entire Central Committee of the Communist Party be purged, and on the following day the purge was extended to seventeen top editors of Akahata, the official JCP newspaper. The party itself remained a legal political organization. In justifying the purge of the Central Committee, MacArthur declared that recent inflammatory statements and lawless acts by Communists “bear striking parallel to those by which the militaristic leaders of the past deceived and misled the Japanese people, and their aims, if achieved would surely lead Japan to an even worse disaster. To permit this incitation to lawlessness to continue unchecked, however embryonic it may at present appear, would be to risk ultimate suppression of Japan’s democratic institutions in direct negation of the purpose and intent of Allied policy pronouncements, forfeiture of her chance for political independence, and destruction of the Japanese race.”68
On June 26, the day after the Korean War began, Akahata was ordered to cease publishing (for thirty days initially, but this was later amended to indefinite suspension). Within three weeks, some seven hundred Communist and left-wing papers had been shut down, and by October 1950 such indefinite suspensions had been extended to 1,387 publications by the official SCAP account (approximately 1,700 by another calculation). Although General MacArthur and the conservative government that carried out his directives justified these purges and suppressions by equating Communist leaders with the militarists in prewar Japan, to many the more obvious historical counterpart was the prewar repression of left-wing protest against militarism and oppression. Since the media were immediately placed under immense pressure to follow the official U.S. position regarding the conflict in Korea, the parallel to imperial Japan’s enforcement of a single voice for the “hundred million” seemed all the more apt.69
Suspension of the left-wing press was accompanied by expansion of the Red purge in the public sector and its extension into the private sector. The primary thrust of these firings was to undermine left-wing influence in organized labor, but the witch-hunts also altered what was read, heard, and seen in the mass media. Over 700 individuals were removed from journalistic circles, between 104 and 119 from broadcasting (the tally sheets vary), and 137 from the film industry. Most of these individuals had been summarily dismissed by September. Whereas the initial GHQ suspensions had targeted “ultra-leftist” publications, many with small circulations, the Red purges struck at the mainstream. The purge of public radio, for example, was carried out in various cities on July 28, 1950 and involved posting the names of individuals who were to be expelled immediately from the broadcasting facilities. In some cities (such as Osaka), it reportedly was stated that this was being done in accordance with General MacArthur’s orders, and American MPs participated in the expulsion of designated individuals.70
The first wave of Red purges in the mainstream press took place the same day. Where the private sector was involved, dismissals were handled in various ways. At the Asahi, persons designated to be purged were summoned one by one to the office of a pale and clearly shaken company executive. At the Yomiuri, where bitter conflict between management and staff had prevailed since 1946, the dismissals were announced by an official flanked by plainclothes police and company guards, and were declared to be in accordance with General MacArthur’s letter of June 6. At the Kyōdō news agency, employees who attempted to stay on after their dismissal was announced were forced out by armed police called in by management. In the film industry, the purges were carried out in September, after a high official in GHQ’s labor section summoned studio executives and ordered them to expel all Communists from their companies, but to take the responsibility for doing so themselves.71
Although GHQ never resorted to the sort of systematic suppression of left-wing expression that the imperial government had carried out under the Peace Preservation Law, its shutdowns, harassments, and witch-hunts served their intended purpose. Many progressive and left-wing publications folded; others took a conservative editorial turn.72 Beyond this, however, more than a few genuinely idealistic supporters of democracy became disillusioned and moved from early enthusiastic support of the United States to cynicism or outright anti-Americanism. The purges also confirmed the more doctrinaire Left in its self-righteous condemnations of bourgeois hypocrisies.
Did SCAP’s regimen of censored democracy really matter when set against the larger developments and accomplishments of the occupation period? The answer is: yes. Quantitatively, to be sure, the number of overt cases of blue-pencil censorship was miniscule compared to the overall deluge of words in print. The media undeniably were vastly more lively at the end of the occupation than they had been during the war. At the same time, however, they became less dynamic and diversified as the occupation dragged on. Certainly to liberals and leftists who had chafed under wartime repression and had been surprised and gladdened by the vigor of the early postsurrender reforms, it was disheartening to discover the pleasure Americans took in exercising absolute authority—and dishearteningly familiar to observe the reflexive animosity they soon exhibited to those who disagreed with them.
Iwasaki Akira, who had been involved in shooting the footage of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the Americans confiscated, and who went on to be producer of Kamei’s ill-fated Tragedy of Japan, soon came to refer slyly to occupation authorities as the “gunbatsu” or military clique. “I was sickened to be made to realize how tight the undemocratic American gunbatsu had now drawn Japan into their clutches,” he recalled feeling when he discovered that there was no way to protest the pulling of Tragedy from the movie houses. Satō Tadao, the incisive, self-educated dean of postwar film critics, looked back on the occupation as a two-stage epoch of “encouraged democracy” followed by “repressed democracy.” To Matsuura Sōzō, who witnessed GHQ’s increasingly frenzied campaign against the left at first hand as an editor of Kaizō, it was not until the occupation authorities actually left in early 1952 that a “renaissance of democratic journalism” was possible—an open, springlike atmosphere comparable, indeed, with the early stages of the occupation.73 Among other things, only then was it possible to discuss the occupation itself frankly.
The deeper legacies of this censored democracy transcended ideology. Can anyone really believe that no harm was done to postwar political consciousness by a system of secret censorship and thought control that operated under the name of “free expression”—indeed, waved this banner from the rooftops—and yet drastically curbed any criticism of General MacArthur, SCAP authorities, the entire huge army of occupation, occupation policy in general, the United States and other victorious Allied powers, the prosecution’s case as well as the verdicts in the war-crimes trials, and the emperor’s personal war responsibility once the victors pragmatically decided that he had none? This was not a screen for weeding out threats to democracy (as official justifications claimed), but rather a new chapter in an old book of lessons about acquiescing to overweening power and conforming to a dictated consensus concerning permissible behavior.
From this perspective, one legacy of the revolution from above was continued socialization in the acceptance of authority—reinforcement of a collective fatalism vis-à-vis political and social power and of a sense that ordinary people were really unable to influence the course of events. For all their talk of democracy, the conquerors worked hard to engineer consensus; and on many critical issues, they made clear that the better part of political wisdom was silence and conformism. So well did they succeed in reinforcing this consciousness that after they left, and time passed, many non-Japanese including Americans came to regard such attitudes as peculiarly Japanese.