Japan in the Wake of World War II
OF THE
PULITZER; - 'PRIZE 1
,J
I
John W. Dower
EMBRACING DEFEAT Japan in the Wa...
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Japan in the Wake of World War II
OF THE
PULITZER; - 'PRIZE 1
,J
I
John W. Dower
EMBRACING DEFEAT Japan in the Wal<e of World War II W . w. Norton & Company / The New Press
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
13
INTRODUCTION
19
Part 1. I.
2.
VICTOR and VANQUISHED
SHATTERED LIVES
33
Euphemistic Surrender Unconditional Surrender Quantifying Defeat Coming Home . . . Perhaps Displaced Persons Despised Veterans Stigmatized Victims
34 39 4S
48 S4
S8
61
GIFTS FROM HEAVEN
6S
"Revolution from Above" Demilitarization and Democratization Imposing Reform
69 73 80
8
Contents
Part II.
TRANSCENDING DESPAIR
3. KYODATSU: EXHAUSTION AND DESPAIR Hunger and the Bamboo-Shoot Existence Enduring the Unendurable Sociologies of Despair Child's Play Inflation and Economic Sabotage 4. CULTURES OF DEFEAT Servicing the Conquerors "Butterflies," "Onlys," and Subversive Women Black-Market Entrepreneurship "Kasutori Culture" Decadence and Authenticity "Married Life" 5. BRIDGES OF LANGUAGE Mocking Defeat Brightness, Apples, and English The Familiarity of the New Rushing into Print Bestsellers and Posthumous Heroes Heroines and Victims
Part III.
87 89 97
104 I/O
112
121 123
132 139 148 154 162 168 170 172 177 180 187 195
REVOLUTIONS
6. NEOCOLONIAL REVOLUTION Victors as Viceroys Reevaluating the Monkey-Men The Experts and the Obedient Herd 7. EMBRACING REVOLUTION Embracing the Commander Intellectuals and the Community of Remorse Grass-Roots Engagements
203 204 213 217
225 226 233 239
Contents
9
Institutionalizing Reform Democratizing Everyday Language 8. MAKING REVOLUTION Lovable Communists and Radicalized Workers "A Sea of Red Flags" Unmaking the Revolution from Below
Part IV.
244 251
254 255 259 267
DEMOCRACIES
9. IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY: DRIVING THE WEDGE
277
Psychological Warfare and the Son of Heaven 280 Purifying the Sovereign 287 The Letter, the Photograph, and the Memorandum 289 10.
II.
12.
IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY: DESCENDING PARTWAY FROM HEAVEN
3 02
Becoming Bystanders Becoming Human Cutting Smoke with Scissors
3 02 308 314
IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY: EVADING RESPONSIBILITY
JI9
Confronting Abdication Imperial Tours and the Manifest Human One Man's Shattered God
320 33 0 339
CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY: GHQ WRITES A NEW NATIONAL CHARTER 346 Regendering a Hermaphroditic Creature Conundrums for the Men of Meiji Popular Initiatives for a New National Charter SCAP Takes Over GHQ) "Constitutional Convention" Thinking about Idealism and Cultural Imperialism
347 351 355 360 364 370
10
Contents
13· CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY: JAPANIZING THE AMERICAN DRAFT
"The Last Opportunity for the Conservative Group" The Translation Marathon Unveiling the Draft Constitution Water Flows, the River Stays "Japanizing" Democracy Renouncing War ... Perhaps Responding to a Fait Accompli 14· CENSORED DEMOCRACY: POLICING THE NEW TABOOS
The Phantom Bureaucracy Impermissible Discourse Purifying the Victors Policing the Cinema Curbing the Political Left
Part V.
374 376 379 383 387 391 394 399
4 05 4 06 4 10
419 426 432
GUILTS
15 VICTOR'S JUSTICE, LOSER'S JUSTICE
Stern Justice Showcase Justice: The Tokyo Tribunal Tokyo and Nuremberg Victor's Justice and Its Critics Race, Power, and Powerlessness Loser's Justice: Naming Names
443 444 449 454 461 469 474
16. WHAT DO YOU TELL THE DEAD WHEN YOU LOSE? 485 A Requiem for Departed Heroes Irrationality, Science, and "Responsibility for Defeat" Buddhism as Repentance and Repentance as Nationalism Responding to Atrocity
486 49 0
49 6 50 4
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has taken a long time to prepare, and would have taken forever without great contributions from two people. My wife, Yasuko, helped to survey a broad range of materials; and our conversations, woven into the fabric of everyday life, became an important way of mulling over themes and probing nuances. We covered a great deal of ground together-not only figuratively, exploring the past, but also literally, in various places in Japan and the United States. This is a heavy debt, as well as a rewarding way to do history. At a certain point these labors came together in an exceedingly long manuscript, and I called on an old friend to help me get untangled. Tom Engelhardt responded with patience and an exceedingly sharp pen. His critical scrutiny extended beyond language to structure, and beyond structure to themes and concepts. The manuscript reads differently (and faster) because of his friendship and skill. I am indebted to others as well. Sodei Rinjiro, General MacArthur's Japanese biographer and a master of knowledge about occupied Japan, has directed me to many Japanese materials. My reliance on some of his writings, especially his analysis of letters written by ordinary Japanese to MacArthur, is obvious here. Ever since a long sojourn in Kamakura early on in this project, I have turned to Aketagawa Tohru to track down
14
Acknowledgments
Japanese sources. I also shared materials with Herbert Bix and had numerous helpful conversations with him about the role of Emperor Hirohito. Takao Toshikazu directed me to one of the most remarkable texts I have introduced here, the diary-memoir of Watanabe Kiyoshi. Alex Gibney shared transcripts of some of the excellent interviews he conducted concerning the American drafting of a new Japanese constitution. Murakami Hisayo called attention to interesting materials in the Gordon Prange collection of Japanese publications submitted for vetting by the occupation's censors and now housed in the McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland; it was she who showed me what I regard as a little gem, the 1946 cartoon history of the occupation by KatO Etsuro. James Heisig made me aware of Tanabe Hajime, the formidable nationalistic philosopher of "repentance." James Zobel at the MacArthur Memorial identified a number of important archival documents. Years ago, when I began exploring Japan's transition from war to peace, I had the good fortune of being associated for a year with the "postwar financial history project" of the Japanese Ministry of Finance, headed by Hata Ikuhiko; and I still ride on some of the materials collected then. One summer Yasuko and I secluded ourselves at Farm Island Lake in Minnesota and did economic policy in a cabin generously made available to us by Jerry and Aiko Fisher. I also received advice, materials, or assistance from Takemae Eiji, Matsuo Takayoshi, Sumiya Mikio, Igarashi Takeshi, Yui Daizaburo, Koseki Shoichi, KatO (Yasuhara) Yoko, Miura Yoichi, Eiji Yutani, Yuki Tanaka, Kozy Amemiya, Laura Hein, Marlene Mayo, David Swain, Frank Schulman, Andy Coopersmith, Peter Grilli, Edward Friedman, Glen Fukushima, and Steve Rabson. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, student projects by Abigail Vargus, Jennifer Mosier, and Ann Torres helped illuminate aspects of the Japanese scene immediately after the war; Leslie Torrance typed several chapters; Dianne Brooks and Mabel Chin were of unfailing help in navigating the practical world; and in various ways the university administration generously supported my research. At one point early on, our daughter Kana turned some handwritten chapters into computerized ones. Ed Barber and Andre Schiffrin have been my patient mentors at W. W. Norton and The New Press, respectively, and Georges Borchardt has been my literary agent. Barbara Gerr copyedited the manuscript. Sarah Holt and Alan Tolliver at Boston's WGBH television station shared photographs collected for a documentary on General MacArthur. Funding that has supported the project has come from the Japan Foundation as well as MIT. On several
INTRODUCTION
Japan's emergence as a modern nation was stunning to behold: swifter, more audacious, more successful, and ultimately more crazed, murderous, and self-destructive than anyone had imagined possible. In retrospect, it seemed almost an illusion-a ninety-three-year dream become nightmare that began and ended with American warships. In 1853, a modest fleet of four vessels, two of them coal-burning "black ships," had arrived to force the country open. In 1945, a huge, glistening armada came back to close it. When all this began with the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry, Japan was a small country with few obvious resources. For over two centuries, intercourse with foreigners had been largely prohibited by its feudal shoguns Although the economy had become commercialized in those long years of seclusion, no industrial revolution had taken place, nor had there been any striking advances in science. If Americans and Europeans found these island people capable and clever as well as exotic, no one thought to say of them, as Napoleon had of neighboring China with its vast territories, its awesome population, and its millennia of high civilization, that here was a sleeping giant. In 1868, dissident samurai drove out the shogun and established a government in the name of the emperor, hitherto a remote, powerless figure.
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88. The biography of Kimura is Shiojiri Komei, Am Isho IIi Tsuite (Tokyo: Shinchiisha, 1948; reprinted in 1951 by Shakai Shisa Kenkyukai). See also Kike-Wadatsumi no Koe, pp. 281-304; Seiki 11/J 151111. p. 433. For an abridged English translation of Kimura's testament, see l'vlichiko Aoki and J\ilargaret Dardess, eds., As the Japanese See If: PIlSf IIlld Preselll (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981), pp. 297-303. 89. These sample entries were all reproduced in the special January 1954 issue of AkebO//O de\'Oted to selections from Testamel/!S oI the Ce1ll1l1')'. 90. A.kebollo. January 1954. p. 8.
91. Seiki I/O Isho. pp. 407-8. This particular entry was typical of testaments whose writers argued their innocence of the charges brought against them. In this instance, the doctor, assigned to a prison camp, claimed that in determining who was fit for work details he followed regulations precisely and treated POWs and Japanese soldiers,
Notes (to pages 526-528)
643
many of whom were also physically debilitated, exactly the same. (This was one of the entries deleted at the request of surviving family members in the 1984 edition.) It is impossible to exaggerate the influence of sentiments such as those conveyed in Testaments of the Centllry on postwar thinking about the war, and "war \'ictims," in general. They embody a romanticized conservative reconstruction of the war, and their appeal to right-wing neonationalists is obvious. At the same time, they also offer reassurance to great numbers of ordinary Japanese whose kin and acquaintances fought in the war and simply can not be remembered by them as "war criminals" or men who gave their lives for an "aggressive war" and nothing more. Thus, in 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, one of the largest citizens' groups calling for homage to the Japanese dead of World War II and opposing "categorical" and "unequivocal" apologies for Japan's aggression and atrocities was the Association of Bereaved Families (Izokukai). Some of these individuals would categorize themselves as pacifists; a great many certainly see themselves as antimilitarists. Their memorial services to the Japanese dead almost invariably involve appeals for peace-the appeal that there be no such Japanese "sacrifices" in the future. Unscrupulous right-wing politicians routinely exploit these sentiments, and non-Japanese routinely condemn them.
CHAPTER 17. ENGINEERING GROWTH I have addressed U.S. reverse-course policy in detail in "Occupied Japan and the Cold War in Asia," reprinted in Dower, Japan ill War and Peace: Selected Essays (New York: The New Press, 1993), pp. 155-207. See also Howard B. Schonberger, A.F termath 0/ War: AmfTicalls and the Remaking ofJapa", 1945-1952 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989); William S. Borden, The Pacific Alliallce: Ullited States Foreign Ecollomic Policy and Japanese Trade Rec07.!eTY, 1947-1955 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); and Michael SchaUer, The America" Occllpation of Japan: The OrigillS of the Cold War ill Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 2. Rekishigaku Kenkyukai, ed., Sellryo Seisakll 110 Tenkan to KiiTPa, vol. 2 of Nihon Dojidai Shi (Tokyo: Rekishigaku Kenkyukai, 1990), pp. 194-95. I.
3. Gelldai Yogo nQ Kiso Chishiki, 1948 (Tokyo: special issue of the magazineJ(yu Kokumill, published by Jigyoku Gepposha), p. 131.
4. Zako Jun, Tonedachi Masahisa, and Nagasawa Michio, ShOwa 110 Kotoba (Tokyo: Asahi Soporama, 1989), pp. 318-20; Takahashi Nobuo, ShiiTM Seso Ryfikogo Jiten (Tokyo: Obunsha, 1986), pp. 122-23. 5. Takahashi, pp. 195-97. See also the interesting October 1951 essay on Misora Hibari reprinted in "Shl1kl/11 Asahi" 110 Showa Sili (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1989), vol. 2 (ShOwa 2o-nelldai), pp. 239-56. Hibari (her stage name) was the preeminent female vocalist of postwar Japan until her death in 1989-her charisma, if not her style, comparable to that of Judy Garland or Edith Piaf. 6. Shiozawa Minobu, Showa Beslltoserii Seso Sili (Tokyo: Daisan Bunmeisha, 1988), pp. 265-66. Yoshikawa had two "top ten" bestsellers in 1948: Shitzran, a biography of the thirteenth-century Buddhist evangelist of that name (the same prophetic thinker who had inspired the philosopher Tanabe Hajime in his search for an indigenous concept of "repentance"), and Shillsho Ttzil/l!;ki, a "new" rendering of a famous fourteenth-century war chronicle. In 1949, Sh;lIroll was joined on the bestseller list by Yoshikawa's M~J'(Jmot() Mllsashi, a romanticized biography of a near-legendary seventeenth-century swordsman that remained a bestseller in 1950. In 1951, the prolific Yoshikawa had yet another bestseller, Shill Heike lHollogatari, a "new" render-
644
Notes (to pages 528-532)
ing of the most cherished of all Japanese war chronicles, dealing with the latetwelfth-century civil war that ushered in long epoch of feudal rule. Also on the "top ten" lists of 1951 was Tanizaki Junichiro's brilliant rendering in contemporary Japanese of the romantic eleventh-century classic Gellji MOllogaltlri (The Tale of Genji). 7. Mombusho [Ministry of Education], All/rashi; Kempii 110 Hanashi (Tokyo: Mombusho, 1947). This was reprinted by a Japanese peace group (Nihon Heiwa Iinkai) in 1972 and has received subsequent publicity as an example of the lost idealism of the early postsurrender period. See also the article about Asai and the origins of the booklet in Asahi Shimlllm, May 2, 1994. 8. "Basic Initial Post-Surrender Directi,·e to Supreme Cummander for the Allied Powers for the Occupation and Control uf Japan," November 3, 1945 (forwarded to MacArthur on NO\·ember 8); Edwin M. Martin, The Allied Occupation ofJapan (New Yurk: Stanfurd University Press for the Institute of Pacific Relations, 1948), pp. 113, 115· 9. See chapter 3 (note 12) on U.S. aid to occupied Japan. 10. The "centralized and authoritarian" phrase is from Martin Bronfenbrenner, an economist who served with E.S.S.; see his concise summary of occupation-period economic policy in Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1983), vol. 2, pp. 154-58. As noted earlier, SCAP's inordinate informal as well as formal authority is nicely com·eyed by another insider, Theodore Cohen, in Remaking Japal/: The Americall OccuplltiQII as New Deal (New York: Free Press, 1987). For Japanese views of the occupation's managed trade, see Noda Kazuo, ed., Smgo Keiei Slti (Tokyo: Seisansei Honbu, 1965), pp. 294-302; this mammoth source otTers many intimate insights into postwar management. II.
Mitsubishi Economic Research Institute, ed., Mitsuj-A1.;tsubishi-Sumitoll/o: Preselll Status of the Former Zaibatsu Enterprises (Tokyo: Mitsubishi Economic Research Institute, 1955), p. 6; see also the table reproduced in Dower, Japan ill H'ar and Peace, p. 120. The Nissan combine is sometimes identified by the name Ayukawa.
12. Inten·iew with :\ndo Yoshio in Ando, ed., Shiiwa Seiji Keizai Shi e 110 Shiigm (Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1966), \"01. 3, p. 144; Kazuo Shibagaki, "Dissolution of Zaibatsu and Deconcentration of Economic Power," Social Science AbstraL"lS 20 (Tokyo: Shakai Kagaku Kenkyiijo, Tokyo Unh·ersity, 1979), p. 21; Masahiro Hosoya, "Selected Aspects of the Zaibatsu Dissolution in Occupied Japan, 1945-1952: The Thought and Behavior of Zaibatsu Leaders, Japanese Government Officials and SCAP Officials," Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University (December 1982), pp. 17-18. The first two chapters of this dissertation provide interesting insight into the response of high executi,·es to the surrender and early SCAP demands for zaibatsu dissolution and economic deconcentration. 13. For inside accounts of these developments, see Okurasho Kanbo Chosakai Kinyii Zaisei Jitsujo Kenkyukai, Sengo Zaisei S/Zi Kiiju Shiryo, vol. I, entries 3 and 9; this is an unpublished Ministry of Finance collection of interviews with occupationperiod officials. On the printing-press inflation, see Fuji Bank, ed., Banking in Modem Japlln, special issue of Fuji Balik Bullelin, vol. II, no. 4 (1961; commemorating the eightieth anni,·ersary of the founding of the Fuji Bank), p. 187, and the Economic Planning Agency publication Keizai Kikakucho Sengo !