Japan, the United States and a Changing Southeast Asia Book

Before defeat, and after defeat
In the top photo Hirohito is in military uniform. After the surrender, in the photo with Douglas MacArthur, the uniform was discarded


This is a masterful account of Japan after their surrender in August, 1945. It is very nuanced, pointing out both positive and negative aspects of the U.S. occupation and how the Japanese coped and adapted. And the primary problem for most Japanese was food. Many were already mal-nourished before the surrender - and their struggle continued. Millions of returning soldiers and civilians from China and Korea added to the problem.

Hovering over all this, chameleon-like, is the Emperor Hirohito. Due to his reverence by the Japanese people he was spared of any involvement in causing and making war. War against China in Manchuria that started in 1931, a vicious racist war in China proper that started in 1937, and the war in the Pacific and Southeast Asia (Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia...) that commenced in December of 1941.

Hirohito managed to transfer himself from the head of the Imperial Japanese Army to become the Emperor of peace and a new Japan that was to have non-militarism as a basis of government. There were many outside Japan that put him in the same category as Hitler and Tojo (and there were some who thought that way in Japan too).

Douglas MacArthur was now the new supreme leader of the U.S. occupation forces in Japan. His main concern was to protect the Emperor from any type of tarnishment as a war leader. He went so far as to tell all the Japanese being prosecuted as war criminals to deny (lie) of Hirohito's culpability in the war. MacArthur feared that if Hirohito were removed from the throne, Japan would descend into chaos. There is truth in this; many Japanese revered the Emperor as a deity. On a few occasions Hirohito considered abdicating, MacArthur told him not to.

Hirohito tried to humanize himself by emulating the British monarchy and going out amongst his people now and then. He never did deny that he was a deity, keeping some of his God-like aura.

Page 278 (my book)
Hirohito was also, as it turned out, resilient and malleable, blessed by the heavens - and by General MacArthur more particularly - to survive and prosper, while all around him, his loyal subjects were denounced, purged, charged with war crimes, even executed. The emperor's role in Japan's aggression was never seriously investigated. He was dissuaded by the Americans from acknowledging even moral responsibility for the repression and violence that had been carried out in his name and with his endorsement... the occupation authorities chose not merely to detach the emperor from his holy war, but to resuscitate him to the center of their new democracy...if the nations supreme secular and spiritual authority bore no responsibility, why should his ordinary subjects be expected to engage in self-reflection?


Page 179
Renovation and iconoclasm [in Japan] were strains as deeply embedded in consciousness as were the reverence for the past or acquiescence to the powers that be. For almost a century the Japanese had been socialized to anticipate and accommodate themselves to drastic change. When World War II ended, they were well prepared - not merely by the horrors and manifest failure of the war, but also by socialization of the past and even the psychic thrust of wartime indoctrination - to carry on the quest for a "new" Japan. In other words, it was entirely "traditional" to find pundits gathering soon after the surrender to engage in a "roundtable discussion" on "changing the world". What changed, and drastically so, was how men and women now chose to define what that new world should be like.

The occupation caused a tremendous overhaul of Japanese society. When the Japanese government modified their constitution the Americans said "not good enough". So a small U.S. staff worked to make a new, much more liberal constitution. It granted equal rights to women (something the U.S. constitution does not do), it allowed trade unions, educational reform, removed patriarchy, allowed more freedom... During the occupation there was an astounding growth of new periodicals, newspapers, movies, and new radio shows. Political prisoners, mostly communist or left-wing, were released from prison.

But there were restrictions, no criticism of the occupation forces or the Emperor was permitted. The author discusses how this lack of freedom to "question" the role of the Emperor and the emasculation of a "free press" led the Japanese readily to see themselves as victims, but not as victimizers. The top military cadre was blamed for the defeat - and the Emperor was removed from that clique. Also when China became communist in 1949 the Japanese atrocities in China became more and more overlooked. Communism was now the new enemy and Japan was needed as a buffer to stop the advancement of Soviet and Chinese forces. This also made the U.S. side with the right-wing in Japan.

This is a comprehensive examination of many aspects of Japan after the war. And it was then that the great Japanese companies like Toyota, Sony, and Nikon started to build up their vision of a future far different than what had recently occurred. Japan is obviously a country that is able to re-invent itself.