The Japanese Phoenix

Title: Embracing Defeat

Rating: 5 Stars

I did not know much about postwar Japan. I thought that I might as well use this Pulitzer prize winning history as a way to fill the gap. In so doing, I became truly fascinated by the subject.

I knew that Japan had lost WWII (duh!). In the aftermath of WWI, Germans, although soundly defeated, were able to convince themselves, due to relatively minor damage on the home front, that they really hadn’t lost the war. They felt betrayed by their government. These feelings of betrayal led directly to Hitler’s rise. Accordingly, the Allied forces made sure to pretty much lay waste to Japan. The nation needed to be rebuilt. Also, I knew that Douglas MacArthur, in charge of forces in occupied Japan, never a humble man, positively reveled in his role as the Supreme Commander.

As I found out reading this, that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. It’s such a massive work that it’s difficult for me to provide a relatively succinct summary. I’m just going to spew out some interesting things that I learned and see how it goes.

Japan was nearly completely laid to waste. In the aftermath of the war, it wasn’t clear how the government was going to feed, clothe, and house its people. Making this task even harder was that, according to the surrender terms, that the government had to pay for all costs of the occupation. Therefore, while its people were quite literally scrabbling for food, the Japanese government was having to pay for such things as home remodels (eg adding a swimming pool) so that the US soldiers could live in comfort. Even low level officers had maids and other servants.

Japan, with no experience in surrendering, did not know what to expect. Their only baseline was what they demanded of the nations that had surrendered to them. One of the more notorious actions that the Japanese military imposed upon Korea was comfort women. This is fairly well known now, but comfort women were Korean women conscripted to become sex slaves. Worried that the US would impose a similar burden on them, immediately after surrender, the Japanese government actually started setting up an organization of Japanese comfort women. These would be women that were already prostitutes or were similarly seen as somehow fallen. They would give themselves up for the good of their country and to protect the ‘good’ women of Japan.

True to his nature, Douglas MacArthur set himself up on a god like plane essentially equivalent to Emperor Hirohito. In fact, in all of the years that he was in Japan, only sixteen Japanese people ever met him more than twice. Despite that, forever after, he claimed a unique understanding of the ‘oriental’ mind.

In the early days, there were opportunities to radically reshape Japan. Occupation forces preached the twin concepts of de-militarization and democratization. Japanese citizens, having seen first hand the misery of their fifteen year military dictatorship, took to these concepts with alacrity. The Japanese citizenry turned almost immediately from militarism to liberalism. In fact, a number of significant reform were made. The parliamentary Diet was empowered. Women’s rights were dramatically improved.

The main groups that actively fought against the military dictatorship were the Communists and the Socialists. During that time, many of them were imprisoned or exiled. Once released and back home, they were justifiably treated as heroes for having stood up against the dictatorship. Holding a prominent place in politics, they began to drive even more radical change. At the same time, the relationship between the US and the USSR had deteriorated into The Cold War. Accordingly, the US, in the form of the occupation forces, began to sideline the Communists and the Socialists and to keep in power many of the conservative politicians that held significant positions in the previous military government. In fact, an accused war criminal ended up serving as one of the early postwar Prime Ministers.

It is odd that the US occupation forces were able to force democracy in a top down authoritarian manner. The Japanese were in the process of amending their existing constitution to meet the criteria spelled out in the surrender agreements. MacArthur got wind of this and decided to step in. He gave his staff ten days to write a new Japanese constitution. Working desperately round the clock and with absolutely no input from the Japanese, they were able to complete the draft. The Japanese cabinet, the group that had been diligently figuring out what constitutional changes should be made, were called in, presented the draft document and told to use it (they could amend it). Shocked at this behavior, the cabinet nevertheless took it and presented it to the Diet for debate. I believe that it was pretty much accepted as is with minimal changes. Since its adoption, it has not even once been amended.

Assignment of war crime responsibility was a significant objective of the occupation forces. The first thing that is interesting was that Hirohito’s potential responsibility was immediately taken off of the table. This doesn’t make a lot of sense. In my mind, I’d always thought of Hirohito as some figurehead that played no role in the war. This was not true. He took part in planning sessions. He made recommendations. He signed the actual declaration of war. He was the head of state. There’s almost no question that he held ultimate responsibility. The occupation forces tried to make the point that the Japanese would rise up and fight to the death to defend their emperor. This was not true. As mentioned above, the Japanese felt so bitter at suffering their defeat that getting rid of the emperor that lorded over all of it would not strike them as unreasonable. MacArthur thought he could rule more effectively if he operated behind the screen of Hirohito’s royalty. All of the accused war criminals agreed to shield Hirohito from blame.

The war crime trials themselves are interesting. First of all, it was conducted in something like four languages. During testimony, at the end of every sentence, everyone would stop to allow the translation to complete. The trial moved at a snail’s pace.

Some of the charges were obvious. For those cases where an officer was accused of ordering torture, abuse of prisoners, or other beyond the pale crimes, there was no problem with justice being rendered.

Some of the charges were a bit more problematic. One of the charges that Japanese political leaders were accused of was depriving a nation’s people of choice of government. This was specifically regarding the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. This was just a bit difficult because Indonesia was a territory ran the by the Dutch, Malaysia by the French, and Singapore by the British. Claiming that by overthrowing a European colonizer that Japan was depriving the indigenous people of the land the choice of their government is just a bit of a stretch. It could certainly be argued that, if that actually is a war crime, then the Dutch, French, and (especially!) the British had a much longer history of such crimes.

Questions were also raised of crimes against humanity. Was what the Japanese did really worse than such war events as the mass firebombings of Tokyo and the dropping of two atomic bombs?

One last thing to discuss is the Japanese economy. For most of the postwar period, the Japanese economy was sputtering along. The conversion from wartime to domestic manufacturing was moving along slowly. Various economic programs that were introduced were only partly successful and, in many cases, made things worse. Bizarrely enough, the event that saved the Japanese economy was the Korean War. With Japan being the nearest modern manufacturing country, the US granted Japanese manufacturers huge orders for material. This jump started the Japanese economy and allowed innovations like Deming’s quality initiatives to take root and proliferate. Not a few Japanese were discomforted by the fact, although their constitution precluded military action and that their military government had earlier committed atrocities against Korea, that their economic strength was reconstituted on the back of a war in Korea.

Whew! This was a long post and there’s so much more that I could write about. If you’re at all interested in how a country that was devastated by defeat can manage to rebuild itself with the help of the country that vanquished it, you’ll have trouble putting down this book.