Revisiting America's Occupation of Japan

Abstract

This essay surveys and evaluates the last decade of English-language scholarship on the Occupation of Japan, locating it within American history, Japanese history, post-colonial studies, and the new international history, noting how new work in each field affects our interpretations.

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to Michael Allen, Hosoya Masahiro, Jeff Kingston, Nakano Kōtarō, Mark Selden, and Michael Sherry for their reactions to the first draft of this essay.

Notes

Laura Hein is Professor of Japanese History at Northwestern University. Her most recent work is Imagination without Borders: Feminist Artist Tomiyama Taeko and Social Responsibility, co-edited with Rebecca Jennison (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2010).

 [1] While my focus here is on English-language studies of the Occupation, Japanese-language ones show parallel developments. In addition to publications in Japanese by the authors mentioned in this essay, I will cite only three new publications, all from Iwanami publishing house. Amamiya Shōichi, The Occupation and Reform emphasises the importance of pre-surrender developments to post-war Japanese society and argues that the Americans had only limited significance. Yoshimi Shunya, Post-Postwar Society assigns far more importance to the Occupation-era changes and to American influence in Japan after 1952, which he regards as semi-colonial. Nakamura Masanori, Postwar History, a senior scholar of twentieth-century Japan, sees Japan more in the context of the Cold War than of imperialism. All three see the Occupiers as having in some ways helped and in some ways hindered democracy in Japan.

 [2] Johnson, ‘On Agency’, 115.

 [3] Johnson, ‘On Agency’, p. 117–8.

 [4] Wallerstein, ‘Reading Fanon’.

 [5] The Occupation of Japan was far more legitimate in the eyes of both Japanese and other Asians than are today's wars. This legitimacy came from the fact that Japan had attacked the United States on 7 December 1941 and had been defeated militarily after a long war. Previously, Japan had attacked many other independent countries, such as China, and colonial possessions such as the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia). While Japanese were not happy about being occupied, they accepted the Allies' right to take charge of their nation, explaining why there was essentially no armed resistance to the Occupation from within Japan. There was also no protest against occupation from people outside Japan that I am aware of. It is certainly hard to imagine Chinese and Koreans crossing the border to help their Japanese brethren throw off the hated interloper, as happened in Iraq. In addition, the Americans worked through the existing Japanese government and other highly developed political institutions. The police force, the rationing system, and the judiciary all remained in place, as did the imperial family. So did the legislature, which had operated throughout the war years as well. Moreover, the Occupationaires, including some who had participated in ‘New Deal’ social reforms in the United States in the 1930s, defined democratic economic reform in completely different ways than did George W. Bush's advisors in Iraq. They pursued land reform and workers' rights, and allowed the Japanese to retain substantial state control over the economy. They revamped the tax system to be more progressive than in the past, and to provide the government with needed revenue. In contrast, some of the first acts of the Occupation government in Iraq were to slash workers' rights, cut taxes, and eliminate protections against foreign control of the economy. These facts make the Occupation of Japan essentially irrelevant to Iraq, as John Dower has argued in Cultures of War.

 [6] Takemae, Inside GHQ.

 [7] Friedman and Selden, America's Asia.

 [8] Williams, The Tragedy; McCormick, China Market.

 [9] Gayn, Japan Diary; Dower, Empire and Aftermath; Moore, Japanese Workers and the Struggle for Power; Schonberger, Aftermath of War; Dower, Embracing Defeat.

[10] Gluck, ‘Entangling Illusions’. One thought-provoking way to explore this topic is the history of American gangsters and fraudsters – not just Japanese yakuza – in Occupied Japan, including their significant role in consolidating right wing power in Japan. Whiting's Tokyo Underworld is a suggestive beginning.

[11] Sodei, The Occupation of Japan; Mayo et al., War, Occupation, and Creativity.

[12] Tanaka, Japan's Comfort Women.

[13] Tanaka and Young, Bombing Civilians.

[14] These developments include the national health insurance system; foodstuffs management (more recently elaborated on by Katarzyna Cwiertka, Modern Japanese Cuisine) much of the tax structure; subcontracting arrangements between firms; seniority wages; and a cooperative attitude between business and government. That scholarship opened up new research agendas in economic history and corrected earlier ones that assumed near-total discontinuity in 1945. This approach was pioneered by Chalmers Johnson's book on the origins of the post-war economic system (MITI and the Japanese Miracle), and then elaborated on by Sheldon Garon (Molding Japanese Minds), Bai Gao (Economic Ideology), the contributors to Gordon's Postwar Japan as History, Okazaki Tetsurō (‘The Japanese Firm’), Yukio Noguchi, and Nakamura Takafusa (A History). These authors reframed the war years as economically innovative albeit politically repressive.

[15] Kasza, One World of Welfare; Hein, Rebuilding Urban Japan.

[16] O'Bryan, The Growth Idea; Mizuno, Science for the Empire. In the 1930s many Japanese confused class agency with national agency, which was why so many Marxists could move with breathtaking speed across the entire political spectrum to ultra-nationalism. This slippage is similar to the one between individual and national agency that I discuss here. Other recent work argues that fascist thought looked much like fascism elsewhere even though the people who embraced it wished to identify ways that Japan was unique. See works by Yamanouchi et al. (Total War) on wartime social-scientific ideas, Hiromi Mizuno (Science for the Empire) on wartime science, Yanagisawa Osamu (‘The Impact of German Economic Thought’) on wartime economic thought, Kevin Doak (A History) on nationalism, and Richard F. Calichman and Chris Goto-Jones on Kyoto-school philosophy. A recent volume edited by Alan Tansman (The Culture of Japanese Fascism) carries this analysis into literary and cultural realms.

[17] Young, Japan's Total Empire; Mitter, The Manchurian Myth; Tamanoi, Memory Maps; Saaler and Koschmann, Pan-Asianism; Kushner, Thought War; Henry, Keijō; O'Dwyer, People's Empire.

[18] Oguma Eiji, Genealogy; Fujitani et al., Perilous Memories.

[19] Watt, When Empire comes Home.

[20] Koseki, Birth of Japan's.

[21] Dower, Embracing Defeat.

[22] Pratt, Imperial Eyes.

[23] Molasky, American Occupation.

[24] Enloe, Globalization; Moon, Sex Among Allies.

[25] Koikari, Pedagogy of Democracy; Sanders, ‘Prostitution’; Kovner, ‘Occupying Power’.

[26] Molasky, American Occupation.

[27] Dower, Embracing Defeat, 111.

[28] Rohrer, ‘Demons to Dependants’; Green, Black Yanks.

[29] Bailey and Farber, The First Strange Place.

[30] Shibusawa, America's Geisha Ally.

[31] Johnson, Blowback; Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire; Johnson, Nemesis; Johnson, Okinawa.

[32] Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea.

[33] Merrell, The Indian's New World; Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land; Neptune, Caliban and the Yankee.

[34] Lutz, Homefront; Lutz, Bases of Empire.

[35] Dower, Cultures of War.

[36] Takemae, Inside GHQ.

[37] Allen, Identity; Tanji, Miyumi, Myth; Obermiller, ‘U.S. Military Occupation’; Figal, ‘Bones of Contention’; Johnson, Okinawa: Cold War Island; Hook and Siddle, Japan and Okinawa; Hein and Selden, Censoring History.

[38] Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun.

[39] Borden, The Pacific Alliance; Schaller, ‘Securing the Great Crescent’.

[40] Jacobs, America's Miracle Man; Simpson, Economists with Guns.

[41] Caprio, ‘The Cold War Explodes’.

[42] Morris-Suzuki, Borderline Japan.

[43] Morris-Suzuki, ‘Invisible Immigrants’

[44] McCormack.

[45] Sakurai, ‘Okinawan Bases’; Yoshikawa, ‘Dugong Swimming’.

[46] Hein and Selden, Censoring History, Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan; Miyoshi Jager and Mitter, Ruptured Histories.

[47] Ushimura, Beyond the ‘Judgment of Civilization’.

[48] Ushimura, Beyond the ‘Judgment of Civilization’

[49] Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial.

[50] Rotter, Hiroshima.

[51] Sherif, Japan's Cold War.

[52] Carlile, Divisions of Labor.

[53] Carlile, Divisions of Labor

[54] The Soviet Union (and its empire) appears in recent work on Japan mainly as the villain in the story of Japanese POWs who languished in Siberia deep into the post-war years, the topic of a forthcoming book by Andrew Barshay.

[55] Koschmann, Revolution; Slaymaker, Confluences; Barshay, Social Sciences; Hein, Reasonable Men.

[56] Brandon, Kabuki's Forgotten War.

[57] Victoria, Zen at War.

[58] Scholars of Asian American history have questioned the overriding importance of nationality in another way, by looking at Asian American individuals who moved between Asia and America, such as Bert Winther-Tamaki's study of the sculptor Isamu Noguchi (Art in the encounter of nations). Noguchi himself had great difficulty defining either ‘Japaneseness’ or ‘Americanness’, but was nonetheless crucial in framing these concepts in both places.

[59] Dower; Fujitani, ‘The Reischauer Memo’; Herbert Bix, Hirohito; Dower, Embracing Defeat.

[60] Matsuda, Soft Power; Fanon, Wretched of the Earth.

[61] Matsuda, Soft Power; Molasky, American Occupation.

[62] Ōuchi Hyōe, My Journey.

[63] Ōuchi Hyōe, My Journey