Occupation of Japan

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 2nd of September 1945, aboard the USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay, Japan signed the instrument of surrender that ended the largest war in human history. What followed was something with no real precedent: a foreign power taking control of Japan for the first time in the country's recorded history. Nearly one million Allied soldiers would eventually cycle through the occupation. A single American general, Douglas MacArthur, would wield authority over an ancient imperial nation with almost no checks on his power. The questions this documentary will explore are not just about who won and who lost. They are about what happens when a victor tries to rebuild a defeated nation from the ground up, about the gap between democratic ideals and the compromises made to pursue them, and about why an occupation that officially ended in 1952 still shapes Japan's politics, military posture, and relationship with the United States today.

• 2. MacArthur and the Emperor

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  On the 27th of September 1945, General Douglas MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito met face to face for the first time. The photograph taken that day became one of the most famous in Japanese history. MacArthur wore his standard duty uniform with no tie, deliberately forgoing the dress uniform protocol typically required when meeting a head of state. The contrast was unmistakable: the towering American commander beside the diminutive Emperor.

  The decision about what to do with Hirohito was one of the most consequential choices MacArthur made. Allied leaders and some members of Japan's own imperial family, including Takahito, Prince Mikasa, Hirohito's younger brother, pushed for abdication or prosecution as a war criminal. Intellectuals such as Tatsuji Miyoshi demanded accountability. MacArthur refused all of it. His argument was political: prosecuting the Emperor would be overwhelmingly unpopular with the Japanese people and would undermine the entire occupation project.

  What MacArthur required instead was cooperation. Hirohito agreed to replace the wartime cabinet with a ministry acceptable to the Allies and to commit to implementing the Potsdam Declaration. In exchange, he kept his throne and received full immunity from prosecution. Historian John W. Dower later wrote that with full support from MacArthur's headquarters, the prosecution at the Tokyo tribunal functioned, in effect, as a defense team for the emperor.

  Behind the scenes, high officials and Showa government figures worked with Allied headquarters to compile lists of war criminals, while the Class A suspects imprisoned in Sugamo prison vowed to protect the Emperor from any taint of war responsibility. MacArthur's subordinates worked to attribute responsibility for the attack on Pearl Harbor specifically to former prime minister Hideki Tojo, allowing the major suspects to coordinate their stories so that the Emperor would be spared from indictment. Figures such as Masanobu Tsuji, Nobusuke Kishi, and all members of Unit 731, including its director Dr. Shiro Ishii, were granted immunity and never stood trial.

• 3. Rebuilding From Rubble

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  Before MacArthur could reform anything, he had to feed a nation on the edge of collapse. Air raids had destroyed most major cities. Bad harvests and the demands of wartime had created food shortages even before the surrender. When Japan lost access to food supplies it had been seizing from Korea, Taiwan, and China, the crisis worsened sharply.

  Around 5.1 million Japanese returned to Japan in the fifteen months following the 1st of October 1945, as people repatriated from across Asia and demobilized prisoners came home. Another million returned in 1947. As Kazuo Kawai put it in a phrase that became a guiding principle for occupation planners, democracy cannot be taught to a starving people. Emergency food relief came through Government Aid and Relief in Occupied Areas funds. In fiscal year 1946, that aid amounted to roughly 92 million dollars in loans. From April 1946, private relief organizations were also permitted to help.

  With the food network taking shape, the occupation's reformers moved quickly. On the 4th of October 1945, SCAP issued the directive removing restrictions on political, civil, and religious liberties, abolishing the Peace Preservation Law and freeing all political prisoners, including Japanese communists who were simultaneously granted legal party status. On December 15, the Shinto Directive abolished state Shinto and prohibited teachings deemed militaristic. A week later, on December 22, the Diet passed Japan's first trade union law.

  The land reform that followed was among the most sweeping of all. Between 1947 and 1949, approximately 5.8 million acres, roughly 38 percent of Japan's cultivated land, were purchased from landlords and resold at extremely low prices, after accounting for inflation, to the farmers who worked them. By 1950, three million peasants had acquired land. MacArthur's land reform meant that only about 10 percent of land was ultimately worked by non-owners, dismantling a landlord class that had dominated Japanese rural life for generations.

• 4. Writing a New Constitution

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  In 1947, the Diet ratified a new constitution through formal amendment of the Meiji Constitution, but the document had been drafted by American civilian officials within SCAP. Its inspirations were deliberately eclectic: the US Bill of Rights, New Deal social legislation, liberal European constitutions, and even elements drawn from the Soviet constitution. Sovereignty was transferred from the Emperor to the people, reducing the throne to a state symbol.

  The most discussed provision was Article Nine, by which Japan forever renounced war as an instrument of national policy and was forbidden from maintaining a standing army. Article Nine was paired with a clause directly enfranchising women in national law. The constitution also guaranteed fundamental human rights, strengthened Parliament and the Cabinet, and decentralized the police and local government.

  The story of women's enfranchisement was more complicated than the final text suggested. Ichikawa Fusae, a leader of the pre-war women's suffrage movement, had organized the Women's Committee to Cope with Postwar Conditions as early as August 1945, a group of 70 Japanese women who pressed the issue immediately after surrender. Home Minister Horiuchi Zenjiro advocated for enfranchisement within the Shidehara Cabinet on the 9th of October 1945, and the cabinet voted unanimously to grant women the vote. Two days later, before Japan had acted on its own decision, MacArthur issued his five-point reform directive that included women's enfranchisement as an order. The woman who actually wrote the equality articles in the new constitution was Beate Sirota, an American civilian.

  On the 10th of April 1946, Japan held its first postwar general election. Voter turnout reached 78.52 percent among men and 66.97 percent among women. The result was 39 female candidates elected to office. Shigeru Yoshida succeeded Kijuro Shidehara as prime minister on the 22nd of May 1946, becoming the first prime minister partially elected by women as well as men.

• 5. The Reverse Course

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  Beginning in 1947, the occupation underwent a significant shift in priorities. The name commonly attached to this shift is the Reverse Course. Where the first phase had focused on punishing Japan and dismantling its military-industrial base, the new phase focused on stabilizing Japan as a Cold War ally. A US Department of State history later described it as focused on strengthening, not punishing, what would become a key Cold War ally.

  The earliest visible sign came in January 1947, when MacArthur announced he would not permit a nationwide general strike that labor unions had scheduled for February 1. Over the following years, thousands of conservative wartime leaders who had been purged were de-purged and allowed back into politics and government. SCAP screened a total of 717,415 possible purgees over the course of the occupation, excluding 201,815 of them from public office, but most would be readmitted to public life by 1951. Plans to break up 325 zaibatsu industrial conglomerates were scaled back; in the end, only the 11 largest companies were actually dissolved. The incomplete dismantling allowed the remaining conglomerates to partially regroup as informal associations known as keiretsu.

  American banker Joseph Dodge arrived in 1949 as economic consultant. His Dodge Line imposed strict contractionary fiscal and monetary policies that caused hardship but brought rampant inflation under control. Dodge fixed the exchange rate at 360 yen to the dollar, a rate chosen to encourage Japanese exports and power what would later be called the Japanese economic miracle.

  The climax came in 1950 with the Red Purge. Following the Chinese Communist Party's consolidation of power in 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the Japanese government and business leaders, with SCAP's encouragement, purged tens of thousands of communists, alleged communists, and leftists from government posts, private sector jobs, and teaching positions. The Reverse Course weakened left-wing forces sufficiently to lay the foundations for decades of conservative rule, though it did not destroy the left entirely, setting the stage for the massive Anpo protests and Miike Coal Mine Strike, both in 1960.

• 6. The End and Its Aftermath

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  The Treaty of San Francisco was signed on the 8th of September 1951 and came into effect on the 28th of April 1952, formally ending the occupation and restoring Japanese sovereignty. Two exceptions remained: the island chains of Iwo Jima and Okinawa stayed under American control. Iwo Jima was returned to Japan in 1968, and most of Okinawa followed in 1972.

  The price of restored sovereignty was the simultaneous implementation of the US-Japan Security Treaty, which allowed American troops to remain based on Japanese soil on an indefinite basis. Even after the occupation formally ended in 1952, 260,000 American soldiers remained based on mainland Japan, not counting the tens of thousands stationed in US-controlled Okinawa. As of the time the source was written, roughly 31,000 US military personnel remained based in Japan, including at major bases near Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Aomori, Sapporo, and Ishikari.

  Popular anger at those bases grew throughout the 1950s. Bloody May Day in 1952, the Sunagawa Struggle from 1955 to 1957, and the Girard Incident protests in 1957 all reflected a nationwide anti-base movement. The original 1951 Security Treaty was revised in 1960 into a somewhat less one-sided pact, producing the current US-Japan Security Treaty. Even the revised version provoked the 1960 Anpo protests, described as the largest protests in Japan's modern history.

  On the day the occupation officially ended, the Asahi Shimbun published an essay calling it almost akin to colonialism and arguing it had left the Japanese population irresponsible, obsequious, and listless, unable to perceive issues in a forthright manner. Under what became known as the Yoshida Doctrine, Japan traded full remilitarization for economic growth, relying on American military protection to focus its resources on recovery. The economic strategy worked: from the 1960s through the 1990s, Japan experienced a period of unprecedented expansion remembered as the Japanese economic miracle.