The Penguin History of the World

The events of 1945 forced Japan spiritually into a Europeanizing mode it had already entered economically and technologically. Defeat confronted its people with deep and troubling problems of national identity and purpose. The westernization of the Meiji era had seeded a dream of ‘Asia for the Asians’; this was presented as a kind of Japanese Monroe doctrine, underpinned by the anti-western sentiment so widespread in Asia and cloaking the reality of Japanese imperialism. It had been blown away by defeat, and after 1945 the rolling back of colonialism left Japan with no obvious and credible Asian role. True, at that moment it seemed unlikely for a long time to have the power for one. Moreover, the war’s demonstration of Japan’s vulnerability had been a great shock; like the United Kingdom, its security had rested at bottom upon control of the surface of the sea, and the loss of it had doomed the country. Then there were the other results of defeat; the loss of territory to Russia on Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands and the occupation by the Americans. Finally, there was vast material and human destruction to repair.

On the asset side, the Japanese in 1945 still had a great sense of national cohesion, and even if central institutions were delegitimized through defeat in war, it was the prestige of the emperor that had made an orderly surrender possible. The American commander in the Pacific, General MacArthur, wanted to uphold the monarchy as an instrument of a peaceful occupation and was careful not to compromise the emperor by parading his role in policy-making before 1941. He took care to have a new Japanese constitution (with an electorate doubled in size and now including women) adopted before republican enthusiasts in the United States could interfere; he found it effective to argue that Japan should be helped economically in order to get it more quickly off the back of the American tax-payer.

Those Japanese who in the wake of the defeat wanted a fundamental rearrangement of Japanese society to eradicate militarism and authoritarian rule were at first greatly helped by the reforms the Americans imposed. Some problems must have been eased by a major land reform in which about a third of Japanese farming land passed from landlords’ to cultivators’ ownership. But by 1948 the Cold War had begun to have its effects in Japan as well, both among the Japanese and in the Americans’ occupation policy. In what some call a ‘reverse course’ (though that is an overstatement) the American occupation authorities began dropping their support for trade unions and radical organizations, and moved towards making their peace with the great number of Japanese bureaucrats, businessmen and local leaders who had supported the war but not played a prominent role in it. Gradually, Japanese politics moved back to a conservative political dominance that would last up to today.

In 1951, with the Korean War in full swing, the Americans decided that having Japan as an ally supporting the war was more important than further democratic education and careful demilitarization. They proposed a peace treaty, contingent on an alliance treaty with the United States. The Soviets and the Chinese, of course, refused to sign. Japan regained less than full sovereignty, some believed, since its constitution included for ever renouncing ‘war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes … land, sea, and air forces will never be maintained’. But other Japanese celebrated the anti-militarist constitution, and campaigned to keep it even when both the Americans and many domestic conservatives wanted it changed. Confined to its own islands, and facing a China gradually becoming much better consolidated than for a century, Japan’s position was still not necessarily a disadvantageous one. In less than twenty years its status was, as it turned out, to be transformed again.