Enforced Democracy under American Occupation - Essay Example

Enforced Democracy under American Occupation At the first session after the war of Japan's Imperial Diet a liberal Japanese sman Ozaki Yukio instinctively put his finger on the enigma of the American-imposed democracy under the Allied Occupation when he observed that: "We are grateful for our new freedom and our new liberty, even though they are rationed by MacArthur's headquarters." The remark straightforwardly conveyed Japanese mystification with a program for democracy that meant vast censorship of a whole range of cultural thought and expression (Nishi 84). In fact, a multifaceted recovery process evolved under the U.S. military occupation in the postwar effort to restructure imperial Japan as a democracy, ultimately to take a far more crucial turn with the imminent course of Communist domination in Asia. Paradoxically the U.S. control of the nation reversed Japan's zealous colonial ambitions earlier in the twentieth century to subjugate neighboring Asian populations in the name of Hakko Ichiu (Nishi 22). The moral goal of Hakko Ichiu, construed by the Japanese national religion of Shintoism, was a perceived mandate of manifest destiny for Japan as the first created Asian state, to bring the corners of the world together under kodo, the unity of the Imperial Way, in subservience to the divine Emperor. In fact, Japanese military aggression in the Pacific purportedly had the inspired objective of freeing Asian neighbors from western European and American imperialism to create a peaceful and prosperous eastern constituency. Japan's war-time government envisaged an imperial empire as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Tsunoda 294). As outlined explicitly in the plan: It is necessary to foster the increased power of the empire, to cause East Asia to return to its original form of independence and co-prosperity by shaking off the yoke of Europe and America, and to let its countries and peoples develop their respective abilities in peaceful cooperation and secure livelihood. (Tsunoda 294) At the dnouement of the ill-fated endeavor, with Japan forced to laid down its arms, the nation was occupied by foreigners for the first time in the long annals of its history. Townsend states that the fact that the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers was short of qualified personnel to administer Japan compelled General MacArthur to make judicious use of the time-honored Japanese civic structure and existing public agencies to implement his post-war objectives (207) after first purging vast numbers of Japanese military and civilians who had been complicit in the war. MacArthur dismissed five million Japanese troops from military service, set hearings for war crimes, identified nationals as known co-conspirators within the military command and suppressed the zaibatsu, but discreetly spared Emperor Hirohito (Townson 207). In the years before surrender the Japanese people had lived under a repressive regime whose fierce ambitions were fueled by an obsessive nationalism through its radical misreading of Japan's future as embodied in the manuscripts of its ancient Shinto religion. The prominent zaibatsu controlled almost all its commerce (Price 18). Journalism had been censored, academic freedoms were curtailed and dissidents had been mercilessly suppressed by the secret police, while every facet of Japanese social life had succumbed in subservience to the self-sacrificing civic compliance mandated by the war effort (Nishi 22). The zaibatsu were powerful family-owned banking and industrial syndicates that played key roles in Japanese economic development in the decades before the onset of World War II. By 1937 the four chief zaibatsu had cemented tight relations with the main political parties and firmly dominated half of all Japanese shipbuilding and maritime transport, a third of all bank assets, a third of all foreign trade, and virtually all of Japan's heavy industry (Sugita 21). Under the U.S. occupation, the termination of the zaibatsu topped one of the chief objectives in the postwar strategy of the Allied forces (Sugita 24). Later in decades of the 50s and 60s, when the economic revival of Japan became a major aim in the U.S. response to the threat of Communist domination in the far East, the defunct zaibatsu would effectively reemerge as the keiretsu. By astutely pooling their assets these reinstated syndicates of post-World War II Japan would ultimately restore the nation's erstwhile ascendancy to a competitive global power (Tadashi et al 311). From 1946 through 1948 the Allied command in Tokyo arraigned and indicted a significant number of Japanese military personnel as Class-A war criminals, including fourteen generals and three admirals. Courts across Japan and Southeast Asia convicted four thousand troops and executed some 920 prisoners (Nishi 51). About 200 thousand civilians were forcibly retired from public life, and another 200 thousand permanently prohibited from retaining any office in the civic sector (Nishi 80-81). The zaibatsu were singled out for complete elimination, since their powerful subsidizing of the Japanese government's military resolve was held largely accountable for Japan's international aggression across Asia in the decades leading up to World War II (Sugita 24). Legislation was enacted in 1947 to outlaw the Japanese oligopolies entirely (Townsend 207). Many in the Allied Command continued to contend that Emperor Hirohito should be tried as a war criminal; however, MacArthur adamantly refused to do so, convinced that Japan's inherent deference to the Emperor would be indispensable to the stability of the nation in postwar affairs of state (Sugita 9). From the beginning the Allied Command moved to reinforce constitutional rights and democratic sympathies in Japan as a guarantee that any resurgence of Japanese nationalism and aggression be rendered impossible. Consequently, Japanese political factions suppressed during the war, such as the Socialist Party, the Liberal Party and Progressive Party were restored to political power and even the Japanese Communist Party was legally recognized (Townsend 207). At first the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers anticipated stage-managing a voluntary Japanese revision of a new democratic Constitution under General MacArthur's supervision and control, until numerous orchestrated efforts were to prove fruitless (Nishi 117). According to Shinkokai, when Japan first emerged out of its centuries of isolation from the West in the mid-1800s, the nation dug back into her own rich inheritance as Japanese scholars studied European history to initiate the process of its modernization in unprecedented openness to the rest of the world (9). In 1889 the Meiji Constitution established Japan's first legislature to form a constitutional monarchy similar to prototypes in Europe. Emerging from the Meiji Ishin, or the Meiji revolution, the ratification of the Constitution outwardly made the Emperor of Japan the imperial ruler while, in reality, the Meiji ruling class exerted substantial political influence over Japan's first elected parliment known as a Diet. The Meiji concept of imperial rule was that the emperor exercised high priestly responsibilities, while in reality the Meiji oligarchs ruled in the imperial name (Shinkokai 11). Japan's first postwar election in 1946 attempted to comply with the Allied push for a democratic government, and the Liberal Party won the greatest number of seats to go on to create a coalition government with the Progressive Party. Though the Matsumoto constitutional draft of February 1946 embodied months of revision efforts by Japanese legal experts, the final document only incensed MacArthur with the superficiality of the projected changes and its sly allegiance to the old Imperial system (Nishi 117). Despairing at Japanese resistance to his coercive interventions, MacArthur was ultimately compelled to drop all pretense to assure that a strictly democratic political system could be created by an American-authored version of the Japanese Constitution (Nishi 119). MacArthur commissioned the Occupation's Government Section under Brigadier General Whitney and a group of inexperienced young Americans: military personnel, civilian staff, researchers, and translators to draft a new Constitution for the Japanese (Gibney 72). The makeshift constitutional convention was convened explicitly to replace the fifty-seven year old Meiji charter that had given uninhibited license in the prewar years for an imperial Japanese oligarchy to ascend to supreme power through furtive deification of the Emperor. (Nishi 17). The American authors were self-assured idealists, unimpeded by any explicit preparation in Japanese culture or history but wholly committed to clarifying and ratifying the civil rights and democratic liberties of the Japanese masses (Gibney 73). Along with deputy chief Colonel Charles Kades the group comprised a physician, a writer, a retired congressman and governor of Puerto Rico, a news reporter, an ambassador, two scholars, and five attorneys (Gibney 73). To radically restructure the national polity of Japan the foreign committee had very little raw material: a handful of English versions of draft constitutions authored by disparate Japanese political factions which had turned up in American hands, a worn copy of a rough State Department draft on democracy, and a memo penned by MacArthur to clarify for the group critical directives to be built into the final document, such as retention of the emperor, termination of long-held feudal privileges for those of noble lineage, abolition of war as a national prerogative, and a curious mandate to pattern the recovering economy after "the British system." (Nishi 120) In deference to the General's orders the drafters did not attempt to design an American-like system for Japan. Instead, the committee conceived a type of parliamentary rule that required both houses of the existing Japanese Diet to be chosen by popular vote. Under the old Meiji Constitution, the Diet was made up of a council of the imperial family, the nobility, and appointees of the emperor. To pre-empt any exploitation of authority by the cabinet and private counselors to the Emperor, the new Constitution directed that the prime minister be elected by the lower house, and that the full cabinet be held responsible to the Diet, not the emperor, as the Meiji Constitution had ordained (Gibney, A 73). In the wake of Japanese aggression before the war, Article 9 of the Constitution strictly repudiated warfare and the use of any combat to resolve disputes between Japan and other nations, and outlawed as well all branches of the military. When the ban was later understood not to apply to legitimate self-defense, a Japanese army, navy and air force could be legitimately created for that sole purpose. Any future amendment to the Constitution had to be sanctioned by a two-thirds vote from both houses of the Diet, and also had to be accompanied by a majority in a referendum. The constitution has never been amended (Sakamoto 8). Through an imperial rescript MacArthur secured a crucial endorsement of the new Constitution by Emperor Hirohito before submitting it to the Diet, ostensibly as a Japanese draft, for approval (Nishi 122). On the birthday of Emperor Meiji, Emperor Hirohito proclaimed the Constitution into law (Nishi 123). In the native Shinto religion of Japan the Emperor, from time immemorial revered as a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, reigned at the very heart of Japanese life and well-being. (Shinkokai 146). Hirohito may have disclaimed any divine prerogatives in order to endorse democracy for the survival of the nation, but to all intents and purposes he virtually retained his imperial status. "With him as figurehead," MacArthur is said to have affirmed, "our job is so much more easy." (Price 18) After World War II the Occupation inexorably censored state Shintoism and every vestige of it in left in Japanese art and culture as a required corollary to moral disarmament. Shintoism embodied the psychological mindset underpinning the years of alarmingly indomitable Japanese military pursuits (Nishi 59). In keeping with the democratic principal of separation of Church and state the Allied Powers wrote secularization of the state into Japan's new constitution. Besides compelling the emperor to repudiate all divine prerogatives, the display of Shinto art for nationalistic ambitions was also taboo. American personnel were firmly convinced that the mystique of Shintoism through some psychosomatic charisma strongly served to reinforce Japan's aggressive national spirit (Nishi 60). Many critics have been inclined to argue that a compulsory democracy enforced from outside is far less thoroughly anchored in ancient Japanese culture and its far-reaching history as the first Meiji effort to help Japan catch up to the modern world had been. A good number believe that the foreign meddling has only thwarted the assimilation of true democracy and served to ensure that widespread self-interest, along with the return to power of a controlling hegemony of prominent keiretsu, an often self-serving government bureaucracy, and the single-party political hegemony of the Liberal Democratic Party itself, have largely undermined the original vision of the American crafters of Japan's Constitution (Gibney 75). At best the modern political structure in contemporary Japan frustrates equal citizen involvement. It gives preferentiality to insiders, mostly big business and well-orchestrated agricultural interests, often to the disadvantage of less-well-represented outsiders. (Japan's long march. 42). In 1947 the Japanese masses accepted the course of action taken by the U.S. Occupation, concurring largely with the basic tenets of the Constitution and reacting positively to their initial experiences in the postwar climate. For the neglected and victimized masses, especially the immense workforce of peasants and women, Japan's surrender actually meant deliverance (Sakamoto 3). In reality the diverse democratic principles set forth by the Constitution ratified in 1946 were not unfamiliar to conversant Japanese civilians. The surprising discovery of prototypes of early constitutions from as far back as the Meiji period in dwellings all over Japan indicate that cultured members of the populace had been appraising European literature, as well as pushing for more extensive representation and constitutional rights that long ago (Shinkokai 9). These aspirations had been suppressed by imperial rulers bent on a system that consolidated imperial power at the cost of democracy. The postwar constitution, however American-made and manipulated, was ultimately successful in resolving the impasse (Gibney 72). After a subsequent election, from April of 1947 through October of 1948 a socialist-led faction took over and formed a coalition with the Democratic party. The Socialist Prime Minister Katayama drew up an extensive Bill of Rights to form a government of the people for which the old Diet became the highest level of state authority in the wake of the repudiation of the supreme powers of the Emperor (Nishi, 118). However, the rising pressure of left-wing socialists forced Katayama to resign early in his term. Afterwards Katayama joined the Democratic Socialist Party and fought hard for the preservation of Japanese pacifism outlined in the constitution, for improvement of the election process, and for Japan's critical economic recovery (Sugita 51). The 1945 Labor Union law gave Japanese workers the right to join unions, to organize strikes, and to initiate collective bargaining, and by 1947 additional Labor Standards legislation authorized a forty eight hour working week with an eight-hour work day, and added yearly paid holidays along with workplace insurance. The legislation also stipulated equal pay for equal work between men and women. About five million laborers representative of forty-one per cent of the workforce had signed on to labor unions as early as 1947 (Townsend 107). Outside of economic recovery, some of the most crucial reform measures concerned distribution of property and education. Former government policy on land reform proved less than comprehensive, so that MacArthur acted to impose his own program in 1946. All lands held by fugitive property owners were handed over to tenants and a limit was set on the amount of property anyone could acquire. In as little as five years a negligible five per cent of farm workers remained as tenants, while almost three million acres of Japanese farmland as well as nearly two million acres of Japan's highlands had been purchased by about five million previous tenants. Land reform worked well because the majority of Japanese welcomed the improvements (Sugita 26-27). In Japan before the war schooling had been exclusive, and generally only a small percentage of students went further than the primary level. Although the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers initiated a U.S. version of education that covered six years elementary, three years junior high, three years of high school, and four years of higher education (Townsend 207), the structure of the new system was, in effect, not really so revolutionary or different from the more elitist educational order under the Meiji constitution (Shinkokai 5). The distinction lay in its wider availability to all Japanese youth without exception. Under the new system the first nine years were mandatory and open to pupils of every district, but many more universities or Daigaku were also established to provide wider prospects for higher education (Shinkokai 5). The postwar educational structure remains essentially the same today, and its thorough accessibility has shaped Japanese culture significantly. Only seven percent of students in early 1940 went on to high school. Just fifteen years later the figures climbed to fifty percent and continued on to reach ninety-five percent by 1986 (Townsend 107). The quality and accessibility of education has contributed greatly to the free and open exchange of ideas that quickened Japan's swift recovery to take a larger role in the community of nations (Tadashi 35). From 1947 to 1948 the Occupation's strategy altered considerably. Inflation continued to hover precariously at one hundred sixty-six percent in 1948. The dissolution of the thriving zaibatsu had affected a drastic correction in the economic structure and many believed that MacArthur's policy of undermining the industrial conglomerates had greatly weakened the Japanese economy (Sugita 25). Japan virtually had no foreign legal tender with which to purchase equipment or raw materials. Mass starvation loomed imminently, staved off through huge imports of provisions from the U. S. and Allied Powers. Earlier restructuring measures were discarded, and the economic revival of Japan took urgent priority. As the Cold War expanded and the success of the communist bloc in China's civil war was all but assured, American resolve to ascertain that Japan would never fall prey to the communist threat heightened. The cold war became a decisive factor in the inner dynamics of American-Japanese relations (Tadashi 35). By 1948 the leftist volatility churning in the Asian-Pacific area had supplanted the U.S. retaliatory attitude toward Japan that prevailed immediately after the war to give way to a growing American anxiety to reconstruct the Japanese nation as a bastion of freedom and democracy in the region (Sugita 131). The U.S. Occupation technically ended with the signing of a Security Treaty in 1951 that permitted the maintenance of large U. S. military bases in Japan and Okinawa. Without any obligation to consult the Japanese, U.S. troops were at liberty to employ their new headquarters for major engagements in Asia. American military who perpetrated crimes in Japan remained entirely under U.S. authority, and the treaty then contracted could be terminated only by common consensus. The ratification put Japanese foreign policy virtually under direct U.S. control similar to the terms forced on Japan in earlier centuries (Townsend 208). With the occupation ended by the Security Treaty, the Korean War broke out in 1950 between the Communist North and the American-supported South, and the U.S. judiciously cemented its alliance with Japan. The war gave rise to U. S. military expenditures that provided Japan's listless economy the particular boost it needed. Japanese industry assumed a significant role in the production of supplies invested in the war effort against a new leftist menace to its Asian neighbors. The U.S. became a central exchange for Japanese commerce. Enigmatically, sixty years after Japan's surrender, the nation today enjoys a resilient political system, economic power, and something of the prominence as an Asian leader that it struggled to take by force prior to World War II (Sugita 133). Works Cited Gibney, Alex. "Six days to reinvent Japan: Constitutional Convention in Japan after World War II." The Wilson Quarterly Autumn 1996 Vol. 20, Issue 4, Page 72(9). "Japan's long march." The Economist. Oct 1, 1994. Vol. 333, Page 42(3). Economist Newspaper Ltd. InfoTrac College Edition. Nishi, Toshio. Unconditional Democracy: Education and Politics in Occupied Japan 1945-1952. Hoover Institution Press: Stanford, California. 2004. Price, Sean. "Under U.S. rule: the occupation of Japan; after World War II." New York Times Upfront. March 7, 2003. Vol.135, Issue11, Page18 (5). Sakamoto, Yoshikazu. "The Postwar and the Japanese Constitution: Beyond Constitutional Dilemmas." Japan Focus. 10 November 2005. Accessed 22 April 2007. 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