Oct 10 2008
Occupation of Japan
East Asia after World War II
East Asia went through a period of adjustment following the end of the second world war. Japan, defeated, was occupied by the United States. China went through a revolution (or perhaps “civil war” would be a better term) that ended with victory for the Communists, and a retreat by the Nationalist Kuomintang Party, led by Jiang Kai-shek, to the island of Formosa. Korea, split into Soviet and American occupation zones, like Germany, at the end of the war, also experienced a war that appeared to pit a communist political system against one supported by the capitalist West. East Asia, then, was the first hotpoint in the Cold War. That fact meant that events in Asia would to a great extent define Cold War attitudes and policies the West, as well as the Soviet block.
The U.S. occupation of Japan is as a good a place to start in this story as any, and so it will be our beginning point.
On August 14, 1945, following the explosions of two Atomic weapons by the Americans – one on Hiroshima, the other on Nagasaki, that between them killed more than 150, 000 people, had decided to surrender. The Emperor Showa (Hirohito) made a recording of a speech to the nation, in secret on the night of the 13th. In it he noted that the war had not favored the Japanese, and asked his people to “bear the unbearable.” The recording was kept hidden for fear that militarist extremists would destroy it before it could be broadcast the next day. When it was broadcast, it was very difficult for common Japanese to understand. Hirohito never used the word “surrender” or admitted to having lost directly, and the language he used was a very esoteric, polite style of speech known only to Japanese aristocrats. Most people had to wait for the commentary by radio station announcers to understand that Japan was surrendering to the United States. Nearly the entire nation broke down and wept at the news. They had been ready to sacrifice down to the last person, and now it was no longer being asked of them. Many were confused by the change in direction – most still did not fully grasp the fact of the atomic bombs, or their effect. The surrender, then, came as a shock, even as most of the nation knew that the war was being lost.
When, in September of 1945, American marines began to wade ashore on the beaches, no one was exactly certain what the reception would be. Americans were certainly not prepared, though, for the warm welcome they received from their erstwhile enemies. It was as if many Japanese were happy to see them.
In fact, many Japanese were happy, once they had adjusted to the fact of the loss, that the war was at last over. The cost to the Japanese economy, and to the lives of ordinary Japanese, had been high. More than three million soldiers, and 2 million civilians, had been lost during the war. Many more were still unaccounted for by September, 1945 – most trapped behind U.S. lines in the Pacific or Asia, where they had been hopped over, supply lines cut, and left to wilt with no one to help them. Many of those would be repatriated. Some would choose not to go home. Others, out of no choice of their own, could not go home. So Japanese families were wrecked by the war, and its end brought hope to some, closure to others. Additionally, nearly everyone was poorer – not just in terms of savings, but in terms of total possessions and lifestyle, than they had been before the war. They began to refer to the war period as a dark valley in Japan’s history. Its end brought the hope for a new beginning in the simple fact that change had to occur. So the occupation was in some ways welcome simply because it signified the end of the war.
This does not mean, however, that most Japanese liked having been defeated. Many were nervous. Rumors about the Americans suggested that they were brutal rapists and murderers, as happy to slash a child to pieces as to munch a chocolate bar. To protect Japanese womanhood, one of the pre-occupation government’s last acts was to set up a “front line” of brothels occupied by volunteers, orphans, “compromised” women who were seen, in effect, as soldiers defending other women. Many were shocked by the defeat. Most were impressed by the fact that while Japan had gutted its economy and its resources to fight and lose the war, the United States had actually increased its wealth and productive capacity. This was visually demonstrated by the symbolic acts of filling Tokyo Bay with naval ships, and blotting out the sun over Tokyo with a fleet of over 1,000 aircraft during the signing of the surrender instrument aboard the USS Missouri.
Japan, then, unhappy about losing, but somewhat pleased to be done with the war, entered a new period in its history. When Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) arrived and began implementing his program to rebuild Japan, that new course was set.
MacArthur’s program was, in his mind, no less than a holy mission to democratize what he saw (somewhat incorrectly) as a backward, “feudal” political and social system. MacArthur was determined to remake Japan into a free and democratic nation with a market economy and free exchange of ideas. He was back up in this determination by the Truman administration – since the government of the United States had begun planning as early as 1943 for the occupation.
The occupation’s first act was to disband the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy. Als soldiers and sailors were discharged and sent home. Japan was, for the entire occupation period, to depend for its defense entirely upon the United States.
Next, the pre-war Meiji Constitution was replaced by a document written by a committee of Americans working for SCAP – and often that committee was micromanaged by SCAP himself. The constitution contained a number of new provisions. The most significant of these were its granting of universal adult franchise – both men and women could now vote. It also defined the Emperor not as head of state, but as a symbol of the Japanese state and the Japanese people. Hirohito’s divinity was disavowed (even by the Emperor himself, publicly, in his second ever radio address to the Japanese people), and he was made a powerless figurehead. The second critical point in the constitution was, of course, Article 9, in which the Japanese renounced war, and the right to maintain any military forces for any reasons whatsoever – including self-defense. This article, though its interpretation has been modified, is still extremely popular among Japanese today. Finally, the constitution mandated the creation of a parliamentary system based on that of the British government, in which the Prime Minister is chosen from the majority party, and is one of the sitting members of the legislative assembly. MacArthur deliberately chose this system over the directly elected executive system of the United States – perhaps for the purpose of keeping power in the state fluid and difficult to concentrate in one pair of hands.
At the same time, MacArthur and SCAP concentrated great amounts of energy on social engineering. They redistributed the land to farmers in Japan – a very popular move, and one that increased the number of middle class, property-owning Japanese – thus hoping to increase the number of people with self-interest in the political activities of the state. This was an attempt not only to be fair, but to create and sustain a private voice in government to balance special interests and the military. They also began to promote democracy in Japan, with education campaigns about voting, get-out-the-vote rallies, and articles in Japanese newspapers about what democracy was to mean to a new Japan. The word democracy, and the images of popular power that go with it became fashionable – one magazine actually called itself Democracy.
Social engineering, for SCAP, included recreating the economic system. The Zaibatsu – huge industrial combines, quite literally trusts, of many different types of business activities centered around a single bank, through which they shared profits and losses, and kept each other afloat – were dismantled. Each different business division was required to go its own way in the world in the name of a market economy.
Former government and business leaders who had been in their positions during wartime (between 1936 and 1945) were purged. Many were sent to jail. Others were forced into retirement. At the same time, wartime thought police prisons were opened, and suspected dissenters, socialists, communists, liberals all came out entered society once more. They began immediately to organize along the lines of their former political beliefs. The communists became quite popular, and were able to organize or help organize some massive labor strikes that crippled whole industries during a period of difficulty. Again, this was done in the name of getting a diverse set of opinions and political ideas out into the marketplace so that Japanese could think critically about any choices their government made, and think back critically on the war.
In 1950, however, all of this came to a stop, and much of what was gained in Japan by the Americans was lost. This was the result of the beginning of the Cold War, and the first hot flare-up of that war, in Korea in 1950.
Thus the context of the change in the direction of the occupation, known as the Reverse Course, involved much more than the war in Korea. It was also related to the success of Mao Zedong’s revolution in China: the People’s Republic Of China had been proclaimed in 1949, and the United States saw communism winning the world’s most populous country. The Soviet Union had exploded its first atomic weapon in 1949. The arms race was starting all over again.
In response to these events, American need to hold the line against communism appeared to become more important, and Japan came to be the last wall against communism in Asia. It was used as a jumping off point, forward supply base, rear area medical and entertainment center by American troops fighting in the Korean War. Japanese corporations were invested in, then used to supply war materiel to the U.S. military. Billions of dollars was spent to return Japan’s industrial capacity to full production as soon as possible. The Zaibatsu partially reconstituted themselves. The United States’ Military Police actually joined the Japanese police in putting down strikes. Even the political agitators who had been released from prison by the United States in 1945/46 were in many cases re-arrested. Many of the wartime leaders of business and government who had been purged in 1945/46 were now rehabilitated and accepted by the SCAP as legitimate representatives of Japan.
In Short, the activities that came to be known as the Reverse Course were implemented because the United States was fighting a war against communism in Asia, and Japan was the nearest and most convenient staging ground. U.S. policy had changed from the original goal – to make Japan a successful but third-rank economy governed by a contentious multi-party political structure that maximized gridlock and minimized political unity. Now the goal was to make Japan into the Asian outpost against communism in what was becoming a game of global one-ups-man-ship. Anything Japan needed to remain capitalist was to be provided – from money to political motivation.
This was the basis for Japan’s “economic miracle” after the war then. The Japanese people certainly worked hard, and sacrificed much. But they needed customers, and the United States supplied both heavy-duty investments, the legal and moral framework for rebuilding much of Japan’s heavy industry, and the customers for Japanese goods. In return for the commitment from Japan’s once and future leaders to resist communism and allow U.S. use of Japanese soil, and U.S. patronage of Japanese companies the Japanese government received the green light to develop itself into a first rank industrial power.
Additionally, the United States discovered that while it was busy fighting a war elsewhere, it had not the financial nor the political capital to fully guarantee Japan’s defense. So Japan was pressured to develop its own defense forces – in violation of the constitution written for the Japanese by the United States. The Japanese finally agreed to this change, but only under the condition that the force created be limited to self defense, and created under rules that allowed for police forces – thus necessitating no change in Article 9 of the “Peace Constitution.” In a 1952 agreement reached in San Francisco, the United States agreed to provide Japan with any additional defense needs it had in exchange for the use of Japanese soil for forward bases for U.S. forces in Asia. This accomplished, and the Japanese economy well on the road to recovery, the United States returned sovereignty over most of Japan to the Japanese government in 1952. Okinawa was not returned to Japan until 1972.
In direct contrast to Japan, China, which was also devastated by the Second World War, in 1949 became the world’s largest communist country under the leadership of the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong. China’s march to communism, and perhaps more importantly unity and modernization had begun, though, not in 1945, but in 1895.
In 1895, Sun Yat-sen was born in Guangzhou, in southern China. Sun was educated at Iolani School in Hawaii, then later took his medical degree in Hong Kong. Sun was called to serve China, however, and became one of the chief proponents of modernization and unification in the early 20th century. In 1912, Sun was elected president of China in Nanking. Ironically, in an unrelated series of events, protests against the Qing regime in Beijing reached a fever pitch, and the ministers for the young emperor Pu-yi agreed to have the emperor abdicate his thrown. At something like five years old, the boy sealed a decree in which he gave up his claim to the thrown and abdicated in favor of a new Chinese republic.
The first leader of that republic was not Sun Yat-sen, though his election appears to have been as valid as any other. Sun stepped aside in favor of Yuan Shih-kai, a former Qing general (at the time a warlord who controlled Manchuria and much of northern China). Yuan had an army, and Sun apparently hoped that he would use that army to try and unify China by defeating other warlords and making a reality out of a republic that really had only a very superficial legitimacy and mandate.
Yuan Shih-kai proved a disappointment to Sun. Eventually Yuan attemped to make himself emperor, and to found a new Chinese dynasty. It was only popular revolt that stopped him.
In this atmosphere, Sun Yat-sen once again stepped into the vacuum and provided leadership to a directionless China. Sun proposed a three step system, the Three Principles of the People, that he said would make it possible for China to unify, and to create a viable democracy. The first of the three principles that Sun advocated was nationalism. He planned to unstill the Chinese with a keen sense of nation that would allow them to care for, and suffer with, compatriots from across the country as their own. How he planned to accomplish this was unclear.
Sun’s next step was what he called democracy, a stage in which the Chinese people, under the tutelage of Sun’s nationalist Kuomintang Party, would be taught what democracy is, and how important it was for each citizen to participate. Until the Chinese could get the hang of this, to prevent radical parties such as fascists or communists from gaining control, the first few decades of the democracy phase would have to be an enforced one-party system. The Kuomintang would be the only legal party that could field candidates. This, according to Sun, would have the effect of limiting the risk that China’s government could be abused to near zero., Evnetually, Sun’s hope was, that full multi-party democracy would be possible, but he did not expect that within his own lifetime.
Sun’s last principle, and last step, was called people’s livelihood, and consisted of creating an economy in which everyone could afford basic life-sustaining goods and services. Again, what such an economy would look like, or how it was to be developed, Sun did not elaborate.
It may have been this big-picture with no clear program defined as to how to carry out his reforms that ultimately made Sun Yat-sen ineffective as a leader of a unifying and consistent political movement with real hopes of taking and reforming China. Instead, the party that Sun created – the nationalist Kuomintang – muddled through its existence in China in the early 1920’s with a program, but little in the way of effective implementation.
That was changed when Jiang Kai-shek became the commander in charge of the Kuomintang military academy, then later, after Sun’s death, leader of the Kuomintang itself. Jiang was trained to organize a party, to implement its policies, and to lead a revolutionary group by the Russians, who saw an opportunity to expand the world revolution to include China. When he returned to China, however, Sun’s contacts and supporters came from the middle class, and had essentially liberal political goals. Jiang supported those goals. By 1926, Jiang was so successful in organizing the Kuomintang that he began a successful “Northern Campaign” to get rid of warlords and bring north China under KMT control.
During that same period, in the 1920’s, the Chinese Communist Party was struggling to organize itself and to have some relevance in a China that was far less industrialized than even Russia had been in 1917.
The CCP base of operations was the most industrialized city in China at the time: Shanghai. It was there that they could organize industrial labor in the marxist way. But a young communist named Mao Zedong quickly realized that a successful revolution was going to have to include the peasants. Though the party scoffed at him, Mao began riding his bicycle out to the countryside and organizing them. He taught them how to create a collective fruit stand, the profits of which they could all share. He also taught them, eventually, that as a group they were strong enough not only to defy their landlords, but to overthrow their landlords and gain control and ownership of the land themselves.
Mao’s experiments were very successful, and his peasant-oriented and practical vision of how a revolution could take place made him the leader of the CCP. Mao was elected to this post during the “Long March” – a trek by foot around the outermost fringes of China, thousands of miles, and months long, that was made by the communist party to escape discovery and persecution by Jiang Kai-shek in and around the area of Shanghai.
Mao was aware from early in his career that China faced the same problems in its revolution that Russia had faced in 1917. Far more of China’s population were engaged in farming than in industrial labor. In fact, China’s industrial sector was even small and less developed in comparison with the overall population than Russia’s had been.
Mao’s solution to this problem was very different from that of Lenin, however. Mao was not interested in Lenin’s revolutionary vanguard party, whose role as Lenin saw it was to teach Russia’s peasants class consciousness and lead them in revolution, then lead the country through an industrial revolution. Mao, too, skipped a step in Marx’s dialectical history – the industrial/bourgeois phase. However, Maoism was much more people- and results-oriented. For Mao, the Communist Party was not a vanguard to lead and teach people about the revolution. Rather, it was an organ of the people, existing only to serve the public will. The party was to stay in touch with this public will be maintaining close ties to working Chinese. Party officials were expected to roll up their sleeves and get into work alongside peasants and laborers to find out what their lives were like, and what they needed. Rather than lead the people, the Party was to be led by the people.
Organizationally, the party did not differ drastically from the Soviet model. However, Mao’s emphasis on serving the people of China, rather than leading them, would have dramatic effects on China’s revolution.
First, during the Second World War, while the nationalist Kuomintang, even with support from the United States in money and materiel, continued to withdraw in front of the Japanese army, leaving ordinary Chinese to face the wrath and slaughter. Jiang was apparently holding his troops in reserve, perhaps for a final push against Japan, but historians speculate that he was more interested in waiting for the Japanese to be beaten, then having the resources to destroy the communists.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operated in a different mode. They conducted a guerrilla war against the Japanese in north China, making any territory outside of the cities extremely dangerous for the Japanese. They traveled mostly on foot, and received little outside aid in arms or money. They chose to inhabit a series of caves, which they enlarged through had stone carving, away from major population centers, where they grew their own food. Mao enjoined the CCP resistance fighters never to take anything from farmers without asking and paying. In most cases, the CCP carried all the supplies it needed with it, thus avoiding any disturbance of peasant lives, in marked contrast the the rapine ways of the KMT. As the communists liberated territory, they often organized the peasants, who would then be encouraged to rebel against landlords, and the landlords’ property and wealth would then be redistributed among the peasants in the area. These policies made the communist party quite popular in the north China countryside, and contributed to a growing number of new members, and consequently a growing military force.
Immediately after the Japanese surrendered, both the Communists and the KMT began frenzied attempts to maximize their territorial positions. Jiang, in a mad race to gain cities, flew KMT troops to major cities all over the country to accept the surrender of local Japanese garrisons. The United States attempted to assist the KMT by forbidding Japanese commanders to surrender to anyone but a legitimate representative of the KMT. So, by 1946, the KMT held the cities, and the CCP held the Chinese countryside. By 1949, through shrewd tactics and popular activities, the CCP had gained control of the country, and the KMT, with Jiang, fled to the island of Formosa.
Mao and his CCP then began a period in which they consolidated their control of the country and the government structure. Much of this organization was done with Soviet help and advice. The Soviet Union saw China as its little brother in communism, and was liberal with both money and counsel.
However, the realities of China and of Mao made Chinese communism very different in many ways from the Russian brand. By 1957, Mao was beginning to tire of the Soviet advisors, and by 1959, they were gone, and China and the USSR had entered a period of frosty relations. Mao realized that without Soviet aid, China would have to become self-sufficient. He therefore began an economic experiment that was designed to make China first completely independent economically, then, within 15 years, help it to out produce even Great Britain – at the time still one of the world’s most productive and prosperous economies.
This plan came to be known as the Great Leap Forward. It began in 1958 with China’s second 5-year plan, and was intended to industrialize China far faster, and more efficiently than would have been possible in any other way. The secret to the expected success was within Mao’s brand of communism – decentralization. Rather than create factories in the cities and bring laborers to them, Mao decided to move the factories out into the countryside. This coincided with his move to collectivize Chinese agriculture into huge communes. The Communes were thus asked both to produce food for China, and become its industrial workshops as well. This double duty caused double trauma for China. Not only were the peasants unable, because of bad weather, poor advice, and lack of labor, to produce enough food for the nation (crop shortages may have contributed to the starvation deaths of up to 30 million people), they were also not knowledgeable about industrial production methods. Backyard steel furnaces that had been the centerpiece of Mao’s hopes produced more steel than China had ever produced before, but all of it was of such poor quality it was unusable. China’s economy was devastated.
Chairman Mao had to face the music for the failure of his economic program. In 1960, he accepted the failure of the Great Leap Forward, and resigned as President of the People’s Republic of China. He retained his position as de-facto and official head of the CCP. This made him, while famous, much more of a background figure in the governing of China for the years following.
Mao was replaced in the position of President by Deng Xiaping, a long time communist and member of the core party faithful. Deng instituted reforms that placed communes and industry under professional managers, and began to disassemble the great communes that the Great Leap had created. His government began the slow process of rebuilding a government structure and workflow system. This necessarily involved creating a hierarchy of authority, specific job functions, experts in the various functions of government, etc. Deng’s government appears to have been on the road to becoming efficient and effective. However, its hierarchical structure and assumption of the authority to lead, rather than simply serve, the people of China went against Mao’s principles. He also, apparently, had an interest in getting back into the limelight of leadership.
Mao thus began, in 1966, to organize the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. His activities were based on a sense that a true revolution can never end. It must be an ongoing phenomenon, or risk the creation of a stable, hierarchical system of political leadership. This was the specific complaint Mao had about Deng’s government, and the reason why he said that Deng was following the “Capitalist Road.” Namely, the creation of a government means that one group of people claims greater expertise than, and authority over, another group of people. Mao saw this as fundamentally opposed to the equality that was the goal of communism. For Mao, equality meant interchangeability. He expected every member of Chinese society to be able to do the work of any other member. This meant that University Professors and government administrators should be able to farm, and farmers should be able to teach at colleges, or run government offices. During the Great Leap Forward, and even before, Mao had encouraged the creation of such situations as an educational tool – mostly for the white collar intellectual and administrative types to experience the kind of life peasants lived, in order to indoctrinate them into Mao’s vision of communism. With a planned, hierarchical government structure in which responsibility for different administrative tasks was clearly delegated, interchageability became an impossibility. This was what Mao called “the white and expert path,” as opposed to the “red and expert path,” which was essentially communist and promoted interchageability.
Mao’s complaints against Deng’s government were thus made clear. But the CCP, and many ordinary citizens, were beginning to see the benefit of efficient government, and so Mao had to find a group that would follow him, and be willing to upset the apple cart in the process. He finally settled on China’s youth, because they had never experienced a revolution, and he felt that giving them a cause, and a sense of creating their own revolution would teach them the spirit of sacrifice necessary to carry on without becoming complacent (his main complaint against their parents).
So Mao appealed to the youth of China, and he, his wife Jiang Qing, and several other high level CCP operators printed a “Little Red Book” of quotations from the writings of Chairman Mao. These books (the only book that has had more copies printed is the Christian Bible) were used by organizers of the youth groups (known as Red Guards) to inspire young people to follow the example and teachings of Chairman Mao. Mao was raised almost to the status of demigod, and was looked up to by millions of young Chinese. Mao urged them to complete the work of the revolution, left undone by their complacent parents. Schools were closed down, from grade one through graduate school. Primary and secondary schools did not reopen until 1969. Colleges and Universities did not reopen until 1972. During that time, Mao encouraged the youth to eliminate old ideas, old culture, and anything else that might be seen as linking Chinese people with their non-communist past.
He told government officials to welcome students into their offices to observe their work and criticize it in terms of its applicability to the goals of communism. Where students found the work or the people to be lacking in their devotion to the red and expert path, their criticism could become public and violent. Deng was dragged out of his office and paraded around Beijing surrounded by huge posters proclaiming he was a capitalist roader. In local areas, Red Guards would turn on, and turn in, their parents, or stand aside as other Red Guards criticised them, then kicked and beat them, sometimes to death. In some instances, possession of foreign books or newspapers was enough to convict a CCP member of being a subversive and capitalist roader, with the result that many were sent to labor camps in remote regions to do hard labor for years. In all, the Cultural Revolution became a sort of purge of the CCP that was encouraged by the top, but carried out by the rank and file – as Mao would certainly have wanted it.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution did cause chaos in China’s society and political system. However, it was a part of Mao’s evolving plan for continuous revolution, without which, he believed, a hierarchical system would reassert itself, and the fundamental equality of all people on a social and economic basis would be destroyed, leading to the sort of control by small groups of elites that the revolution had been made to destroy. Without constant revolution, the people of China would not be aware of what sacrifice meant, and how it could benefit them. They would not be a unified group serving a higher cause, but an atomized society of individuals who could be divided and conquered by insidious means used by intelligent people to enslave them. It was thus necessary to give both the experience of revolution, and constantly reap the benefits of turning society on its head so as to avoid complacency that Mao was after. It can be said, then, in that sense, that the Cultural Revolution was sometimes too successful. By the early 1970’s, in fact, even Mao had had enough, and he began to use the army to calm, then disband, the Red Guards.
Mao died in 1976, just 3 years after a rapproachement between the United States and China that would result in normalized relations by 1979. In the wake of his death, Deng Ziaoping, who had been purged from the CCP and reinstated at least three times since his time as President in the early 1960’s, emerged as the leader of China. Deng set about reforming Chinese communism during the 1980’s to bring China into the modern world. Deng’s reforms included special economic zones where a limited form of capitalism could be practiced, and where exports were the name of the game. He relaxed economic and social rules, while at the same time reaffirming that the CCP was the only legitimate political body in China.
Deng’s reforms would certainly have made Mao turn in his grave. If there is a capitalist road, Deng’s reforms definitely went down it. Their success in transforming China from a net debtor nation that could not feed all of its own people in the mid 1970’s to a nation that exports to the world in the 21st century has been nothing short of amazing. While it can certainly be extrapolated from this that communism in China may be dead, the corrollary to that analysis is that successful capitalist economies do not also have to be democratic societies. Where China will go from here, and how it will change, are matters of intense interest for the world. Still the world’s most populous country, with a growing military budget, and a powerful economy, and a desire to lead Asia into the 21st century, China is ambitious, rich, and powerful, and is likely to play a critical role on the world stage.
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