History 152: World Civilizations 2

East Asia after World War II

We’ve discussed the beginnings of the Cold War in light of the general postwar historical context – the emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as two superpowers, and the decline of the older European Great Powers of the previous hundred years – England, France, Germany, etc… This decline is fascinating in a number of different ways. However, in this lecture, I intend to talk specifically about the post war situation in East Asia. By East Asia I mean primarily China, Korea, and Japan.

The realities of Asia in the immediate postwar period were stark. The prewar international system, including trading partnerships, diplomatic relations, even the “trajectory of development” of many nations had been compromised and in some cases, like that of China, overturned. The trading relationship between Japan and China, which had been very large before the war, was non-existent in 1946. Great Britain had been removed as a major factor in the military equations of the region, as had France and the Netherlands, both of which had lost their colonies during the war. The United States had become the preeminent power in the region. This meant that, under international auspices, it was the American plan that would determine what the immediate postwar peace would look like.

However, the United States had no clear plan for Asia as a region, and very little understanding of the dynamics of Asia politically, socially, or economically. During the war, in fact, there was so little information in American academe about Asia that much had to be created in a short time. One example is the fact that ethnographies of Japanese culture were so severely lacking that the Department of Defense commissioned a young Anthropologist with no previous connection to Japan to research and write a report that could help them to understand prisoners of war and possibly predict Japanese reactions to American military and diplomatic maneuvers during the war.

Japan after WWII

The scholar, Ruth Benedict, produced the classic study The Chrysanthemum and The Sword in response to this request. The book was a marvel of speed and hard work, and served its purpose relatively well, becoming quickly one of the foundations of understanding for Americans seeking knowledge of Japanese culture and ideas. Still, it suffered from some critical flaws, as well. All of Benedict’s informants, for example, were prisoners of war. Japanese soldiers so rarely surrendered during the Pacific War that these people were potentially unusual as examples of Japanese culture (most who surrendered were caught unawares and disarmed before they could do themselves harm – captured unconscious, for example. Some few surrendered willingly. However, the shame involved with being a POW for a Japanese soldier was so great that most assumed it was as if they had died and never expected to return home). Additionally, the number of people who could speak Japanese was severely limited (even more than it needed to be, as the majority of the Japanese-American population was incarcerated in concentration camps for the duration of the war, and when they were allowed to come out, it was to fight in the European theater, where their language skills were useless – though some did serve as interpreters and translators in the Asian theatre). So understanding of Japan was severely limited.
This example holds true for many of the countries that were liberated from Japanese control at the end of the war as well. Thus, as mentioned above, it was difficult for the United States to make plans for the post-war period with limited understanding of how people in the occupied territories viewed themselves and their position vis-a-vis other Asian groups and nations.
Places like Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam had been colonies of Western nations since well before WWII (the Philippines was a U.S. possession before the war). This made their postwar position ambiguous, and limited American vision in thinking about the postwar reorganization of Asia. It seems that American planners and diplomats had an innate assumption in many cases that postwar rebuilding would be directed by the former Western colonizing power that “owned” each of these territories. This, of course, turned out to be far from accurate.
It should be no surprise, then, to find that the United States had no postwar reorganization plan for the Asia-Pacific as a region, and in fact, had clear policy goals only for Japan. This led to a haphazard approach to the creation of a new world order, and left plenty of gaps for the coming Cold War to seep into.
The policy for Japan, though inconsistent at times in its implementation, followed general U.S. postwar goals in its outline. Japan was to be turned into a primarily agrarian land of private property ownership, petty capitalism, and democratic government.
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, Japanese quickly adjusted to the fact 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 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 mistakenly) 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 backed 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. All soldiers and sailors were discharged and sent home. Japan was, for the 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 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.
Finally, to give the Japanese a sense that they did have both the need and the desire to learn these lessons from the United States, American shipments of food and clothing, American medical aid, and grassroots diplomacy was used to care for the starving, poverty-stricken postwar Japanese nation. This largess, combined with the reality in the period after 1945 that the United States was not only the single largest player in the world economy, but controlled 60% of all world trade, convinced Japanese that if occupation was unavoidable, the United States was the only acceptable occupying power, and one that could be learned from.
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.

Korea after WWII

No such plan existed for Korea. The United States initially committed all of its soldiers not occupying places taken elsewhere during the war to Japan. There was no U.S. force left for Korea, nor had their been much thought given to what needed to be done in Korea after the Japanese moved out. The United States seems to have assumed that with the absence of the Japanese, the Korean peninsula would somehow find leaders and form a government.
This was unrealistic given the history of Japanese occupation of Korea. Japanese control of the political system had been brutal. Koreans, particularly after annexation to Japan in 1905, were expected to become Japanese subjects (though they were always seen as second class people, even within the Korean peninsula). Political criticism and activism by Koreans was punished with brutal torture and execution. Koreans were expected to speak Japanese, and an active campaign to eliminate the Korean language seems to have been carried on. Korean school children were not only taught to speak Japanese, they were not allowed to speak Korean, were required to have Japanese names, and studied the same emperor-centered nationalist history of Japan that school children did in Tokyo, Kita-Kyushu, or Sapporo.
Koreans were drafted to go to Japan as members of virtual slave-labor work gangs, replacing Japanese who had been sent to war. Many Korean men were drafted into the Japanese military and fought for Japan during the entire war period, and the Japanese high command expected Korean women, willing or not, to do their part for the war effort by providing sexual services for Japanese soldiers as so-called “comfort women”.
It should come as no surprise to find that the American (lack of a) plan for Korea was doomed to fail. The government was not trusted by the Korean people and soon overthrown. Communist forces which had fought the Japanese as adjuncts to Mao Zedong’s communist forces in China were unwilling to let American-style democracy and capitalism get a foothold on the peninsula.
The United States and the Soviet Union (Russia) agreed to divide Korea along the 38th parallel into occupation zones, as Germany was, and await a United Nations brokered solution and UN-sponsored elections to unify the peninsula. Such elections never occurred. Instead, in 1948 in the southern (U.S. Occupied) zone, a military leader, Syngman Rhee, became autocratic ruler of southern Korea. The Soviet Union and China sponsored Kim Il-Sung and helped him to organize a communist administration in the north.

China after WWII

China was also in turmoil in the immediate postwar period. Before 1937, China, though it had its problems, had been expected to become Asia’s next industrialized and democratic great power. After WII, the United States’ goal was to restore that China, and to accelerate its progress toward democracy and a place in the world economy. However, Communist agitation, which had been growing before the war, and which had provided the more effective force in China against the Japanese during wartime, grew quickly after 1945. Jiang Jiexi, (Chiang Kai-Shek) and his Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT in Chinese) had been given the bulk of foreign aid during the war in order to fight the Japanese. After a number of defeats, however, and after correctly gaging the U.S. and Great Britain’s commitment to get the Japanese out of China, Jiang seems to have bided his time, and to have stockpiled most of the weapons and cash he received, engaging the Japanese only in a limited way, in order to fight the Communists at war’s end.
When the war did end, the United States gave the Japanese occupying forces orders to surrender only to Jiang’s forces, and not to the Communists. When Jiang proved unable to get his soldiers to many northern cities on time, the United States provided air transport to lift KMT soldiers to these cities in order to accept the surrender of Japanese forces. Still, the Communists were faster, and many of the Japanese forces were so poorly supplied, and so close to starvation, that they disregarded U.S. orders and surrendered to the Communists. This began to give Mao and his Communists a foothold in northern cities in China where they could begin to apply their wartime policies of wealth redistribution, which had been amazingly popular in the countryside, to the urban situation. Despite some early setbacks, the Communists learned quickly, and were able to soon gain a few cities from which they could launch their attacks on other northern cities held by the KMT. KMT weakness, combined with corruption, and a perceived distance from the Chinese people played into the Communists’ hands, and by 1948 the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) had the advantage in this civil war.

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