Post-War Setting

Immediate Post-War

At the end of World War II there must have been great confusion, and very few people probably had a very good idea about what needed to be done. Japan had never known what it meant to suffer a major defeat in the hands of a foreign enemy, let alone be completely occupied by troops from a country that they barely knew. Should the emperor remain or should he go? What kind of constitution would be suitable for a country whose democratic system was nipped in the bud only decades before? How to deal with a victor who had just laid to waste two of Japan's largest industrial centers in a matter of seconds and then presented food and blankets, lent capital for reconstruction, and opened its markets for just repayment? Where had Japan gone wrong, and what needed to be done, so that it would not happen again? And then the rubble. Reconstruction was not going to be easy.

In many ways Japan was lucky because postwar events did not allow much room for thought, neither on the part of the defeated, nor on the part of the occupying victor. In just a few years the war on the Korean peninsula had broken out, and shortly thereafter the Iron Curtain was constructed -- a new enemy was born. Time was short, decisions had to be made quickly, and the United States government was vastly underequipped to meet the challenge. Unlike in Germany where the occupying forces knew well the language and culture of the people whose land they beset, the occupying forces in Japan were almost always in the dark. As a result, with the exception of but a few top officials who were removed from office and tried under dubious circumstances, the Japanese government was largely left in tact. The same people who had kept Japan's military machine running at home, while its young men marched across the Western Pacific only years before, now formed a solid bureaucratic edifice vis-a-vis the US occupation forces. Of course, the goal of the US government was not to subjugate Japan, rather it was to rebuild it in such a way that it no longer posed a threat. But how to achieve such an awesome task, when few people within the US government barely knew the words for sake and rice, let alone how to defecate without a stool to sit on? During the war the English language had been banned in Japanese schools and censored in the Japanese press. Moreover with the exception of a few learned people, the Japanese foreign service, and a small number of overseas traders, there were few Japanese who had spoken command of the language. Communication must have been a major stumbling block for the occupied forces, and the US government must have depended enormously on the good will of its previous enemy to achieve the few important changes that it was able. Because of the relative dearth of good communication, the lines of diplomacy must have been drawn quickly and simply.

Ideally the US government would have liked to remold Japan in its own image, realistically it could have only sought the cooperation of the Japanese government in achieving certain goals which often had very little to do with Japan. So long as the Japanese government supported the United States effort to hold the communists at bay and introduced -- at least on the surface -- crucial domestic reforms, Japanese government and business leaders must have had a free reign in the determination of how post war Japan was to be rebuilt. Moreover, the US commander in charge of these reforms was himself a military general -- hardly the kind of person under whose leadership strong democratic reforms were likely to evolve. For example, when it became clear that the socialist left was beginning to amass power, Japan's labor leaders were quickly pushed aside by new reforms which brought the administration of labor unions under the control of individual firms. These reforms paved the way for life-long employment and a free, but tightly controlled secondary labor market. Indeed, it was simply too convenient for GHQ not to leave the Japanese bureaucracy largely in tact.  For what better way to exact reforms on an obedient Japanese public, than through a powerful governmental center who would kowtow to US government dictates whenever the latter became aware that its policies were not being properly implemented. Such an approach could hardly have been conducive to a fundamental change in the Japanese way of thinking.

In time many Japanese appear to have become friends with the people of the United States, but was this a friendship based on like minds; or was it one founded on a carefully described set of common policy objectives and commercial ends? In effect, it appears that Japanese government and business leaders simply redirected their military machine from a force of armed conquest to an army of industrial laborers, whose extraterritorial political destiny was determined in Washington, D.C., but whose internal political strategy,  domestic and external commercial goals, and social objectives were achieved quite independently. And so, the reconstruction must have begun.