Toshio Nishi: Unconditional Democracy: Education and Politics in Occupied Japan, 1944-1952. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1982.
Japan’s defeat in World War II resulted not merely in surrender, but unconditional surrender to the United States and its allies. The United States had imposed unconditional surrender on a regime enemy before—in 1865, in defeating the Confederate States of America. Both the Confederacy and the Empire of Japan suffered physical devastation during those wars. Both the Confederacy and the Empire of Japan were also required to change their regimes from oligarchy to republicanism, or to what Nishi calls “unconditional democracy,” requiring years of political ‘reconstruction.’ Once its political structure was reintegrated into the United States, the Southern states backslid, as local political elites allied with working-class whites to reinstitute social and political subordination of the freed slaves. In Japan, however, ‘regime change’ or political revolution proved far more successful. Nishi, a Hoover Institution research fellow and teacher at the Institute of Moralogy in Kahiwa, Japan, shows how the Americans brought that off.
He begins with a brief, useful overview of modern Japanese political history. From 1604 to 1867, the Tokugawa Shoguns ruled the country, maintaining an oligarch-‘feudal’ hierarchy within Japanese society. For most of that period, they kept Japan in a situation of splendid isolation from the West. By 1844, King William II of the Netherlands, that eminently commercial country, urged the Japanese to open their country to foreign trade, to avoid having it opened by force. In the 1840, British, French, and American naval commanders issued the same warning. Underestimating the military power now at the disposal of the Western countries, power afforded them by the technological advances made possible by modern-scientific experimental methods, the Shogunate refused to comply. In July 1853 U. S. Commodore Matthew C. Perry, President Millard Fillmore’s special envoy, arrived with an imposing naval squadron. The Japanese regime temporized, but by the following year Perry could return home with a Treaty of Peace and Amity in hand. With American English, Russian, and Dutch access to a limited number of ports, “the treaty introduced the concept of extraterritoriality to the Japanese people”; now not only present on Japanese soil but “immune from Japanese laws,” the foreigners soon provoked “bitter resentment among the Japanese” at what they took to be a form of colonization.
The lower-ranking Samurai rebelled, calling for a new imperial regime. Worried at the prospect of a military coup, the regime changed policy, now intending, as the rulers said, to “clear the barbarians out of the country.” A marriage between the presiding Shogun and a princess of the Imperial House “confirmed for the Japanese people the ultimate legitimacy of imperial governance.” But to make the expulsion of foreigners certain, the rebels waged civil war against the Shogunate, installing a new regime in 1868. “The new regime was named ‘Meiji’ or Enlightened Reign.” To the existing hierarchic “class structure based upon Confucian ethics,” the Meiji added modernization, understood as industrialization based on “adopting Western technological skills.” “The imperial government constructed new industrial plants and sold them to a few private merchants. Government protection, no competition, and great opportunities for expansions enabled those merchants to develop their firms into huge conglomerates, commonly called zaibatsu (literally, ‘financial cliques,’), that dominated the market through oligopoly.” Surely, the modern West must have “some vital secrets that were responsible for its superior technology.” “Various missions and many bright students were sent abroad to search them out.” Today’s readers will recognize the identical strategy in post-Maoist China. Upon returning to Japan, the young scholars brought back not only scientific knowledge but an ideological mishmash of Rousseau, British liberalism, Prussian statism, the various and contradictory economic notions of Malthus, Smith, Mill, and List, and the philosophic doctrines of modern historicism found in Kant, Hegel, Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer. The regime frowned upon much of this, especially Western political thought.
“Enrich the Nation! Strengthen Its Arms!” “The regime neither question nor resisted the imperialistic propensity that was inherent” in these slogans, instead “dreaming of a civilized and mighty utopia,” somehow blending Western technology with Eastern spirituality. Japan’s first prime minister, Ito Hirobumi, proclaimed bushido, the “warrior’s code,” based on what he described as “an education which aspired to the attainment of Stoic heroism, a rustic simplicity and a self-sacrificing spirit unsurpassed in Sparta, and the aesthetic culture and intellectual refinement of Athens”—none of which produced modern technology because none possessed the spirit of modern science, founded on the aspiration to conquer nature, a project imbued with neither heroism, nor rustic simplicity, nor self-sacrifice, nor aesthetic culture, nor classical philosophy. Sure enough, the Education Act of 1872, with its emphasis on vocational training and “success in life,” in many respects replaced the Confucian Analects with Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, a tract famed for its aphorism, “Heaven helps those who help themselves.” Regime control over the academic world successfully bridled those whose ‘Western learning’ had gone in politically distasteful directions.
Ideational incoherence notwithstanding, the policy worked, for a while. In 1895, Imperial Japan defeated China; ten years later, it defeated Russia. It chose the winning side in World War I. “Because of its xenophobic fascination with the West,” Imperial Japan “was extraordinarily sensitive to the military and political movements of the Western powers,” even as the Chinese regime has become, today. “This sensitivity found expression in a fervent and uncompromising nationalism; the Japanese oligarchs of the late nineteenth century had ‘rectified’ the nation’s indulgent dependence upon the West and restored the ‘real Japan,'” as militarism “began to pervade Japanese domestic and foreign policies.” After the war, the multiplying apprehensions of the Western regimes led them to sit down with the Japanese at the 1921-22 Washington Naval Conference, resulting in a naval arms limitation treaty preserving American and British superiority. This, coupled with “racist treatment of Japanese immigrants” in the United States (whose Progressive intellectuals were still under the sway of ‘race-science’ illusions), “left a lasting bitterness in the minds of the Japanese people.” “Ironically, the American treatment of Japanese immigrants matched the Japanese treatment of Koreans and Chinese people in Japan was well as in their native countries,” now dominated by Japanese military power.
The year 1931 saw the Japanese conquest of Manchuria. Stung by the League of Nations’ condemnation of the invasion, Japan withdrew from the league, the regime feeling “that they were humiliated every time they succeeded in the very game that the West had introduced to Asia.” The military and industrial oligarchy “collectively interpreted the civility of one nation toward another as a clear sign of weakness,” and convinced themselves that “foreign policy was not a matter of diplomacy but of conspiracy.” By 1937, nearly 69 percent of the Japanese gross national product was going to military expenditures. By then, the regime had abrogated the Washington Naval Agreement. The Ministry of the Army began its statement of policy with a principle drawn not from Confucius but from Heraclitus: “War is the father of creation and the mother of culture.” Since war requires the proverbial sinews of war, “the Japanese emphasis on material wealth was an ideological necessity for nation building,” and material wealth in modernity required “a literate and skillful labor force.” Nonetheless, by the aftermath of the Great War Japan saw riots sparked by inflation in rice prices caused by crop failure and hoarding.
Presiding over this regime was the Emperor, who “filled an important symbolic role for the new and insecure regime.” “At once the most personal and the most transcendent institution” in the country, the Emperor “became the ultimate political instrument that the imperial oligarchy used to solidify and legitimize its power” both at home and in its empire. The 1889 Imperial Constitution described the imperial line s one “unbroken for ages eternal” and the Emperor himself as “sacred and inviolable.” The three ruling bodies of the regime—the ministers of state, the military forces, and the Emperor’s Privy Council (the latter an extraconstitutional body) framed “the crucial policies of imperial Japan,” with the imperial legislature set to one side as “a vigorous debating society.” The Constitution “affirmed itself as ‘an immutable fundamental law,” and did indeed remain unchanged until its abrogation by the Allied occupiers in 1946.
Every regime needs its myths, and Imperial Japan nourished its share. Shinto, “the Way of the Gods,” valorized deceased emperors and empresses as gods, as “the regime instituted a cult of antiquity” to go along with its cult of modernity. The gods themselves endorsed imperial rule and Japanese nationalism in a regime in which “dissent was treason” and indeed sacrilege. “Suppression of civil liberties grew so habitual that the Government stopped justifying its actions. It interpreted the public fear, silence, and acquiescense as public tranquility.” Then as now, much nonsense was thought about economic growth somehow leading to civic freedom. On the contrary, “internal solidarity had been engineered at the expense of freedom of thought and action—freedoms that might have grown, as Japanese intellectuals of both left and right had once thought, to be inherent by products of modernization and industrialization.” “Every aspect of Japanese life was now dominated by war,” under the approving gaze of the sacred Emperor.
The big war that came next ended in disaster for the Meiji regime. The political outcome proved much less disastrous than it did for Germany because, although at the July 1945 Potsdam Conference the American president, Harry Truman, gave Stalin’s Russia control over the Kurile islands, rule over the rest of the country remained in American hands, specifically those of General Douglas MacArthur. Although the Japanese rulers who stipulated provisions for freedom of speech, religion, and thought and other “fundamental human rights” may not have “fully comprehended nor accepted these provisions,” MacArthur understood them quite clearly, and set about implementing the new ruling institutions that would secure them for the Japanese people. And of course this occurred after the United States firebombed Tokyo and dropped nuclear devices on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By early September, the Emperor ordered his people “to lay down their arms and faithfully to carry out all the provisions of instrument of surrender and the general orders issued by the Japanese government,” as he in turn had been ordered to do by the United States. For their part, General MacArthur and his occupation forces would introduce “radical policies aimed at destroying everything that was even suggestive of Japanese loyalty to the ancient regime.”
Advised by President Truman that “our relations with Japan do not rest on a contractual basis, but on an unconditional surrender,” that “your authority is supreme,” and that “you will not entertain any question on the part of the Japanese as to its scope,” MacArthur additionally, and quite sensibly, opposed any sharing of power in Japan with the Soviet regime, which had already massed troops on the 38th Parallel in Korea. Efforts to establish civilian control, or at least limitations, upon the general by the State Department proved feeble, as MacArthur’s executive powers, exercised ‘on the ground’ in Japan and not in Washington, D.C., trumped all others. When U.S. officials (quickly) saw that the Soviets were no friends of the United States, the Cold War began and MacArthur’s authority stood unchallenged. He used it to change the Japanese regime.
Immediately after the surrender documents were signed, MacArthur recalled that “Commodore Perry, ninety-two years ago,” had intended “to bring to Japan an era of enlightenment and progress by lifting the veil of isolation to the friendship, trade, and commerce of the world. But alas the knowledge thereby gained of Western science was forged into an instrument of oppression and human enslavement.” Now that “freedom is on the offensive, democracy on the march,” Japan would be turned toward “a simple philosophy embodying principles of right and justice and decency,” away from its odd regime combining feudalism (by which he meant oligarchy and civil religion) with modern science and a form of nationalism that despised human rights. Under this regime, the Japanese had become “not only politically illiterate but politically indifferent,” having had no serious opportunity for civic life. Under American occupation, Japan had now “become the world’s great laboratory for an experiment in the liberation of a people from totalitarian military rule and for the liberalization of government from within.”
The experiment was daunting, as most republican regimes had arisen only after a long apprenticeship of limited self-government—typically, some form of constitutional monarchy. MacArthur had no such luxury. On the other hand, the collapse of the Meiji regime presented a novel situation: what MacArthur called a “collapse of a faith” which “left a complete vacuum morally, mentally, and physically.” But “the plight of the Japanese, MacArthur bluntly told the Japanese, was their own fault.” His fifteen-point policy aimed at filling that vacuum. “First destroy the military power. Punish war criminals. Build the structure of representative government. Modernize the constitution. Hold free elections. Enfranchise the women. Release political prisoners. Liberate the farmers. Establish a free labor movement. Encourage a free economy. Abolish police oppression. Develop a free and responsible press. Liberalize education. decentralize the political power. Separate church from state.” He also called for Christian missionaries to establish themselves in Japan. Some 10 million Bibles were distributed, as MacArthur hoped Christianity’s “spiritual repugnance of war” would take hold among the people. Conversion rates were unimpressive, however. More effective was his use of athletics to teach rules of fairness and to redirect the strong Japanese sense of honor to a peaceful form of competition.
These types of civil-social forms of rule were indispensable supplements to the institutional revolution. The Japanese needed to assimilate republican forms of government, learn to use them, habituate themselves to them. First among these efforts was demilitarization. He purged the government of its military men and proclaimed former prime minister and army general Tojo Hideki “Japan’s first war criminal.” Tojo gave MacArthur unwitting assistance by failing at his suicide attempt, intensifying his dishonor by using a pistol instead of the traditional samurai sword. By October 1946, after a process of screening by the Japanese government, MacArthur had removed 186,000 employees from the national government; all military personnel were barred from holding public office. He also ordered a national election for a new, and newly-empowered House of Representatives. Crucially, Japanese voters avoided candidates from the far left and the far right. By April of the following year, old-regime elements had also been purged from the local governments in time for the country’s first election of provincial and municipal executives and assemblymen. In May, Japan had its first prime minister elected by the people, the democratic socialist Katayama Tetsu.
On the religious front, “Japanese conservatives worried that without Shinto and imperial sovereignty japan would never be strong again.” To counter this sentiment, MacArthur redoubled his efforts to sever all connection between Temple and State. “One conspicuous reason for the ferocity of GHQ’s attack on the former state religion was that the origins of the imperial system and of Shinto were virtually indistinguishable,” the emperor being “the object and primary practitioner of Shinto rituals,” combining the functions of High Priest and principal deity. MacArthur and his team described this as nothing short of “ideological tyranny so insidious and all-pervasive as to reduce to impotence all opposition, whether of individual or of ideas.”
The first step to economic reform was equally draconian. The U.S. government initially reduced the Japanese to “a subsistence economy” in order to “accelerate the disintegration of the Japanese Empire and guarantee the future paralysis of any potential Japanese war machines” while effectively destroy socioeconomic hierarchies which supported the old regime. Consequently, “MacArthur swiftly began dissolving zaibatsu, those family-centered financial conglomerates that had played such a part in the development of Japanese business and commerce” as modern versions of feudal fiefs. To avert mass starvation, MacArthur distributed food to the Japanese; hunger took much of the remaining ‘fight’ out of them. But the Americans saw that a subsistence economy could and should not be maintained for long, concluding “that the risk of a strong, capitalistic Japan becoming a future military threat to the United States was less than that of an economically feeble Japan becoming a prey to international communist encroachment.” The newly-formed Central Intelligence Agency understood that the nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-Shek was on the brink of defeat in China, with Mao Zedong’s Communist Party poised to take over rule of the mainland. For their part, Japanese civilian leaders “understood that the United States needed Japan as much as they themselves wanted American money and security.” The two sides began to bargain.
A substantial spur to Japanese economic recovery was MacArthur’s land reform; from the American “standpoint of making every Japanese laborer a good capitalist, his land reform was brilliant policy.” Landlords were forced to turn their lands over to “those farmers who actually cultivated it.” Unlike Russia and China, Japan saw no inroads by the communists in the countryside. Since communist organizers had used peasants in other countries as a crucial element in their revolutions, this reform contributed substantially to ruining communist hopes for a ‘people’s revolution’ directed by Stalinists.
Despite MacArthur’s efforts to present himself as a mere guide to the Japanese on “the road to democracy,” they “knew he was over and above even the emperor.” This meant that MacArthur’s long-term presence in the country could not be justified, if Japan was truly to adapt its way of life to a republican regime. For a few years, however, the militarist ethos the Meiji regime had instilled in the people worked in the Americans’ favor; the fact that MacArthur and the Americans had won and their leaders had lost valorized the Americans and dishonored the Japanese militarists. As far as many Japanese were concerned, there was no objection to starting the war, but losing it was a disgrace. It would take another generation to substitute that ethos for a commercial-republican one.
Accordingly, press freedom in postwar Japan most immediately meant freedom from old-regime propaganda, and emphatically not “destructive criticism of the Allied Powers” or “the Allied forces of occupation.” MacArthur did abrogate prewar laws and ordinances “that subjugated the press” to the Japanese government, an important move in the long run. On balance, “American democracy, no matter how one interprets it, offered far more intellectual freedom and political liberties to the Japanese people than they had ever experienced before 1945.”
Nishi describes MacArthur’s dismissal of “the possibility of a spontaneous development of Japanese democracy” as self-righteous. It was hardly that, but rather a matter of common sense. “The Japanese leaders were more comfortable with the familiar tyranny of the oligarchic cliques than with the tyranny of the ignorant masses, which was what they imagined popular sovereignty to be.” As MacArthur therefore saw, “We could not simply encourage the growth of democracy. We had to make sure that it grew.” There was no time for Burkeanism. Accordingly, MacArthur set the Japanese to writing a new, republican constitution. When the first draft came back looking rather like a Japanese version of the Southern ‘Redeemers’ policies in post-Reconstruction America, the general rejected it. “Their skill in fashioning facades involving no structural remodeling” of the old regime institutions “was notable,” the general remarked, tartly and accurately. The Japanese wanted to continue the emperor’s anointment as a “supreme and inviolable” being. The last Meiji prime minister stated that the surrendering regime accepted the Potsdam Declaration with the proviso that the Emperor’s prerogatives would be infringed in no way, but by New Year’s Day 1946 the Emperor himself “denied his divinity.”
That was an indispensable beginning, but regime change requires the right institutional framework, not just declarations. MacArthur ordered his staff to write a constitution consistent with the regime America wanted. When “the Japanese Government finally realized that MacArthur had no interest in compromising his version of what the United States wanted—or what Japan in future should want,” the government split into supporters of the new Constitution and its enemies. The supporters prevailed, partly because MacArthur at least granted the emperor status as “the symbol of the State,” whereas other American proposals would have deprived him of even that. After Emperor Hirohito proclaimed it law, MacArthur could call it “the most important accomplishment of the Occupation,” and so it has proved to be. Aside from the desacralization of the emperor, the main features of the new constitution were elimination of kolutai, the imperial national policy; the guarantees of civil and political liberties; and Article 9, the “no-war clause.”
Why did it work? Nishi remarks that one must not assume “that the Japanese [were] so rooted in tradition that they could hardly change their political orientation or preferences.” After all, the Meiji regime itself dated back only to 1868, less than a century before the Americans arrived, and the aspiration to modernize had gripped Japanese elites a couple of decades before that. Indeed, “the celebrated Meiji Constitution of 1889 itself was an idealized version of Prussian constitutional absolutism”—that is, an importation from the West. Moreover, “Japanese reality during the 1940s was a nightmare, the end of which encouraged a mood of idealism and risk taking in conqueror and conquered alike.” In the event, whereas “Japanese conservatives attempted to preserve the structure of imperial sovereignty” by “inject[ing] some democratic practices into it to placate domestic and foreign suspicions,” MacArthur “did the reverse,” abolishing imperial sovereignty and “inject[ing] undemocratic practices for the sake of achieving democratic ends.” MacArthur prevailed because the Japanese people had had enough of the regime of imperialist oligarchs. “The vast majority of the people welcomed the substance of the new Constitution.”
Like all serious political founders, MacArthur understood he who rules the education system rules the country. In his own generation, American Progressives had done just that. Having framed a new constitution for Japan, “MacArthur had to teach the Japanese people how to use it in their daily lives.” Accordingly, “education in occupied Japan was fiercely political; to the U.S. government, it was the best instrument for achieving basic ideological change,” as it had been for American Progressives and indeed for the American Founders. Ergo, “no nationalism, no militarism, and no communism in Japanese education.” The need for this was urgent, because the Meiji regime had done such a thorough job of promoting its own ruling principles that “the word ‘intellectual’ in Japanese society automatically connoted ‘political.'”
Because the Meiji had promoted what amounted to a ‘success’-based ideology, its failure prepared the Japanese to respect “the invincible Americans.” General MacArthur made no effort to dissuade them of that sentiment. He used his absolute authority “not only to improve but actually to revolutionize the Japanese way of thinking about self-government,” to “constitutionally prevent the Japanese from fighting another war in the future” by “disarm[ing] the Japanese mind.” By October 1945, military training in the schools was abolished, military officers on school staffs were removed, and plans for reeducating teachers were formed. But that was not enough, as the Japanese Minister of Education dragged his feet. “The Americas understood [his] covert intention: to keep imperial sovereignty alive” in the minds of Japanese youth. To counter his efforts, MacArthur commanded that the Japanese government “revise the content of all educational instruction ‘in harmony with representative government, international peace, the dignity of the individual, and such fundamental human rights as the freedom of assembly, speech, and religion.'” More, the educational system would become a sort of permanent ‘truth and justice commission,’ informing students, teachers and the public about “the part played by militaristic leaders, their active collaborators, and those who by passive acquiescence committed the nation to war with the inevitable result of defeat, distress, and the present deplorable state of the Japanese people,” as one directive put it. Since “the identification of the individual with the state was one of the primary themes” in Japanese education, “serv[ing] as a powerful reinforcement for the doctrine of state supremacy,” MacArthur’s education emphasized individualism based on human rights inherent in the human person as such. As for modern science, already esteemed by the old regime, MacArthur’s educational system taught that, contrary to the militarists, “a scientific attitude…was a peaceful attitude,” one rightly regarding “Japanese mythology, folklore, and even a sense of historical continuity [to be] something shameful and tainted with defeat.”
Reforms extended to the Japanese language itself. The Japanese people had used a combination of three forms of writing: Katakana, the simplest form; hiragana, a “slightly more complex” form; and kanji, a “visibly more complicated” form. Robert King Hall, chief of the Education Section of the Planning Staff for the Occupation of Japan at the Civil Affairs Staging Area, strongly recommended the use of the simplest form of written language in the educational system—in obvious contradiction to the spirit of aristocratic/oligarchic education embodied in kanji. After struggling to master the complexities of kanji, Hall argued, Japanese students “may lack the linguistic abilities essential to democratic citizenship,” such as reading “daily newspapers and popular magazine.” Nishi objects that Germany and Italy, Japan’s allies, had had vernacular languages for a long time, and turned to fascism anyway, this misses Hall’s point. German and Italian fascism were mass movements, ‘democratic’ and indeed demagogic. Further, to say that a vernacular or ‘democratized’ language does not necessarily result in a regime of democratic republicanism does not require one to deny that a highly complex language inclines the educated classes toward attitudes that fit an aristocratic civil society.
The Americans introduced a final, structural reform to Japanese education. Since “the interests of individual human beings were not to be subordinated to those of the state,” control of education needed to be devolved from the central government to local school boards. Americans and Japanese alike “understood well that America-initiated school boards would take away power and prestige from the central government in Tokyo.” Problems arose because many Japanese didn’t understand the process, having never governed themselves at the local level.
By May 1946, the Japanese Ministry of Education effectively surrendered. In their Guide to New Education in Japan, they identified five defects of “Japanese outlook and character,” all deriving from the “general defects” of the “body politic and especially “in the wrong way of thinking of the people themselves.” First, they understood that “Japan is not sufficiently modernized,” by which they meant that the Japanese had “learned how to use steam engines and electrical apparatus” without “adequately learn[ing] the scientific spirt which had built these things.” Teachers must “make better use of our abilities to embrace and assimilate and take in the fundamental principles of Western Civilization, digest these principles and be able to use them as our own.” Second, “The Japanese Nation does not sufficiently respect Humanity, Character, nor Individuality”; since human beings have “free will,” each one has “a nature peculiar only to that particular person.” Education should proceed on this assumption. Related to this point and thirdly, “The Japanese lack critical spirit and are prone to obey authority blindly.” They must learn to reject “the idea that officials are better than civilians.” Fourth, “the Japanese people are scientifically backward and have a poor sense of logic.” Those who “are inclined to obey authority blindly” are also those who “did not have the ability to think logically.” To think logically, to be capable of analyzing policy proposals rationally, was the sine qua non of democratic self-government. Finally, “the democratic people are self-satisfied and narrow-minded,” taking “an arrogant and egoistic attitude toward those below them who are blindly obedient to their superiors.” Japanese racism and religious prejudice result from this unwarranted self-conceit. The May 1947 Fundamental Law on Education reinforced these policy changes, which were also regime changes.
As the Japanese people began to grow “restless with the Occupation” (“Would it never end?” they wondered), the American government recommended that MacArthur negotiate a permanent peace treaty for the Cold War era. MacArthur initially demurred, but when the Korean War began in June 1950, and the purge of communists intensified, he inched toward such a settlement, completed in 1951. The occupation itself ended the following year.
Nishi concludes that although “the Japanese people had to swallow many alien ideas and practices,” “much to their surprise…the people found these ideas and practices far from unpalatable.” “The Japanese people discovered democracy to be a pleasant, efficient, and even commercially profitable way of life.” The one remaining shadow over the new regime—which has endured nearly as long as the Meiji regime—”is best described as a craving for the aesthetic simplicity of vertical loyalty,” exploited by MacArthur, “unintentionally perpetuated” by him, and persisting as “a powerful undercurrent of indigenous emotion that runs against the tide of democracy.”
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