Socialist Action /May 2000
The Destruction, Resurrection, and Eclipse
of Japan
By PAUL SIEGEL
John W. Dower's "Embracing Defeat" won the Pulitzer Prize and
the National Book Award for 1999 non-fiction. These prizes were richly deserved.
"Embracing Defeat" explains much about what has made present-day
Japan what it is-and indeed, although Dower does not explicitly draw such
conclusions, about what has made the contemporary world what it is. Marxists
and other radical critics of capitalism can learn many valuable lessons
from it.
Dower, generally conceded by scholars in the field to be the foremost
historian of post-war Japan, has engaged in extraordinary research, using
Japanese archives, academic studies, and forms of popular culture-newspapers,
films, song lyrics, best-selling books, private correspondence-to exhibit
swift-changing currents and cross-currents of Japanese thought and feeling
under the American occupation.
Acclaimed by fellow historians, his book, vividly written, makes fascinating
reading for the non-specialist as well as the specialist.
The American occupation authorities were utterly taken aback by the enormity
of the destruction that had been wreaked on Japan and marvelled that the
Japanese government had held out as long as it did. They were equally surprised
by the response of the Japanese people, not at all in keeping with the notion
put forward by their "experts" of a people that had been thoroughly
robotized by the governing militarists and incapable of acting on its own.
Their lives shattered, exhausted, despairing, disgusted by the plunder
of military stockpiles and the diverting of public resources by members
of the military and civilian elite in the wake of defeat, the Japanese masses
rejected the ultranationalistic concepts with which they had been indoctrinated.
A Japanese police report expressed fear of the mass mood as one of "grave
distrust, frustration, and antipathy toward military and civilian leaders."
The Japanese, therefore, welcomed as liberators the Americans-who, determined
to smash the Japanese military machine, promised peace and democracy. The
occupation authorities, however, while maintaining absolute power, ruled
through the existing governmental and social elite, purged of the militarists.
Although the occupying authority, intent on "rooting out" militarism
through "democratization," instituted many democratic reforms,
the huge occupation force by its own existence negated these reforms.
"While the victors preached democracy," Dower points out, "they
ruled by fiat; while they espoused equality, they themselves constituted
an in- violate privileged cast. ... [A]lmost every interaction between victor
and vanquished was infused with intimations of white supremacism."
At the same time that the Supreme Commander, as General MacArthur was
called, spoke about freedom of the press, his headquarters maintained a
tight censorship of the Japanese media. They were not permitted to criticize
occupation policies, to say anything negative about the victors, or even
to mention that the censorship existed.
When a newspaper editorial stated that "the way to express the gratitude
of the Japanese people toward General MacArthur for his efforts to democratize
the nation is not to worship him as a god," the newspaper was, although
it had gotten through the censorship, confiscated by the American military
police.
The Supreme Commander ruled in a kind of double sovereignty with Emperor
Hirohito. During the war MacArthur had been governed in his propaganda directed
to the Japanese people by an internal memorandum that counseled "the
driving of a wedge between the Emperor and the people on the one hand, and
the Tokyo gangster militarists on the other."
In this way, it continued, "calm-minded conservatives may see the
light and save themselves before it is too late." The "calm-minded
conservatives," Dower explains, is a reference to "elderly conservative
elites, including titled scions of the high nobility, who had controlled
the country before the military gained ascendancy."
Now MacArthur was governed by a memorandum that counseled that "in
the interest of peaceful occupation and rehabilitation of Japan, prevention
of revolution and communism, all facts ... be marshalled ... to establish
an affirmative defense" and "prevent indictment and prosecution
of the Emperor as a war criminal."
To defend the Emperor for the occupation authority's purposes, the ancient
means by which monarchs through the centuries had shrugged off responsibility
for their actions-they had been deceived by "bad advisers"- was
to be used.
Actually, there was by no means the single-minded popular devotion to
the Emperor that MacArthur's advisers, alleged experts on "the Oriental
mind," claimed. Field-level intelligence agents stated in the early
months of the occupation: "People are more concerned with food and
housing problems than with the fate of the Emperor." Other intelligence
reports said things to the same effect and observed that the Emperor "has
even become the `point' of many jokes."
Toward the occupation itself popular feeling was mixed: there was gratitude
for the Allies having ended the nightmare of war and having ejected the
militarists from the government, mixed with resentment for the arrogance
of the lordly conquerors.
This resentment emerged after the occupation in articles in mass-circulation
magazines that recounted instances of such arrogance. In one notorious incident
American MPs boarded a commuter train and subjected the women on it to a
humiliating examination for evidence of venereal disease, as if to proclaim
that they regarded all Japanese women as whores.
In response to the democratic reforms of the occupation authority, the
Japanese almost immediately, to the dismay of the authority, went far beyond
them. Unions grew extremely rapidly, from 380,000 members at the end of
1945 to one million a month later to 5.6 million at the end of 1946 and
to 6.7 million in the middle of 1948. Two-thirds of the unions were dominated
by the Communist Party and the rest by Socialists.
Even more alarming was the "production control" movement in
which, independently of the trade-union officialdom, workers seized control
of factories and continued production without turning the products over
to the owners until the owners acceded to their wage demands.
However, "production control"-which Marxists have traditionally
called "workers' control"-was more than a means to get higher
wages; it reflected a suspicion that factory owners were purposely holding
back production to contribute to the economic crisis and thereby sabotage
democratization.
The economic crisis and food scarcity brought forth a huge demonstration
of 250,000 people on "Food May Day," 1946, on the plaza in front
of the imperial palace. May Day demonstrations, stimulated by the Russian
Revolution, had been held from 1920 until 1936, after which they were suppressed.
The Communist Party of Japan and the Marxist intellectuals had almost
entirely succumbed to patriotic hysteria during the war. Only a small number
of Communists-in prison or in the Soviet Union or the Communist-held areas
of China-had maintained their opposition to the war.
Now there was a resurgence of Marxist influence, but the Japanese Communist
Party, while denouncing "militarists and war criminals," proclaimed
that it was taking as "its immediate and fundamental goal the achievement
through peaceful and democratic methods of our country's bourgeois democratic
revolution, which is already in progress."
In accordance with this orientation, the organizing committee of "Food
May Day" expressed its "sincerest appreciation for the measures
taken by the Allied Powers to liberate the people" and petitioned the
Emperor, as "the holder of sovereign power" and "the highest
authority," to repudiate those who had driven Japan to destruction.
Hirohito refused to accept the petition, and MacArthur issued a statement
condemning the "excesses of disorderly minorities," in a phrase
that recalled the war-time laws that his headquarters had annulled six months
before. Mark Gayn, an American journalist on the scene, reported: "There
was consternation in union headquarters and in the offices of the left-wing
parties. In conservative quarters, there was undisguised jubilation."
Even after the statement by MacArthur, however, the unions, responding
to a galloping inflation and government threats to dismiss large numbers
of public employees, made plans for a general strike. MacArthur now announced
that he would not allow "the use of so deadly a social weapon"
and forced the unions to call off the strike.
A "Red purge," in which the occupation authorities, the Japanese
government, and corporation managers worked together, was embarked on. Eleven
thousand activist public employees were dismissed, and after the Korean
war began 10-11,000 workers in private industry were also dismissed. "Side
by side with the 'Red purge' came the 'depurge'-the return to public activity
of individuals previously purged 'for all time' for having actively abetted
militarism and ultranationalism."
A particularly egregious case was that of Colonel Tsuji, who had played
a leading role in "the Bataan death march" of American prisoners
of war in the Philippines. Tsuji lived in hiding with the knowledge of General
Willoughby, MacArthur's chief of counter-intelligence and the former commander
of American troops in the Philippines, who was gathering together a corps
of anti-communist officers. He was pardoned in a "Christmas amnesty."
The "Red purge" and the "depurge" weakened labor
and the left parties. Moreover, the economic crisis was resolved by the
boom resulting from the U.S. "special procurements" policy during
the Korean war and the post-war reconstruction of South Korea.
The United States had earlier intended to restrict the Japanese economy
to the production of non-competitive cheap knickknacks, but now it promoted
the growth of heavy industry, production that doubled in two and a half
years.
The "Japanese model" of capitalism-governmental "administrative
guidance" of business-had its origin in the Japanese war-production
of World War II, but it was given impetus during this later period by the
occupation authority, which permitted the bureaucracy to remain an unaccountable
power and key banks to control the financing of industry.
"In later decades," comments Dower, "when alarm concerning
'the Japanese threat' arose in the United States and elsewhere, the binational
genesis of this state-led, keiretsu [powerful business and banking concentrations]
dominated economy was all but forgotten." So is it now forgotten when
the industrial policy of Japan, once feared, is being assigned the blame
for Japan's long recession.
Reading Power's book brings out sharply a number of things. We all know
the immense destructiveness of modern war, the potential of which is now
far greater than it was in World War II, but "Embracing Defeat"
exhibits it in human terms, not merely in statistical terms.
At the same time it shows the great resilience of the human spirit and
the rapid changes in mass consciousness that are possible. Even after radicalism
has been pronounced dead, it revives in response to major events.
"Embracing Defeat" shows, furthermore, how modern technology
and technological know-how can revive the economy of a nation that has been
plunged into the utmost devastation. But it also shows how this "miracle"
does not eliminate the contradictions of capitalism that drive it to a new
impasse.
And, finally, the book shows, through the negative examples of the Japanese
Communist Party and other left parties, the need for a revolutionary party,
steeled in struggle and possessing the confidence of the workers, to evaluate
the situation correctly and lead the masses to victory.
Socialist Action /May 2000 |