A History of Japan: From Stone Age to Superpower (68 page)

Hirohito’s humanisation, and his role as a symbol of the people, were also to be formally reinforced in the constitution a few months later. This changed his role from that of absolute monarch to that of ‘symbol of the State and of the unity of the people, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power’.
³⁵

From this point on Hirohito, now an emperor of the people, was made to go on meet-the-people tours, despite his obvious discomfort. His personal image of an avuncular ‘harmless old man’ in ill-fitting suits was designed by SCAP staff to help his acceptability both at home and abroad.
³⁶
Popular books and articles soon appeared stressing his private life and human qualities, and his scholarly achievements as a naturalist. They showed him as a peace-loving, cultured intellectual whose thoughts were always with the people – a human emperor who had been misrepresented by the military and other evil types.
³⁷
Emphasis was placed on his courage in speaking out to end the war. His failure to abdicate was made into a point of honour, for he was personally seeing through the ‘unbearable’ consequences of the Potsdam Declaration that he himself had decided to accept. In other words, he was manipulated by public relations specialists even more than his grandfather Meiji had been.

The new constitution was arguably the greatest achievement of the Occupation, not just for its humanisation of Hirohito. It stands unchanged to this day as a symbol of the democratisation of the nation – at least on the outside – despite intensifying debate about Article IX in particular. It was drafted early in February 1946 by a young and very inexperienced team of SCAP staff plus a few civilians. They worked with a control document from Washington numbered SWNCC 228.
³⁸
Under pressure from MacArthur, who had despaired of the Japanese themselves coming up with a suitable draft,
³⁹
they did the job in less than week. Their youth and inexperience in state-building made them not unlike the Meiji oligarchs. None of the team knew much about either Japan or constitutions. Even the man charged with responsibility for carrying out the task, team leader Colonel Charles Kades, admitted to having ‘zero’ knowledge about Japan.
⁴⁰
This lack of knowledge meant that the input of the chief author of the control document, Hugh Borton of the State Department,
⁴¹
became all the more important. It also meant that the Japanese themselves were able to make – as in many SCAP directives – a degree of informal input in the final product.
⁴²

Such informal Japanese input was deliberately exaggerated by SCAP, and the constitution was officially said to have been drawn up by the Japanese themselves. This fooled few people. The American origin of the constitution continues to be a source of some controversy. Nakasone Yasuhiro, a well-known nationalistic prime minister from the 1980s, does not necessarily disagree with the content of the constitution. However, he argues that true democracy cannot be imposed by an external power, but should come from within. That is, for better or for worse the Japanese should have been allowed to produce their own constitution.
⁴³
The willingness of the Occupation authorities to, if necessary,
force
freedom on the Japanese is one of the paradoxes of the constitution and the Occupation. But it is at the same time convenient, for it allows Japan to claim it is a democracy when in practice this is open to question – another case of difference between outer form and actual substance.
⁴⁴

The new parliament was to be elected democratically, but just like the Meiji oligarchs, MacArthur wanted democracy on his terms. In the April 1946 elections
⁴⁵
the incumbent prime minister Shidehara Kij
r
lost out. He was due to be replaced by Hatoyama Ichir
, who headed the newly formed Japan Liberal Party (
Nihon Jiy
t
), of
Seiy
kai
lineage. However, Hatoyama had been involved in a number of illiberal activities before the war and was not favoured by SCAP. He was purged from office on the eve
of forming his cabinet. In his stead, the presidency of the party, and hence the prime ministership, passed to Yoshida Shigeru.

When the new constitutional draft was put before the new parliament for formal approval, the section on women’s rights seems to have caused particularly lively debate. This section had become for SCAP a symbol of the new democracy, despite its extraordinary and almost cavalier back-ground – entrusted to a Russian-American ‘slip of a girl’ (in the words of one Occupation official) and hurried past the Japanese representatives on the draft steering committee without real debate.
⁴⁶
It was supported by the 39 newly elected women members of parliament – out of a then total of 466 Lower House seats – but opposed by most male politicians. Among the public, it was not just males who opposed it, but many women too, largely but not entirely due to Confucianist indoctrination that was to linger for many decades more.
⁴⁷
In any event, protests were to no avail. The emperor made his support clear. The new constitution, complete with its guarantee of equal rights for women, was finally approved after appropriate guidance and reflection. It was promulgated in November 1946, becoming effective in May 1947.

In most cases the constitution simply formally endorsed policies that had been put in place already by the Occupation through various directives. Other constitutional provisions were to be embodied in laws shortly afterwards. Its key points included:

•
the emperor made a symbol of the people;

•
sovereignty vested in the people;

•
war renounced along with maintenance of armed forces;

•
equality of the sexes;

•
guarantee of human rights in general, notably the ‘right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’;

•
guarantee of freedom of assembly, thought, belief (including religion), and expression;

•
right to vote given to all adults over 20;

•
separation of church and state;

•
guarantee of workers’ rights to organise and bargain collectively, and of minimum labour standards;

•
establishment of free and equal education;

•
abolition of the peerage;

•
establishment of an independent judiciary;

•
provision for revision of constitution (by two-thirds majority in both houses and majority public support in a referendum).

A particularly important pre-constitution directive was the
Civil Liberties Directive
of October 1945. This ordered the release of all political prisoners – including the dreaded communists. It also gave early provision for freedom of assembly, leading to a proliferation of political parties. These had been officially banned in Japan since 1941, when all parties had been merged into the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, but in practice they had been strongly discouraged for more than a decade. They now returned with a vengeance – at least numerically, with literally hundreds formed, but the great majority had few members. Oddities included the Great Japan Charcoal Production Party.
⁴⁸
Less of an oddity was the Communist Party, which had suffered severe repression in prewar Japan but now re-formed on the very day of the directive.

A clear illustration of the Occupation paradox of forcing democracy on the Japanese was that, while it was guaranteeing freedom of speech, SCAP was itself practising quite rigorous censorship.
⁴⁹
At the same time that SCAP was positively insisting films should show human freedoms and dignity, such as enlightened women and kissing in love scenes,
⁵⁰
it was also banning certain books and movies. Erskine Caldwell’s
Tobacco Road
, which showed the darker side of American society, was one example of a banned book, while samurai movies were among the 236 films condemned by SCAP as feudalistic and militaristic.
⁵¹
All references to SCAP’s involvement in government reforms were also banned.
⁵²