A History of Japan: From Stone Age to Superpower (69 page)

School textbooks were among the targets of SCAP censorship, for MacArthur too knew the value of these as tools of indoctrination. He ordered the content of all texts and instruction to be revised along democratic lines. Texts such as
Kokutai no Hongi
were replaced with American texts such as the
History of the War
, compiled by SCAP staff.
⁵³
Unsuitable persons were removed from the area of education in October 1945, in an early display of purging. The American 6-3-3-4 system (six years’ elementary, three years’ junior high, three years’ senior high, and four years’ tertiary) was introduced. To avoid excessive centralisation, regional authorities were empowered to appoint their own school board officials by election. To remove prewar elitism, four-year universities were greatly increased in number and based on the general American model.

Reforms covered the economy too. A land reform bill of 1946 allowed farmers to own as much land as they could farm themselves – usually around 3 hectares – and to rent out a small amount of land in their village of residence. Rents were controlled, tenants’ rights enforced, and various monitoring mechanisms set up. The government itself bought up land from absentee landowners and redistributed it to the farmers themselves.
As a result of these various measures, tenancy was reduced from almost 50 per cent to around 10 per cent.
⁵⁴

Another major economic reform, seen as being in the interests of both demilitarisation and democratisation, was the move to dissolve the
zai-batsu
. At the end of the war the ‘Big Four’ – Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda – controlled between them 25 per cent of Japan’s paid-up capital, and six lesser
zaibatsu
a further 11 per cent. These ten were the principal targets for reform.
⁵⁵
Measures taken from late 1945 included dissolving
zaibatsu
holding companies, banning
zaibatsu
family members from working in their own companies, preventing
zaibatsu
from making claims on the government for wartime purchases, removing excess wartime profits, and distributing
zaibatsu
stock on a wider basis. In April 1947 the Anti-Monopoly Law was passed, and some 325 companies in the industrial and service sectors were potentially targeted as having excessive concentrations of power.
⁵⁶

In the area of labour,
⁵⁷
a series of laws between December 1945 and April 1947 carried through the provisions of the constitution, but with some restrictions such as on the right to strike where public welfare was endangered. As a result of these new rights and freedoms, labour union membership increased dramatically from a prewar (1936) high of some 420,000 to about seven million by mid-1948. The rate of union membership of the workforce was to peak in 1949 at 56 per cent.

However, it was also in the area of labour that one of the most serious incidents of the Occupation occurred. This was the banning by MacArthur of a general strike planned for 1 February 1947. Communists played a major part in events. Among other things it was a communist, Ii Yashiro, who was the main leader of the planned strike. MacArthur, along with many Japanese government leaders such as Yoshida Shigeru, had been worried from the outset about releasing communists from imprisonment. Those released included the influential Tokuda Ky
ichi. He was soon joined by another powerful figure, Nosaka Sanz
, who returned from China early in 1946. The poor state of the economy immediately after the war was already a potential source of unrest, and there were a number of large demonstrations and strikes in 1946. The communists seemed able to use this to their advantage. They did not enjoy much success in the formal political arena, but waged their campaign rather in the workplace.

Though membership of the Communist Party itself was small, it was growing,
⁵⁸
and the same applied to support for communism among the general public. In December 1945 circulation of the communist daily newspaper
Akahata
(‘Red Flag’) was 90,000, but by February 1946 this had risen to 250,000.
⁵⁹
The communists themselves were also disproportionately vocal and active. They expressed open defiance of the emperor and criticism of the government. They occupied leading positions in many unions, and seemed to be deliberately agitating and using strikes and other disputes for political purposes.
⁶⁰
There were soon fears, both in Japan and overseas, that Japan was – in a phrase popularised by Yoshida – being ‘submerged in a sea of red flags’.
⁶¹
Yoshida also inflamed the situation by calling communist union leaders ‘bandits’.
⁶²

The planned general strike would have involved almost three million public servants and many millions more from the private sector. MacArthur was reluctant to intervene but felt he could not permit such massive disruption and defiance. Just hours before the strike, after discussions with Ii and others had failed, he banned it.

Again in a manner reminiscent of the Meiji oligarchs, MacArthur immediately balanced this act of authoritarianism with an act of democracy.
⁶³
He called for another general election to let the public express their feelings. This was held in April, and to his relief the communists, who had been expecting to increase their seats from five to at least 20, actually lost support. They emerged with only four seats.

They were not the only losers. The public was not entirely happy with Yoshida, who was widely seen as having too much in common with the prewar types who had led Japan to disaster. His cabinet fell, to be replaced by a coalition led by the Socialist Party under the Christian Katayama Tetsu. The Socialist Party was another party to have suffered prewar bans, though it had not been treated with quite the same harshness as the Communist Party. The other coalition members included the newly formed Democratic Party (
Minshut
), of
Minseit
descent. MacArthur too was not always at ease with Yoshida, and gave considerable support to Katayama’s cabinet. Among other things he openly expressed his satisfaction at seeing a Christian prime minister in Japan.

By mid 1947, then, most of the Occupation’s plans for the demilitarisation and democratisation of Japan were set in place, both formally and informally. The process had been smoother than many had expected, though the activities of the communists and the need to ban the general strike were unfortunate. Public peace of mind was also still less than perfect, and the economy was still very weak. Utopia still seemed attainable, but it did seem to have a few clouds on its horizon.

6.2 Cold War Realities Reshape the Dreams

The banning of the general strike was an opportunity for reflection, for both government and public, both American and Japanese. Ever since the Occupation started the Japanese government had been uneasy about the pace and intensity of democractic reforms. Yoshida referred to an ‘excess of democracy’.
⁶⁴
The public too, having been carried away by the first flushes of reform, were now starting to think along the same lines.
⁶⁵
Certainly, they preferred freedom to repression, but there had to be a balance between freedom and control. One could not allow freedom to become abused and end up as anarchy. Democracy was a powerful, dangerous beast. It could bring blessings, but it needed to be handled carefully and kept under control.

The American government was also alarmed, and so too was the American public. During 1947 there was open criticism in the American media of Occupation policy, accusing it of bungling the job, of promoting too much democracy and not enough economic recovery. Those who were not New Dealers were particularly quick to criticise – including within SCAP headquarters.
⁶⁶

The year 1947 also saw the term ‘Cold War’ coined, to refer to the ideological, economic, and political division between the Free World and the Communist World. Fear of a major confrontation with the communists underlay much of the change in American mood about Japan and indeed the world. Korea was already divided into communist
vs
non-communist zones, and Germany was just about to be. In China, Chiang Kai-shek’s forces were on the verge of being driven into Taiwan by the communists under Mao. Eastern Europe was coming increasingly under communist control. It was important that Japan remained a bulwark of the Free World.

But the Free World could not exist just as an idea. It needed power and substance. In the postwar world, where all-out military confrontation with its fear of nuclear consequences was to be avoided where possible, this meant primarily economic power. Japan in 1947 was far from being an economic power. Production was still not even at half its prewar levels, and inflation was running at over 200 per cent per annum. It needed fixing, and MacArthur was perhaps not the man for this particular job.

Early in 1948 Washington sent George Kennan of the State Department on a fact-finding mission to Japan. Kennan had for some time been stressing the need to contain communist expansion. He concluded that the Occupation reforms to date were ‘paving the way for a Communist takeover’. He recommended instead that: ‘The regime of control by SCAP over the Japanese government should be relaxed. … The emphasis should be shifted from reform to economic recovery’.
⁶⁷
Recommendations by other trouble-shooters, such as Under-Secretary of the Army William Draper (an investment banker), were similar.
⁶⁸
As a result, American policy for Japan from 1948 switched to an emphasis on economic recovery. This meant stopping certain existing policies, and introducing certain new ones.
⁶⁹

Purges of business leaders were stopped, for it seemed foolish to remove capable people. Of the 200,000 individuals who were purged during the Occupation, only 3,000 were from business, and even then mostly only partially or temporarily.