History of Modern Japan

“Postwar” Japan: Was it Truly Postwar?

​

The period in Japan following World War II is often referred to as postwar Japan. However, not long after the end of the war, Japan was dragged into conflicts in the Cold War. Before World War II ended, tensions were already rising between the United States and the Soviet Union. When the war ended in Europe, the Soviets decided to start fighting the Japanese in Manchuria to help end fighting on the Pacific front. This decision was unwelcome to the Americans who wanted influence in Asia when the war ended. Both the Soviets and the Americans wanted the opportunity to occupy Japan when the war finally ended, but the United States was able to get there first. This started American occupation of Japan that would inevitably make Japan an ally of the US during the Cold War. This essay will argue that the period after World War II in Japan was not strictly postwar on the grounds that Japan was drawn into the issues related to the outcome of World War II that soon sparked conflict in Korea and areas of Southeast Asia. I will argue that the decades following World War II should be referred to as the Cold War, or with another name that is more accurate to the fighting that actually occurred during this so called “Cold War”. There is a clear building of alliances and identification of an enemy. In order to make Japan an ally, the United States had to take several measures to gain favor with the Japanese and to make Japan reliant on American military protection.

​

The occupation of Japan began in 1945 after the end of the war. This was the start to a period of time where Japan was heavily influenced by the United States. There could have been many ways the US could have occupied Japan and punished them for World War II, but the US chose to be very lenient on those who could have been held responsible for the war, such as the Emperor. The US chose not to put the Emperor on trial and redefined the emperor system using the US drafted constitution, put into place in 1947 (Sakai 179). “The emperor was made to symbolize the continuity of Japanese tradition and the unity of Japanese national culture” (Sakai 179). This preserved Japanese nationalism in occupied Japan, while giving the US occupational forces a puppet to control (Sakai 180). The US also helped rebuild many of the cities it had destroyed during the war. All but five Japanese cities had been seriously firebombed during the last few months of the war, and two of those five had atomic bombs dropped on them in the last few days (Selden 10). By the time the Americans came, Japan was in desperate need of resources and repair. In the next few years, the US would invest large amounts of money to rebuild everything, including baseball stadiums.

​

The US also needed to make sure Japan would have the same political ideology as the US. They needed a stable country in Asia that would be democratic rather than communist to combat Soviet ideologies. When the occupational forces first arrived, they put many political leaders and powerful businessmen in prison. They also started breaking up the zaibatsu, the large corporations that had been responsible for most of the wartime industry. However, the result of these actions was that black markets started to appear because legitimate industry could not meet the demand of consumers. Another result was that Japan’s first elected Prime Minister was the Socialist Party’s Tetsu Katayama. This prompted the occupational forces to change to a strategy later known as “Reverse Course”. They released many of the people they had imprisoned and allowed the zaibatsu to reform. The US did everything they could to keep Japan from becoming socialist or communist.

​

There also had to be a general shift in attitude towards one another for Japan and the US to become allies. During the war, both sides had used propaganda to dehumanize the other. For Japan, the shift came as the US rebuilt their cities, allowed them to keep their culture and nationalism, and encouraged games and sports. American shift in attitude came as more propaganda was published, but towards a new enemy. The hatred and “stereotyped patterns of perception” Americans had toward the Japanese during World War II was easily adapted for new enemies of the cold war: “the Soviet and Chinese Communists, the Korean foe of the early 1950s, the Vietnamese enemy of the 1960 and 1970s, and the hostile “third world” movements in general” (Dower 14). While these groups became the hated other “Second World”, Japan became part of the good “First World”.

​

Finally, the US had to find a way to make Japan dependent on them militarily so that the US could continue its military presence in the region. This was achieved by creating the addition of the “Peace Clause” in the new Japanese constitution. This clause made it impossible for Japan to have a military and created a “pacifist” state. The 1951 San Francisco Treaty officially ended US occupation of Japan. They then signed another treaty in 1952, the US-Japan Security Treaty, that permitted the US to keep military bases in Japan. In a way, Japan was forced to sign this treaty because they would have been virtually unprotected due to their inability to form an official military. This is how the US was able to gain military influence in Asia without an official colony. This fit their new approach to postwar order which “lay not in a vision centered on the acquisition of colonies but in a global network of military bases and naval and air power that only in recent years has begun to be understood as the American way of empire” (Selden 11). In agreeing to be under the protection of the US, this put them on the American side in the Cold War. 

​

The formal remilitarization of Japan began as early as 1947. The Japanese had resumed building munitions to supply to the American armies. Even once the occupation ended, they continued supplying the US with munitions and performed mine sweeping duties during the Korean War. Japan also created the National Police Force which would later become the Self-Defence Force and used military vehicles referred to as “special vehicles” to avoid violating the “Peace Clause”. In this way, Japan was remilitarized, but forced to rely on the protection from the American military bases on their soil.

​

If Japan was remilitarized as early as 1947, and supplying the US with munitions from then on, can this period truly be called postwar? If Japan was allied to the US and helping with military duties such as providing mine sweeps, is this postwar? If the countries were divided and there was actual fighting taking place, is this postwar? Japan may have been forbidden from having a military, but this did not mean it was a pacifist state. It clearly had an allegiance and participated in the war effort. I would argue that this was a time of war and that a more proper term should be used to characterize this time period than postwar, which implies a time of peace. The proper term would in theory be the name of the war, but the Cold War is not very fitting because there was fighting involved.

 

The term postwar that we currently use to characterize the time after World War II is truly disappointing. The world was clearly entering into another period of war and conflict immediately after World War II. Are people no longer able to distinguish between periods of war and peace? Perhaps the brutality of World War II was so desensitizing that the period that follows pales in comparison. However, this does not change the fact that fighting occurred, people died, and ideologies were used as a means of distinguishing whether you are one of us, or one of them. The name used for a time period has a lot of power in how it will be remembered. We should put more effort into giving periods more accurate names for what occurred.

​

​

Sources

Dower, John W. 1986. War Without Mercy: Race and the Power of the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books.

Dower, John W. 2014. “The San Francisco System: Past, Present, Future in U.S.-Japan-China Relations.” The Asia-Pacific Journal 8, no. 2 (February): 1-41.

Sakai, Naoki. 2000. “You Asians: On the Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary.” South Atlantic Quarterly 99, no. 4 (October): 789–818. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-99-4-789.

Seldan, Mark. 2007. “A Forgotten Holocaust: US Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities and the American Way of War from World War II to Iraq.” The Asia-Pacific Journal 5, no. 11 (May): 1-29.

​