Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

Chapter 10 further explores Emperor Hirohito’s role in the reformed, postwar society. The MacArthur-led initiative to rebrand the emperor as a symbol of peace and democracy took approximately a year after the surrender. This campaign included Hirohito’s national tour visiting all prefectures but Okinawa and meeting his former subjects. The emperor even dressed in a Western-style suit during his tours. More important, by the summer of 1946, Hirohito was exempt and formally exonerated from all war responsibility, unlike many of his accomplices.

In addition to publicly rebranding Hirohito, there were his formal statements about his changed status. The emperor published a New Year declaration in which he appeared to have renounced his quasi-divine status:

I stand by my people. I am ever ready to share in their joys and sorrows. The ties between me and my people have always been formed by mutual trust and affection. They do not depend upon mere legends or myths. Nor are they predicated on the false conception that the emperor is divine, and that the Japanese are superior to other races and destined to rule the world (314).

Hirohito himself downplayed the importance of this statement, calling it a semantic gesture. After all, the emperor was never divine in the Western sense, to begin with. The author calls Hirohito’s transformation “becoming human.”

The response to Hirohito’s declaration was mixed. American circles welcomed it, whereas some Japanese felt a strong sense of betrayal. Most Japanese citizens sought to maintain the imperial institution, and changing its status and meaning was shocking to some: “This myth of an unbroken imperial line tracing back to the sun goddess—around which many of the emperor’s unique sacerdotal activities revolved—was soon challenged at the grass-roots in other ways” (306).

The subject of the emperor’s war responsibility was debated in Japan at the highest levels of power. For instance, the Prime Minister Naruhiko Higashikuni—himself of imperial lineage—argued that Hirohito was not responsible for the Pearl Harbor attack that pulled the United States into the war. 

The Tokyo War Crime Trials (the Military Tribunal for the Far East) took place between 1946 and 1948. They were a counterpart of the Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946) in Europe. A number of Japanese military officials received death sentences for such crimes as the Rape of Nanking and for the mistreatment of Allied POWs. Dower, however, uses this important legal event as a background for the debates around the war responsibility of Emperor Hirohito.

While the idea was simply incomprehensible in the Japanese court circles, the subject of Hirohito’s potential abdication was discussed. For instance, Prime Minister Higashikuni believed it best for Hirohito to step down. Despite his appreciation of the imperial heritage, Christian educator Shigeru Nanbara was also convinced that Hirohito should step down. Nanbara’s argument had moral implications. In contrast, MacArthur believed that imperial abdication was unnecessary. Ultimately, the SCAP and several Japanese officials worked together to ensure not only that would Hirohito avoid trial but also that other witnesses would not implicate him during the war-crime tribunal. Hirohito was exonerated approximately a year after the formal surrender.

Formal exoneration was one piece of the puzzle in the American-led rebranding of Hirohito. During his extensive public tours, the emperor was often accompanied by the predominantly white American occupation army. He wore a Western-style suit and was more accessible to his former subjects than ever before. Some of the sites that Hirohito visited included factories and repatriation camps. The author underscores the importance of this transformation’s publicity:

In the two decades between his ascension to the throne in 1926 and the end of the war, Emperor Hirohito played an increasingly prominent public role as the commander in chief—and unassailable ideological center—of his country’s runaway militarism. His most memorable public appearances involved reviewing the imperial forces from his handsome horse, White Snow (332).

Despite the overall support for Japan’s imperial institution, the “rapid twists and turns of imperial politics” at this time were bewildering to many ordinary Japanese (335). Some felt outright betrayed. Citing Shattered God (Kudakareta Kami) (1983), the diary of Kiyoshi Watanabe, Dower examines the emperor’s rapid transformation from a godlike creature into a human; Watanabe was a young soldier who returned home to face the defeat of his country. He felt angry and betrayed by the transformed Emperor’s behavior, which, in his view, subverted Japanese traditions. Watanabe also found the relationship between Hirohito and the American conquerors extremely demeaning. He was a “man consumed by rage having been betrayed by his sovereign” (339). 

Early on, MacArthur set in motion “probably the single most important accomplishment of the occupation” (345-56): drafting a new constitution for Japan to replace the imperial-era Meiji counterpart. SCAP decided to change Japan’s constitution suddenly without announcing it publicly or holding debates. Indeed, MacArthur presented a draft to the “completely unsuspecting Japanese government” (373). The author believes that MacArthur acted with such urgency because he considered a new constitution “essential to protect the emperor” (361).

In Chapter 12, the author discusses the extent to which the upper echelons of the American occupation force shaped the language and content of Japan’s postwar national charter. One of the central aspects of the constitution was Japan’s demilitarization as it pertained to the Potsdam Proclamation (July 1945). The Proclamation outlined Japan’s surrender and demilitarization but featured ambiguous wording, such as that regarding the emperor. Whether Japan had the right to defend itself through limited rearmament was one of the central problems of drafting a new constitution expressed in Article 9.

Not everyone in Japan was ready to give up the Meiji Constitution (1890-1947). There were many men of privileged social status born in the given period. One of the most important aspects of this document was the status of the emperor as it pertained to Japan’s sovereignty. These men considered this principle untouchable. Indeed, emperor worship was part of the Meiji document, which these men wanted to maintain.

Nonetheless, the American-led initiative generated no less than a dozen proposals for revising the constitution between late 1945 and March 1946. There were also unofficial proposals from the Communist Party focused on the subject of human rights as well as freedom of speech to criticize the government. At first, MacArthur approached Prince Fumimaro Konoe in the fall of 1945 to draft the new constitution. The prince, however, died by suicide shortly afterward. Another proposal came from Jōji Matsumoto, an expert on commercial law. Matsumoto’s status as a commercial-law specialist reflected the general trend of not using constitutional lawyers specifically for this important task. One proposal, by Kempō Kenkyūkai (Constitutional Research Association), was of particular interest among the American occupation leadership because of its liberalism and timeliness.

It represented, after all, an indigenous viewpoint distinctly more democratic than that of the “moderates” or “old liberals.” It was also useful in the way it called attention to the relatively recent and ideologically charged genesis of the Meiji Constitution (357-58).

One of the key aspects of the new draft constitution was Japan’s military status in the context of postwar demilitarization. The draft discussions also involved other issues such as gender equality and governing via a political cabinet rather than the military. The government released a series of political cartoons explaining these issues to the public.

The American occupation leadership considered the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) to be an exemplar for renouncing war. The Pact was issued in the wake of the First World War agreeing to outlaw war. However, this document did not prevent the Second World War. One of the key players in revising Japan’s constitution, Colonel Charles Louis Kades, “had long been an admirer of the Kellogg-Briand ideals” (369). According to Dower, associating the formerly militarist Emperor with radical anti-war sentiment was “a brilliant example of SCAP’s wedge tactic” (369). 

In Chapter 13, Dower calls the American-led constitution initiative a fait accompli. Following the English-language draft constitution for Japan, Dower describes “Japanizing the American draft” (374). Shigeru Yoshida and Jōji Matsumoto received the English draft from GHQ. Later, as a sign of defiance, Matsumoto did not even read the final draft of his country’s constitution. At the same time, Emperor Hirohito’s authentic thoughts about the new constitution for Japan are unknown. He was, however, involved in the process because the constitution was handed over to the Diet as an “amendment” to the previous constitution as a technicality: “To both MacArthur and the Japanese royalists, this was fortuitous: constitution-making and emperor saving became part and parcel of the same undertaking” (387).

During the translation process, the Japanese slipped “substantial changes into the translation” in hopes that the Americans would not notice (378). Many Japanese believed that they had to go along with the conquerors’ constitutional initiative and that it could be modified at a later date. Colonel Kades underscored the fact that the American victors encouraged the Japanese to modify the language of the constitution. However, many Japanese were worried about the “long reach of the SCAP’s invisible hand” (391). Ultimately, the Diet voted overwhelmingly in favor of this constitution: 421 against 8.

Akin to a birthday of a new Japan, the country’s new constitution came into effect on May 3, 1947. This document contained language about gender equality, human dignity, a pledge against war, and peaceful cooperation. The Diet was to be the people’s government, whereas the emperor was to have no political power, but was to “be the symbol of the State and of the unity of the People,” Article 1 stated (“The Constitution of Japan.” Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet, 2022).

Article 9 was one of the most contentious parts of the document: “Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes” (Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet). On the one hand, Article 9 was attractive to those who were psychologically tired of the last decade of war: “The renunciation of war—the prospect of becoming a pure embodiment of Kellogg-Briand ideals—offered a way of retaining a positive sense of uniqueness in defeat” (398).

On the other hand, some viewed the Article’s statements as forfeiting the right to self-defense. There were debates about what constitutes a just an unjust war. Others yet pointed out that Japan’s recent wars of aggression began under the banner of self-defense. Yoshida, a self-described realist, argued that recognizing the legitimate right to self-defense is in itself harmful. He believed that Japan’s security should be guaranteed by an international organization.

Japan’s government released 20 million copies of a small booklet called New Constitution, Bright Life (Atarashii Kempō, Akarui Seikatsu) in order to acquaint the Japanese citizens with the constitution’s contents and its meaning. This vast number of copies targeted every household in Japan. 

One crucial aspect of the American-led “revolution from above” was the curation of Japan’s entire information and communications field from promotion to outright censorship (439). For this reason, Dower calls this investigation a “censored democracy.” The American occupation force developed a pervasive system of media and communications censorship conducted “through an elaborate apparatus within GHQ” from September 1945 until September 1949 (406). In other ways, censorship continued beyond this point and simply changed forms until Japan gained formal sovereignty.

The subjects of censorship included all criticism pertaining to the American occupation in general and the SCAP specifically, WWII revisionism, the Allies and their actions, and the WWII military tribunals. Nationalist or militarist propaganda and the glorification of feudalism were subject to censorship, whereas left-wing progressive thought was gradually crushed. The censors targeted all forms of media from the cinema to the newspapers. They operated through an extensive bureaucracy that included the Civil Censorship Department (CCD) within the Civil Intelligence Section. In addition to policing all the media sources, the censors also had an extensive reach into the people’s private lives: “Over the course of their four-year regime, CCD’s examiners also spot-checked an astonishing 330 million pieces of mail and monitored some 800,000 private phone conversations” (407).

Dower refers to the CCD as the “new thought police” (409). As time went on, censorship became more strict. The censors informed the publishers through a confidential memorandum that they were forbidden to publicize the censorship policy, show physical signs of censorship such as blacked-out information, or mention the CCD and its operations.

The GHQ operated within the peculiar parameters of, on the one hand, promoting the “freedom of speech and press” (406). On the other hand, this type of free speech should not disturb the ambiguously phrased “public tranquility,” they believed (406). This statement’s ambiguity meant that censorship reached bizarre levels. Dower calls this trend “purifying the victors” (419). For example, an image of a small dog was removed from a photograph of US troops parading because it looked undignified.

Censorship also suppressed the visual documentation of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No copies of documentary footage remained in Japan at the time since they were all sent to Washington. It was not until the 1950s that graphic representations of bombings and their effects appear in the media. Even grieving the war dead was looked down upon.

Political cartoons also came under censorship. Cartoonists like Yoshio Sigura were a “triple abomination for the CCD” (421). His works targeted the emperor, the economic crisis, and the American GIs spending time with the Japanese women. The Emperor was, notably, not subject to satirical depictions, at least formally.

In cinema, directors like Akira Kurosawa found American censorship to be less severe than that of wartime Japan. His aesthetics and subject matter, however, became darker in contrast to his early idealism. His films, such as the 1948 Drunken Angel (Yoidore Tenshi) depicted environments with soldiers, gangsters, and criminals. Other directors, such as Fumio Komei, “came to personify the forbidden terrain of the new censored democracy” (427). He was unable to screen a brief documentary The Tragedy of Japan (Nihon no Higeki). Such censorship revealed the presence of an omnipresent authority with its arbitrary rulings. Not abiding by the censorship policy, at times, translated into serious consequences.

Furthermore, Dower underscores the fact that the censorship policy was in flux, from nationalist to left-wing subjects: “Indeed, the very process of moving away from the initial procedure of prepublication censorship had involved the explicit stigmatization of the left as the new enemy of democracy” (434).

Therefore, left-wing publications came under harsh censorship policies. There were purges in the newspapers and even threats of military tribunals for some editors subscribing to these views. To American conquerors, the Left became an “enemy of democracy” (432). The start of the Korean War (1950) generated a formal purge of the Communist Party overseen by MacArthur.