Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

The Americans had long looked askance at the Meiji charter, deeming it incompatible with the healthy development of responsible democratic government. This critique was developed in a number of confidential internal studies and policy papers. It was also expressed unusually vividly in a Guide to Japan that was prepared for U.S. forces around the time of the surrender. Readers of the guide, after being informed that the early Meiji government was dominated by powerful former samurai associated with the former feudal domains of Satsuma and Chōshū, were told that these oligarchs had looked west for a constitutional model and emerged with an unholy hybrid. “The new Japanese Constitution, with Prussian tyranny as its father, and British representative government as its mother, and attended at its birth by Sat-Cho [Satsuma and Chōshū] midwives,” the guide declared, “was a hermaphroditic creature.”2