By 1949, “Red purge” had become one of the fashionable new terms of the occupation, appropriately expressed in Japanized English (reddo pāji). Initially referred to within GHQ simply as a “troublemaker purge,” the Red purge involved close collaboration among occupation officials, conservative politicians, government bureaucrats, and corporate managers. A major objective was to break radical unions at the company and industry level, and to this end some eleven thousand activist union members in the public sector were fired between the end of 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War on June 25,
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