Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

The president of the Komatsu company, a maker of tank parts and anchor chains for warships, was inspired by the sight of American bulldozers leveling an airfield to make the bulldozer his company’s literal vehicle for recovery. The successful postwar camera manufacturers Canon and Nikon had been producers of optics for the war effort. In 1946, Honda Sōichirō, who had been a small wartime subcontractor supplying piston rings to Toyota, began motorizing bicycles with tiny engines the military had used in communications devices. Hugely popular among small-shop owners and petty black-market operatives, these motorbikes led to the marketing of a motorcycle named “Dream” in 1949 and marked the beginning of the Honda Motor Company empire. Many successful postwar electronics firms had their genesis in middle-size companies that had manufactured communications equipment for the military. Within weeks of the surrender, Ibuka Masaru, a former employee of one such a company, had collaborated with a few colleagues to produce a popular device that converted shortwave transmissions to normal broadcasting frequencies—laying the basis for the great Sony corporation.20

There would be changes, of course. The “social dumping” of cheap exports that had enabled prewar Japan to penetrate and disrupt foreign markets would be eliminated. This, in fact, had always been one goal of the occupation’s reformist economic policies, including its land and labor reforms. Improving the lives of the working population by promoting higher wages, higher incomes, and a more equitable distribution of wealth, the argument went, would create a larger domestic market and inhibit the dumping of underpriced goods abroad.

erstwhile

Well, the German problem is a completely and entirely different one from the Japanese problem. The German people were a mature race. If the Anglo-Saxon was say 45 years of age in his development, in the sciences, the arts, divinity, culture, the Germans were quite as mature. The Japanese, however, in spite of their antiquity measured by time, were in a very tuitionary condition. Measured by the standards of modern civilization, they would be like a boy of twelve as compared with our development of 45 years. Like any tuitionary period, they were susceptible to following new models, new ideas. You can implant basic concepts there. They were still close enough to origin to be elastic and acceptable to new concepts. The German was quite as mature as we were. Whatever the German did in dereliction of the standards of modern morality, the international standards, he did deliberately. He didn’t do it because of a lack of knowledge of the world. He didn’t do it because he stumbled into it to some extent as the Japanese did. He did it as a considered policy in which he believed in his own military might, in which he believed that its application would be a shortcut to the power and economic domination that he desired. . . . But the Japanese were entirely different. There is no similarity. One of the great mistakes that was made was to try to apply the same policies which were so successful in Japan to Germany, where they were not quite so successful, to say the least. They were wor...