More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
we are caught in the uncomfortable position of writing a liberal Constitution for a people who still think mystically.”
The draft exhibited advanced thinking in constitutional matters, he observed, but at the same time contained nothing without precedent.
It established not only political democracy but economic and social democracy as well,
On February 11—serendiptously, the country’s National Foundation Day—he
(the tyranny and misrule of Japan’s recent decades apparently did not give him pause on this score).
lese majesty.
“In order that our nation may fall in line with other nations in the march toward the attainment of the universal ideal of mankind,” Shidehara declared, “His Majesty with great decision has commanded that the existing Constitution be fundamentally revised so as to establish the foundation upon which a democratic and peaceful Japan is to be built.”
It was inconceivable that these two drafts could have a common authorship.
The Fiji Shimpō compared its initial response to someone who smelled the aroma of Japanese cooking coming from the kitchen and then discovered that Western dishes were being served.
Still, the proposed constitution held great attraction as a beacon of hope and idealism in a defeated and war-shattered land.
In going so far as to renounce war as a sovereign right, the nation, as Shidehara put it, might even see itself as leading the rest of the world. To a proud people told they had become a fourth-rate nation, this was a comforting kind of new nationalism to grasp at.
Whatever their politics, these were clever and agile men.42
At the insistence of the FEC, the Diet also added a clause stipulating that all cabinet members must be “civilians.”48
The Socialists, partly influenced by the Weimar and 1936 Soviet constitutions,
“All people shall have the right to maintain the minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living” and “All people shall have the right and the obligation to work,”
In an interesting instance of effective grass-roots pressure, a coalition of teachers affiliated with adult-education schools and night schools succeeded in persuading the Diet to eliminate wording that would have limited compulsory education to six years of free elementary schooling. Arguing that education should not benefit only the elites, the teachers directed their lobbying activities at the Ministry of Education and GHQ as well as at politicians. The final provision guaranteed all people “the right to receive an equal education correspondent to their ability, as provided by law,” and
...more
All aggressive wars, including Japan’s recent aggression beginning in 1931, he observed, were waged in the name of self-defense.
True security, the elderly prime minister suggested, lay in earning the confidence of other nations.61
The political and ideological dynamics of the situation, however, were too complex to be explained away by such simplistic notions of mass psychology.
As added evidence of imperial largesse, the emperor decreed an amnesty terminating the penal sentences of 330,000 individuals. This was his final grand exercise of sovereign authority.66
If a genuine democratization were to be effected, language, too, would have to be democratized; and the proper place to begin would be to reform the special language hitherto reserved for the throne.
The constitution’s bold declaration that “we will not do war any more” expressed a high ideal for humankind and was the only way for Japan to be reborn.
picayune
the breakdown of global capitalism,
Western racism,
For over six years, Japanese scientists and doctors—and even some American scientists in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were conducting research on radiation effects—were denied access to data that might have assisted them in communicating to and helping atomic-bomb victims.18
Procession of Ghosts,
This was not exactly immortal literature. But
haori
lese majesty
the Tokyo tribunal initially captured the imagination of a war-weary world by expanding the interpretation of “crimes against humanity” and, more boldly yet, by introducing a sweeping new formulation of “crimes against peace.”
Would fire bombing entire cities be included under this?
In practice, such hopes and ideals inevitably became tainted by the double standards of those who sat in judgment,
Although the revelation of widespread Japanese atrocities did make an impression on the general populace, many appear to have regarded these distant exercises in Allied justice as little more than another example of how, in war and in peace, individuals lower in the hierarchy of authority had to pay for the misdeeds of men with real power. When all was said and done, it was obvious that only a small number of high army and navy officers, few high bureaucrats, no captains of the war economy, and virtually none of the civilian ideologues in politics, academe, and the media who helped prime the
...more
not the brutes and the physical criminals and murderers, but the political war criminals,
I still believe that it was an ex post facto law. They made up the rules after the game was over. So we hanged them because they used war as an instrument of national policy.”
As Thorpe saw it, the “Class A” trials were fundamentally an exercise in revenge (“we wanted blood and, by God, we had blood”).
the brilliant and unscrupulous former bureaucrat (and future prime minister) Kishi Nobusuke,
Despite the grievous crimes of which they were accused, the defendants failed to exude the aura of evil personified that choked the courtroom where their Nazi counterparts were tried.
The prohibition against “wars of aggression,” it was argued, had been established in the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928,
The defendants were being tried for “crimes” that did not exist as such under international law prior to the defeat of the Axis powers.
Indonesians
“Netherlands East Indies.”
congeries
The Indian justice took palpable pleasure in suggesting the hypocrisy of the victors’ case.
the “Amau Doctrine” of 1934, in which Japan had enunciated its special rights and interests in China, Pal observed that this definition of national interest “finds obvious precedent in the conduct of the United States in pursuance of the Monroe Doctrine.”
Pal did not condone Japan’s actions—nor, with hindsight, did the majority of Japanese.
fatuity
As it turned out, the number of Japanese prisoners who would die in Soviet hands was much larger than the number of American and British Commonwealth prisoners who perished so miserably as prisoners of the Japanese.
Justice Rölling was also of the opinion that the air raids that culminated in the atomic bombings had violated the laws of war.
Nothing fails like failure,
