Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

In 1853, a modest fleet of four vessels, two of them coal-burning “black ships,” had arrived to force the country open. In 1945, a huge, glistening armada came back to close it.

As a line in a popular Japanese song of the 1880s put it, “There is a Law of Nations, it is true, / but when the moment comes, remember, / the Strong eat up the Weak.”1 While most of the rest of the world fell under the control of the Western powers, Japan emulated them and joined their banquet. In 1895, the imperial army and navy brought China to its knees; this decisive victory on the Asian mainland, capped by an enormous indemnity, precipitated a scramble for international concessionary areas torn from the very body of the sleeping giant. “Slicing the Chinese melon” was the pleasant way westerners came to speak of this.

The war brought imperial Japan its first colony, the island of Formosa. Triumph over czarist Russia ten years later, after costly battles on land and a sensational victory at sea, gave the nation an internationally recognized foothold in Manchuria and paved the way for taking Korea as a second colony. Loans raised in New York and London helped to finance this war, and the Western powers turned a deaf ear to the appeals of Korean patriots. In World War I, Japan joined the hostilities on the Allied side, moving against German holdings in China, and was rewarded by being seated as one of the “Big Five” nations at the Versailles peace conference, where the victors met to punish Germany and rearrange the world. No other nonwhite, non-Christian people at that time could have imagined playing the great game of global power and influence at this level;

Dai Nippon Teikoku—the “Great Empire of Japan”—spread like a monstrous stain. (On Japanese maps, the empire was always colored red.) Nineteen thirty-one saw the takeover of Manchuria; 1937, the launching of all-out aggression against China; 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor as part of a strategy of seizing control of the southern reaches of Asia and the Pacific.

Banzai cries to the glory of the emperor’s holy war and the invincibility of his loyal soldiers and sailors pierced the heavens in myriad places at home and overseas. Poets, priests, and propagandists alike extolled the superiority of the “Yamato race” and the sublime destiny of the Imperial Way.

They had, at the same time, become prisoners of their own war rhetoric—of holy war, death before dishonor, blood debts to their war dead, the inviolability of the emperor-centered “national polity,” the imminence of a decisive battle that would turn the tide against the “Chinese bandits” and stay the “demonic Anglo-Americans.” Long after it had become obvious that Japan was doomed, its leaders all the way up to the emperor remained unable to contemplate surrender. They were psychologically blocked, capable only of stumbling forward.

From the rape of Nanking in the opening months of the war against China to the rape of Manila in the final stages of the Pacific War, the emperor’s soldiers and sailors left a trail of unspeakable cruelty and rapacity. As it turned out, they also devoured themselves. Japanese died in hopeless suicide charges, starved to death in the field, killed their own wounded rather than let them fall into enemy hands, and murdered their civilian compatriots in places such as Saipan and Okinawa.

In China alone, perhaps 15 million people died. The Japanese lost nearly 3 million—and their entire empire as well.

Beginning with Pearl Harbor and ending with the emperor’s capitulation after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war between Japan and the Allied powers lasted three years and eight months; the occupation of the defeated nation began in August 1945 and ended in April 1952, six years and eight months later, almost twice as long as the war itself. In those years, Japan had no sovereignty and accordingly no diplomatic relations. No Japanese were allowed to travel abroad until the occupation was almost over; no major political, administrative, or economic decisions were possible without the conquerors’ approval; no public criticism of the American regime was permissible, although in the end dissident voices were irrepressible.

Responsibility for occupied Germany, Japan’s former Axis partner, divided as it was among the United States, England, France, and the Soviet Union, lacked the focused intensity that came with America’s unilateral control over Japan. Germany also escaped the messianic fervor of General Douglas MacArthur, the postsurrender potentate in Tokyo. For the victors, occupying defeated Germany had none of the exoticism of what took place in Japan: the total control over a pagan, “Oriental” society by white men who were (unequivocally, in General MacArthur’s view) engaged in a Christian mission. The occupation of Japan was the last immodest exercise in the colonial conceit known as “the white man’s burden.”

Most of all, they encountered a populace sick of war, contemptuous of the militarists who had led them to disaster, and all but overwhelmed by the difficulties of their present circumstances in a ruined land. More than anything else, it turned out, the losers wished both to forget the past and to transcend it.

The occupiers and their agenda hold pride of place in most accounts, whereas the vanquished country itself is located in the postwar context of a world falling into antagonistic Cold War camps and discussed in terms of a vision of that moment which was distinctly American. The once-formidable Japanese enemy becomes miniaturized, the conquered people but shadow figures on the margins of a new global drama.

For journalists, and later for historians as well, what the Americans would do to the Japanese was the story of most compelling interest. Until recently, it has been difficult to imagine the occupation as an “embrace,” or to consider what effect the losers might have had on the victors and their agendas, or how that “American interlude” might have reinforced rather than altered tendencies within the defeated country. It has been difficult, certainly for outsiders, to grasp the defeat and occupation as a lived Japanese experience.

Shattered lands, shattered peoples, shattered empires, and shattered dreams have been one of the central stories of our times. Certainly, there is much to be learned from the world as viewed through the eyes of the defeated—not only about misery, disorientation, cynicism, and resentment, but also about hope, resilience, visions, and dreams.

To put it a little differently, I have tried to capture a sense of what it meant to start over in a ruined world by recovering the voices of people at all levels of society. World War II did not really end for the Japanese until 1952, and the years of war, defeat, and occupation left an indelible mark on those who lived through them. No matter how affluent the country later became, these remained the touchstone years for thinking about national identity and personal values.

This was a far cry from what many of the “old Asia hands” in Washington and London had predicted, fixated as they were on the idea that Orientals were, at their essence, an “obedient herd.”

Because the defeat was so shattering, the surrender so unconditional, the disgrace of the militarists so complete, the misery the “holy war” had brought home so personal, starting over involved not merely reconstructing buildings but also rethinking what it meant to speak of a good life and good society.

Portmanteau concepts such as “love” and “culture” were discussed obsessively, and the adjective “new” was coupled with promiscuous abandon to almost every noun in sight.

Just as the dynamism of the Japanese in defeat has been underestimated, however, so too the nature of the “Americanism” of the occupiers has generally been oversimplified. The reforms that the victors introduced were unique to both moment and place. They reflected an agenda inspired by heavy doses of liberal New Deal attitudes, labor reformism, and Bill of Rights idealism of a sort that was in the process of being repudiated (or ignored) in the United States.

However high minded they may have been, General MacArthur and his command ruled their new domain as neocolonial overlords, beyond challenge or criticism, as inviolate as the emperor and his officials had ever been.

They epitomized hierarchy—not merely vis-à-vis the defeated enemy, but within their own rigidly layered ranks as well as by their white-men’s rule. One of the most pernicious aspects of the occupation was that the Asian peoples who had suffered most from imperial Japan’s depredations—the Chinese, Koreans, Indonesians, and Filipinos—had no serious role, no influential presence at all in the defeated land. They became invisible. Asian contributions to defeating the emperor’s soldiers and sailors were displaced by an all-consuming focus on the American victory in the “Pacific War.” By this same process of vaporization, the crimes that had been committed against Asian peoples through colonization as well as war were all the more easily put out of mind.

For ideological purposes, MacArthur also chose to rely on Emperor Hirohito, in whose name all of Asia had been savaged.

This American royalism would have been inconceivable without the determination of the general and his closest aides to exonerate the emperor of all war responsibility, even of moral responsibility for allowing the atrocious war to be waged in his name. The emperor’s active contribution to his country’s aggression had not been negligible, although serious investigation of this was thwarted by the occupiers. His moral responsibility, in any case, was transparent; and in choosing not merely to ignore this but to deny it, the Americans came close to turning the entire issue of “war responsibility” into a joke. If the man in whose name imperial Japan had conducted foreign and military policy for twenty years was not held accountable for the initiation or conduct of the war, why should anyone expect ordinary people to dwell on such matters, or to think seriously about their own personal responsibility?

It is not just outsiders who tend to isolate and insulate the Japanese experience; no one makes more of a fetish of the supposed singularity of the national character and the national experience than the country’s own cultural essentialists and neonationalists. Even during that passing moment in the 1980s when Japan seemed to have emerged as the master of global capitalism, it was the peculiarly “Japanese” dimension of its practices that drew greatest attention at home as well as abroad. Although all peoples and cultures set themselves apart (and are set apart by others) by stressing differences, this tends to be carried to an extreme where Japan is concerned.

what is most compelling from my own perspective is that defeat and occupation forced Japanese in every walk of life to struggle, in exceptionally naked ways, with the most fundamental of life’s issues—and that they responded in recognizably human, fallible, and often contradictory ways that can tell us a great deal about ourselves and our world in general.

Similarly, the preoccupation with their own misery that led most Japanese to ignore the suffering they had inflicted on others helps illuminate the ways in which victim consciousness colors the identities that all groups and peoples construct for themselves.

Neonationalistic voices are strong in contemporary Japan, and some of the loudest of these have zeroed in on precisely the years discussed here, depicting the period of defeat and occupation as an overwhelmingly humiliating epoch when genuinely free choice was repressed and alien models were imposed.

The emperor was to speak! In the two decades since he had ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne, Emperor Hirohito had never once spoken directly to all his subjects. Until now the sovereign’s words had been handed down in the form of imperial rescripts—as printed texts, pronouncements humbly read by others.

The emperor’s voice was high pitched and his enunciation stilted. He did not speak in colloquial Japanese, but in a highly formal language studded with ornamental classical phrases.

The millions of Japanese who gathered around neighborhood radios to hear that broadcast were not “citizens” but the emperor’s subjects, and it was in his name that they had supported their country’s long war against China and the Allied Powers.

Like insects in amber, lines and phrases from the broadcast soon became locked in popular consciousness. The emperor never spoke explicitly of either “surrender” or “defeat.” He simply observed that the war “did not turn in Japan’s favor, and trends of the world were not advantageous to us.” He enjoined his subjects to “endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable”—words

With this rescript, the emperor endeavored to accomplish the impossible: to turn the announcement of humiliating defeat into yet another affirmation of Japan’s war conduct and of his own transcendent morality.

With reference to the recent atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the emperor went on to present Japan’s decision to capitulate as nothing less than a magnanimous act that might save humanity itself from annihilation by an atrocious adversary. “The enemy has for the first time used cruel bombs to kill and maim extremely large numbers of the innocent,” he declared, “and the heavy casualties are beyond measure. To continue the war further could lead in the end not only to the extermination of our race, but also to the destruction of all human civilization.” By accepting Allied demands to end the war, the emperor declared it was his purpose to “open the way for a great peace for thousands of generations to come.”

Only now, as sentimental royalists would soon put it, were people actually hearing the sovereign’s true voice. It was “as if the sun had at long last emerged from behind dark clouds.”

Bonfires of documents replaced napalm’s hellfires as the wartime elites followed the lead of their sovereign and devoted themselves to obscuring their wartime deeds.

On September 2, in an imposing ceremony on the deck of the U.S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, MacArthur, representatives of nine other Allied powers, and Japanese officials signed the instruments of surrender.

One of the flags displayed on the Missouri was the same Old Glory that had been flying over the White House on December 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Another, rushed by plane from Annapolis, was the standard with thirty-one stars used by Commodore Matthew Perry on his flagship Powhatten when his gunboat diplomacy forced Japan to end more than two centuries of feudal seclusion.

Two Japanese officials signed the surrender documents: General Umezu Yoshijirō, representing the imperial armed forces, and the diplomat Shigemitsu Mamoru, representing the imperial government.

the emperor did not participate in these proceedings, nor did any representative of the imperial family or the Imperial Household Ministry. This concession on the part of Allied authorities caught observers in the camps of both victor and vanquished by surprise.

The emperor’s complete exclusion from the great morality play of September 2 was a heartening signal to the Japanese side, for it intimated that the victors might be willing to disassociate the emperor from ultimate war responsibility.7

In words directed explicitly to his fellow Americans, he reported that “the holy mission has been completed,” and warned that the utter destructiveness of modern war meant that “Armageddon will be at our door” if the world did not learn to live in peace.

Where defeated Japan was concerned, the supreme commander declared that the terms of surrender committed the victors to liberate the Japanese people from a “condition of slavery” and to ensure that the energies of the race were turned into constructive channels—what he referred to as expanding “vertically rather than horizontally.”

The future remained terribly uncertain, and the enormity of the nation’s humiliation had only begun to sink in. The country’s utter subjugation was reinforced by the dramatic setting of the surrender ceremony itself. The imperial navy had long since been demolished. Apart from a few thousand rickety planes held in reserve for suicide attacks, Japan’s air force—not only its aircraft, but its skilled pilots as well—had virtually ceased to exist. Its merchant marine lay at the bottom of the ocean. Almost all of the country’s major cities had been fire bombed, and millions of the emperor’s loyal subjects were homeless. The defeated imperial army was scattered throughout Asia and the islands of the Pacific Ocean, its millions of surviving soldiers starving, wounded, sick, and demoralized. But Tokyo Bay was clogged with hundreds of powerful, well-scrubbed American fighting ships. At a thunderous theatrical moment, the sky was all but obscured by a fly-by of some four hundred glistening B-29 bombers accompanied by fifteen hundred Navy fighter planes. The imperial soil was being desecrated by the landings of wave upon wave of well-fed, superbly equipped, supremely confident GIs—an army of occupation whose numbers, in a short time, would surpass a quarter of a million. A country that had celebrated its mythic “2,600-year anniversary” in 1940, and prided itself on never having been invaded, was about to be inundated by white men.

Nine days after the surrender ceremony, MacArthur observed at a press conference that Japan had fallen to the status of “a fourth-rate nation”—a blunt statement of reality guaranteed to tear asunder the vital organs of every Japanese leader from the emperor on down. From the moment Commodore Perry had forced Japan open, its leaders had been obsessed with becoming an ittō koku, a country of the first rank.

Like a reopened wound, the term yontō koku—“fourth-rate country”—immediately became a postsurrender catchphrase.10

Sixty-six major cities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had been heavily bombed, destroying 40 percent of these urban areas overall and rendering around 30 percent of their populations homeless. In Tokyo, the largest metropolis, 65 percent of all residences were destroyed.

Even amid such extensive vistas of destruction, however, the conquerors found strange evidence of the selectiveness of their bombing policies. Vast areas of poor people’s residences, small shops, and factories in the capital were gutted, for instance, but a good number of the homes of the wealthy in fashionable neighborhoods survived to house the occupation’s officer corps. Tokyo’s financial district, largely undamaged, would soon become “little America,” home to MacArthur’s General Headquarters (GHQJ. Undamaged also was the building that housed much of the imperial military bureaucracy at war’s end. With a nice sense of irony, the victors subsequently appropriated this for their war crimes trials of top leaders. Railways still functioned more or less effectively throughout the country (Tokyo residents, for example, had been able to ride directly to distant Hiroshima to see if their kin had survived the atomic blast). Outside of devastated poor people’s neighborhoods, most utilities including electricity and water were also still in working order. Wittingly or not, U.S. bombing policy, at least in the capital city, had tended to reaffirm existing hierarchies of fortune.l8

In the wake of defeat, approximately 6.5 million Japanese were stranded in Asia, Siberia, and the Pacific Ocean area. Roughly 3.5 million of them were soldiers and sailors. The remainder were civilians, including many women and children—a huge and generally forgotten cadre of middle-and lower-class individuals who had been sent out to help develop the imperium. Some 2.6 million Japanese were in China at war’s end, 1.1 million dispersed through Manchuria. In addition, almost six hundred thousand troops laid down their arms in the Kurile Islands and the Darien’Port Arthur enclave in southern Manchuria. Over five hundred thousand Japanese were in Formosa (Taiwan) and nine hundred thousand in Korea, the countries Japan had colonized in 1895 and 1910, respectively.

In September 1946, more than a year after the emperor’s broadcast, over 2 million Japanese still remained unrepatriated and the government acknowledged that the where-abouts of 540,000 others were unknown.21

The British, in charge of the repatriation of approximately three-quarters of a million Japanese from south and southeast Asia, made no bones about their intention to hold on to a large number for projects in areas where the European powers, having ousted the Japanese aggressors, were intent on reasserting their own colonial authority. In mid-1946, they announced that they would retain 113,500 POWs for local work until some time in 1947. Of this number, 13,500 were later turned over to the Dutch, engaged in reimposing their rule over the former Netherlands East Indies.