Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

In this, his darkest moment, Ii still managed to convey an impression of integrity and hope. In broadcasting his statement calling off the strike, he embellished on the text approved by Marquat. One must often, he told his labor constituency, take one step back for every two steps forward. He offered a banzai cheer for “workers and farmers.” And, voice hoarse and heavy with emotion, he wept. Photographs of a trenchcoat-clad Ii holding his glasses in one hand and wiping tears from his eyes fixed his anguish in popular memory. Many of his listeners sobbed also. This too became part of the mythic story—“tears of limitless anger,” as later leftwing accounts put it, “that workers instinctively felt toward the Japanese government and Americans.” Some years later, Ii called this the pivotal moment at which it became clear that the American occupation authorities were “deceiving the Japanese people with democracy only at the tip of their tongues.” Although the general election of April 1947 resulted in the formation of a short-lived Socialist-led coalition cabinet and union membership continued to rise, suppression of the general strike marked the beginning of the end of the possibility that labor might be an equal partner in the sharing of “democratic” power.22