Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

The left-wing monthly Kaizō offers a small case study in the types of statements about the victorious Allies and their world that could be deemed to be in violation of the Press Code. As Professor Furukawa Atsushi has documented, Kaizō was required to delete references to racial prejudices toward peoples of color among the Western Allies; mention of the surrender of Japanese troops to Kuomintang (Nationalist) rather than Communist forces in China; an allusion to the denial of voting rights to blacks in the United States; descriptions of the Soviet Union as “socialistic,” the United States and Great Britain as “capitalistic,” and China as “semicolonial”; mention of tension between the “democratic” U.S.S.R. and “reactionary imperialistic” United States; an expression of fear that Japan might become subordinated to international capital; a description of fascism as a manifestation of “capitalistic contradictions”; and criticism of capitalism in general (by, for example, well-known Marxist scholars such as Hani Gōrō).